Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan, Con't...

Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel comes to Kentucky to look at the Democratic primary on May 21 and the three Democrats waiting to take on GOP Gov. Matt Bevin.  If the argument is "white guys can win against extremely unpopular Republicans in Trump Country" then there's no better test case.

There's an even better test case because all three Democrats are running on different platforms: State House minority leader Rocky Adkins is a pro-life conservative who's won consistently, AG Andy Beshear is a moderate who has kept his office but lost in 2015 to Bevin by double-digits, and businessman Adam Edelen is a liberal who wants to bring in new industries and jobs.

Bevin, whose years-long battles with teachers and public-sector unions has made him wildly unpopular, is seen as vulnerable despite his party's political dominance in the state. He has been tied up in court over an attempt to add work requirements for Medicaid recipients and over bipartisan efforts to ban abortion; he earned the wrong kind of national attention after speculatingthat a teacher's strike led to a child's death. He's facing a primary challenge from Robert Goforth, a state legislator who says Bevin has squandered his opportunities; at the same time, he has presided over Republican gains that replaced a Democratic state House with a GOP supermajority.

“I have never led in any poll or been popular in any survey that has ever been done,” he said this year, after one survey pegged him as the least-popular governor in America. "Polls, schmolls."

Kentucky Democrats held onto power longer than their counterparts in any other Southern state and are eager to prove that the party can win again in "Trump Country." But they're hurtling toward a May 21 gubernatorial primary with three very different theories of recovery. Adkins, who has held onto a rural Appalachian district amid a Democratic wipeout, is antiabortion and says he could compete for social conservatives. Beshear, whose father was a popular two-term governor, talks about stopping Bevin's biggest excesses in court and getting the state back to balance.

And Edelen, who blames the “quiet, tired pablum of the past” for his party's decline, argues that Bevin can be beaten by a new economic agenda of renewable energy, rural broadband and decriminalized marijuana — not giving up on rural Kentucky, but boosting turnout in suburbs that have turned on the modern GOP. To push back against the idea that the governor's unpopularity will sink him, Edelen invokes the double whammy of 2015 and 2016, two elections that his party thought were impossible to lose, until they lost them.

“Matt Bevin was an early predictor of Donald Trump in both form and fashion, and the campaign we ran against him clearly sought to disqualify him,” Edelen said in an interview. “It was: 'Oh, this guy is crazy! He can't be governor! He's too radical.' And the people of Kentucky listened to his message and delivered him a victory in a landslide, which is what happened again nationally in 2016.” 

Every candidate's case against Bevin starts with the teachers. A year ago, with Republicans in full control of the legislative agenda, Bevin replaced teachers's pension plans with less-generous investment portfolios, then vetoed a budget that would have raised education spending. After protests, a bipartisan coalition overrode the veto; after a lawsuit, the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned the pension plan. Adkins and Beshear, who battled Bevin from different parts of the capitol, have made those victories the centerpieces of their campaigns.

“There's no place to hide on that House floor,” Adkins told supporters at a Saturday night rally in his hometown. “You go toe to toe with the governor.” In an interview, and everywhere he goes, Beshear recalls just how badly Bevin lost the pensions fight: “We took him to court and we beat him, seven to nothing.”

Bevin's reelection argument rhymes with the one the president is planning for 2020. He's right, the left is wrong, and the state's booming economy can prove it. In Bevin's first TV ad, the first image of the governor is from a meeting with Trump. (The president even tapped Bevin's pollster for his 2016 campaign.)

If Democrats can win here in KY and beat Bevin, there's an argument to be made that they can win nationally.  The problem is I don't think they can with any of the three candidates, because they'll all be buried as fascist Socialist enemies of the state and I don't think any of the three of them know how to fight back without coming across at petulant kids.

There's also the problem that Kentucky has far fewer black voters than the national average.  Unlike Southern states, there's not a big bloc of black voters here that can help the Dems.  Like it or not, Kentucky isn't California.  These are the candidates we have, and I'm tired of blue states giving us up for dead all the time.

Polling shows the primary is Beshear's to lose.  We'll see in a week and change.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Jerry Nadler and House Judiciary Democrats are running out of "DO SOMETHING" options that aren't impeachment at this point, while the Trump regime just laughs and keeps flipping the table over again and again.

A growing number of Democratic committee members are pushing Nadler to take more aggressive steps to force President Donald Trump and top administration officials to comply with a host of congressional subpoenas. Some lawmakers even want Congress to dust off its little-used authority to fine or even jail witnesses, something that the House hasn't done in more than 80 years and is ill-prepared to execute.

But Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team worry that such moves, while pleasing to a party base that loathes the president, would backfire and boost Trump politically.

Caught in the middle is Nadler, a 71-year-old Democrat who has long been a thorn in Trump's side. Anything he does will displease some key constituency — either at home in his New York City district, in his committee room in the Rayburn House Office Building or in the Capitol’s leadership suites.

The new push inside the Judiciary Committee to use its “inherent contempt” power against Trump administration officials underscores the larger challenge facing House Democrats in responding to the president's blanket stonewalling.

While Pelosi and her lieutenants have all but ruled out impeaching Trump — despite incessant calls to do so from party activists and some lawmakers — the White House keeps upping the stakes by refusing to comply with House probes into Trump’s finances and conduct. That leaves Democrats with few tools to respond effectively short of taking Trump to court, a risky and time-consuming process that could take months or years to resolve.

But doing nothing isn’t an option for Democrats, who don’t want to look feckless in the face of Trump’s defiance.

Trump "certainly is the best argument for impeachment there is," said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the Judiciary and Oversight panels. "This is the most impeachable president in the history of the United States of America. But that still leaves us a whole bunch of questions about what to do and when to do it."

The problem is outside of impeachment, there's no enforcement mechanism to compel Republicans to actually do anything that won't be tied up in courts until after the election, and even with impeachment, there's zero chance Trump is removed from office.

Practically, it doesn't matter what Nadler chooses to do here when it comes to Trump remaining in office.

It won't make a lick of difference either way with the GOP.

Now, with Democrats, that's a different story.  We'll see.

Sunday Long Read: We Gotta Face The Face(Book), Con't

FaceBook co-founder Chris Hughes takes to the NY Times this week to make the case that Mark Zuckerberg has too much personal power over the planet's social media and culture and that Zuck's repeated failures in safeguarding privacy means that government must step in and break the company up for the good of humanity.

He is absolutely correct in this regard.

The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. We met at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and drove to his house, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood. We spent an hour or two together while his toddler daughter cruised around. We talked politics mostly, a little about Facebook, a bit about our families. When the shadows grew long, I had to head out. I hugged his wife, Priscilla, and said goodbye to Mark.

Since then, Mark’s personal reputation and the reputation of Facebook have taken a nose-dive. The company’s mistakes — the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users’ data into a political consulting firm’s lap; the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news; and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention — dominate the headlines. It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.

Mark is still the same person I watched hug his parents as they left our dorm’s common room at the beginning of our sophomore year. He is the same person who procrastinated studying for tests, fell in love with his future wife while in line for the bathroom at a party and slept on a mattress on the floor in a small apartment years after he could have afforded much more. In other words, he’s human. But it’s his very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic.

Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.

The government must hold Mark accountable. For too long, lawmakers have marveled at Facebook’s explosive growth and overlooked their responsibility to ensure that Americans are protected and markets are competitive. Any day now, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to impose a $5 billion fine on the company, but that is not enough; nor is Facebook’s offer to appoint some kind of privacy czar. After Mark’s congressional testimony last year, there should have been calls for him to truly reckon with his mistakes. Instead the legislators who questioned him were derided as too old and out of touch to understand how tech works. That’s the impression Mark wanted Americans to have, because it means little will change.

We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.

It is time to break up Facebook.

Hughes lays out the case as to why this needs to be done, and he makes an excellent argument.  With great power comes great responsibility, as Peter Parker's uncle told him.  Mark Zuckerberg has proven himself incapable of handling that responsibility, so that great power must be taken from him.
 
Breaking up Facebook is only a partial solution given bigger issues like Citizens United and, you know, the GOP, but getting Facebook out of Zuck's hands is an imperative.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Trump regime state TV moved closer to calling for mass roundups of Democrats in Congress with Donald Trump's personal favorite "legal expert" Jeanine Pirro announcing that House was "stolen" by the Democrats last year and that they will absolutely try to "steal" the election in 2020.

Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro claimed the House of Representatives had been “stolen” during her opening statement on Saturday.

“They’ve stolen the House, the people’s House,” Pirro claimed. “That hallowed chamber our forefathers created to represent the people as well as be closest to the people.”

“They hijacked it to maintain power for themselves,” she continued. “They don’t work for or represent you.”

“These radicals who have forfeited their job representing you, continue to resist, create havoc and claim Constitutional crisis,” she argued.

“Most important, start gearing up for 2020. We need a House of Representatives that represents the people in this great nation. The people who want to remake America and maintain their own power. God help us and God help us if we elect these same people and they stay in control of our country,” she concluded.

Expect Donald Trump to start repeating this utter nonsense, along with several House GOP luminaries like Louie Gohmert and Steve King before the end of the month.

The ground is being laid for mass arrests, guys.  We're watching it happen in real time here.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

With tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese imports going from 10% to 25% and new tariffs coming on another $300 billion in goods from Beijing, it's the American people who will be on the hook for billions in new taxes, and Trump is lying about every word of China picking up the tab. The NYT editorial board:

President Trump’s new tariffs on Chinese imports, which took effect at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, are taxes that will be paid by Americans. That is a simple fact, and it remains true no matter how many times Mr. Trump insists the money will come from China.

Mr. Trump’s latest escalation of his trade fight with China is a 25 percent tariff, or import tax, on products that compose about one third of China’s exports to the United States, including Chinese bicycles, circuit boards and wooden doors. The tariff rate on those goods was previously 10 percent. Mr. Trump also has threatened to impose the 25 percent rate on virtually all products imported from China — more than $500 billion in goods last year.

Mr. Trump could make an honest case for this tax increase. He could argue that Americans must endure higher prices because China will suffer too — while China does not bear the direct cost of the tariffs, it is likely to suffer a loss of sales — and the United States needs that leverage as it presses China to change its economic policies.

Instead, Mr. Trump continues to repeat the false claim that the money will come from China, even though he has been told repeatedly that this claim has no basis in fact. He is willfully peddling a falsehood for political gain.

The mechanics of tariffs are not complicated: The government sends a tax bill to the company that brings goods into the country. Most of those tax bills go to American companies, often import firms that specialize in dealing with the customs process.

It doesn’t really matter who gets the bill, however. The important question is where the money to pay it comes from. And in broad terms, there are only two options: It comes either from the firms that make, move and sell the products or from the pockets of the buyers.

Consider the case of washing machines. In January 2018, Mr. Trump imposed a tariff on washing machines, initially at a rate of 20 percent. The tariff caused a 12 percent increase in the price of washing machines, according to a study by economists at the Federal Reserve and the University of Chicago. It also resulted in a similar increase in the price of dryers. Americans responded by buying more domestic washing machines, creating about 1,800 new jobs. But the cost of the tariffs was borne entirely by American consumers. The study estimated that each of those new jobs came at a cost of more than $815,000.

And retaliatory tariffs are killing American farmers, who are already having a brutally bad year due to record Midwestern flooding. But Trump blaming China is working.  Farmers are rallying aroundthe flag just like in any other stupid, pointless GOP-caused war.

In Shelby County, Ind., Phil Ramsey said he appreciated the president’s reasons for revisiting trade deals, but said the ailing farm economy had been brutal in deeply personal ways. He said he was going without health insurance to save money. He said he has delayed some equipment purchases.

“I was very patient a year ago,” said Mr. Ramsey, who grows corn, soybeans and wheat. “I’ve gone from being very patient to being very anxious.”

But Mr. Ramsey, a Republican who voted for the president, said his primary frustrations were with China, which the United States accused of reneging on some trade promises, and with Congress, which has not approved a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico.

“He can’t do it by himself,” Mr. Ramsey said of the president. “He needs the support of all the U.S. government.”

The lack of a trade deal was especially painful in Nebraska, which saw widespread damage from flooding in March. The damage there, as well as in parts of Missouri and Iowa, has turned cropland into debris fields and forced some farmers to evaluate whether they could continue making a living off the land.

“It’s a little bit of piling on when you have so many different things that you’re struggling against,” said Steve Nelson, the president of the Nebraska Farm Bureau. “Obviously, the trade issue is one of those. The weather is one of those.”

Lance Atwater, 29, who farms corn and soybeans near Ayr, Neb., escaped the worst of the flooding but said that he has seen prices for some of his crops plunge. Mr. Atwater, a Republican who voted for Mr. Trump, said he was eager for a trade deal but taking a wait-and-see approach on the president’s policies.

“He’s claimed that he’ll get these trade deals worked out and that it will be a better deal,” Mr. Atwater said on Friday as he hauled grain. “That’s what we’re wanting to see — see those results.”

Jerry Mohr, 66, a fourth-generation farmer who grows corn and soybeans near Eldridge, Iowa, said he was growing frustrated.

“I admire the president for wanting to make change,” said Mr. Mohr, a Republican who voted for Mr. Trump, “but now we need to perform.”

He said the president’s success in finalizing trade deals, as well as expanding ethanol production, would help determine what happens in next year’s election.

“If the president comes through on what he says he was going to do, it would be hard for him to lose,” Mr. Mohr said. “If he doesn’t, it’s going to be hard for him to win.”

US farms are going to get wrecked over the next 18 months.  But they'll blame China and Mexico and Congress and not the guy imposing a brutal trade war that will wipe out farms across the country.  Really, the only question is how many taxpayer billions farmers will get from the government to help them through this tough time, but don't you dare call it socialism.

And in November of next year, they'll vote for Trump again.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Trump no longer cares about the appearance of his criminality and is openly announcing to the world that's he's doing illegal things because he believes that nobody in this country can or will stop him. Whether or not he's right is the real argument now.

Within a day of the release of the Mueller report last month, President Trump sought to have former White House counsel Don McGahn declare he didn’t consider the president’s 2017 directive that he seek Robert Mueller’s dismissal to be obstruction of justice, but Mr. McGahn rebuffed the request, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump has publicly denied asking Mr. McGahn to fire the Russia probe special counsel since the release of the report. Mr. Mueller’s report detailed that directive, and a subsequent request by Mr. Trump that Mr. McGahn deny that conversation ever happened, and said that Mr. McGahn rebuffed both. Last month, Mr. Trump tweeted: “If I wanted to fire Mueller, I didn’t need McGahn to do it, I could have done it myself.”

Privately, Mr. Trump asked White House special counsel Emmet Flood to inquire whether Mr. McGahn would release a statement asserting that he didn’t believe those interactions with the president—and Mr. Trump’s subsequent efforts to have Mr. McGahn deny news reports about that request—amounted to obstruction, the people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Flood didn’t respond to a request for comment.

William Burck, a lawyer for Mr. McGahn, said in a statement about the request: “We did not perceive it as any kind of threat or something sinister. It was a request, professionally and cordially made.”

Mr. McGahn turned down the request because he didn’t want to weigh in on the totality of evidence in the report beyond his own testimony, and didn’t want to comment on his own testimony in isolation, the people said. Mr. McGahn also didn’t view his personal opinion as relevant, because Attorney General William Barr had already said he didn’t believe the evidence in Mr. Mueller’s report amounted to obstruction of justice, the people said.

Mr. Flood, as he sought the statement from Mr. McGahn, pointed to previous assertions by Mr. Burck that if Mr. McGahn believed Mr. Trump had committed a crime, he would have resigned his post, the people said.

Obstruction of justice is just baked in to the normalization process.  And the corruption will continue through the 2020 campaign and beyond.

President Donald Trump told POLITICO on Friday that it would be “appropriate” for him to speak to Attorney General Bill Barr about launching an investigation into his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden, or his son, Hunter.

The question of whether Trump could pressure Barr to probe Biden is coming under scrutiny after Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, said he would be traveling to Ukraine to urge the incoming government there to look at Hunter Biden’s involvement with a Ukrainian energy company that has reportedly been in prosecutors’ crosshairs. The efforts appear to be part of a broader campaign by Trump’s allies to damage the former Democratic vice president’s White House campaign and have raised questions about whether Trump’s team is trying to enlist a foreign government to aid the president’s re-election bid.

“Certainly it would be an appropriate thing to speak to him about, but I have not done that as of yet. … It could be a very big situation,” Trump said in a 15-minute telephone interview on Friday afternoon, which stemmed from POLITICO’s inquiries for a separate story.

Barr also drew attention during his recent congressional testimony when he demurred on a question about whether anybody in the White House had ever suggested that he launch an investigation.

The two Bidens’ connections to Ukraine have become a subject of deep interest among the president’s political allies, who charge that Biden as vice president pressured the Ukrainian government to oust a prosecutor in order to benefit his son. The Ukrainian prosecutor had reportedly faced allegations of ignoring corruption among Ukraine’s business and political elite. No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden was acting to assist his son, and it is not clear that the official was probing the company at the time.

I mean at this point Trump is giving away the plot because like a pulp villain, he doesn't believe the heroes can stop it from happening.  He's absolutely announcing that it's "appropriate" to have "his" Attorney General open an investigation into the 2020 frontrunner opponent.

We'll see if he's right.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The next step in the Trump regime's coming roundup and mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants from the country took a dark step closer to reality this week with news of HUD plans to evict more than 100,000 undocumented immigrants from public housing and putting tens of thousands of US citizen kids in detention camps.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development acknowledged that a Trump administration plan to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing could displace more than 55,000 children who are all legal U.S. residents or citizens.

The proposed rule, published Friday in the Federal Register, would tighten regulations against undocumented immigrantsaccessing federally subsidized housing to “make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said last month.

But the agency’s analysis of the rule’s regulatory impact concluded that half of current residents living in households potentially facing eviction and homelessness are children who are legally qualified for aid.

Current rules bar undocumented immigrants from receiving federal housing subsidies but allow families of mixed-immigration status as long as one person — a child born in the United States or a citizen spouse — is eligible. The subsidies are prorated to cover only eligible residents.

The new rule, pushed by White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, would require every household member be of “eligible immigration status.”
Undocumented immigrants may no longer sign the leases of subsidized housing, even if their children are entitled to prorated benefits.

Approximately 25,000 households, representing about 108,000 people, now living in subsidized housing have at least one ineligible member, according to the HUD analysis.

Among these mixed-status households, 70 percent, or 76,000 people, are legally eligible for benefits — of whom 55,000 are children, HUD says. The vast majority live in California, Texas and New York.

We're about to put 55,000 more kids in concentration camps, guys.

This is what America is now.  It will only get worse later as a few court decisions allow the Trump regime to declare that immigration status must be checked before a housing lease is signed anywhere in America, and then the real deportations begin.

Keep in mind all of this:

• from the building of the private ICE camps with government funding and blessing, 
• to expanding ICE and Border Patrol boots on the ground, 
• to bringing in ICE/BP as "intelligence agencies", 
• to going after "sanctuary cities", 
• to increased ICE raids at workplaces, 
• to attacking "birthright citizenship", 
• to ignoring legalized asylum policies that the rest of the planet allows,
• to child separation policies, 
• to the Muslim visa ban, 
• to making passports harder to get for trans folks, 
• to effectively ending legal immigration (except from Russia it seems),
• to the leadership purges at Homeland Security and ICE,
• and now to HUD's policy to evict undocumented,

all of this is being done on purpose to build the legal justification framework, the logistics, the manpower, and the social normalization of one singular evil, twisted goal.

That goal is hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mass deportations of undocumented out of the country in the name of demographic reversal and white supremacy.

Never forget that.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

In the 36 hours or so since NC GOP Sen. Richard Burr announced he would be issuing a subpoena for Donald Trump Jr. over the younger Trump's lies to the Senate Intel Committee involving the Trump Corporation's plans to build a hotel in Putin's backyard, the response from a stunned White House and furious Senate GOP has been unprecedented.

A single senator criticizing a fellow senator of the same party, especially a committee chair, is rare enough, but six Republican senators criticized the decision by Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. about the Russia investigation.

What's next: We're told Don Jr. won't show up. Options include daring the committee to hold him in contempt, taking the Fifth in writing, or (most likely) a compromise like answering written questions.

A Trump ally said: "We're drawing battle lines: If you touch Don, we'll come after you. ... And our base will come after you."

Burr is not the only GOP NC senator facing crucifixion by his party if he follows through with this.

Donald Trump Jr.’s political allies launched an all-out war against the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, turning several Republican senators Thursday against the panel’s chairman amid news that he subpoenaed testimony from the president’s son.

The broadsides included tweets targeting the Republican chairman, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, calls from people close to the president to at least one vulnerable Republican senator, and a Breitbart story aimed at senators including the majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, according to multiple people involved in the effort.

Even President Trump got involved on Thursday, telling reporters he was “pretty surprised” his son — “a very good person” — would be subpoenaed after Mr. Burr had said publicly he had found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The main target of the pressure campaign appeared to be Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, a close ally of Mr. Burr’s who is facing a conservative primary challenger next year. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies said they anticipated that the president would tweet support for Mr. Tillis’s primary opponent if the senator did not speak out.

The extraordinary pressure campaign, taking place in public and private, is forcing the party’s senators to choose between their loyalty to the Intelligence Committee and to the president’s family as it attempts to quash any remaining investigations of the president after the completion of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

It also put Mr. Burr and the Intelligence Committee on their heels. After two years of conducting the only bipartisan congressional investigation into Russia’s election interference campaign, the committee is in the final stages of its work and had hoped to avoid partisan fireworks that would distract from the substance of its final warnings about the Russian threat.

Burr's fine, he's not going anywhere.  Tillis however, that's a much different story, there's a very real chance he loses his primary seat.  But at this point Junior here obviously feels 100% safe from a congressional subpoena, and besides, in the end all of it is up to Mitch McConnell anyway.

A source with direct knowledge confirmed to Power Up that McConnell defended Burr's decision to issue a subpoena during a closed-door GOP lunch on Thursday. Publicly, the GOP leader spent the week pushing the line “case closed” with regards Mueller's investigation (not to mention placing an op-ed defending Trump in his favorite newspaper: The New York Post).  

“Mr. McConnell’s remarks seemed to many to run counter to a closely watched speech he delivered on the Senate floor this week, in which he declared the “case closed” on Russian collusion after the Mueller report. Donald Trump Jr. and several Republican senators pointed to the speech as evidence that Mr. Burr was missing his cues,” the New York Times's Nicholas Fandos, Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns report.  

“However, McConnell also acknowledged an exception for the Intelligence Committee’s probe, which he said should continue,” Seung Min and Karoun reported.

GOP strategists and Senate staffers viewed McConnell's "case closed” rhetoric as a deliberate decision to lay down a marker in an effort to move people off the topic. 

“McConnell is where he is because he's a Zen master at navigating precarious positions,” GOP strategist Kevin Madden told Power Up. “This isn't the first committee chair to do what they believe is best for their committee. McConnell knows exactly where to shore up bulwarks of support elsewhere in his conference. As far as popularity as a measure, his political capital is always expertly deployed inside his home state and inside his Senate majority. That's how you become the longest serving leader in your party.”

“McConnell is a political survivor,” a GOP Senate staffer told Power Up, adding that certain parts of the country like “what the Trumps are doing,” and McConnell understands that better than anyone.

“People have fallen in line with the McConnell messaging tone and context more than the alternative. A lot of folks have come out and made it clear that it is case closed,” the GOP strategist added.

Anyone expecting more than Trump Jr.'s lawyers handling a Burr written questionnaire is making a sucker's bet, but it's entirely possible that Junior is just as much of an asshole as his dad and will make a point of taking the 5th and daring Burr to do any single goddamn thing about it, too.

We'll see.

Trump Cards, Con't

If you want to know where a second Trump term is going in the future, look at the path where Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán has been. The Atlantic's Franklin Foer:

Orbán’s first stint as prime minister ended after four years, with his defeat in the 2002 elections. The loss caught him by surprise, and it was followed by another, four years later. Orbán vowed that he would never suffer defeat again. In a closed-door speech in 2009, leaked to Hungary’s formerly robust media, he said that he wanted to create “a central political force field” that would allow conservatives to rule for “the coming 15 to 20 years.” As he put it in another speech, “We have only to win once, but then properly.”

When scandal and recession crashed his socialist opponents in 2010, Orbán returned to power, reinventing himself as the field marshal of a civilizational Kulturkampf. His old resentments became the basis for his political platform. He alone would defend the integrity of the family, the nation, and Christendom against “the holy alliance of Brussels bureaucrats, the liberal world media, and insatiable international capital.” He stoked mass hysteria about a wave of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa that arrived in the autumn of 2015, passing through Budapest on their way north.

His masterstroke was to describe the migration crisis as the handiwork of an odious cabal, orchestrated by a Jewish puppet master. In one typical attack, he bellowed, “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward, but crafty; not honest, but base; not national, but international; does not believe in working, but speculates with money.” All of the time-honored tropes of anti-Semitism were unmistakably heaped on George Soros. Soon billboards appeared across the country with an image of Soros cackling and the caption don’t let him have the last laugh.

This counteroffensive was wholly cynical. Soros had long ago ceased to be much of a player in the country. By 2016, his annual spending on nongovernmental organizations in Hungary had dwindled to $3.6 million. “When they started the anti-Soros campaign, nobody thought it would be this successful,” Péter Kréko, a political analyst at the think tank Political Capital Institute, told me. “The polling data showed Soros was an unknown figure. Nobody hated him. In one and a half years, Orbán turned him into a diabolical figure.”

In the face of his demagoguery, the country had already suffered a brain drain. “Hundreds of thousands of people are leaving,” Kréko said. “They will transfer money home, but they don’t vote here. They don’t go to protests. The government likes having a smaller population that is more loyal.” But if one generation of critics exits, the universities can always generate another, so the government set out to shred the academy, too. When Orbán moved against CEU, it wasn’t just political posturing or spleen. Destroying Hungary’s finest institution of higher education was a crucial step in his quest for eternal political life.

Trump absolutely wants this.  The Know-Nothing approach to attacking higher education as a "Soros plot" is there for a reason, and it worked beautifully in Hungary.

When I asked [US Ambassador To Hungary David] Cornstein about Orbán’s description of his own government as an “illiberal democracy,” the ambassador shifted forward and rested his elbows on a table. “It’s a question of a personal view, or what the American people, or the president of the United States, think of illiberal democracy, and what its definition is.” As he danced around the question, never quite arriving at an opinion, he added, “I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orbán has, but he doesn’t.”

He doesn't yet.

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

On the heels of Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine signing an unconstitutional "heartbeat" bill last month that would effective outlaw abortion in the state if it takes effect in July, and new legislation that would ban insurance coverage of all abortion procedures in or out of state, Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has signed an even worse bill that would not only end abortion in the state, it would effectively criminalize not bringing a pregnancy to full term with up to life in prison or even the death penalty for women.

The primary purpose of HB 481 is to prohibit doctors from terminating any pregnancy after they can detect “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity,” which typically occurs at six weeks’ gestation. But the bill does far more than that. In one sweeping provision, it declares that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person” that deserves “full legal recognition.” Thus, Georgia law must “recognize unborn children as natural persons”—not just for the purposes of abortion, but as a legal rule.

This radical revision of Georgia law is quite deliberate: The bill confirms that fetuses “shall be included in population based determinations” from now on, because they are legally humans, and residents of the state. But it is not clear whether the bill’s drafters contemplated the more dramatic consequences of granting legal personhood to fetuses. For instance, as Georgia appellate attorney Andrew Fleischman has pointed out, the moment this bill takes effect on Jan. 1, 2020, the state will be illegally holding thousands of citizens in jail without bond. That’s because, under HB 481, pregnant inmates’ fetuses have independent rights—including the right to due process. Can a juvenile attorney represent an inmate’s fetus and demand its release? If not, why? It is an egregious due process violation to punish one human for the crimes of another. If an inmate’s fetus is a human, how can Georgia lawfully detain it for a crime it did not commit?

But the most startling effect of HB 481 may be its criminalization of women who seek out unlawful abortions or terminate their own pregnancies. An earlier Georgia law imposing criminal penalties for illegal abortions does not apply to women who self-terminate; the new measure, by contrast, conspicuously lacks such a limitation. It can, and would, be used to prosecute women. Misoprostol, a drug that treats stomach ulcers but also induces abortions, is extremely easy to obtain on the internet, and American women routinely use it to self-terminate. It is highly effective in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Anti-abortion advocates generally insist that they do not want to punish women who undergo abortions. But HB 481 does exactly that. Once it takes effect, a woman who self-terminates will have, as a matter of law, killed a human—thereby committing murder. The penalty for that crime in Georgia is life imprisonment or capital punishment.

HB 481 would also have consequences for women who get abortions from doctors or miscarry. A woman who seeks out an illegal abortion from a health care provider would be a party to murder, subject to life in prison. And a woman who miscarries because of her own conduct—say, using drugs while pregnant—would be liable for second-degree murder, punishable by 10 to 30 years’ imprisonment. Prosecutors may interrogate women who miscarry to determine whether they can be held responsible; if they find evidence of culpability, they may charge, detain, and try these women for the death of their fetuses.

Even women who seek lawful abortions out of state may not escape punishment. If a Georgia resident plans to travel elsewhere to obtain an abortion, she may be charged with conspiracy to commit murder, punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment. An individual who helps a woman plan her trip to get an out-of-state abortion, or transports her to the clinic, may also be charged with conspiracy. These individuals, after all, are “conspiring” to end of the life of a “person” with “full legal recognition” under Georgia law.

It is entirely possible that Georgia prosecutors armed with this new statute will bring charges against women who terminate their pregnancies illegally. In 2015, a Georgia prosecutor chargedKenlissia Jones with murder after she self-terminated; he only dropped the charges after concluding that “criminal prosecution of a pregnant woman for her own actions against her unborn child does not seem permitted.” Starting in 2020, however, Georgia law will permit precisely this kind of prosecution. There is no reason to doubt that history will repeat itself, and more prosecutors will charge women who undergo abortions with murder.

There's no mistake, this law is so egregiously unconstitutional it's frightening, but the thrust of this law is to criminalize women for failure to give birth if they conceive, and putting 100% of that undue burden on women and women alone.

It is the road to Margaret Atwood's Gilead, the setting of The Handmaid's Tale.  The closest we've been so far.

And it will become the law in more and more states.  Should the Supreme Court uphold Georgia's law, we become Gilead overnight.

The Drums Of War, Con't

We now know what Donald Trump's 90-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin was meant to accomplish: talking Trump out of regime change in Venezuela and oh yeah, giving Moscow a permanent Atlantic military presence in South America.

President Trump is questioning his administration’s aggressive strategy in Venezuela following the failure of a U.S.-backed effort to oust President Nicolás Maduro, complaining he was misled about how easy it would be to replace the socialist strongman with a young opposition figure, according to administration officials and White House advisers.

The president’s dissatisfaction has crystallized around national security adviser John Bolton and what Trump has groused is an interventionist stance at odds with his view that the United States should stay out of foreign quagmires.

Trump has said in recent days that Bolton wants to get him “into a war” — a comment that he has made in jest in the past but that now betrays his more serious concerns, one senior administration official said.

The administration’s policy is officially unchanged in the wake of a fizzled power play last week by U.S.-backed opposition leader Juan Guaidó. But U.S. officials have since been more cautious in their predictions of Maduro’s swift exit, while reassessing what one official described as the likelihood of a diplomatic “long haul.”

U.S. officials point to the president’s sustained commitment to the Venezuela issue, from the first weeks of his presidency as evidence that he holds a realistic view of the challenges there and does not think there is a quick fix.

But Trump has nonetheless complained over the past week that Bolton and others underestimated Maduro, according to three senior administration officials who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Trump has said that Maduro is a “tough cookie” and that aides should not have led him to believe that the Venezuelan leader could be ousted last week, when Guaidó led mass street protests that turned deadly.

Instead, Maduro rejected an offer to leave the country and two key figures in his government backed out of what Bolton said had been a plan to defect. Maduro publicly mocked Trump in response and said he wasn’t going anywhere, saying the United States had attempted a “foolish” coup.

Let's review.

It's entirely possible that Maduro was on the way out.  But he got a better offer from a smarter, stronger player in this game: Vladimir Putin.  Expect to see a significant warming of the relationship between Caracas and Moscow in the coming weeks and months.  Putin will try to stabilize the Venezuelan economy in exchange for oil and of course, maybe a military presence in-country.

Republicans are bound to be disappointed.  Blowing up Maduro's regime was high on the Bolton neo-con board and in their minds would have been the perfect distraction from Mueller and impeachment in order to rally the country around the unpopular Trump and the flag.

That focus has shifted to Iran, as I said yesterday.  And now it looks like the table's being set for the main course.

In a highly unusual move, National Security Adviser John Bolton convened a meeting at CIA headquarters last week with the Trump administration's top intelligence, diplomatic and military advisers to discuss Iran, according to six current U.S. officials.

The meeting was held at 7:00 a.m. on Monday, April 29, and included CIA Director Gina Haspel, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, five of the officials said.

National security meetings are typically held in the White House Situation Room. The six current officials, as well as multiple former officials, said it is extremely rare for senior White House officials or cabinet members to attend a meeting at CIA headquarters.

The officials said the discussion was not about the intelligence that led to the decision in the following days to surge a carrier strike group and bomber task force to the Middle East, but did not describe what the meeting covered.

Five former CIA operations officers and military officials said that in the past, such meetings have been held at CIA headquarters to brief top officials on highly sensitive covert actions, either the results of existing operations or options for new ones.

Of course, this is all complete garbage.

On Sunday, the National Security Council announced that the U.S. was sending a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Persian Gulf in response to “troubling and escalatory” warnings from Iran—an eye-popping move that raised fears of a potential military confrontation with Tehran. Justifying the move, anonymous government officials cited intelligence indicating Iran had crafted plans to use proxies to strike U.S. forces, both off the coast of Yemen and stationed in Iraq. National Security Adviser John Bolton also discussed the intelligence on the record. A consensus appeared to be emerging: that Iran was gearing up for war.

But multiple sources close to the situation told The Daily Beast that the administration blew it out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.

“It’s not that the administration is mischaracterizing the intelligence, so much as overreacting to it,” said one U.S. government official briefed on it.

Another source familiar with the situation agreed that the Trump administration’s response was an “overreaction” but didn’t dispute that a threat exists. Gen. Qasem Soleimani—the head of the Quds Force, Iran’s covert action arm—has told proxy forces in Iraq that a conflict with the U.S. will come soon, this source noted.

“I would characterize the current situation as shaping operations on both sides to tilt the field in preparation for a possible coming conflict,” continued the second source, who is also a U.S. government official. “The risk is a low-level proxy unit miscalculating and escalating things. We’re sending a message with this reaction to the intelligence, even though the threat might not be as imminent as portrayed.”

But Moscow is friendly with Tehran, too.  And Putin has already gotten total victory in Ukraine, Syria and now it appears Venezuela.  Will Tehran follow?

Or will Trump's paranoia overcome his ego and lead us into a fatal miscalculation?

Russian To Judgment, Con't

On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell declared an end to the Mueller report fight by Democrats, declaring "case closed".

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday sought to slam the door on further investigations of President Donald Trump by declaring “case closed” after a two-year probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, even as House Democrats’ war with the White House intensified.

McConnell, the top Republican in the U.S. Congress, delivered a stinging rebuke of Democrats seeking additional information on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report that found no evidence Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

“The special counsel’s finding is clear. Case closed,” McConnell declared.

On Wednesday, somebody forgot to give GOP Sen. Richard Burr and the Senate Intel Committee the memo.

The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. to answer questions about his previous testimony before Senate investigators in relation to the Russia investigation, sources with direct knowledge told Axios.

Why it matters: It's the first congressional subpoena — that we know about — of one of President Trump's children. The subpoena sets up a fight that's unprecedented in the Trump era: A Republican committee chair pit against the Republican president's eldest son.

It's also a sign that the Russia investigations in Congress aren't over despite the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe and despite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying it's time to move on from the Russia probe.

A Senate Intelligence Committee spokesperson told Axios: "We do not discuss the details of witness engagements with the Committee. Throughout the investigation, the Committee has reserved the right to recall witnesses for additional testimony as needed, as every witness and witness counsel has been made aware."

Between the lines: Mueller, whose investigation did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, did not indict Trump Jr., despite speculation that he would.

Unlike many congressional investigations in the Trump era, the Senate Intelligence probe — led by Republican chairman Richard Burr and ranking Democrat Mark Warner — has been largely bipartisan.

The fact that they're subpoenaing Trump Jr. is a strong signal that he declined a request to appear before the committee again.

The backstory: Trump Jr. testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017 that he was only "peripherally aware" of proposed plans for the Moscow project. His testimony was released. He testified for a total of more than 25 hours with three different committees, per a source familiar with the situation.

Again, for a Senate Republican-led committee issuing a subpoena against Donald Trump Jr. at this stage of the game when McConnell and the GOP have spent weeks screaming at Democrats to "move on for the good of the country" there's at least one Senate Republican that's not exactly with the program.

We'll see what comes of this.  This might be the first real crack in the dam, or it might be nothing.  The White House was caught looking on this one and I can only imagine that Donald Trump is furious and wants Richard Burr's head.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• BATF agents in Los Angeles seized more than 1,000 firearms from a home near Beverly Hills on Wednesday after agent received a tip involving illegal manufacture and sale of weapons.
• Texas Republicans are continuing voter suppression efforts in the state with legislation criminalizing mistakes on voter registration forms and driving others to the polls.
• Denver has become the first city to decriminalize "magic mushrooms", under a ballot initiative passed this week the city would drop criminal penalties for psilocybin possession and use.
• The Trump regime is searching for a test case to end nationwide injunctions by federal judges, the White House is tasking VP Mike Pence and AG Bill Barr to lead the effort. 
• Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley is sponsoring legislation to end "loot boxes" and other microtransactions in video games in order to protect children from exploitation.

Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

I've been warning about this coming for months now and the Trump regime's vengeance for last night's Trump tax story was the catalyst for a swift and brutal purging the White House press corps of credentials across the board.  

The White House today immediately instituted a "new standard" for credentials based on how often reporters were on the White House grounds, something of course that happens to get rid of credentials for most non-FOX reporters completely.  Again, the vast majority of press reporters, technicians, and camera operators for America's press organizations all lost their White House press credentials today.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank lays out, "exceptions" were made for some "senior" reporters, but those can now be revoked at will by the White House.  And those "senior" reporters do not include Milbank, who has covered the White House for 21 years.

The Post requested exceptions for its six White House reporters and for me, saying that this access is essential to our work (in my case, I often write “sketches” describing the White House scene). The White House press office granted exceptions to the other six, but not to me. I strongly suspect it’s because I’m a Trump critic. The move is perfectly in line with Trump’s banning of certain news organizations, including The Post, from his campaign events, and his threats to revoke White House credentials of journalists he doesn’t like.

White House officials provided me no comment for the record.

I’m not looking for pity. Trump’s elimination of briefings and other changes have devalued White House coverage anyway. But there’s something wrong with a president having the power to decide which journalists can cover him.

Now, virtually the entire White House press corps is credentialed under “exceptions,” which means, in a sense, that they all serve at the pleasure of press secretary Sarah Sanders because they all fail to meet credentialing requirements — and therefore, in theory, can have their credentials revoked any time they annoy Trump or his aides, like CNN’s Jim Acosta did.

Last year, Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ordered the White House to restore Acosta’s press credentials, saying that the White House’s process for revoking his access (after Acosta had aggressively questioned Trump) was “shrouded in mystery.”

In response, it seems, the White House established a clear — if nearly impossible — standard: No credentials to any journalist who is not in the building on at least 90 out of the previous 180 days — in other words, seven of every 10 workdays. The White House wouldn’t provide numbers, but it appears most of the White House press corps didn’t qualify for credentials under the new standard, including regulars for The Post and the Associated Press. (Trump, who has spent more than 200 days at Trump properties and many more on travel, is barely in the White House this much himself.)

The White House said it would grant exceptions for “senior journalists” who are “consistently engaged in covering the White House” and for those with “special circumstances.” Though the culling properly eliminated some (including at The Post) who no longer needed credentials, the victims hurt most were freelance camera operators and technicians who now could lose their livelihood.

The White House, in rescinding my credentials, told me I had only been in the building seven times in the previous 180 days (two foot surgeries during that period kept me at home, though I never came close to the 90-day standard).

More important is that the White House is drastically curtailing access for all journalists. Briefings have been abolished in favor of unscheduled “gaggles” ( on the record, but impromptu and haphazard) in the White House driveway. The Pentagon and State Department have done similarly.

The fact that this policy was rolled out less than 24 hours after the Trump tax story hit the presses last night is no coincidence.  The White House was given the heads up on the story some time ago when the NY Times called for comment.  They had the time to work this out, and when the story landed with a bang last night, today was the revenge.

We've taken a dark and rapid turn into authoritarianism with a looming shooting war and possible impeachment hearings.  No doubt this message pitch for America's press is very clear: you will report what we want you to report, or you will be gone...

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Neither the Trump regime nor House Democrats were bluffing today when it came to carrying out their threatened actions this week on the impeachment front, as the House Judiciary Committee voted 24-10 to hold AG Bill Barr in contempt of Congress, and the Trump regime asserted executive privilege over the unredacted Mueller report.

President Donald Trump has asserted executive privilege over special counsel Robert Mueller's unredacted report as the House Judiciary Committee prepares to vote to hold his attorney general, William Barr, in contempt of Congress.

Faced with "blatant abuse of power" by Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the president "has no other option than to make a protective assertion of executive privilege," the White House said Wednesday.

The committee vote and Trump's assertion of privilege represents a major escalation of the battle between congressional Democrats and the president. It will likely lead to a protracted legal war over Mueller’s 448-page report on alleged obstruction of justice by Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

The Justice Department had told lawmakers Tuesday ahead of the session that it would recommend that Trump assert executive privilege to that material.

Members of the Judiciary Committee were expected to spend the Wednesday markup discussing the resolution to hold Barr in contempt, as well as a supporting 27-page report in which Democrats raised the prospect of impeachment as a result of their investigation relating to the Mueller probe.

In his opening remarks, Nadler said it was "not a step we take lightly," but rather the "culmination of nearly three months of requests, discussions and negotiations with the Department of Justice."

"In response to our latest good-faith offer, the Department abruptly announced that if we move forward today, it would ask President Trump to invoke what it refers to as a protective assertion of executive privilege on all of the materials subject to our subpoena. Just minutes ago, it took that dramatic step," Nadler continued.

"Let me be clear: The information we are requesting is entirely within our legal rights to receive and is no different from what has been provided to Congress on numerous occasions, going back nearly a century," he added.

Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., the ranking member of the committee, said in his opening statement that Democrats on the committee were rushing the oversight process because they are "angry" that "the special counsel's report did not produce the material or conclusions they expected to pave their path to impeaching the president" — sullying Barr's reputation in the process.

"I ask you to recognize that craven and insincere politics yield anemic dividends for Americans who have asked us to legislate," Collins said. "As I have told you on multiple occasions and proved at last week’s pharmaceuticals markup, I stand ready to work with you to promote solutions. I will not, though, become a bystander as you assail the attorney general and this committee. Our democracy deserves better."

Once the Judiciary Committee signs off on the contempt resolution, it will go to a vote in the full House. The timing of that vote would be up to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Pelosi, for her part, says Trump is becoming "self-impeachable".  Whatever that means.

“The point is that every single day, whether it’s obstruction, obstruction, obstruction — obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, ignoring subpoenas . . . every single day, the president is making a case — he’s becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things that he is doing,” Pelosi said at a Washington Post Live event.

I agree with Greg Sargent.  The only Democrat right now really taking Trump's impeachment seriously as a necessary duty to preserve the republic is Elizabeth Warren.

Is President Trump an aberration whose defeat in 2020 would allow the nation to begin rebounding toward normalcy? Or does his ascendance reflect long-running national pathologies and deeply ingrained structural economic and political problems that will intractably endure long after he’s gone?

The answer to this question — which has been thrust to the forefront by the Democratic presidential primaries — is, in a sense, both. Trump represents both a continuation of and a dramatic exacerbation of those long running pathologies and problems.

As of now, Elizabeth Warren appears to be the Democratic candidate who most fully grasps the need to take both of those aspects of the Trump threat seriously. The Massachusetts senator is, I think, offering what amounts to the most fully rounded and multidimensional response to that threat.

In recent days, Warren has addressed the deeper issues raised by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report — and the reaction to it from Trump and Republicans — in by far the most comprehensive way.

In an important moment on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Warren took strong issue with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s profoundly cynical effort to treat this all as a closed matter. “Case closed,” McConnell said, speaking not just about Mueller’s extensive findings of likely criminal obstruction of justice by Trump but also about Trump’s eagerness to reap gain from Russia’s sabotage of our elections, which McConnell blamed on Barack Obama.

In response, Warren again called for an impeachment inquiry, but she did more than that: She indicted the Republican Party as a whole for shrugging off Trump’s epic misconduct and wrongdoing.

Warren has also pointed out more forcefully than any rival has that Trump tried to derail an investigation not just into his own campaign’s conduct, but also into the Russian attack on our democracy — which Trump has refused to acknowledge happened at all, hamstringing preparations for the next attack.

It is this dereliction of duty on Trump's part that poses the most serious threat.

Unfortunately, America just doesn't give a damn.

There's been a lot of bandwidth devoted to the Mueller Report.

The public mostly accepts the Democrats' conclusions, i.e. that Trump hasn't been honest, probably obstructed, probably committed crimes.

It doesn't think that warrants impeachment, though.https://t.co/yOWmcscfey https://t.co/cvM24aJNco

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 7, 2019

Contrast that, by the way, to the stories that have gotten the most news coverage, which of course includes Russia at/near the top. The idea that Democrats haven't done enough to focus the public's attention on Russia seems really wrong to me. https://t.co/jUXbPoAZsG pic.twitter.com/AgzdIJobhR

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 8, 2019

A grand total of zero respondents said it was the most important issue to their 2020 vote when CNN asked two months ago.

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) May 8, 2019

Liz Warren is "out of touch" for wanting to save the country and the country just doesn't want to deal with it.  Period.  Maybe that changes, but that's apparently up to Democrats to convince America that's the case and despite the massive coverage of it, the country literally could not care less about it.

That's where we are right now.  We were told Hillary didn't make the case she was going to be better than Trump in 2016.  Now we're being told Democrats haven't made the case for impeachment in 2019.

All evidence points to 2020's election being far too late.