StupidiNews!

• A California civil jury has returned a $2 billion verdict against agriculture giant Monsanto for causing cancer in in a couple with their popular weed killer product, Round-Up.
• Donald Trump says he will veto a House Democratic bill to add protections for LGBTQ Americans to civil rights and housing laws, the White House says the bill is "filled with poison pills".
• The White House says Donald Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in June as trade war between the two countries threatens to damage the global economy.
• Upcoming midterm elections in the Philippines appear to be setting the stage for President Rodrigo Duterte to pass leadership to his eldest daughter Sara, currently Mayor of Davao City.
• BitCoin is back up to $8,000, a new 2019 high, as the price of the cryptocurrency has again skyrocketed in just a few short weeks.

Last Call For Trump Trading Blows, Con't

We're now to the point where we've gone from Americans will be helped by Trump's idiotic trade war with China, to Trump's trade war probably won't hurt, to it will hurt but it's okay, to GOP Sen. Tom Cotton this morning telling Americans that the pain in your pocketbooks is less than the pain of those serving in our endless wars, so suck it up loser.

As the U.S. and China inch closer to an all-out trade war, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton says that the sacrifice Americans will pay for President Trump's tariffs are "minimal" compared to those serving overseas. President Trump has maintained that Americans would not be fronting the brunt of the cost for tariffs, but many, including the president's own economic adviser, say they will.

"There will be some sacrifices on the part of Americans, I grant you that, but I also would say that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes that are laid to rest in Arlington make," Cotton told "CBS This Morning" when asked about the impact of tariffs on farmers in his own state of Arkansas.

Cotton, the author of "Sacred Duty: A Soldier's Tour at Arlington National Cemetery," said that in the long term, the goal is to make sure that the U.S. "remains preeminent as a global super power both in the economic and the security" worlds.

The price tag for that "preeminence" on the average American family, according to trade experts falls between $700 to $1,000.

"If we remain the world's largest economy and the world's largest economic super power in the short term, I say it is worth that cost," said Cotton.

Enjoy your Trump Patriotic Trade Tax and pay it proudly, citizen!  This money will go to...something.  I'm sure.  But this is the price of your freedom, so pay up.  And keep paying up because Leader Trump says so.  You're a real American, aren't you?

Your grandfather died fighting socialists so that you could have freedom but freedom comes with a price, which is roughly $1000 in extra costs for goods this year so quit whining, liberal!

Tariffs for some, tiny American flags for others!

Trump meanwhile wants more money going to farmers because they are getting wrecked by his policies, but it's okay if the rest of us buy them off because Trump Patriotic Trade Tax.

President Donald Trump is seeking an additional $15 billion in U.S. subsidies in an effort to protect farmers from the devastating impact of his trade war with China. That’s on top of $12 billion already earmarked for the farmers to help them weather the fallout.

That would be an additional bill for U.S. taxpayers already shouldering the cost of increased tariffs in the form of higher costs for products and parts from China.

Trump revealed the subsidy figure in a tweet Friday. He suggested the government use the funds to buy agricultural products to ship to other nations for humanitarian aid, though setting up such a system would be extremely complicated. In his most recent budget proposal, Trump proposed eliminating three food aid programs, Politico noted.

The president appeared to dismiss the impact of the cost as he falsely claimed — again — that “massive” tariff payments are being paid by China “directly” to the U.S. Treasury, which would presumably be used to cover the cost of the subsidy. There is “absolutely no need to rush” to negotiate a deal with China, he tweeted.

In fact, the tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, who pass on the extra costs to the American consumer in the form of higher prices for products, a fact White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow admitted Sunday. Economists have estimated that the trade war is costing the U.S. more than $3 billion a month.

So who's protecting the American consumer from Trump's trade war?

Nobody.  Now go do your patriotic duty and pay that tariff.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The Very Serious Washington Pundits™ tell us that super cunning Trump wants to be impeached, a trap that must be avoided because Trump will never be removed from office by the Senate, and loser Democrats will only lose and Trump's popularity will skyrocket in the wake of a failed attempt.

It seems a crazy idea that any president would actually want to be impeached. 

But Donald Trump has so subverted Washington logic with his wild, norm-crushing presidency that there is now a serious conversation -- at least among Democrats -- about whether he views the ultimate constitutional crisis as a weapon in his re-election campaign. 

The possibility is shaping the strategies of Democratic leaders as they weigh the political risks of impeachment and their duty to defend principles of American governance. 

Many Democrats fear that Trump may be laying an impeachment trap that could consume the House majority, distract them from key issues like health care and alienate persuadable voters. 

But it's also possible their leaders could be talking up the idea that Trump wants to be impeached as a way to quell discontent among some base activists that Washington Democrats are not doing more to constrain the President.  

Now, imagine that those are the only two possibilities, one, that Democrats have already inevitably lost the impeachment battle, and impeachment leads to Trump's master stroke of a 2020 government completely controlled by Republicans eager to exterminate all Dems, or two, that everything in scenario one is correct so that Democrats are using this as the excuse not to impeach in order to save the country.

The question is not going away, given Trump's staggeringly broad effort to subvert investigations of his presidency, campaign, personal finances and business career. 

"The President is almost self-impeaching because he is, every day, demonstrating more obstruction of justice and disrespect for Congress' legitimate role to subpoena," Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday. 

One of Pelosi's top lieutenants, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, is, like Pelosi, wary of the risks of impeachment. But he acknowledged Trump's own actions might be propelling Washington toward a precipice. 

"Part of our reluctance is we are already a bitterly divided country and an impeachment process will divide us further," Schiff said Sunday on "This Week" on ABC News. "He certainly seems to be trying and maybe this is his perverse way of dividing us more ... He thinks that's to his political advantage, but it's certainly not to the country's advantage." 

Trump dodged a question in a Politico interview last week about whether he wanted to be impeached. And he argues that if anyone committed crimes over the 2016 campaign, it is Democrats, not him. 

At other times he has, however, seemed to be testing out arguments that he could use in his defense in an impeachment showdown. 

"It's hard to impeach somebody who hasn't done anything wrong and who's created the greatest economy in the history of our country," Trump told Reuters in an interview in December.

Judging by this article, Democrats have already surrendered.

If that's true, we're done as a country.

The Perpetual Outrage Machine, Con't

For a change of pace, Republicans are attacking Muslim Democrats other than Rep. Ilhan Omar as anti-Semitic, and that of course means taking Rep. Rashida Tlaib out of context entirely.

House Republican leaders took aim at Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) on Sunday for a podcast interview in which she discussed her support for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In an interview on Yahoo News’s “Skullduggery” podcast published Saturday, Tlaib was asked about her position on the issue. The freshman lawmaker began her response by noting that the United States commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day two weeks ago. She then discussed her Palestinian ancestors and the founding of the state of Israel, saying she was “humbled by the fact that it was my ancestors that had to suffer” to create a safe haven for the Jewish people.

“There’s, you know, there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out. . . . I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time,” Tlaib said.

Now, any actual student of history knows this is true, that Palestinians were forcibly removed from parts of what is now Israel in order to make a homeland for the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

She added that the events of the past have informed her views on how to approach a solution to the conflict.

“I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that [safe haven], in many ways,” Tlaib said. “But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, right? And it was forced on them. And so, when I think about one-state, I think about the fact that, why couldn’t we do it in a better way?”

Tlaib’s comments were picked up by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which published an article with the headline, “Tlaib Says She Is Humbled Her Ancestors Provided ‘Safe Haven’ for Jews After Holocaust.”

But two of the top House Republicans on Sunday criticized her use of the phrase “calming feeling,” falsely accusing her of using the phrase to describe her views about the Holocaust itself.

And that out-of-context garbage is all that matters.

“There is no justification for the twisted and disgusting comments made by Rashida Tlaib just days after the annual Day of Holocaust Remembrance,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in a statement. “More than six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust; there is nothing ‘calming’ about that fact.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the No. 3 Republican in the House, issued a statement describing Tlaib’s remarks as “sickening.”

“I call on Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer to finally take action against Representative Tlaib and other members of the Democratic caucus who are spreading vile anti-Semitism,” she said, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.). “All of us, regardless of party, must stand as Americans against the evil of anti-Semitism. If the Democratic leadership continues to stand by in silence, they are enabling the spread of evil.”

And of course, Liz Cheney and Steve Scalise are behind this, two of the most vile, perfidious liars in the GOP.  Expect another week of "Democrats hate Jews" and "How can an American Jew vote for a Democrat" as the needle gets moved off the Trump regime's journey towards autocracy.

StupidiNews!

• An Oregon man wanted by the FBI for 23 years turned himself into police Friday, Wayne Arthur Silsbee escaped authorities for over two decades on sexual assault and child molestation charges.
• Some 44 states are filing a mass lawsuit against more than 20 drug manufacturers over conspiracy and collusion to raise prices on American consumer by over 1,000%.
• Officials in Sri Lanka are temporarily blocking social media after mosques and Muslim-owned businesses were attacked in the capital of Colombo, several arrests have been made in the case.
• Donald Trump says the White House is "where we want to be" after raising tariffs on China this weekend, China is promising swift retaliation that will be "regrettable". 
• Ridesharing giant Uber's first day on the stock market was a bust, with the company losing 7.6% in trading and all news pointing more selling this week.

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.