Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The hammer fell today on former Paul Manafort partner turned government witness Rick Gates, who did not emerge from his sentencing hearing in front of Judge Amy Berman Jackson unscathed, and we learned that Manafort himself was the one who bribed Gates to not cooperate.

A federal prosecutor on Tuesday — at the long-awaited sentencing of former Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates –elaborated on the previously non-specific detail that Gates was offered “monetary assistance” not to cooperate with the Mueller investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston said that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whom Gates went on to testify against, offered Gates access to a legal defense fund if Gates agreed not to cooperate with the government.
The government’s motion for downward departure only said last week that Gates was pressured not to cooperate and that he was offered monetary assistance, but didn’t get more specific than that:

Finally, is important to note that the public nature of this case has made Gates and Gates’ family the subject of intense media scrutiny. Gates’ cooperation has been steadfast despite the fact that the government has asked for his assistance in high profile matters, against powerful individuals, in the midst of a particularly turbulent environment. Gates received pressure not to cooperate with the government, including assurances of monetary assistance. He should be commended for standing up to provide information and public testimony against individuals such as Manafort, Craig, and Stone, knowing well that they enjoy support from the upper echelons of American politics and society. Based on his substantial assistance, the government recommends a downward departure and does not oppose Gates’ request for a probationary sentence.

The government praised Gates for testifying against Manafort, Greg Craig, and Roger Stone, despite the fact that these individuals had friends in high places. They also asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson to sentence Gates to probation, citing his “extraordinary” cooperation with the government.

Instead, Jackson sentenced Gates on Tuesday to 45 days behind bars that will be served on weekends. The judge tacked on three years of probation and 300 hours of community service.

Six months' worth of weekends is better than no jail time, I suppose, and I really hope he ends up cleaning public toilets for a couple of months, but that's just me.

Still, he did help bury Manafort and Stone.  At least some justice came from the Mueller investigation.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

With 24 hours until the historic vote, and marches planned across the country later today, the Washington Post takes a look at where the House stands on articles of impeachment.

House Democratic leaders introduced two articles of impeachment against President Trump on Dec. 10: one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress. 

[Everything you need to know about impeachment] 

Trump will be impeached if the House passes one or both articles by a simple majority (That means House Democrats need 216 votes given the current makeup of the House — there are a handful of vacant seats). More than 200 House Democrats have announced their support for both articles of impeachment. 

A two-thirds majority of senators present would then have to vote to convict and remove the president from office. 

The House is expected to vote on the articles before the Christmas recess. Below is a tally of how House members are expected to vote on impeachment. None have yet said they will vote for just one article, but we will track that here if they do.

The count stands at 206 for, with ten more needed out of 27 uncommitted so far.  Now Republican Jeff Van Drew is against the measure, and so far only Minnesota Democrat Colin Peterson has defected.  Independent Justin Amash, driven out of the GOP for even entertaining the idea of impeachment, is a yes vote.

We'll see where the vote lands tomorrow.

The Beat Reporter Beat Is Beat

As much as I complain about the media in this country being a bunch of DC cocktail party circuit nimrods, the fact is I'm glad I didn't go into the field like I wanted to 25 years ago.

Hundreds of freelance writers at Vox Media, primarily those covering sports for the SB Nation site, will lose their jobs in the coming months as the company prepares for a California law to go into effect that will force companies to reclassify contractors in the state as employees.

“This is a bittersweet note of thanks to our California independent contractors,” John Ness, executive director of SB Nation, wrote in a post on Monday. “In 2020, we will move California’s team blogs from our established system with hundreds of contractors to a new one run by a team of new SB Nation employees.”

In a separate memo seen by CNBC, Ness said that California contractors can apply for a full-time or part-time position in California. Contractors who wish to continue contributing can do so but “need to understand they will not be paid for future contributions,” he said. “We know this may be a difficult decision, so we’re giving everyone affected 30 days to decide what works for them,” Ness added.

The announcement follows the September passage of Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) by the California Assembly and its signing by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Targeted primarily at ride-hailing and food delivery companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and PostMates, the legislation requires gig economy workers to be hired as employees with benefits like health coverage and minimum wage protections.

As it pertains to Vox, the law forbids nonemployees from submitting more than 35 pieces per year. Most of the changes at Vox will be at SB Nation, which has writers all over the country covering professional and college sports, but will also touch other sites like Curbed and Eater, according to a person familiar with the matter.

SB Nation is posting about 20 part-time and full-time jobs, so some of the freelancers may be hired on as staff, said the person, who asked not to be named because not all the details have been made public. A few of them were posted on Monday.

California takes action to make gig contractors actual employees, employers respond by laying off everyone and actually expecting people to work for zero dollars instead.

This is going to be the big fight over the next decade.  Employers will be reclassifying everyone as contractors.  It's not just journalism or IT either, at technology eliminates more and more industries eintirely.

We're going to have to come to grips with that, and in the last 25 years we've dona  dismal job of it.  Collective bargaining and organized labor are needed more than ever.  Where's a gig economy smartphone app for that?

StupidiNews!

• European Union researchers have discovered the largest recorded ancient Roman shipwreck off the coast of Kefalonia, thought to be some 2,000 years old. 
• China is protesting the expulsion of two diplomats by the Trump regime in September after the pair allegedly drove onto a sensitive US military base.
• A federal judge has rejected claims of prosecutorial misconduct in the case of Michael Flynn, Flynn faces sentencing for his Mueller probe conviction on January 28.
• Mexico will raise its minimum wage by 20% as President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador approves the country's second minimum wage hike in two years. 
• Internet domain management company ICANN may try to block the sale of rights to the .org domain by a private equity firm.

Last Call For Hyperloop Hyperbole

The biggest suspension of disbelief in the new study this week that finds constructing a hyperloop route from Chicago to Pittsburgh through Cleveland would cost $30 billion or so is that anyone actually wants to go to goddamn Cleveland at 700 mph.

A high-speed hyperloop line that could zoom passengers through a vacuum tube from Cleveland to Chicago and Pittsburgh could cost from $24.7 billion to $29.8 billion to build, depending on variations in the route and stops along the way.

But the profits and economic benefits would justify the expense and attract the substantial private investment needed to make it happen.

Those statements are among the key assertions of an 18-month, $1.3 million feasibility analysis scheduled for release Monday by the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency and Los Angeles-based Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.

The report, led by TEMS, a consulting firm based in Frederick, Maryland, constitutes what the authors believe is the most extensive hyperloop feasibility analysis released publicly to date, anywhere, said NOACA Executive Director Grace Gallucci, who discussed some of the report’s core findings ahead of Monday.

A hyperloop system would consist of large-scale vacuum tubes with magnetic-levitation tracks that would carry capsules with 28 to 40 passengers at speeds of up to 760 mph.

First envisioned by entrepreneur Elon Musk as a high-speed alternative to other modes of transportation, hyperloop has yet to be proven safe for human travel. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or HTT, is testing capsules on a track in Toulouse, France.

Hyperloop projects are under study in Europe, the Middle East and corridors in the U.S., including a Pittsburgh-Columbus-Chicago route.

On the basis of the new report, Gallucci said she would recommend that the Cleveland region should participate in further studies that could lead to construction as soon as 2023, with the understanding that the bulk of the costs would be borne by private investors.
“I am sold to move to the next step,’’ Gallucci said.

“I think there’s enough evidence in the feasibility study to suggest we should move forward as a region in order to leverage the work that we’ve already done and to capitalize on the momentum of hyperloop nationally and internationally,” Gallucci said.

But she emphasized that the impetus for hyperloop is coming from the private sector.

“NOACA’s not trying to push this,” she said. “NOACA wants to be part of the innovation and a leader, but that’s very different from pushing it. This is not our agenda.”

The report will state that a Cleveland, Chicago and Pittsburgh route could be up and running by 2028, following six years of construction.

Cincinnati can't get a bridge built to replace the Kennedy-era Brent Spence over the Ohio River, but hey, hyperloop!

I know picking on Elon Musk is low-hanging fruit, and normally I'm a raging Keynesian on macroeconomic issues and especially on mass transportation infrastructure, but hyperloop is a classic example of Austrian school malinvestment.

Hyperloop will choke out all other infrastructure spending and end up hurting a lot of people. $30 billion spent on going really, really fast from Chicago to Pittsburgh means it's not being spent on anything else, and besides, if you want to go that quickly we have these things called airplanes.

Jesus, this is a horrific idea.  Give me the $30 billion, I'm sure I can find something better to spend it on.

Backing Off Tobacco

Congress has to be dragged kicking and screaming across the finish line to do anything remotely useful and bipartisan, and there's a reason why the institution of the US legislative branch has an approval rating somewhere around gonorrhea, but every now and then they accidentally get stuff done to create political cover from even tougher issues, and raising the age nationally to purchase tobacco products to 21 is one of those things.

Congress is on the verge of a sweeping health care reform: Federally prohibiting the sale of tobacco products to people under 21.

The legislation significantly raising the age cap on cigarettes and e-cigarettes is increasingly likely to be included in the year-end spending deal, the result of support from a diverse coalition of lawmakers, according to four people familiar with the matter. While the deal has not been finalized, it is more than likely to be in the package, according to sources in both parties.

The effort has the support of Democrats like Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Tim Kaine of Virginia as well as Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.); on the Republican side Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) supports it as does National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

The legislation had been included in a larger package of measures intended to reduce the cost of emergency medical bills. But that legislation has been bogged down in a partisan fight and the broadly popular tobacco legislation will probably be spared from the gridlock.

The rise of vaping products to hook a new generation of kids on tobacco isn't an accident, and the tobacco industry went nuts when Trump wanted to ban flavored vaping juice to minors anyway (I still absolutely believe young master Barron Trump got caught with some) so this is Congress stepping in and getting it done. 

I've counted at least four vape shops in my neighborhood popping up in the last couple of years, and any time any industry like that has growth of that magnitude, Uncle Sam is going to want to regulate it.

Of course, there's also the bonus of positive health outcomes and saving taxpayers billions in treatment costs for tobacco-related illnesses.  Gotta call that a win.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

With a House vote on impeachment a few days away, the obligatory dealmaking in the Senate is beginning with Chuck Schumer wanting former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton and Acting WH Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to testify before the Senate trial.

The top Senate Democrat on Sunday called for subpoenaing several senior Trump administration officials who have yet to testify in the House’s impeachment probe as witnesses for President Trump’s impeachment trial — part of an opening salvo in negotiations that could determine the parameters for the Senate proceedings next month.

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) outlined a number of procedural demands that Democrats believe would make the Senate trial fair and completed “within a reasonable period of time.”

That includes subpoenas issued by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. for acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney; Robert Blair, a senior adviser to Mulvaney; former national security adviser John Bolton; and Michael Duffey, a top official at the Office of Management and Budget. Mulvaney, Blair and Duffey had been subpoenaed by the House committees and defied the summons; Bolton has not been subpoenaed but indicated he would fight one in court.

“The trial must be one that not only hears all of the evidence and adjudicates the case fairly; it must also pass the fairness test with the American people,” Schumer wrote to McConnell in the letter sent Sunday. “That is the great challenge for the Senate in the coming weeks.”

Under Schumer’s proposal, the trial proceedings would begin Jan. 6, although Roberts and the senators won’t be sworn in until Jan. 7 and House impeachment managers would begin their presentations on Jan. 9.

The proposal on witnesses is almost certain to draw the most resistance from McConnell. The top Senate Republican, as well as a growing consensus of GOP senators, would prefer not to call the type of high-wattage witnesses that Trump has demanded — such as Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, and the whistleblower, whose complaint triggered the impeachment inquiry — and McConnell has warned privately that a battle over witnesses would be “mutually assured destruction.”

We all know Mitch McConnell wants the entire proceeding to be dismissed with a single vote, but there is the slim possibility that a few Republican senators could want the appearance of justice even if they don't want to dispense any.

Even FOX News has impeachment at 54%.  Besides, Trump himself could insist on something like a trial.  After all, it's his legacy going down in flames for good this week.

McConnell will almost certainly lard up the witness stand with everyone from Joe Biden to Adam Schiff to the whistleblower to hell, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama if he's forced to.

I don't see that happening, however.  I see the Senate trial being over by January 17, if it even makes it to the second week.

 

StupidiNews!

• At least three people are reported dead in the aftermath of a magnitude 6.8 earthquake centered on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao on Sunday.
• The death toll from this weekend's volcanic eruption on New Zealand's White Island has reached 18, search and rescue teams are still looking for people who were at the popular tourist destination.
• Aircraft giant Boeing is considering reducing or even halting production of its troubled 737 Max airliner after the FAA confirmed the plane would not be allowed to fly in the US until 2020.
• China is threatening "significant" trade retaliation against Germany over concerns Berlin could ban tech manufacturer Huawei's 5G mobile networks due to possible espionage.
• Archaeologists have discovered a cave painting in Indonesia dating back 44,000 years, making it the oldest known cave painting on earth.

Last Call For Climate of Disaster, Con't

The Trump regime pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords may be a massive, intractable problem for the world, but the rest of the planet isn't exactly coming together on climate solutions either.

Marathon international climate talks ended Sunday with major polluters resisting calls to ramp up efforts to keep global warming at bay and negotiators postponing the regulation of global carbon markets until next year.

Those failures came even after organizers added two more days to the 12 days of scheduled talks in Madrid. In the end, delegates from almost 200 nations endorsed a declaration to help poor countries that are suffering the effects of climate change, although they didn’t allocate any new funds to do so.

The final declaration called on the “urgent need” to cut planet-heating greenhouse gases in line with the goals of the landmark 2015 Paris climate change accord. That fell far short of promising to enhance countries’ pledges to cut planet-heating greenhouse gases next year, which developing countries and environmentalists had lobbied the delegates to achieve.

The Paris accord established the common goal of avoiding a temperature increase of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. So far, the world is on course for a 3- to 4-degree Celsius rise, with potentially dramatic consequences for many countries, including rising sea levels and fiercer storms.

Negotiators in Madrid left some of the thorniest issues for the next climate summit in Glasgow in a year, including the liability for damages caused by rising temperatures that developing countries were insisting on. That demand was resisted mainly by the United States.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he was “disappointed” by the meeting’s outcome.

“The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis,” he said. “We must not give up and I will not give up.”

“It’s sad that we couldn’t reach a final agreement” on carbon markets, admitted the climate summit’s chair, Carolina Schmidt, Chile’s environment minister.

“We were on the verge,” she said, adding that the goal was to establish markets that are “robust and environmentally sustainable.”

Economists say putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, would allow countries or companies to trade emissions permits that can be steadily reduced — encouraging businesses to transition to low-emission technologies.

The carbon-market failure did not upset everyone. Countries in Europe and elsewhere had said that no deal on how to govern the exchange of carbon credits was better than a weak one that could undermine a dozen or so existing regional carbon mechanisms.

“Thankfully, the weak rules on a market based mechanism, promoted by Brazil and Australia, that would have undermined efforts to reduce emissions has been shelved,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a campaign group.

Helen Mountford, from the environmental think-tank World Resources Institute, said that “given the high risks of loopholes discussed in Madrid, it was better to delay than accept rules that would have compromised the integrity of the Paris Agreement.”

So the world will try again in 2020, as they have for decades, and that too will most likely end in failure.  A quarter-century after Kyoto should have been ratified and put into place globally at the cost of billions, we're now arguing over who will pay for the planetary triage that will cost trillions instead.

I'm a great uncle these days, my brother's daughter gave birth this week to an adorable baby boy, and I'm wondering what world the little one will grow up in. 

When he becomes an adult, what will he think of the world he will inherit from us, and how much will he despise us for it?

It's About Suppression, Con't

Republicans continue to disenfranchise voters across the country, and in nearly every instance it's voters in predominantly black and Hispanic counties. Wisconsin is arguably the most critical battleground state from an electoral college standpoint in 2020, and a Republican judge has just purged nearly a quarter of a million voters from the rolls.

At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.

The commission planned to remove the letter's recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn't heard from them. But Malloy's decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.

Before Friday's hearing, Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said in an interview that quickly removing voters from the rolls would cause "clear harm to Wisconsin voters." That's because some people who haven't moved would likely lose their ability to vote, at least for the time being.

"Any time people have to go through extra steps to vote, and certainly re-registering is a significant additional step, the result is that fewer people end up voting," he said. "Fewer people will be registered. A number of people will have to re-register."

Three voters sued the commission last month with the help of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. They argued election officials were required to remove voters from the rolls 30 days after sending the letters if they hadn't heard from them.

They asked Malloy to issue an injunction that would require election officials to purge their rolls. Kaul, commissioners and others say that would lead to some people getting knocked off the rolls who shouldn't be.

But Malloy went further than issuing an injunction. In granting a writ of mandamus — essentially a court order that a government official or agency do its job — he said he was convinced the commission had a clear, positive, plain legal duty to purge the voter rolls within 30 days.

"I don't want to see someone deactivated, but I don't write the law," said Malloy, who was appointed to the bench in 2002 by Republican Gov. Scott McCallum and has been re-elected by voters.

And of course, the reason these voters are suspect in the first place is because of the state's record system, ERIC.  Wisconsin did the same thing in 2017 with more than a third of a million voters based on ERIC records and found that the vast majority of them had not moved and should have kept their voter registration intact.  Now Wisconsin is doing it again.

Considering we know our Russian friends have broken into state voter registration systems in all 50 states, and that our GOP friends refuse to allow legislation to pass that would strengthen America's defenses against those attacks, it doesn't take a genius to see how it would be easy to de-register and disenfranchise registered Democrats all over the country.

Please check and recheck your voter registration status on a regular basis.  Most states allow you to check online, even Kentucky.

They don't have a flip a single vote if they can keep millions of Democrats from voting at all.

Sunday Long Read: The Forever War

After three years of fighting with the Trump regime over FOIA requests, Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock has put together an indispensable (and Pulitzer-worthy) series on America's massive 18-year failure in Afghanistan.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. 

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

Part 2 of the series is here, taking a look at the fundamental flaws in America's warfighting strategy from day one.

Afghanistan has been the pervasive American military disaster for my generation and younger.  I know several people who went out into the Sandbox over the years and while all of them came back, they were far from being all there when they returned.  And this entire mess was one huge lie.

It always was, but now we know everyone knew, including and especially our own government, a trillion dollar puppet show that destroyed our credibility and is still ongoing.

Last Call For Ejector Jeff

New Jersey Democratic Rep. Jeff Van Drew is not only coming out against impeachment, he's coming out against being a Democrat and is expected to switch parties to the GOP before the end of the year.

Officials said Saturday that Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, a vocally anti-impeachment Democrat, will join the Republican Party in the coming days, following a Friday meeting with President Trump — delivering a political jolt to Democrats ahead of next week’s expected vote to impeach the president.

Two Democratic officials familiar with Van Drew’s discussions in recent days said they believe he has decided to switch parties. The White House meeting was confirmed by a Trump administration official and one of the Democratic officials.

Van Drew, his chief of staff and his communications director did not respond to requests for comment Saturday.

Van Drew, who won a previously Republican seat in 2018, has been a critical voice opposing impeachment inside the Democratic ranks, saying that the process is too divisive and comes too close to the 2020 presidential election. A member of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, Van Drew has positioned himself at the rightmost flank of his party.

It's weird though, Van Drew's voting record is actually really anti-Trump.  His 538 Trump Score is a low 7.1%, putting him to the left of Democrats like Jerry Nadler and Hakeem Jeffries.  The DCCC recruited him to run in NJ-2, which was a district Trump carried in 2016 (South Jersey/Atlantic City).  It's rated R+1, and for twenty years the district belonged to Republican Frank LoBiondo.  Van Drew won by six points.

So why is he switching parties?

Because coming out against impeachment killed his re-election chances.

Van Drew and Rep. Collin C. Peterson, a veteran Minnesota Democrat who represents a much more conservative district than Van Drew’s, were the only two Democrats to vote against a House resolution in October formalizing the impeachment inquiry.

Van Drew’s decision to oppose impeachment badly alienated Democratic voters in his district, sparking a primary challenge that threatened his prospects for reelection.

A polling memo obtained by The Washington Post, citing results of a Dec. 7-10 survey of likely Democratic voters commissioned by Van Drew’s campaign, found that only 24 percent believed that he should be reelected, with 58 percent wanting another Democrat nominated for the seat.

Fine with me, saves the trouble of primary challenging him.  Perhaps the DCCC could recruit somebody who isn't going to jump to Trump in the middle of his term.

He's the anti-Amash, but unlike Amash he's skipping the Independent spoiler stage and going full Trump.  And Trump does love Atlantic City...

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The Senate GOP was never going to convict Trump, but now they are openly mocking the idea of Senate trial, and it's becoming more likely that the entire impeachment process will simply be disposed of with a single vote.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a close ally of President Donald Trump, said he will do everything in his power to quickly end an expected impeachment trial in the Republican-led Senate. 

"This thing will come to the Senate, and it will die quickly, and I will do everything I can to make it die quickly," the South Carolina Republican said Saturday during an interview with CNN International's Becky Anderson at the Doha Forum in Qatar. 

The House Judiciary Committee on Friday approved two articles of impeachment against the President, paving the way for a final vote on the House floor expected next week. That will set up the Senate trial, for which lawmakers are now gearing up.

Asked if it was appropriate for him to be voicing his opinion before impeachment reaches the Senate, Graham replied, "Well, I must think so because I'm doing it." 

"I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here," Graham said, adding, "What I see coming, happening today is just a partisan nonsense." 

In his opening remarks at the forum, Graham predicted the impeachment process would be over around mid-January.

They're not even pretending anymore that the Constitution exists.  It's whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it.  The Senate oath to be an impartial juror suring a Senate trial?  Meaningless, because they simply don't consider Democrats to have any legitimacy at all.

The Founders were never prepared for villainy of this nature, and so America will suffer, maybe for decades.  There was never any possibility set aside to deal with the notion that an entire political party who controlled the Senate and White House would simply commit mass crimes and that enough people would cheer those crimes on because they figured they would benefit from them, and that the political opposition would be rendered helpless.

I know we're short of the darkest days of American history, but we're pretty close and getting closer.

Hack The Planet, Con't

This year we saw major cyberattacks cripple the city governments of Atlanta and Baltimore, now New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell has issued a state of emergency as the city's PC networks were attacked on Friday.

Phishing attempts and suspicious activity were detected on the city's network around 5 a.m., New Orleans chief information officer Kim LaGrue said during a press conference. 

By 11 a.m., technician investigators detected "a cybersecurity incident" and the city's information technology department began powering down servers and city computers as a precaution, the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said in a series of tweets. 

While ransomware was detected, no ransom has been demanded in the cyberattack, Cantrell said. 

At this time, the city does not believe any employee information was compromised during the phishing attempts that occurred. 

The incident is being investigated by the city with assistance from the Louisiana State Police, Louisiana National Guard, the FBI and Secret Service, according to the tweets. 

The city's 911 system was not affected by the attack, the city said. 

Cantrell said the attack is similar to the most recent attack on the state level. In July, several school systems in Louisiana were attacked by malware, prompting the governor to issue a state of emergency.

Expect this to become all the more familiar in the months ahead as we head towards the 2020 elections.  The Trump regime has done everything possible to leave federal, state and local government networks wide open to attack, with Mitch McConnell regularly killing legislation that would strengthen system defenses.

This will only get worse.

It's About Suppression, Con't

A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of precinct closures in predominantly black areas of Georgia by GOP lawmakers and then Secretary of State Brian Kemp ahead of the 2018 elections found that the closures kept as many as 85,000 Georgians from voting last year.

The AJC mapped Georgia’s 7 million registered voters and compared how distance to their local precincts increased or decreased from 2012 to 2018. During that time, county election officials shut down 8% of Georgia’s polling places and relocated nearly 40% of the state’s precincts.

Most of the precinct closures and relocations occurred after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 ended federal oversight of local election decisions under the Voting Rights Act.

The AJC’s analysis, vetted by two nonpartisan statistics experts, showed a clear link between turnout and reduced voting access. The farther voters live from their precincts, the less likely they are to cast a ballot.

Precinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots on Election Day last year, according to the AJC’s findings.

And the impact was greater on black voters than white ones, the AJC found. Black voters were 20% more likely to miss elections because of long distances.

Without those precinct relocations, overall Election Day turnout in last year’s midterm election likely would have been between 1.2% and 1.8% higher, the AJC estimated.

“Seems to me, they’re making it harder for us to vote,” said Coleman, who voted in the November election for governor but didn’t cast a ballot in the primary. “I hate that they closed that place down because it was more convenient. Maybe I wouldn’t miss elections if it was still open here.” 

The AJC’s analysis accounted for both large, rural precincts and small, urban precincts by measuring how far voters had to travel as a percentage of their precinct’s geographic area. Both groups were impacted, the AJC found.

The average Georgia voter’s distance to a polling place more than doubled from 2012 to 2018, according to the AJC’s analysis.

While the state made it easier to register to vote, they made it much harder to actually cast that ballot.  And even though Georgia's midterm election turnout was 57% in 2018, it could have been as high as 59 or 60% if the closed precincts had remained open.

The GOP plan is to get people in rural areas registered to vote and make it easier for them to vote, and to do just the opposite in urban counties and predominantly black ones.

Still, the AJC is careful to say that Kemp still would have won, even with the additional turnout, but the racial disparity still remains.

Once freed from federal oversight, precinct closures accelerated in areas previously covered by the Voting Rights Act. At least 1,688 polling places were shut down since 2012, according to the Leadership Conference Education Fund. The AJC reported last year that 214 of those precinct closures were in Georgia, third most of states previously covered by the act’s preclearance provision.

Before the ruling, voters of all races were barely affected by their distance to the polls, accounting for a 0.2% and 0.4% reduction in turnout, according to the AJC’s analysis of election data from 2012. The number of Georgia voters who missed elections because of distance more than quadrupled in 2018 compared to 2012, the AJC found.

Turnout by black voters would have been between 1.3% and 2.1% higher on Election Day in 2018 if they all lived near their polling places.

Overall, black voters are also significantly more likely to live farther from their precincts than white voters, the AJC found. About 30% of black voters must now travel across half of their precinct to reach their poll compared to less than 20% of white voters.

The AJC’s analysis shows the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling, said Donald Verrilli Jr., the U.S. solicitor general at the time of the court’s decision in 2013. The court’s majority said the Voting Rights Act covered states based on their history rather than on recent evidence of discrimination.

“This is exactly the kind of updated data the justices in the majority said was lacking,” Verrilli told the AJC. “Exactly the kind of data that suggests that the judgment of the majority of the court — the South has changed — may be in need of amendment. Maybe the South hasn’t changed as much as one would have hoped.”

Voter suppression through precinct closing may not have been the sole reason Kemp won, but it definitely helped.