Holidaze: Immolation Nation

Australia now enters month three of the worst wildfires in the country's recorded history, and there's no end in sight to temperatures over 110 degrees, massive destruction of homes and wildlife, devastating drought, and pictures that look like the mouth of Hell itself.

As the fire stalked the east coast of Australia on Tuesday, the daytime sky turned inky black, then blood red. Emergency sirens wailed, followed by the thunder of gas explosions. Thousands of residents fled their homes and huddled near the shore. There was nowhere else to go.

Apocalyptic scenes like these in Mallacoota, a vacation destination between Sydney and Melbourne, came on the last day of the warmest decade on record in Australia. The country is in the grip of a devastating fire season, with months of summer still to go, as record-breaking temperatures, strong winds and prolonged drought have ignited huge blazes across the country.

The government prepared to deploy navy vessels and military helicopters to help fight the fires and evacuate people.

The devastation is immense. In the state of New South Wales, which includes Sydney, more than 900 homes have been destroyed and nine million acres have burned since November. About 90 fires were still raging in the state on Tuesday, with about three dozen more across the border in Victoria. At least 12 people have died.

Australia is normally hot and dry in summer, but climate change, which brings more frequent and longer periods of extreme heat, worsens these conditions and makes vegetation drier and more likely to burn. The country recently concluded its driest spring on record. That was followed in mid-December by the hottest day on record, with average highs across the country of 41.9 degrees Celsius (107.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Polls show a large majority of Australians view climate change as an urgent threat and want stronger government action to combat it. The catastrophic fire conditions have put an intense focus on the Australian government’s failure to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which traps heat when released into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a conservative, has made it clear that Australia’s economic prosperity comes first. Even as his country burned, he has said repeatedly that it is not the time to discuss climate policy.

“We have stood up to these terrible disasters before, and we have come through the other side,” he said in his New Year’s Eve address. “We will rebuild and we will stay strong.”

The Morrison government won't lift a finger to change anything, and Australia will continue to burn every summer.  The thing about climate change, and people who refuse to do anything about it, is that eventually the destruction will become so awful that people will revolt.

When that happens, I'm not sure what will become of humanity.  But I foresee bloody conflict ahead for a lot of places as people fleeing the ravages of climate change run into realpolitik and the people with the rifles and tanks.

Get used to scenes like this over the decades ahead.  Not all of us are going to make it.

Holidaze: We Learned Nothing From 2009

I've had my problems with Joan Walsh over the years, but she's absolutely right in her look back at the last decade, and pins the events of the rise of Trump to the cowardice of both the media and of Democrats starting in 2009.

I had a strange spot from which to regularly witness this f&$%ing decade: cable news green rooms, tiny flash cam cubbies and convivial tables of televised political-panel chats; mostly on MSNBC, occasionally on Fox, and lately CNN. Once the euphoria of Obama’s inauguration subsided, it quickly became clear to at least a few of us that we were witnessing a profound racial backlash. In the early days of the anti-Obama Tea Party, journalists were required to say the uprising was about government spending run amok (I covered San Francisco’s first Tea Party event, on Tax Day 2009, and tried to give attendees the benefit of the doubt, though I couldn’t miss the guy demanding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi examine Obama’s birth certificate, an early “birther.”)

Fox News, always a site of white racial anxiety (remember when Barack and Michelle gave one another “terrorist fist jabs” during the 2008 campaign?) immediately became a clubhouse for white panic. Fox went from hyping the lame thuggery and purported voter intimidation of the tiny, impotent New Black Panther Party, to “exposing” some past controversial political views of Obama’s black “green jobs czar” Van Jones (which led to bipartisan demands for Jones to resign), to promoting doctored videos “showing” the black-led community empowerment group ACORN supposedly helped a “pimp” avoid paying taxes (which led to a bipartisan push to defund ACORN), to pushing another Andrew Breitbart (RIP) story that former NAACP leader Shirley Sherrod used a government job to discriminate against white farmers when the truth was the opposite (which led to bipartisan demands that Sherrod be fired).

Yes, my point is: Fox is evil, but it sometimes succeeded because Democrats are cowards, and utterly unprepared to fight evil enemies. Hosts like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and the rising Sean Hannity regularly peddled those and other racial panic stories, while the mainstream media generally, and even leading Democrats, tried hard to avoid seeing what was happening.

Then there was the almost immediate uptick in political violence. In April, 2009, a Glenn Beck fan killed three police officers in Pittsburgh. In May, an anti-abortion terrorist murdered Dr. George Tiller in the Wichita church where he served as an usher. In June, an elderly white birther murdered a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. In August, anti-Obama protester William Kostric brought a loaded gun to a New Hampshire town hall meeting with Obama, and carried a sign referencing Thomas Jefferson’s famous credo, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” Folks in the media debated what Kostric was trying to say. (You can understand why I insisted on roping in 2009 into this decade.) But the political violence continues and has worsened—from Charleston to Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso—ever since.

***

I covered all of this, and I had the distinction of being mocked, at least twice, by the cable hosts I loved the most, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. After I debated disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in July 2009, over whether his violence-tinged rhetoric contributed to the climate that led an anti-abortion zealot to murder Dr. George Tiller, Stewart played our heated exchange and distilled it down to each of us saying the other had blood on their hands (admittedly not my finest moment), and mocking us with the zinger “No backsies!”
The fact that I got thousands of hateful emails and a few old fashioned snail-mail letters, some of them threatening harm to me and my daughter, while O’Reilly railed at me every night for almost a week from his top-rated multi-million-dollar Fox perch, didn’t figure in the sketch. We were simply “both sides.” It prefigured Donald Trump’s “many fine people, on both sides” after Charlottesville—but for laughs.

Maybe worse, I was apparently mocked at the stupendously awful “March to Restore Sanity” Stewart and Colbert sponsored in October 2010, for calling the people behind the uptick in political murder “gun nuts.” I say “apparently” because multiple people told me I was in some compilation video of the divisive people on “both sides,” the partisan “crazies” who needed to be called out so that bipartisan “sanity” could be restored, but I’ve never been able to find it online. Whether or not I was mocked doesn’t really matter; we know the “march” occurred, and was intended to promote nonpartisan solutions to the rising climate of hate. Which was mostly, can we now admit, coming from one side? But again, in this f&$%ing decade, criticizing “both sides” was apparently the only way to acknowledge the rot emanating from one side.

But I didn’t only face this on Fox or, occasionally, from folks I admired on Comedy Central. I ran up against it sometimes on MSNBC too. On “Hardball,” longtime political analyst Pat Buchanan regularly attacked me as an elitist for deriding the racism of the growing Tea Party, even as he recognized them as the descendants of the George Wallace voters he’d welcomed into the GOP four decades earlier. The first time he did it, I was gob-smacked, thinking I’d won the debate. But new rules, put into place under Obama, meant you couldn’t even dismiss George Wallace voters as racist anymore. Back-dated by Buchanan, and a precursor to the right’s Trump analysis, the Wallace voters’ problem was merely “economic anxiety” combined with resentment that “elites” like me didn’t like them. Never mind that Buchanan came from a wealthy Washington D.C. family and I grew up a working-class New Yorker.

Meanwhile, I lost my regular invite to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” the day in early 2010 when I failed to correctly identify the person Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski believed was the MSNBC equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. I can still find the video and transcript, courtesy of the right-wing Web that loved how a “clueless” me was schooled, especially by Brzezinski:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: …I think it helps us all to say there are extreme voices on the left, there are extreme voices on the right, and it’s our responsibility to call out people, I believe, on our side.

JOAN WALSH: Who would you have me call out? I mean who would you say on the left is comparable to Rush and…

SCARBOROUGH: Don’t do it.

MIKA BREZEZINSKI: Mmm-mmm! No thanks, Joan. We’re good. We’re good.

SCARBOROUGH: Can we talk about the Chinese now?

MIKA: I think it’s all very obvious.

WALSH: Is it obvious? Who on the left is comparable to Rush and Glenn on the right?

MIKA: Okay, Joan, if it’s not obvious to you I’ll talk to you off-set. I mean, my God! Alright so let’s read from the Washington Post…

SCARBOROUGH: We’ll talk off-set.

WALSH: Okay…

MIKA: Seriously, it’s like BLIP… BLIP… BLIP… right in front of you and you’re like [imitates willfully clueless Walsh] “I’m sorry, I don’t see it!”

A shocked Walsh was left with her mouth hanging open.

I am sure my mouth did hang open. It just hung open again, reading that exchange. “Off-set,” and also later on the Web, it was “revealed” to me that the correct answer was then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Folks, Olbermann has had his career and personal ups and downs, and I have had my own with him, but there is no way that he ever—then or now—spewed the crazy hatred, let alone the casual racism, of Limbaugh or Beck. Of course, the history of this f&%^cking decade shows that “Morning Joe” later opened its airwaves to candidate Donald Trump whenever he chose to phone in—and even later turned on him, to the hosts’ credit. But “even later” was too late. The damage had been done.

Trump's racist birther garbage was apparent eleven years ago, and so was the failure of our media and the Democrats.  The signs were there, and at every turn last decade the country gave in to him.

Now in 2020 we have one last chance to stop him, or the country is done.

Holidaze: They Learned Nothing In 2019

Our media is bad, it has been bad for years, that lack of common sense in the media is a big reason we have Trump in the White House, and after three years of this hurricane of fecal matter flying around the country leaving destruction in its wake, our media betters are still the same awful clods they were in 2016, as evidenced by Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple interviewing NY Times reporter Adam Goldman on the Steele dossier.

What was your first reaction to the dossier? Were you wary of it?

I hadn’t read the dossier until BuzzFeed published it. I was at The Washington Post, and I left in late August [for the New York Times], and I started hearing rumors, but nobody actually told me anything. I’m at the Times; I’m doing terrorism; I’m dealing with the Clinton Foundation; and I don’t actually read the dossier until it’s online.

Were you part of Steele’s media tour?

No, I was not.

You heard rumors, and then BuzzFeed posted it, and then did your focus turn to it?

No, my focus didn’t turn toward it because I was subsumed with the FBI Russia investigation itself, all the different components to it, right? Figuring out if he was under investigation, right? What was it based on, what were the origins of Crossfire Hurricane? I was trying to figure out the past and trying to keep up with what the FBI was doing. So the dossier for me was not a central — there was a lot of reporting to be done, and I wasn’t the one focused on the dossier.

But then it did obviously, eventually come closer into your world.

Of course I remember reading the memo — the [Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) memo claiming surveillance overreach at the FBI], the dueling memos from the Dems and the Republicans. … Who was right and who was wrong? The dossier had been used, we knew, from Nunes’s memo. We didn’t know how much of it was used, and we didn’t have a good understanding of what the FBI had done to vet it. The assumption was they certainly were trying to. And, well, what did they know that we didn’t know? And then how many months ago, the deputy attorney general says they need to look into this. There were all these accusations floating around. So the deputy attorney general has the IG start looking into it. But really for me, as the guy covering the FBI, I was very interested in what the IG was doing. There was a lot going on, as the IG developed his case and more people started to talk to more people, I was able to get a better sense eventually there were going to be problems not only with the dossier but obviously big problems with the FISA.

[…]

I might have figured [that the FBI had interviewed the dossier’s primary sub-source in January 2017] in early 2019 or late 2018. And that for me was an extraordinary moment: Right? I knew, s---, there were problems. So now there’s some indication that there were problems with the dossier and the FBI had a sense of it. But there were only a handful of people in that room with the source [in January 2017]. And I couldn’t — to be able to write a definitive story with the details the IG had was, I guess, a bridge too far, right? It was a mountain too high for me. Because as the IG report shows, the information didn’t even get to the FISA court. So it somehow rested with this very small group of people in the FBI. I did identify one former law enforcement official who I thought would know about it and I’m sure probably did, and this person did not answer any of my requests. So I went to great lengths to try to build out that information and also figure out who the primary [source] was, and it proved to be extraordinarily tough. I mean, you can imagine: That was an explosive part of the IG report. I would have liked to have known and reported what he said in January of 2017. If I had learned more, I would have liked to have written a much larger, more important story informing the public [about] the problems that the FBI uncovered.

[…]

People on the right on Twitter criticized us for our pre-IG leak stories. I thought they were all very sound. The New York Times was the first newspaper to identify Kevin Clinesmith by name. [Clinesmith is the FBI lawyer who, according to the Times account, “altered an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap.”] My colleagues and I had the first comprehensive story about the main takeaways: No evidence of bias, no — [Joseph] Mifsud wasn’t working for the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane was legit; and these were all important takeaways. The immediate two stories we wrote — I wrote there are many errors, omissions and mistakes [in the FISA applications]. And I wrote there’s exculpatory evidence they should have included about [George] Papadopoulos and the FISA and about Carter [Page]. I didn’t have the nitty-gritty detail of a 500-page report to be able to walk through all 17 of those significant errors. And frankly it wasn’t even clear to me what Clinesmith had done and how he had altered that email. I had a sense of that. … The way it was described to me it was he took something from the positive and made it into a negative. And that’s what he did. … It was an important report, and I think we did a pretty good job previewing what a lot of it was going to say on a macro level.


Everything you did predict actually was in the report. The criticism, such as it is, is a matter of weighting.


Well, the president of the United States has been accusing the FBI of a coup. He said it in that news conference afterward, they tried to overthrow the government. This is a big, weighty accusation. Why wouldn’t we have tackled that one: Was the president right, did the president know something we didn’t? And if the president was right, that’s pretty extraordinary.

[…]

Also: I was very careful with this language reporting they hadn't placed reporters or undercovers inside the campaign. That was also a major takeaway.

Given that you’ve covered the FBI forever and law enforcement forever and surveillance and all this stuff, tell me what you think about the semantics and the technicalities of this debate about spying.

I mean, look, Matt Apuzzo and I wrote the NYPD stories [about the NYPD’s illegal surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, for the Associated Press]. We used the word “spying” because it seemed that the NYPD didn’t have a legal justification to do what they were doing: going into coffee shops, eavesdropping on private citizens in public spaces, gathering intelligence about communities and putting them in secret documents. People had done nothing wrong and were not accused of doing anything wrong. In this particular case, you have what the IG says are informants who didn’t violate any rules or policies being used as a legitimate law enforcement investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr thinks it’s spying. I don’t think I would hesitate to use the word “spying” if they had found something illegal. If lawful surveillance is spying, then is every FBI investigation they do spying? Did they spy when they busted those NFL players for health-care fraud? God knows what they did in that investigation.

Is the investigation into Rudy and Lev and Igor — is that spying? Where is the line between lawful surveillance and spying?

It’s like torture, right? … The implication of “torture” is that somebody did something wrong. They violated someone’s human rights.

You reported in April about the alleged flimsiness of the dossier.

I had just been collecting a lot of information wanting to do a story about all of this. I'd just been filling up this bucket until I had enough information to write a story. And I kept refilling the bucket.

It was cited on “Hannity.” How do you feel oftentimes to see Sean Hannity and Trump rip the New York Times and then rely on it the next day?

I don’t pay much attention to it. But I’d love to go on “Hannity.” 

David Kris was on the Lawfare podcast and said he needed to emphasize a million times that the FISA problems were not political and he couldn’t emphasize that enough. And I know that there are representations in the Horowitz report saying that he couldn’t find political bias —

That’s fine, but he also said he didn’t get reasonable satisfactory answers. I mean, there were so many screw-ups. How is that possible — basic stuff that people were incapable of doing? My position is that we’re going to go with the Horowitz report until we learn otherwise from U.S. Attorney John Durham or whoever — somebody reputable.

And I mean, Goldman is a solid reporter, and Wemple has been all over the Trump regime's treatment of the media, but Goldman would also love to go on the Junior Fascist Hatred Hour, and Wemple is now up to part seven (this interview) of his long-winded criticism of how the media absolutely failed America in every sense of the word by even reporting on the Steele dossier and the Carter Page story.

Wemple has gone so far as to trash Steele himself, going after McClatchy for the Michael Cohen Prague story, slagging Rachel Maddow's coverage of the story over the months, and defending disinformation conduit John Solomon, among other attacks over the last several weeks that's had Wemple cited positively by the very right-wing outlets that have been horrible to him for years.

The media has learned nothing in 2019.  They still believe the Trump regime is operating in good faith. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, their salary depends on not understanding that Trump is their mortal enemy.

Zandar's 2020 Predictions

Another year means another set of ten predictions covering the next 12 months, so without further ado, here's what I think 2020 will bring. I was very pessimistic in my 2019 predictions, but I'm returning to the sunny side of the street this year.

1) Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump and becomes President.  Yeah, this is a safe guess and a pretty likely outcome, but I think it's what will happen.  Biden has been ahead in the primaries and leading in head-to-head matchups with Trump for all of 2019.  I have to believe that Biden will win, but whether or not Trump concedes in 2021 is a question for 2021.

2) Trump will be acquitted in his Senate trial.  I know, I know, next I'll tell you water is wet and the sun is made of burny stuff that is hot.  But it'll happen, and it'll be a big reason why...

3) The Democrats will reclaim the Senate in 2020.  Those votes to acquit are going to wreck vulnerable GOP senators like Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, Martha McSally and Thom Tillis, and I think they're going to lose. A 50-50 tie with Biden winning means Biden's VP is the tiebreaker and the Dems will prevail...unless Joe Manchin switches parties or something. That's why I'm predicting Dems get 51 or 52 seats with Iowa's Joni Ernst losing, Pat Roberts's open seat in Kansas getting picked up, and Doug Jones holding on.

4) Democrats keep the House.  Nancy Pelosi continues to outmaneuver the White House and I think high turnout in November will not only assure a Biden win, but a big House gain for Team Blue.

5) The US Supreme Court will give states sweeping powers in rulings on abortion and discrimination.  I don't want to be right on this one, but I forsee a huge hole being blown in Roe and another in the Civil Rights Act as SCOTUS will come down on the side of letting states make their own rules on abortion clinic access and LGBTQ discrimination, and by January 1, 2021 it's entirely possible that there will be a dozen states with no abortion clinics, and there will be no protections for sexual orientation or gender identity at the federal level.

6) US Attorney General Bill Barr will announce indictments for James Comey and John Brennan. Trump has wanted these two heads for ages, and he's going to get them.  The court fights are going to be bad, but Trump rounding up FBI folks for personal revenge will be the last straw for a lot of voters.

7) The Dow Jones will end up under 25,000 by December 31.  I don't think the recession will hit in 2020, but it'll definitely catch up to us next year. The global slowdown will be too much to overcome.

8) Marvel movies will not rule the box office in 2020.  That's not to say parent company Disney won't have an incredible year again, with a pair of Pixar features (Onward, Soul), Harrison Ford starring in Call of the Wild based on the Jack London novel, and live action movies of Mulan and Jungle Cruise.  But of the three Marvel properties, New Mutants, Black Widow, and Eternals, I only see Black Widow breaking half a billion.

9) Trump will finally get around to those pardons.  He'll have nothing to lose once, well, he loses.  Oh wait, he'll be headed for state cases against him and jail time, but in the meantime the pardons will be the least awful thing he does.

10) And of course, ZVTS will make it through year 12.  It'll be thanks to all of you who have stuck with me since the 2008 primary race and through 4 presidential contests.

Am I right?  Am I wrong?  We'll file these away for the future, as always.

Holidaze: Feels Like 40 Years Ago

The US Embassy in Baghdad is under siege by hundreds of Iraqi protesters after the US responded to the death of a US military contractor at an Iraqi military base with missile strikes that killed more than 40.

Supporters of an Iranian-backed militia besieged the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes, breaking through the first layer of security at the embassy compound and damaging a reception area before being expelled by Iraqi security forces. Here’s what we know:

• U.S. diplomats took refuge in a safe room as guards fired tear gas at the invading protesters and tried to put out fires they set.
• President Trump accused Iran of “orchestrating an attack” on the embassy, and the Pentagon said it was sending reinforcements to help protect it.
• Iraqi security forces later intervened and set up a barricade, but protesters threw gasoline bombs into the compound.
• The Kataib Hezbollah militia vowed to force the embassy to shut down.

Hundreds of angry supporters of an Iranian-backed militia shouting "Death to America" broke into the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad on Tuesday, trapping diplomats inside in response to U.S. airstrikes that killed or wounded scores of militia fighters.

Tensions eased somewhat later in the day after Iraqi security forces intervened, erecting a steel barrier at the smashed gate into the compound's reception area and forcing the protesters to leave. However, protesters outside periodically threw molotov cocktails into the compound and tried to tear down the razor wire atop its walls, as guards inside fired stun grenades at them.

The protesters breached the vast embassy compound's outer security but did not reach the main chancery building where diplomats waited out the intrusion in a safe room.

President Trump responded angrily Tuesday to the protesters' actions, charging that Iran was behind a deadly militia attack that led to the airstrikes and blaming Tehran for the embassy siege.

"Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many," Trump tweeted from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. "We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible. In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!"

The US State Department is basically denying everything about any possible breach of the embassy's outer grounds and says there are no plans to evacuate.  Meanwhile, Tang the Conqueror is golfing at Mar-A-Lago again and some cruise missile strikes on Iranian targets would be a great way for him to wrap himself in the flag heading into any impeachment trial.

This is a pretty dangerous situation.  Both sides have considerable reason to want escalation here and the protesters never would have been able to get past the outer embassy security without help from Iraqi security forces, at least initially.

Trump has every reason to make this worse.

Zandar's 2019 Scorecard

Welp, it's December 31, and that means we take a look at how I did in my 2019 predictions, and I wasn't very accurate.  For some of these predictions that's actually a good thing.  For others, I wish I had been right.

1) Robert Muller recommends impeachable offenses for Donald Trump.

Sadly, this did not happen, and it was the miss that maybe defined the year.  If Mueller had recommended indictment six months ago, I honestly wonder where we would be right now. But he was never going to do it, and it was foolish of everyone, myself included, to believe for a second that he would.

2) Trump will wait until after Mueller's report is delivered in order to issue pardons.

That still may be the case, but the impeachment of Donald Trump has so far prevented that. Another miss.

3) Trump will not be impeached in 2019.

Another miss, but not by much.  It took until the waning days of the House 2019 session in December, but he was impeached, another miss (and I'm actually glad).


4) The Roberts Court will get a major decision on executive power related to the Mueller probe.

Again, the impeachment of Donald Trump pushed this back to 2020.  While the Supreme Court did take up the case in 2019, the decision won't come until June, if at all (being remanded back to a lower court is kind of the standard thing for these guys.) A miss.

5) The Roberts Court will effectively side with Trump in Gamble vs. United States.

This was my biggest worry, and in a 7-2 decision, the Roberts Court preserved a state's ability to try a case where the defendant was acquitted on federal charges. Siding with Trump would have meant that the NY state case against Trump would have to be dropped.  A very feel-good miss.

6) Hillary Clinton won't enter the 2020 race in 2019.

I got this one exactly right.  She stayed way, way out of it.

7) Bernie Sanders will enter the 2020 race in 2019.

Of course he did.  As I said, as much of a no-brainer as Clinton passing.

8) Dow Jones Average will be under 20,000 on December 31, 2019.

As much as I thought we were headed for a recession in 2019, it didn't happen. Despite a rough January - May period, the Dow and the economy rallied in the second half of the year and gained more than 20% for the year, the S&P 500 was up over 25%, and the NASDAQ up over 35%.  The Trump Tax Scam and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin made it possible, and it came at the direct expense of higher prices for the American consumer.

9) Marvel movies will continue to rule the box office.

Boy did they ever.  Captain Marvel came up a tad short on the domestic half-billion mark I had set, but all three Marvel films obliterated the billion mark worldwide, and Avengers: Endgame took in $2.7 billion. Eight movies broke one billion worldwide in 2019, seven of them were Disney films (and the other was Joker).  Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker is well on its way to one billion after it's December 20 release, so Disney will have a happy 2020 as well.

10) And of course, ZVTS will make it through year 11.

We did, thanks to you.  It's been a rough year, a year where I went 4 for 10, but if I had been right on more things, I think we would have been in a lot worse shape overall.

I'll have my predictions for 2020 up later this evening.

Meanwhile, I still had a better year than most of these professional pundits, so there's that.

Holidaze: I've Seen The Future

Charles Gaba notes the makeup of the current House caucuses for both parties.

UPDATE: Per several requests, I've redone both charts to keep the colors consistent for each category, and have also embedded the counts/percentages onto the charts. Here's the difference in the Republican & Democratic Parties in a nutshell. pic.twitter.com/OtM2h8Epca

— Charles #GetCovered-ba (@charles_gaba) December 30, 2019

One of these parties has a future with its current House roster, given America's increasingly diverse demographics.

The other party does not.

Well, I take that back.  The other party has a future that should frighten the living hell out of all of us.

Holidaze: The Drums Of War

The Trump regime has counterattacked targets in Iraq and Syria with missile strikes in response to an attack over the weekend on and Iraqi military base that killed a US military contractor.

The strikes occurred at about 11 a.m. ET on Sunday, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. They stand as the first significant military response in retaliation for attacks by the Shia militia group, known as Kataib Hezbollah, that have injured numerous American military personnel, according to US officials. 

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman described the strikes against the group as "precision defensive strikes" that "will degrade" the group's ability to conduct future attacks against coalition forces. 

Defense Secretary Mark Esper briefed President Donald Trump Saturday before carrying them out with the President's approval, according to a US official familiar with the strikes. 

At least 25 people were killed in the US airstrikes, according to a statement Sunday from the Popular Mobilization Units, a Tehran-backed Shiite militia also known as the Hashd al-Shaabi. 

Kataib Hezbollah is a group under the Popular Mobilization Units. Jewad Kadum, a PMU official, said in a statement earlier Sunday that the rescue operations were still ongoing as well as the evacuation of the wounded, recovery of the dead bodies and the extinguishing of the fire caused by the airstrikes.

Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, traveled Sunday to Mar-a-Lago to discuss the strikes with Trump. 

Speaking from the President's Florida resort, Pompeo said the US took "decisive action" and said threats against American forces had been ongoing for "weeks and weeks." 

"We will not stand for the Islamic Republican of Iran to take actions that put American men and women in jeopardy," Pompeo said. 

Esper said Sunday's meeting with the President included discussing "other options available" without providing further detail. He added that the US "would take additional actions as necessary to ensure that we act in our own self-defense and we deter further bad behavior from militia groups or from Iran."

Trump very badly wants to get the press off of his impeachment trial, so a nice military escalation in the Middle East seems to be the solution.  Especially given indicted Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's continued troubles, further significant action against Iranian-backed Syrian targets seems pretty likely at this point.

Stay tuned.

Holidaze: Them's Fightin' Words

As I keep saying, Trump is the symptom.  The disease is the people who vote for Trump, especially those that see his election as an open call to intimidation and violence against those who don't agree with them.  

We call them white nationalists, white supremacists, racists.  That gives them the right to threaten our lives, apparently.  The openly congregate at events like "Trumpstock" in Arizona, with sitting members of Congress like GOP Rep. Paul Gosar joining them, so they can swear allegiance to start shooting if Trump loses.

Arizona will be a key battleground state in 2020: Democrats already flipped a Senate seat and a Tucson-based congressional district from red to blue in 2018. For Mr. Trump, big turnout from white voters in areas like Mohave County — and in rural parts of other battlegrounds like Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia — could be a lifeline in a tight election.

“We like to call this the ‘Red Wall of Arizona,’” said Laurence Schiff, a psychiatrist and Republican campaign official in Mohave County who organizes in support of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Winning the state starts here, with us.”

Grass-roots gatherings play a critical role in the modern culture of political organizing, firing up ardent supporters and cementing new ones. Small circles of Trump-supporting conservatives, often organized online and outside the traditional Republican Party apparatus, engage in more decentralized — and explicit — versions of the chest-beating that happens at Mr. Trump’s closely watched political rallies.

In interviews, people in the crowd described a white America under threat as racial minorities typified by Mr. Obama, the country’s first black president, gain political power. They described Mr. Trump as an inspirational figure who is undoing Mr. Obama’s legacy and beating back the perceived threat of Muslim and Latino immigrants, whom they denounced in prejudiced terms.

“I don’t have a problem with Muslims,” said Angus Smith, an Arizona resident who attended the festival, “but can they take the rag off their head out of respect for our country?”

At Mr. Trump’s official rallies, including a recent one in Florida, the president has referred to Mr. Obama by stressing his middle name, Hussein, and said Democrats were “trying to stop me because I’m fighting for you.”

The Trumpstock speakers pushed even further, tying Mr. Obama’s middle name to a false belief that he is a foreign-born Muslim.

And Democrats were portrayed as not just political opponents, but avatars of doom for Mr. Trump’s predominantly white voter base and for the country.

“There is no difference between the democratic socialists and the National Socialists,” said Evan Sayet, a conservative writer who spoke at the event, referencing Nazi Germany. Democrats, he said, “are the heirs to Adolf Hitler.”

The difference is of course these are the guys willing to start the next civil war.

Events like Trumpstock are not limited to Arizona. Its organizer, Laurie Bezick, recruited speakers from around the country through social media, tapping into a network of pro-Trump voices only a click away.

Long-shot congressional candidates touting an “America First” agenda came from places like Iowa and Maryland. Leaders of fledgling political groups with names like JEXIT: Jews Exit The Democratic Party, Latinos for Trump and Deplorable Pride, a right-wing L.G.B.T. organization, told the overwhelmingly white audience they were not anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, homophobic or racist. In fact, the speakers insisted, people who used those terms were more guilty of bigotry than the people they accused.

To applause, the co-founder of Latinos for Trump, Marco Gutierrez, read the pledge he took when he became a naturalized citizen and renounced his Mexican homeland. Nitemare, a pro-Trump rapper who refused to give his legal name, invoked QAnon and called Mr. Obama a racist slur in his set.

Brian Talbert, the founder of Deplorable Pride, was contacted by the White House after he was barred from the L.G.B.T. pride parade in Charlotte, N.C. At Trumpstock, Mr. Talbert, who has a history of expressing anti-Muslim beliefs on social media, gave voice to hatred of Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Mr. Trump’s 2016 opponent.

“I think she should be hanging at the end of a rope for treason,” he said of Mrs. Clinton.

Members of groups like these at once make up a critical portion of Arizona’s conservative base, and espouse derogatory rhetoric that must repeatedly be repudiated, creating political difficulties for the state’s Republican lawmakers. After a photograph emerged last April of members of Patriot Movement AZ posing with Gov. Doug Ducey, he said he had never heard of the group. “I absolutely denounce their behavior,” he added.

Trumpstock attendees say they are used to being denounced, another quality they feel they share with the president. It’s part of why they are protective of him, to the point that they refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a Trump loss in 2020.

Mark Villalta said he had been stockpiling firearms, in case Mr. Trump’s re-election is not successful.

“Nothing less than a civil war would happen,” Mr. Villalta said, his right hand reaching for a holstered handgun. “I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

We live in a country where people regularly open fire into crowds of people with the intent to kill.  How many times will that happen if Donald Trump is defeated?  These are people only warning us that they will pull the trigger, folks.  And our government cannot be counted on to protect us from them.

Not one bit.

Sunday Long Read: The Most Dangerous Game

In 2017, a white man named James Harris Jackson stabbed Timothy Caughman, an unarmed random black man, to death in the middle of Times Square in NYC.  Jackson walked up to police searching for Caughman's assailant and confessed to the crime.  He absolutely confessed to killing Caughman for the sole reason that Caughman was black.

The man stumbled into the police precinct in Hell’s Kitchen late one night, staggering toward a tall reception desk painted black and blue. Before the desk officer could ask the man his business, he collapsed on a bench, dripping blood.

When officers pulled up his shirt, they found a series of deep stab wounds in his dark skin. As they struggled to stem the bleeding, they asked the man who had attacked him, but he could only groan. He died minutes later at a Manhattan hospital without saying a word.
Police scrambled to make sense of the March 20, 2017, slaying. A witness had seen the victim tussling with someone on the street half a block away. Surveillance footage showed a young white man with a black coat and neatly parted blond hair fleeing the scene.

But the motive was a mystery. And by the following evening, police still had no leads on the suspect — not even a name.

As two dozen officers gathered in Times Square — nine blocks from the crime scene — at midnight to continue the search, a solitary figure suddenly emerged from the stream of tourists. His flaxen hair was carefully combed.

“I’m the guy you’re looking for,” James Harris Jackson said, calmly slipping off his black jacket and setting it down in front of an officer. “There are knives in that coat.”
For the next five hours, in a videotaped interview that would later be entered into the court record, Jackson proudly told detectives how he had stabbed Timothy Caughman in the back with a Roman-style short sword simply because he was black.

Caughman, the 28-year-old Army veteran explained, was “practice” for a bigger attack in which Jackson aimed to kill as many black men with white women as he could.

“I was looking to get black men scared and have them do reciprocal attacks,” he said, “and inspire white men to do similar things.”

If the detectives really wanted to understand him, Jackson said, they should read the manifesto he had planned on sending to the media.

“The Racial World War starts today,” it began. “God has ordered us to eliminate the Negro races from the face of the earth for the good of all mankind.”

There's no doubt that both the number of and the casualties caused by hate crimes in the US have only skyrocketed under the Trump regime.  But now we're seeing these crimes being linked to a much nastier movement, with a distinct goal in mind.

And this regime is helping them.

Holidaze: Another Brick In The Wall

The Trump regime has basically built zero new miles of border wall, because they haven't been able to get the land for it from people who live along the border, so now the Trump regime is stepping up Justice Department lawsuits to take thousands of miles of land by force through eminent domain.

Three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, the U.S. government is ramping up its efforts to seize private land in Texas to build a border wall. 

Trump’s signature campaign promise has consistently faced political, legal, and environmental obstacles in Texas, which has the largest section of the U.S.-Mexico border, most of it without fencing. And much of the land along the Rio Grande, the river that forms the border in Texas, is privately held and environmentally sensitive. 

Almost no land has been taken so far. But Department of Justice lawyers have filed three lawsuits this month seeking to take property from landowners. On Tuesday, lawyers moved to seize land in one case immediately before a scheduled court hearing in February. 

The agency says it’s ready to file many more petitions to take private land in the coming weeks. While progress has lagged, the process of taking land under eminent domain is weighted heavily in the government’s favor. 

The U.S. government has built about 90 miles of walls since Trump took office, almost all of it replacing old fencing. Reaching Trump’s oft-stated goal of 500 miles by the end of 2020 will almost certainly require stepping up progress in Texas.

Opponents have lobbied Congress to limit funding and prevent construction in areas like the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, an important sanctuary for several endangered species of jaguars, birds, and other animals, as well as the nonprofit National Butterfly Center and a historic Catholic chapel. They have also filed several lawsuits. A federal judge this month prevented the government from building with money redirected to the wall under Trump’s declaration of a national emergency earlier this year. Also, two judges recently ordered a private, pro-Trump fundraising group to stop building its own wall near the Rio Grande. 

Even on land the government owns, construction has been held up. In another federal wildlife refuge, at a site known as La Parida Banco, work crews cleared brush this spring and the government announced in April that construction would soon begin. Eight months later, the site remains empty. 

According to a U.S. official familiar with the project, work crews discovered that the land was too saturated. The planned metal bollards installed on top of concrete panels would have been unstable because of the water levels in the soil, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person did not have authorization to share the information publicly. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment on the issue of saturation at La Parida Banco, saying construction there was “currently in the design phase.”

Trump's biggest campaign promise in 2016 was 500 miles of new border wall by the end of his first term, and he'll be lucky if there's 50.  The last thing he wants is the papers in Texas and especially in Arizona filled with stories of government land grabs from law-abiding citizens being forced off their property by gunpoint as we head into 2020.

Of course, a second Trump term absolutely will be filled with those stories.  That's the point.

Holidaze: Eat The Rich

The 500 wealthiest billionaires on the planet gained $1.2 trillion in additional wealth in 2019, or an increase from 2018 of 25%, as the rest of us suffered.

The leveraging of a giant social-media presence, a catchy tune about a family of sharks and a burgeoning collection of junkyards are just a few of the curious ways that helped make 2019 a fertile year for fortunes to blossom around the world.

Kylie Jenner became the youngest self-made billionaire this year after her company, Kylie Cosmetics, signed an exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty Inc. She then sold a 51% stake for $600 million.

It has been almost two months since the Washington Nationals captured their first World Series championship, but people around the world are still singing along to the baseball team’s adopted rallying cry: “Baby Shark, doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.” The Korean family that helped popularize the viral earworm are now worth about $125 million.

Even car wrecks proved to be a treasure trove. Willis Johnson, the gold-chain-wearing Oklahoma native who founded Copart Inc., has amassed a $1.9 billion fortune by building a network of junkyards to sell damaged autos.

Read more: Junkyard billionaire thriving on auto wrecks expands empire

The emergence of atypical fortunes underscores just how much money the uber-rich accumulated in 2019.

And the richer they were at the start of the year, the richer they got. The world’s 500 wealthiest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index added $1.2 trillion, boosting their collective net worth 25% to $5.9 trillion.

It's unsustainable, of course.  25% yearly returns don't happen without massive economic depressions at some point.  But when we get there, the rich will be fine.  They always are.  The other 7.5 billion of us, not so much.

Holidaze: Destruction Modi Engaged

The Atlantic's Yascha Mounk argues that if you want to see the horrific autocratic fascism of a second Trump term, take a look at where India's Narendra Modi is now with his violent hypernationalism.

When I spent a month on a research trip to India in December 2014, half a year after Narendra Modi swept to power, the writers, academics, and intellectuals I met were engrossed in a debate that may now feel oddly familiar to Americans. They all disliked Modi, an ardent Hindu nationalist, because of his disdain for India’s secular constitution. But they were divided on the impact that his rule was likely to have on the basic freedoms they enjoyed.

Some people feared that Modi would quickly move to quash dissent; one even worried that he might soon land in prison for criticizing the government. Others waved such fears away as hyperbolic.

In his first five years in office, Modi did considerable damage, both to the freedoms his critics enjoyed and to the security of the country’s religious minorities. Social-media mobs intimidated anybody who dared to criticize his government. Media outlets allied with Modi stoked fears about Muslim men waging “love jihad” by marrying Hindu women. Mainstream newspapers that were once highly critical of Modi started to praise him with surprising regularity, and to criticize him with notable rarity. And in episodes of what Indians euphemistically call “communal violence,” Muslims were lynched by angry mobs.

The worst, however, was yet to come. After Modi won reelection with an even larger majority in the spring of this year, his government began to take radical action to unwind the secularism of India’s constitution, arguably doing more damage in the first months of its second term than it had in the previous five years. Some of the concerns about Modi that seemed exaggerated at the conclusion of his first term in office are now starting to look prescient.

During his reelection campaign, Modi vowed to introduce a national register of citizens, which would allow the government to keep better records and to expel unauthorized immigrants. This plan raised fears both among Hindu immigrants who came to the country decades ago after being expelled from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh and among Muslims who lack the necessary documentation to prove that they are in fact citizens. Once reelected, Modi proposed to help the former group by granting unauthorized immigrants from Muslim-majority countries—including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—an express path to naturalization if they belonged to a persecuted religious minority in their country of origin. In other words, Hindus who have no legal right to be in India would likely be able to stay, while many Muslims who have been in India for generations would face the threat of deportation—bringing India one step closer to the Hindu nation that Modi desires.

Over the past weeks, a large protest movement has formed to oppose these radical changes. In cities and universities across the country, citizens of every faith have rallied to defend the country’s secular constitution. The government’s response has been brutal: In some states, it has invoked colonial-era statutes to ban the assembly of more than five people. In other states, it has shut down the internet. Harrowing videos that quickly went viral show policemen roughing up Muslim students whom they suspect of having protested the government.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the country’s preeminent political scientist, told me, in his first term, Modi focused on economic initiatives without ever distancing himself from Hindu nationalism. “In the second term, he has taken a more aggressive stand to enshrine Hindu majoritarianism in law and polarize public discourse,” Mehta said. “Even more worryingly, the use of the state apparatus to quell dissent and protest has increased markedly. In states like Uttar Pradesh, the police is cracking down on protesters from the minority community with unprecedented ferocity.”

Many observers of India have been surprised that Modi has grown so much more extreme in his second term in office. But a comparison of populist governments around the world suggests that India is following a predictable pattern of what would-be authoritarians do when they win reelection.

As we’ve seen in countries including Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, populist leaders are at first hamstrung in their ability to concentrate power in their own hands. Many key institutions, including courts and electoral commissions, are still dominated by independent-minded professionals who do not owe their appointment to the new regime. Media outlets are still able and willing to report on scandals, forcing the government to tread somewhat carefully.

Once these governments win reelection, these constraints begin to fall away. As the independent-minded judges and civil servants depart, populist leaders feel emboldened to pursue their illiberal dreams.

Replace "Hindu" with "Christian" and you already have the Trump regime's deportation plan under Stephen Miller.  Give them a second term with Mitch still in charge of the Senate and god help us the House, and another Supreme Court pick or two, and all bets are off as to whether the Civil rights era survives into 2024.


Or free and fair elections, for that matter.

Holidaze: Das Trumpenfuhrer

When polling outfit YouGov asked Germans which world leader they thought was the largest threat to world peace, the results weren't even close.

41% of Germans believe President Trump is more of a threat to world peace than North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping or Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a YouGov survey reported by DW.

Why it matters: The results show the degree to which trust in U.S. leadership has eroded under Trump, even among countries like Germany that are traditionally viewed as close allies.

Details: 2,000 Germans participated in the survey, which was conducted between Dec. 16 and 18. Kim Jong-un came in second at 17%, followed by Putin and Khamenei at 8% and Xi at 7%.

Hey, at least he won something.

Holidaze: Impeachment Reached

Public support for removing Trump from office is now up to 55% in a new Yahoo News/MSN poll conducted this week.

Fifty-five per cent of those asked said they were in favour of the US president’s conviction by the Senate, a figure which has shot up from 48 per cent the week before.

Meanwhile, the number of people against Mr Trump’s removal has dropped to an all-time low, according to the MSN poll.

On Christmas Day, 40 per cent were opposed to the Senate voting to convict the president, who has been impeached over his dealings with Ukraine and an alleged subsequent attempt to obstruct congress.

The gap between the two views has become much wider since last week, when there was little to divide them (48 per cent in favour of Mr Trump's removal, 47 per cent against).

The percentage of respondents who neither supported nor opposed conviction also grew.

David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, said the numbers of people shifting from opposition to removal to "don't know" was significant. “When you follow polling daily, you learn people rarely make big jumps from Opposition to Support,” he said.

“This polling is a clear sign that [the] Republican policy of complete obstruction is not selling well to [the] voting public.”

I'll believe that when I see Republican Senators actually voting to have a real trial, but for now at least Pelosi's delay strategy to put pressure on the Senate is definitely working.