StupidiNews!

• Puerto Ricans took to the streets Monday to demand the resignation of Gov. Wanda Vazquez after a warehouse full of emergency aid supplies was discovered over the weekend in the city of Ponce.
• Iran says it may pull out of its remaining nuclear agreements with EU countries if the UN Security Council forces new sanctions on the country's regime.
• A rally held by pro-gun demonstrators in Richmond protesting firearms safety laws remained peaceful, but contained several known white supremacist and domestic terrorist groups.
• Four people are confirmed dead so far as a previously unknown virus in humans is spreading in China as New Year's celebrations are going on.
• Remote desktop access company Citrix is patching vulnerabilities in its VPN software used by hundreds of local, state, and federal government agencies as attacks are already surfacing.

Last Call For Impeachment Reached, Con't

As the Senate trial of Donald Trump gets underway tomorrow, a new CNN poll still finds that a narrow majority want Trump removed from office

About half of Americans say the Senate should vote to convict President Donald Trump and remove him from office in the upcoming impeachment trial (51%), according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, while 45% say the Senate should vote against conviction and removal. 

Nearly seven in 10 (69%) say that upcoming trial should feature testimony from new witnesses who did not testify in the House impeachment inquiry. And as Democrats in the Senate seek to persuade at least four Republican senators to join them on votes over allowing witnesses in the trial, the Republican rank and file are divided on the question: 48% say they want new witnesses, while 44% say they do not. 

The poll is the first major national telephone poll since the articles of impeachment were sent to the Senate, formally launching Trump's trial there. They are also the first such poll results since Soviet-born businessman Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani, publicly implicated the President in the Ukrainian pressure campaign during a series of television interviews. 

The new poll also finds majorities of Americans view each of the charges on which Trump will face trial as true: 58% say Trump abused the power of the presidency to obtain an improper personal political benefit and 57% say it is true that he obstructed the House of Representatives in its impeachment inquiry. 

But what matters is what Republican primary voters want.

Massive partisan gaps continue to dominate views on Trump and his impeachment trial. Overall, 89% of Democrats say he should be removed from office, while just 8% of Republicans feel the same way. Among independents, it's nearly dead even: 48% say the Senate should vote to remove him, while 46% say that they should not. Views on whether Trump should be impeached and removed are also evenly split across battleground states, 49% are on each side across the 15 states decided by 8 points or less in 2016. Those states are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. 

Beyond partisanship, there are wide divisions in the poll by gender, race, education and age. Nearly six in 10 women (59%) say the Senate should remove Trump from office; 42% of men agree. Among African Americans, 86% say Trump should be removed. That drops to 65% among Hispanics and 42% among whites. 

Combining race and gender, about eight in 10 women of color (79%) say he should be removed. That dips to 59% among non-white men, 49% among white women and 33% among white men. For whites, education adds another degree of division: 59% of white women with college degrees say the Senate should remove Trump, compared with 43% among white women without degrees, 44% among white men with degrees and 27% among white men without college degrees. A majority (56%) of those under age 45 say the President should be removed, while older Americans are more evenly split (47% in favor among those age 45 and over, 50% opposed).

As long as the Senate GOP has far more to fear from the 90% of Republican primary voters who demand acquittal than the big majority of remaining general election voters who want removal, there will be no witnesses, there will be little in way of a trial, and it will most likely all be over at the speed that the White House wants.

King Of The Grifters

The Trump regime corrupting Dr. King's memory for their own vile purposes happens yearly at this point, and I don't know why anyone expected anything different in 2020.

Kellyanne Conway on Monday responded to a question on how the president is observing Martin Luther King Day by claiming the civil-rights leader would oppose the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

During a press gathering at the White House, NBC News correspondent Geoff Bennett asked the senior Trump aide how the president was observing Martin Luther King Day, prompting Conway to first note that Trump was preparing for his trip to Davos before saying the president “agrees with many of the things that Dr. Martin Luther King stood for.”

From there, it only got more bizarre.

Adding that the president and Dr. King would see eye-to-eye on “unity and equality,” Conway complained that it’s not the president who is “trying to tear the country apart through an impeachment process and a lack of substance that really is very shameful at this point.”

“I’ve held my opinion on it for a very long time, but when you see the articles of impeachment that came out, I don’t think it was Dr. King’s vision to have Americans dragged through a process where the president is not going to be removed from office, is not being charged bribery, extortion, high crimes and misdemeanors,” she continued.

After declaring that anyone who cares for the phrase “and justice for all” should appreciate that the president has a “full-throttle defense” when it comes to impeachment, Conway concluded by linking herself with MLK.

“I, this morning, was reading some of the lesser-known passages by Dr. King and I appreciate the fact that we as a nation respect him by giving him his own day,” she proclaimed.

“I’m happy to share a birthday with this day,” Conway concluded.

I'm pretty sure Dr. King would tell Kellyanne Conway to shut the hell up.

A Case Of Government Cheese

The biggest problem that Democratic 2020 presidential candidates have with selling the grandiose plans of Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg and others to black voters especially is that in practice, government programs run headlong into systemic racism and become things that work for white America, but not for the rest.

Democratic candidates have come to understand that they need policies that target racial inequities, especially to win over black voters — a vital force in the Democratic primary. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont says single-payer health insurance will close disparities like the higher infant morality rate in black families. Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., released his Frederick Douglass Plan, which calls for overhauling the criminal justice system, health care equity, and education funding.

In addition to her proposals for black farmers, Ms. Warren has aimed to design her health care and education plans so that they take corrective steps to address historical inequality.

Still, even as the plans add up, black voters have largely not shown enthusiasm about these candidates, and the polling numbers have barely budged. According to a recent nationwide poll of black voters from The Washington Post and Ipsos, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a significant edge, with the support of nearly 50 percent of respondents. Among black voters 65 and older, poll showed Mr. Biden ahead by 60 percentage points.

Mr. Sanders had 20 percent support, driven largely by his popularity with black voters under 35 years old. Ms. Warren was third in The Post’s poll, with 9 percent.

Over the course of her campaign, at events geared toward black voters, Ms. Warren often cites policy proposals such as investment in historically black colleges and new housing in formerly redlined communities. Crowds generally respond positively.

“I want a world where the color of your skin doesn’t matter, you get the same opportunities,” Ms. Warren said at an event over the weekend hosted with groups including the Iowa chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We do not fix a system like this by pretending that race doesn’t matter.”

Mr. Sanders’s progress with black voters has been a mixed bag; he is beloved among younger voters and viewed with some suspicion by older ones, who largely supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and found his insurgent campaign to be harmful to her in the general election. Late last year, Mr. Sanders replaced his South Carolina state director, a sign of the campaign’s desire to shift his strategy for winning over black voters.

Mr. Biden’s candidacy is helped by several factors, including his widespread name recognition, public proximity to former President Barack Obama, and close relationship with black community leaders dating to his years in the Senate.

But in interviews with dozens of black voters in Virginia and South Carolina, another theme emerges: Mr. Biden is also ahead because his leading rivals have yet to wrestle with how their promises of structural change must overcome historical distrust of the government in black communities.

When you ask black voters like myself why we should trust Joe Biden, it's because he spent eight years as Obama's VP.  You ask me about Sanders, and I'm gonna say "the guy who spent more than 30 years in Congress and got nothing passed?"  Warren at least ran for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...and then Trump and the GOP neutered it to the point where it does nothing now precisely because it was helping black and brown folk.

Nobody in SC believe Sanders or Warren or Pete are going to get any major programs past Mitch or the Roberts Court because we all saw what happened to the ACA and to Democrats in 2010 and again when Black Lives Matter gained national attention in 2014.  Affordable health care for all Americans, not just the white ones, became a massive political liability when it threatened the careers of Democratic politicians and they ran from Obama.

We know what Sanders' supporters said and did to the ACA.

We know Warren decided the ACA was bad but she would do better.

Same with Mayor Pete.

Everyone says "We can do better."  Not one of them pointed out that the ACA was sabotaged again and again by Republicans and oh yeah, more than a few Democrats.  Well, Joe Biden did.

It's not rocket science, guys. Joe Biden has his issues, there's a reason I did not vote for him in 2008 in the primaries, in fact several reasons, all of which are pretty terrible baggage.  And he still pretends that the GOP will work with him, when they will spend every day calling him a socialist and a traitor and will sabotage him just as much as they did to Obama, if not more so.

But he is loyal to Obama, and he is loyal to the voters who put Obama in office. And frankly, the GOP will try to destroy any Democratic president, and there's no guarantee Trump will even leave office.

Right now, until somebody can make the case better than Biden that you gotta dance with the people that brung ya, he's my current choice.

StupidiNews (MLK Jr. Day Edition)

As I reflect on the Dr. Martin Luther King holiday here in the Trump era, I post his Letters From A Birmingham Jail, hoping people will finally get it.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Nearly 57 years later, we still have the exact same problem.  The people Dr. King warned us about are the ones who today say "I don't see color!" or "But all lives matter!" and they mean it, because they don't understand, and they have chosen not to.

The negative peace, which is the absence of tension.

The positive peace, which is the presence of justice.

Still, two generations after Dr. King wrote these words, the former remains preferable and the latter is brutally punished.

Try to imagine getting the Dr. King holiday through today's Senate GOP.

Last Call For In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions, Con't

Author and editor Windsor Mann asks in an LA Times op-ed:

If Trump loves America, why does he call our cities ‘disgusting’ and ‘embarrassing’?

The answer of course is that Donald Trump doesn't consider anyone who lives in cities (filled as most are with liberal governments who resist his autocracy and filled with people who didn't vote for him) as Americans at all, and will do everything in his power to hurt those cities by abusing his office. His base follows suit.

That is because Donald Trump, like most people suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, is driven purely by petty vengeance and bitter hatred for anyone who doesn't agree with his worldview that he is the most important human being on earth.  The concept of anyone not agreeing with how great he happens to be is so alien to him that anyone who holds that view offends him to the point where they must be destroyed.

This is a man who has fever dreams of shutting off every single federal dollar to cities like New York and San Francisco, causing racist riots so bloody that their local governments are overthrown and that the new people that rise swear public fealty not to America, but to Trump himself.  This is what he wants to do, and he will incite this violence in his base for this purpose every chance he gets.

Here endeth the lesson.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Who could have imagined that the kind of ambitious people who would want to be Donald Trump's third Russia expert in under a year would be both watched carefully and also stupidly corrupt?

The top Russia expert on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council has left his post after about three months, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Andrew Peek, the NSC’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, was escorted from the White House grounds on Friday, two of the people said, asking not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss personnel matters. A spokesman for the NSC declined to comment, citing the same reason. Peek also declined to comment.

Axios reported earlier Saturday that Peek was placed on administrative leave pending a security-related investigation.

Peek is the third departure from the position in less than a year. The NSC has been marked by turbulence and turnover over Trump’s three years in office, as the president has repeatedly sought national security advisers more in-line with his own ideology.

Peek assumed the top Russia job on the NSC in November, according to his LinkedIn page. The position and the people who have occupied it have featured prominently in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives last year.
Peek replaced Tim Morrison, who left the position late last year. Morrison testified in the impeachment inquiry that the U.S. Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, had told him there was a quid pro quo in which U.S. aid to Ukraine was conditioned on the country’s government opening an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed the son of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Morrison took over the job from Fiona Hill, a longtime Russia expert who also testified as part of the impeachment inquiry. In her testimony, Hill said Republican accusations that Ukraine -- rather than Russia -- meddled in the 2016 presidential election amounted to a “fictional narrative.”

The Senate’s impeachment trial is expected to begin on Tuesday.

Trump fired his last two Russia experts because they told him things he didn't want to hear.  The third is being carted off for possible criminal violations while Trump is facing impeachment. I'd feel sorry for Mr. Peek here, but there is that whole thing about actively choosing to work for the Trump regime that often leads to, well, being scrapped once your usefulness to Dear Leader expires or getting pinched by the feds for doing what Trump wants and getting caught.

Not a good look, but then again, Trump has near total control of his enablers, because if Trump goes down, nearly every single Republican goes down with him. There are plenty of Republicans who have gone so far out on a limb for Trump that there's no climbing back without his help.

We'll see how the trial shapes up, but the Parnas fountain of fun isn't being shit down anytime soon.

Sunday Long Read: Ghost Writer

Author Rax King explains how, in a world of both lasting grief and constant, instant communication, there's always someone on the other side.  When her father died, she sent emails to his old work address, which was active.  And then, somebody wrote back.

As expected, I found only about 10 emails between us in as many years of Gmail use. The revelation was not in anything I read but in the mere typing of his name—an icy wave of relief splashing me in the face. How good it felt to write his name for no reason, in a place that only I could see, and not on some piece of paperwork related to his death or in response to some well-wisher’s post on Facebook. It was like charging a magical sigil. I’d never been one of those writers who attached fetishistic significance to the physical act of writing (or to books themselves, or paper). But I finally understood how those writers felt. Writing to my father, I realized, was a charmed act. It didn’t summon him, but it raised the friendly shadow of him in the room; that was something.

I began writing him emails. I didn’t send them at first. Typing his email address into the recipient bar was enough to conjure up his listening presence. For months I transcribed the hostile anguish in my head into emails to my father, which I would then seal off with the addition of his email address and save in my drafts folder. It was the high school diary, unfiltered. He would never find out how it ended now; it felt good to “tell” him.

The first time I pressed “send,” it was by accident, and I was horrified. I was worried not that someone would receive and read the email, but that the recipient address would bounce back a message that the account had been deactivated.

I stared at my inbox for a minute, waiting for the inevitable. It never happened. The email address was still active.

So I continued the ritual, except now I sent those long-winded emails out. I wrote to my father anytime I needed him. In my letters I tried to talk myself around to whatever he would have said to me, hoping I could reverse-engineer the advice he might have given me. Then I pressed send, which never stopped being thrilling—I’d sidestepped the finality of death and found a plane where my father could thrive unchallenged. I put disclaimers at the beginning of every email: Hey, if you can somehow read this, please ignore it; hey, I don’t think anyone’s checking this email, but if you are then please just delete without reading; I’m lonely, I’m grieving, I miss my father, nothing to see here. But nobody ever responded.

One day, a year and a half later, someone did respond—not from my father’s email address, thank God, or I likely would have passed out at my desk. Still, it was frightening to see another email address from the same Workplace suite, with the same subject line. I don’t know what I was frightened of, exactly. Only that the stakes felt terribly high. I’d forgotten the cardinal rule of doing anything online, even sending emails to a dead person’s inbox—everything that happens online can be witnessed by an audience.

The response I received is the reason you’re reading this, because I posted it on Twitter and it went viral. “I’m sure you remember me,” my father’s former coworker wrote. “I want you to know that I never read these emails because I can tell they are very personal. But I do see them coming in and I can see that you must still miss your dad terribly.” There was more; I’m self-conscious about typing it all out, because of how generous it was for this person to not only share memories of my father with me, but to interpret them, color them with our shared understanding of what my father and I had been together. Like, for example: “Watching the two of you together wisecracking…it was like watching a Mel Brooks movie.”

Zandardad hangs around here and makes his views known in the comment section, and I message him pretty regularly, especially whenever there's a Democratic debate.  I'm lucky that I have a chance to still get advice from pop.  He's a good person, and I've always looked up to him.

In an era of instant messaging, don't take it for granted.

Impeachment Reached, Con't

Dear Leader Trump demands that his impeachment be annulled or removed on unimpeached because it's against the law or something, year, that's the ticket.

President Donald Trump launched his first formal attack on the House’s effort to remove him from office on Saturday, calling the Democrats’ impeachment case against him fatally flawed and “constitutionally invalid” while blasting the effort as a political hit job by his adversaries.

“This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election — now just months away,” Trump’s lawyers argued in a six-page response filed with the Senate just days before the president’s trial begins in earnest.

The allegations raised by Trump’s attorneys — a soft swing at the substance of the impeachment articles and a more direct rebuke of the process Democrats used to get there — mirror the House’s charges against him. Democrats allege the president pressured Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election on his behalf by launching investigations into his political opponents.

Saturday’s filing from Trump marks his initial entry into the impeachment battle. The president and his lawyers had explicitly sat out the House investigation, complaining in a December letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

But that approach won’t fly in the Senate, where Chief Justice John Roberts last week outlined a detailed schedule of separate legal filings for both sides of the debate. Trump’s initial reply will be followed by a more exhaustive trial brief from his lawyers that’s due on Monday.

In its first filing, the Trump legal team hammered what it calls “procedural irregularities” in the House’s impeachment process and the decision by Democrats not to accuse the president of committing a statutory crime — a threshold that constitutional scholars have long said isn’t a necessity when Congress seeks to remove a federal officeholder.

“In the end, this entire process is nothing more than a dangerous attack on the American people themselves and their fundamental right to vote,” the Trump legal filing says.

I can't tell if Trump honestly thinks everyone is as stupid as he is, or if this is the best his legal team can do with impeachment.  Either way, it's embarrassing, America deserves a much better class of villain running the place.

"Impeachments aren't legal because they overturn elections!" except for the part where impeachment is spelled out in the Constitution, making it legal.  I'm not even a lawyer and I think this brief should be written in crayon or finger painted in baby poop, but here we are.

Of course as soon as Chief Justice Roberts rolls his eyes at this, Trump will have all the evidence he needs to convince his base that it will never be a fair trial, so that Trump can and should do whatever he wants regardless of the outcome.

Meanwhile, Mitch is up to his tricks again.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is preparing a resolution that would leave room for President Trump's lawyers to move immediately to dismiss the impeachment charges if they so choose, according to Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.

Yes, but: Republican Senate leaders, including McConnell and Roy Blunt, the senior senator from Missouri, have already said members aren't interested in a vote to dismiss. And it seems unlikely that Trump's team would push for what would almost certainly be a losing vote — a move that could be seen as a sign of weakness at the outset of the trial.

Behind the scenes: "I am familiar with the resolution as it stood a day or two ago," Hawley, the junior senator from Missouri, told me in a phone interview on Saturday. "My understanding is that the resolution will give the president's team the option to either move to judgment or to move to dismiss at a meaningful time..." 

Hawley added that in the most recent draft of the organizing resolution he saw there was an option for the president's counsel to make a motion in multiple places, including at the beginning of the proceedings. 

A Republican leadership aide responded: "The White House has the right to make motions under the regular order, including a motion to dismiss, right after the resolution is adopted because a motion to dismiss is a motion permitted by the impeachment rules."

The real reason?  It's the final option in case the trial goes south.

The big picture: Trump endorsed on Twitter the idea of outright dismissal of the charges against him. It could be an opportunity for some of Trump's closest Senate Republican allies to register their contempt for the case that House Democrats marshaled against the president — even if the motion is doomed to fail. 

It could also serve as a break-glass option if the trial took a turn and Trump's allies felt they needed a mechanism to bring about an abrupt end to the trial.

The Trumpies expect an acquittal or dismissal by January 31, before the State of the Union speech on February 4.  If the trial's not done by then, Trump can't take his victory lap on national TV.

That appears to be the most important consideration for this regime.

Last Call For Pete's Sake

With the Iowa caucuses just two weeks and change away, Pete Buttigieg is making his stand in the Hawkeye State and the biggest question on the mind of his supporters isn't "How does he beat Trump in the general" but "Why don't black Democratic primary voters love him?"

The white voters who come to Pete Buttigieg's rallies just don't understand.

Many of them fell for the 37-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, the first time they heard him speak: his calm demeanor, his intelligence, the way he seemed to appeal to progressives and moderates alike.

But his support among Democratic-leaning black voters nationally is stuck in the abysmally low single digits.

“I don’t understand that,” said Bill Koeneig, a physician in Des Moines who said Buttigieg is one of his top choices in the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

“I don’t understand it,” said Julie Walstrom, a retired teacher in Perry, Iowa, who is deciding between Buttigieg, former vice president Joe Biden, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

“I don’t understand what that issue could possibly be,” said Doug Gardner, a retired sales worker in Urbandale.

In nearly two dozen interviews across Iowa this month, white voters struggled to reconcile their affection for Buttigieg with how black voters see the candidate. Some said it simply didn’t matter to them. Many more had been grappling with how to think about the disconnect and Buttigieg’s challenges: Some were worried, others frustrated.

But not a single person considering Buttigieg said it would affect their vote in the caucuses, which are nearly two weeks away.

“That’s not my battle to fight,” said Gardner.

Buttigieg is among the frontrunners in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two mostly white states that play an outsize role in deciding the presidential nomination as the first two states to vote. But his standing is lower nationally. In South Carolina, a key early-voting state because of its large black population, Buttigieg has frequently pulled 0% among black voters.

The vast majority of white Iowa voters said they’d heard about Buttigieg’s difficulties with voters of color. Many had heard, particularly, of his record in South Bend, where he was criticized for his handling of police relations and housing issues in communities of color.

“I think it’s partly because of the incident that happened in South Bend,” said Sue Seidenfeld, a retired physician assistant in Waukee who said she was undecided in the race and had come to see Buttigieg in Winterset. She did not specify the incident.

“I think that maybe that black voters feel like he wasn’t as empathetic as he could have been, and as on top of the situation as he should have been,” she said. “Which is kind of a shame — because he has to be impartial, and he has to take some time to see what really the facts were, and I think people are too quick to judge sometimes.”

She paused and added: “But maybe not, you know. There may be something to it.”

Still, Seidenfeld said, it wasn’t an issue that was going to affect her vote either way. She thought Buttigieg was “more empathetic to minorities than a lot of people. I also think, for what it’s worth, that it’s a shame that people think that Iowa shouldn’t be the first [caucus] in the nation. Because after all, we were the first to go for Barack Obama.” 

Let me answer the question for the folks in Iowa.  Three answers, actually.

1) The number one priority for black voters like myself is getting rid of Trump.  It's not just a matter of politics, it's a matter of survival.  He hurts us daily.  Trump and his base are doing everything they can to erase Barack Obama's legacy and memory from this country, and along with it all the executive decisions and government agency programs and departmental memos that Obama issued to help us.  All those are going away and his base cheers that on.  White voters in Iowa will survive a second Trump term.  Black voters will continue to suffer grievous harm from it.

So when we ask Pete "Hey, are you going to bring back the Obama-era policies that we need, are you going to get rid of the federal government's systemic hostility towards black and brown folk" he responds with "That's on the list" like great, like he doesn't want to upset the white people voting for him, especially the ones that say "Well, frankly, all lives matter!"  because he knows Clinton's support for Black Lives Matter hurt her in the Midwest.  Clinton at least had the courage to go down swinging and not assume we would support her.

2) There are some real issues with the South Bend PD and Pete's relationship with it and black residents in the city.  The story of how Pete badly handled examples of overt racism in the city government when he was Mayor doesn't fill anyone with confidence.  This story has dogged him for eight months now and he has yet to actually respond to it in any meaningful way, in fact over and over again in interviews and in his own book, he's responded with "I didn't know".

Again, he's had months to respond to the criticism of this (and not all of it is fair criticism against him) and he's chosen to ignore it or to profess ignorance.  It doesn't make black folk willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because we've all dealt with white folk in positions of power like this who say they are our friends, but act like we don't matter. 

3) Iowa has a four percent black population.  It's nowhere near representative of the country. questions of why a state with a small fraction of black voters is the most important state in the nation when it comes to deciding a Democratic presidential candidate aside, Pete has sunk all of his resources into the state and is ignoring the most more representative SC.  You know who thinks SC matters?  Joe Biden.  Obama's VP.  The guy who stood by Obama for eight years.

Biden has earned the loyalty of black voters because he was there for us and still is.  Yes, he made some terrible calls 40 years ago in his Senate career.  He made some terrible calls when he was running in 2008.  But Barack Obama trusted him, and it was a great choice, and I trust him too.  Iowa is not representative of America and Iowa voters acting insulted that somebody wouldn't pick their candidate i not the way to get people to pick your candidate.

Pete has a long, long way to go, frankly.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Monday's pro-firearms rally at Virginia's state capitol is shaping up to be as bad as Charlottesville or worse, and police have already arrested domestic terrorists ahead of the planned armed demonstrations.

Three men linked to a violent white supremacist group known as The Base were charged with conspiring to kill members of a militant anti-fascist group, police in Georgia announced Friday, a day after three other members were arrested on federal charges in Maryland and Delaware.

A senior FBI national security official said police and federal agents intentionally moved to arrest the men ahead of Monday’s rally because they believed some of them intended to commit violence there. It was unknown if the men arrested in Georgia planned to attend the rally in Richmond.

The Base, a collective of hardcore neo-Nazis that operate as a paramilitary organization, has proclaimed war against minority communities within the United States and abroad, the FBI has said. Unlike other extremist groups, it’s not focused on promulgating propaganda — instead the group aims to bring together highly skilled members to train them for acts of violence.

There’s an intensified focus on The Base after the three members were arrested Thursday in Maryland and Delaware on federal felony charges. A criminal complaint included details of how some of the men built an assault rifle using parts, purchased thousands of rounds of ammunition and traded vests that could carry body armor.

“A big reason why we disrupted it now was based on the timing of the rally on Monday and the intent of some of the individuals to potentially conduct violent acts down in Richmond,” said Jay Tabb, the executive assistant director for national security at the FBI.

Speaking at a homeland security event in Washington, he said the FBI has “got a fair sense of worry” because agents “can’t account for everybody and everything.”

“We have a degree of interest of some individuals that we know are at least saying that they will be there and we have no way to predict where rhetoric turns to violence,” Tabb said.

Organizers of The Base recruit fellow white supremacists online — particularly seeking out veterans because of their military training — use encrypted chat rooms and train members in military-style camps in the woods, according to experts who track extremist groups.

The group, which has the motto “learn, train, fight,” brings together white supremacists with varying ideologies.

The arrests show an intensified focus on the group from law enforcement officials who are concerned that the supremacists may go beyond plotting to violent acts, a threat made more urgent ahead of a pro-gun rally Monday in Richmond, Va.

The arrests only added to rising fears that Monday’s rally could quickly devolve into violence, with thousands of protesters planning to descend on Virginia’s capital, and become a repeat of the 2017 white nationalist rally when a man drove his car into counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed an executive order banning guns from the state Capitol grounds for Monday’s rally, but pro-gun groups filed an appeal seeking to overturn the ban. The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the ban Friday.

The people planning to show up in Richmond aren't just tiki torch carrying internet troll assholes, these are hardcore neo-Nazi domestic terrorists trained to fight and kill non-white folk.  The worst of these scumbags are The Base, a group of white supremacist skinheads who have risen in the wake of Charlottesville and the Trump era.

Members of The Base allegedly spray-painted at least one synagogue in Racine, Wisconsin, with swastikas and anti-Semitic language, officials said. Authorities suspect the case is linked to the one in Michigan.

"We welcome the arrests," Holden said Friday. "As a first-hand witness to their mischief-making, I can easily believe law enforcement has good reason to be concerned."

But experts who track hate groups say the vandalism in Michigan is merely a tamer example of the larger, apocalyptic vision that members harbor: Their ideology supports a race war against minorities and the establishing of white ethno-states. The group's name is the English translation of al Qaeda, according to The Soufan Group, a nonprofit security intelligence firm.

"Just like al Qeada, The Base does not believe in any political solution to what they see as a threat to the white race," said Mollie Saltskog, an intelligence analyst with the firm. "Violence is the only option."

Saltskog said that while the ideologies of a white supremacist group such as The Base and a jihadist organization such as al Qaeda appear disparate, their shared desire for bloodshed only incites their followers.

"They feed off each other in a pretty sick way," she added.

The Base, which began about two years ago, maintains it is not a political organization and denies being a paramilitary group or militia with no formal membership or official leadership.

Its membership numbers are unclear, but Saltskog said The Base's chapters extend beyond the United States and Canada, with support in Europe and Australia.

One of those arrested in the U.S. this week is Canadian national Patrik Mathews, 27, who was allegedly a main recruiter for the group in Winnipeg.

These guys are straight up terrorists in every sense of the word.  The have risen in the shadow of Trump's racism and in response to his rhetoric.  Charlottesville was only the beginning.  Richmond, on the federal MLK Jr. day holiday, could become deadly.

I pray that cooler heads prevail and the storm passes, but it won't.  Trump will make sure of that.

If anyone is hurt on Monday, remember Trump did this.

SCOTUS Motion: Integrity And Faithlessness

The US Supreme Court is taking up the question of "faithless electors", and whether or not a elector empaneled by a state in the electoral college in a presidential contest must vote based on the state's popular vote.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up an issue that could change a key element of the system America uses to elect its president, with a decision likely in the spring just as the campaign heats up.

The answer to the question could be a decisive one: Are the electors who cast the actual Electoral College ballots for president and vice president required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states? Or are they free to vote as they wish?

A decision that they are free agents could give a single elector, or a small group of them, the power to decide the outcome of a presidential election if the popular vote results in an apparent Electoral College tie or is close.

"It's not hard to imagine how a single 'faithless elector,' voting differently than his or her state did, could swing a close presidential election," said Mark Murray, NBC News senior political editor.

America has never chosen its president by direct popular vote. Instead, when voters go to the polls in November, they actually vote for a slate of electors chosen by the political parties of the presidential candidates. Those electors then meet in December, after the November election, to cast their ballots, which are counted before a joint session of Congress in January.

More than half the states have laws requiring electors to obey the results of the popular vote in their states and cast their ballots accordingly. The problem of what are known as "faithless electors" has not been much of an issue in American political history, because when an elector refuses to follow the results of a state's popular vote, the state usually simply throws the ballot away.

The cases before the Supreme Court involve faithless electors during the 2016 presidential election. Instead of voting for Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote in Colorado, Michael Baca cast his vote for John Kasich, the former Republican governor of Ohio. And in Washington state, where Clinton also won the popular vote, three of the state's 12 electors voted for Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, instead of Clinton.

Colorado threw Baca's vote out and found another elector to vote for Clinton. Washington accepted the votes of its rebel electors but fined them for violating state law. The electors challenged the fines, but the Washington state Supreme Court upheld the state law requiring them to conform to the popular vote.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver reached a different conclusion, however. It said electors can vote for any legitimate candidate.

It's not really hard to imagine a scenario where the Supreme Court throws out state laws that require electors to cast their ballots for the popular vote-getter in June, and then the Democratic candidate in 2020 wins a state like Arizona, North Carolina, or Florida, and then a few electors are shaved off to vote for Trump, which could throw him a win in a close race.

We'll see where this ends up, I would think that SCOTUS would decide that this is another election matter to leave to the states, but the electoral college is also the only real national election process mapped out specifically in the Constitution as well.  It's not out of the realm of possibility that we get a sweeping ruling that declares all states follow a winner-take-all format, in order to force federal uniformity for a federal election.

The right-wing noise machine is portraying the case as an effort to get rid of the electoral college completely, which won't happen, so I have no idea what Republicans actually think about this case. other than yelling "states' rights!" and walking off.

Oral arguments will be in March.

Taking Your Lunch Money

One of the major goals of the Trump regime is to remove all traces of the Obama administration, by destroying and then taking credit for recreating what worked (NAFTA vs. USMCA, VA Choice program vs. VA MISSION Act, etc) and just flat-out destroying whatever he and the base dislike, especially environment and health stuff such as light bulb regulations, toilet flow rules, and in this case, Michelle Obama's healthy school lunch guidelines.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken another whack at former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature achievement: Establishing stricter nutritional standards for school breakfasts and lunches. And on her birthday.

On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. The agency is responsible for administering nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools.

Lipps said the changes will help address what he described as unintended consequences of the regulations put in place during the Obama administration. For example, when schools were trying to implement innovative solutions such as grab-and-go breakfast off a cart or meals in the classroom, they were forced to give kids two bananas to meet minimum federal requirements.

But Colin Schwartz, deputy director of legislative affairs for Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that the proposed rules, if finalized, “would create a huge loophole in school nutrition guidelines, paving the way for children to choose pizza, burgers, french fries and other foods high in calories, saturated fat or sodium in place of balanced school meals every day.”

He says that limiting the variety of vegetables could make french fries even more central to students’ diets. He says the potato lobby has been pushing for this change, and that the potato industry was behind a change that happened quietly last March making it easier to substitute potatoes for some fruit in weekly breakfast menus.

Kam Quarles, the chief executive of the National Potato Council, said, “Potatoes are a nutrient dense vegetable, which contain more potassium than a banana and 30 percent of the daily value of vitamin C along with 3 grams of protein, fiber and carbohydrates that school children need to perform their best at school.”

This was an easy three-fer in the Trump book: a direct insult to another part of the Obama legacy by erasing it, pleasing red state constituent farmers in places like Idaho, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Maine, and taking cash from yet another industry lobby group.

Don't be surprised if Melania Trump offers "new" lunch guidelines to help kids in school, either.  It was always her idea, of course, and red state Trumpists will love it.

Michelle who?  Never heard of her.

Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

A new national poll of black Americans from the Washington Post finds the overwhelming belief that Donald Trump is a racist who has made racism worse in America, and that his regime has translated into a frightening time for those who are black.  Being black, I absolutely agree with the assessment, but remember that Trump is a symptom of a much larger issue.

More than 8 in 10 black Americans say they believe Trump is a racist and that he has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 disapprove of his job performance overall.
The pessimism goes well beyond assessments of the president. A 65 percent majority of African Americans say it is a “bad time” to be a black person in America. That view is widely shared by clear majorities of black adults across income, generational and political lines. By contrast, 77 percent of black Americans say it is a “good time” to be a white person, with a wide majority saying white people don’t understand the discrimination faced by black Americans. 

Courtney Tate, 40, an elementary school teacher in Irving, Tex., outside Dallas, said that since Trump was elected, he’s been having more conversations with his co-workers — discussions that are simultaneously enlightening and exhausting — about racial issues he and his students face everyday.

“As a black person, you’ve always seen all the racism, the microaggressions, but as white people they don't understand this is how things are going for me,” said Tate, who said he is the only black male teacher in his school. “They don’t live those experiences. They don’t live in those neighborhoods. They moved out. It’s so easy to be white and oblivious in this country.”

Francine Cartwright, a 44-year-old mother of three from Moorestown, N.J., said the ascent of Trump has altered the way she thinks about the white people in her life.

“If I’m in a room with white women, I know that 50 percent of them voted for Trump and they believe in his ideas,” said Cartwright, a university researcher. “I look at them and think, ‘How do you see me? What is my humanity to you?’ ” 

The president routinely talks about how a steadily growing economy and historically low unemployment have resulted in more African Americans with jobs and the lowest jobless rate for black Americans recorded. Months ago he said, “What I’ve done for African Americans in two-and-a-half years, no president has been able to do anything like it.”

But those factors have not translated positively for the president. A 77 percent majority of black Americans say Trump deserves “only some” or “hardly any” credit for the 5.5 percent unemployment rate among black adults compared with 20 percent who say Trump deserves significant credit.

In follow-up interviews, many said former president Barack Obama deserves more credit for the improvement in the unemployment rate, which declined from a high of 16.8 percent in 2010 to 7.5 percent when he left office.

Others said their personal financial situation is more a product of their own efforts than anything the president has done.

“I don’t think [Trump] has anything to do with unemployment among African Americans,” said Ethel Smith, a 72-year-old nanny who lives in Lithonia, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. “I’ve always been a working poor person. That’s just who I am.”

It really does come down to black folk like myself wondering if a room full of white folks are oblivious to the black experience in 2020 or actively hateful of it, and I don't know which.  I learned long ago not to bring up politics in any conversation around here in NKY because then I learn the answer.

Coming For Comey

The Barr Justice Department, unable to find a crime to charge former FBI Director James Comey with in either their investigation into the Mueller probe or Operation Crossfire Hurricane into candidate Trump's Russia connections, has now decided that Comey has to hang for leaking classified info to the press in 2017.

Federal prosecutors in Washington are investigating a years-old leak of classified information about a Russian intelligence document, and they appear to be focusing on whether the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey illegally provided details to reporters, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

The case is the second time the Justice Department has investigated leaks potentially involving Mr. Comey, a frequent target of President Trump, who has repeatedly called him a “leaker.” Mr. Trump recently suggested without evidence that Mr. Comey should be prosecuted for “unlawful conduct” and spend years in prison.

The timing of the investigation could raise questions about whether it was motivated at least in part by politics. Prosecutors and F.B.I. agents typically investigate leaks of classified information around the time they appear in the news media, not years later. And the inquiry is the latest politically sensitive matter undertaken by the United States attorney’s office in Washington, which is also conducting an investigation of Mr. Comey’s former deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, that has been plagued by problems.

Law enforcement officials are scrutinizing at least two news articles about the F.B.I. and Mr. Comey, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2017, that mentioned the Russian government document, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Hackers working for Dutch intelligence officials obtained the document and provided it to the F.B.I., and both its existence and the collection of it were highly classified secrets, the people said.

The document played a key role in Mr. Comey’s decision to sideline the Justice Department and announce in July 2016 that the F.B.I. would not recommend that Hillary Clinton face charges in her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state.

The investigation into the leaks began in recent months, the people said, but it is not clear whether prosecutors have impaneled a grand jury or how many witnesses they have interviewed. What prompted the inquiry is also unclear, but the Russian document was mentioned in a book published last fall, “Deep State: Trump, the F.B.I., and the Rule of Law” by James B. Stewart, a Times reporter.

A lawyer for Mr. Comey declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Washington.

So we know what the Justice Department will be doing for 2020, which is harassing Comey and using these "old leaks" as justification to go through 2016 Obama-era FBI and DoJ files.  Of course our shiny object chasing press will go with it, and Trump will have a ready made smokescreen of "new allegations in the Comey investigation" to roll out whenever he needs to.

And of course, the questions will lead to "What did Joe Biden know?"

As Jon Chait writes, "Enough cases fit the pattern for it to have become unmistakable."

The Department of Justice has conducted several reviews of the Mueller investigation. The last one, conducted by Inspector General Michael Horowitz subjected its FISA warrants of Trump’s staffers to strict oversight, finding several errors. The problem is that the public had little basis of comparison to measure the errors — were they egregious, as Trump suggests, or ordinary sloppiness? Nobody knows what the ordinary level of sloppiness is, because FISA warrants don’t normally come under intense public scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Barr has appointed John Durham to undertake another even broader investigation into the FBI and the intelligence community’s Russia investigation. The probe appears to be aimed at other Trump antagonists, such as former CIA Director John Brennan. Barr has thrown his weight behind the probe, visiting foreign countries and asking their cooperation.

The Department has also pursued a case against former director Andrew McCabe for misleading the Department about media leaks. McCabe is another Trump target, who stood behind Comey after Trump fired him, has since then been the target of public and private abuse by the president. The potential charges have been hanging over McCabe’s head for so long that last month a court ordered the Department either to bring a case or drop it.

In theory, there would be nothing wrong with the Department of Justice tightening up its standards of conduct. But all the evidence points to the conclusion those standards are being raised only for Trump’s political enemies. The Department released batches of private texts by Lisa Page, including texts that had no political relevance, exposing her to personal embarrassment. Trump of course is the head bully, mocking Page repeatedly, including engaging in a simulated orgasm between her and the FBI agent with whom her affair was exposed in the texts. Page is suing the Department, but the Department is not bringing its own charges against the officials who undertook this obvious abuse.

Nor is the Department investigating the ubiquitous 2016 leaks about the Clinton email probe.The sentiment against Clinton among conservative FBI agents was at such a fervor that agents would openly cheer on colleagues investigating her with comments like “You have to get her” and “You guys are finally going to get that bitch.” They pressured Comey to bring charges by leaking constant stories to the right wing media. “FBI agents say the bureau is alarmed over Director James Comey urging the Justice Department to not prosecute Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information,” stated a report in the Daily Caller. Giuliani was literally broadcasting his leaks from conservative agents on television.

This history is relevant for two reasons. First, those leaks were far more historically significant than any of the leaks that are currently being investigated. The anti-Clinton cabal was trying to force Comey to violate DOJ protocol and announce an investigation of a candidate leading up to an election, and they succeeded.

Second, the flagrant nature of the 2016 anti-Clinton leaks show just how unseriously the bureau has taken its rules on leaking. The behavior was so common precisely because everybody on all sides assumed the prohibition would never be enforced, which is what makes the new selective enforcement of strict anti-leaking protocol so obviously biased. It would be as if every car in Washington, D.C., driving even one mile over the speed limit was suddenly pulled over and subjected to the maximum penalty allowed by law.

Trump is not arbitrarily having his opponents arrested. He is doing something more subtle, but still extremely dangerous: using the Department of Justice to selectively hold his opponents to the most exacting levels of legal scrutiny that are not broadly applied. It doesn’t even matter that not every investigation brings charges, and the charges themselves probably won’t hold up in court. The time, expense, and reputational cost of the investigations will be damaging enough.

It's sad that we can see this coming a mile away, and it's still going to most likely work.