StupidiNews!

• South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has suspended his 2020 presidential campaign ahead of Super Tuesday tomorrow.
• A federal judge has ruled that immigration head Ken Cuccinelli was improperly installed by the Trump regime and that everything he has authorized is null and void.
• COVID-19 has now been confirmed in Egypt according the country's health ministry, two cases have been detected as the global spread of the virus continues.
• French President Emmanuel Macron's decision to force state pension reform through without a vote is causing calls for a vote of no confidence by the French parliament.
• Tens of thousands of comments are against a proposed Trump FAA rule that would require nearly all drones to broadcast their positions.

Last Call For Social Engineering

Tired of still having Twitter run by fascism-curious glibertarian douchebag Jack Dorsey, the Trump regime's GOP lackies are considering buying the company out and replacing Dorsey with somebody more friendly to the Trump proaganda machine.

Activist investor Elliott Management Corp. has taken a sizable stake in Twitter Inc. and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, according to people familiar with the matter.

The New York-based firm has nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public.

There are only three seats becoming available at this year’s annual meeting but Elliott wanted to ensure that it nominated enough directors to fill all three seats or any other vacancies that may arise, the people said. The exact size of Elliott’s stake couldn’t be determined.

Elliott approached San Francisco-based Twitter about its concerns privately and has had constructive discussions with it since then, the people said.

Representatives for Elliott and Twitter declined to comment.

Sounds pretty anodyne there, but the reality is Elliott Management is owned by GOP billionaire donor Paul Singer, who was a Never Trumper until converted to the faithful last year.

Republican megadonor and hedge fund executive Paul Singer went into attack mode at a dinner honoring Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week, targeting what he described as a rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party.

The comments offered a glimpse into the mentality of a powerful GOP donor as he decides how he’s going to contribute to the 2020 election. Singer is a billionaire and the founder of Elliott Management.

Singer, speaking at the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner on Wednesday, warned conservatives that policies pushed by Democratic presidential candidates pose a risk to U.S. economic growth under President Donald Trump.

“Yet despite all this, socialism is on the march again,” said Singer, who is chairman of the conservative think tank.

“They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers,” he added.
An Elliott Management spokesman confirmed the remarks to CNBC and declined to comment further.

Singer also attacked the Green New Deal, a sweeping set of policies aimed at creating jobs and curtailing the threats of climate change.

“The so-called Green New Deal, the latest progressive attempt to engineer our way of life and vest power in the administrative state, is now the standard of nearly every Democratic candidate for president,” he said. “Setting out to sell this utopia to the American people isn’t merely irresponsible political rhetoric, it is outright deceit.”

Singer rarely discusses his political ideologies in public but appears to have been more comfortable in front of a group people largely associated with his organization. During the 2016 presidential election, Singer was a vocal opponent of then-candidate Trump and, a year earlier, was the financier of a conservative website that hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on the business executive-turned-Republican nominee for president.

People forget that the Steele Dossier was originally financed as Republican Never Trumper oppo research against The Donald.  Singer was the man who bankrolled it.  Now, Singer is making a move to oust Twitter's CEO and take over just before the 2020 election.

This is not by accident.

You can't trust anyone these days, it seems.

 

Meanwhile, Back In The House...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have gone silent as Trump has rampaged across the executive branch claiming heads, and it doesn't look like they're going to do much of anything heading into election season.

The change in posture is an acknowledgment, House Democrats say, that in a world where Senate Republicans are bear-hugging Trump, and the courts are declining to operate at the speed of the congressional calendar, there are very few options that a single chamber of Congress can pursue short of withholding funds for agencies like the Justice Department — particularly when impeachment is no longer in their election-year arsenal.
"There is nothing that Donald Trump can do that would cause [Senate Republicans] to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors," said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who serves on the House Judiciary Committee. "So that has caused everybody in the House to take a deep breath and figure out what our next steps are."

"That leaves us legislative and political answers," Raskin added.

In other words, the end of the impeachment process has become the advent of a new, narrower focus on what Democrats say is a crucial theme revealed by their efforts: Trump's indifference to, or even encouragement of, foreign interference in the 2020 election. It's a throughline, they say, of Trump's behavior toward Russia, his treatment of Ukraine and his public comments on whether he would reject foreign help in future elections.

Now, rather than revive the smashmouth impeachment approach that they adopted throughout the fall and winter, Democrats say they intend to use their investigative weapons to highlight these election security themes and keep pressure on Republicans who chided Trump for his behavior in Ukraine but ultimately acquitted him for it.

"I would argue that impeachment actually served its purpose. It highlighted for people what we're dealing with here and what the stakes are," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "I would say it set the table for people to take a good hard look at what I think impeachment helped to remind us of, what a threat that represents, and conveniently for us his behavior subsequently has only made our case for us."

Democrats are pondering whether to pass new election security measures, putting them in the Senate's court as the primary gets underway. And they're planning to drive a consistent election security message as the nation's focus shifts toward the November election.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced a March 10 intelligence community briefing for lawmakers, and she's slammed Trump for what she says is politicizing the intelligence community, in part by installing Richard Grenell, a loyalist ambassador, as the acting director of national intelligence. News reports that Russia is already interfering in the upcoming election have returned the issue to the fore.

Separately, Democrats on Friday dusted off their Trump oversight tools and took the first steps to confront the president's campaign of post-acquittal retribution. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) requested testimony from a slew of high-profile Justice Department officials about political interference in criminal cases — including four career prosecutors who quit the case of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone earlier this month after the president intervened in his sentencing. 

Here's what's going to happen:  The House will pass another round of election security measures and the Senate will ignore them.  Jerry Nadler will subpoena Justice Department prosecutors involved in Trump crony cases and the White House will block testimony claiming executive privilege of people who have never worked in the actual White House.  Trump has basically fired everyone who testified in the impeachment hearings.  Nobody else will voluntarily come forward.  The courts will offer no relief.

Democrats will fret and do nothing.

They especially won't turn to inherent contempt of executive officers.

Maybe things will heat up after July and the Democratic nominee is official, but I doubt it.

And remember, the COVID-19 virus means all future bets are off.

Sunday Long Read: Viral Information

James Hamblin at the Atlantic gives us this week's Sunday Long Read on COVID-19, the Wuhan coronavirus, and what an epidemic scenario in the US would really mean.

The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, “Actually, let me start again.” So it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”

Containment is the first step in responding to any outbreak. In the case of COVID-19, the possibility (however implausible) of preventing a pandemic seemed to play out in a matter of days. Starting in January, China began cordoning off progressively larger areas, radiating outward from the city of Wuhan and eventually encapsulating some 100 million people. People were barred from leaving home, and lectured by drones if they were caught outside. Nonetheless, the virus has now been found in 24 countries.

Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of such measures—relative to their inordinate social and economic cost, at least—the crackdown continues to escalate. Under political pressure to “stop” the virus, last Thursday the Chinese government announced that officials in Hubei province would be going door-to-door, testing people for fevers and looking for signs of illness, then sending all potential cases to quarantine camps. But even with the ideal containment, the virus’s spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work.

Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”

At this point, it is not even known how many people are infected. As of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. But Lipsitch’s “very, very rough” estimate when we spoke a week ago (banking on “multiple assumptions piled on top of each other,” he said) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. That’s all it would take to seed the disease widely. The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases. On Friday, Chinese scientists reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case of asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan. The researchers concluded with stolid understatement that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, “the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.”

Even if Lipsitch’s estimates were off by orders of magnitude, they wouldn’t likely change the overall prognosis. “Two hundred cases of a flu-like illness during flu season—when you’re not testing for it—is very hard to detect,” Lipsitch said. “But it would be really good to know sooner rather than later whether that’s correct, or whether we’ve miscalculated something. The only way to do that is by testing.”

Originally, doctors in the U.S. were advised not to test people unless they had been to China or had contact with someone who had been diagnosed with the disease. Within the past two weeks, the CDC said it would start screening people in five U.S. cities, in an effort to give some idea of how many cases are actually out there. But tests are still not widely available. As of Friday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories said that only California, Nebraska, and Illinois had the capacity to test people for the virus.

With so little data, prognosis is difficult. But the concern that this virus is beyond containment—that it will be with us indefinitely—is nowhere more apparent than in the global race to find a vaccine, one of the clearest strategies for saving lives in the years to come.

The new normal is that COVID-19 hits the global population like a truck, and then becomes one of the many flu-like strains that are with us year after year, mutating, then reappearing. If Lipsitch's numbers are right, US fatalities could well be into the hundreds of thousands, and that's not counting the follow-on fatalities from complications from the illness, a hospital system overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, and a just-in-time delivery system of supplies and basic staples when people suddenly find themselves unable to get things they need.

I'm not trying to panic people.  I want people to get good information, because lord knows there's a lot of bad information already out there.  But people need to take this seriously.

Last Call For Primary Positions

Joe Biden rolled to a big win in South Carolina, and billionaire Tom Steyer is folding his cards and cashing out.  Even Jon Chait is apologizing to the universe for throwing dirt on Biden's grave a bit early.

After Joe Biden finished an astonishing fourth in Iowa and then in fifth place in New Hampshire, I wrote a postmortem for his campaign. It now looks like one of the most wrong things I have ever written. It was pointed out to me after I published that I described Biden’s campaign in the past tense, something I did not plan or realize beforehand. It simply seemed obvious nobody could come back from such a catastrophe — least of all Joe Biden.

After Biden’s South Carolina victory, the first primary he has ever won in his three presidential campaigns, things look quite different. The status of Biden’s campaign has not only been upgraded to “alive” — at this point he is the primary, and probably the sole, alternative to Bernie Sanders. At the risk of overreacting in the opposite direction, Biden appears to have taken control of the Democrat Party’s center-left voters so decisively none of his mainstream rivals will be able to sustain a rationale for their candidacy. Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg — all of whom have made Biden-esque pitches to the electorate — will face enormous pressure to leave the race after Super Tuesday, and possibly even before.

The mistake many of us made with regard to Biden was viewing his campaign through the prism of age. Biden looks and acts much older than Bloomberg, Sanders (who has looked exactly 85 years old since the 1980s), and even Trump, who also appears to be experiencing rapid cognitive decline. Biden campaigned unevenly and delivered uncomfortably meandering performances at the debates that often worsened as each debate dragged on. It seemed intuitive that the pattern of decline would also apply to Biden’s campaign. His best day would be his first, and he would slowly exhaust the supply of pent-up goodwill that was his primary asset.

But whatever his limitations, Biden has not gotten worse. His last debate performance was his best. It was almost good.

The heart of Biden’s claim to the mainstream Democratic mantle is his impressive performance with African-Americans, who had little representation in the previous three contests. They are not attracted to Biden out of mere nostalgia, gratitude, or familiarity. Black voters in the state — especially older ones, who have the closest personal experience with overt white supremacy — have thought carefully about the primacy of ousting Trump over every other goal, as well as their role in that process.

This conclusion is not me reading my views onto them. Pay attention to what voters there have told reporters like Astead Herndon, Eugene Robinson, and others. Robinson described the mood of voters he met as “urgent pragmatism” to end a presidency that is reversing decades of racial progress. “Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves,” one voter told Herndon. “So yeah, we’ll back Biden, because we know who white America will vote for in the general election in a way they may not tell a pollster or the media.”

It's that second-to-last paragraph that shows Chait knows damn well Biden wasn't done yet, and most of all, black voters, hadn't weighed in yet in Iowa and New Hampshire when we're the backbone of this party and have been for decades.

Sanders's win in Nevada is significant, and he still has a lot of delegates he can pick up in California and Texas.  But Biden has put the marker down as the Not-Sanders, and there's a lot of territory in that area Biden can cover.

It would be different if Sanders was racking up majority wins.  He's not.  Neither is Biden by any means, and Bloomberg is essentially replacing Steyer now as the billionaire in the race, but the fight is now truly on.  Super Tuesday results are 72 hours away, and after that we'll have a real idea of who will be left.

Out Of The Sandbox

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the US are about to sign a peace deal with the Taliban, in a move that could finally lead to the end of the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan.

After a week-long deal to reduce violence across Afghanistan, the U.S. and the Taliban are set to sign a historic agreement Saturday that would see U.S. troops start to withdraw, according to a statement issued Friday afternoon by President Donald Trump. 

"Soon, at my direction, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will witness the signing of an agreement with representatives of the Taliban, while Secretary of Defense Mark Esper will issue a joint declaration with the government of Afghanistan. If the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan live up to these commitments, we will have a powerful path forward to end the war in Afghanistan and bring our troops home," Trump said. 

Pompeo is headed now to Doha, Qatar, where the U.S. and the militant group have engaged in talks for over a year and a half and the signing ceremony is expected to take place. At the same time, Esper is expected in that joint statement to reaffirm U.S. support for the Afghan government, long rejected by the Taliban and sidelined from their talks with U.S. negotiators. 

The agreement with the militant group that harbored the al Qaeda operatives responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks comes after over 18 years of war. The Trump administration hopes it is poised to reshape Afghanistan, leading to national peace negotiations and ending any Taliban safe haven for terrorists that threaten the U.S. homeland. But critics warn the Taliban has neither the ability nor perhaps the appetite to carry out their commitments. 

According to Pompeo, the agreement triggers a "conditions-based and phased" U.S. withdrawal and the "commencement" of Afghan negotiations where "all sides of the conflict will sit down together and begin the hard work of reconciliation." U.S. officials say the deal also includes Taliban commitments on counterterrorism, although those details are still unclear. 

"These commitments represent an important step to a lasting peace in a new Afghanistan, free from Al Qaeda, ISIS, and any other terrorist group that would seek to bring us harm," Trump said in his statement. "Ultimately it will be up to the people of Afghanistan to work out their future. We, therefore, urge the Afghan people to seize this opportunity for peace and a new future for their country."

Initially, the U.S. will draw down its troops from 13,000 to 8,600 -- a level that Gen. Scott Miller, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces, has said is still sufficient to carry out their mission. While that draw down is expected to take months, conditions and timelines for further reductions after that are unclear.

If this works out, maybe we'll finally get out of the war that has lasted for three-quarters of my adult life.  The thing is though given the history of both Donald Trump and the Taliban that it's not going to work out at all.   Even a best case scenario at this point is troops in Afghanistan for years.

On top of that, the deal forces the Afghan government to release some 5,000 Taliban prisoners.  Sure is going to go well for Kabul, huh?

That's not worth celebrating just yet, but Trump of course is doing it anyway.

Trump begins coronavirus press conference talking about his surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/O1ZYzsFG2d

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) February 29, 2020

Once again this is Donald Trump telling us what he plans to do, but acting like it's already been accomplished and that he, Donald Trump, is the smartest man on Earth. 

He's been wrong every other time before.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The official position of the Chief Executive of the United States of America is that the Wuhan coronavirus has already been contained and that it's a hoax generated by Democrats in order to damage Republicans' chances in the 2020 elections.

President Donald Trump said Friday that Democrats are using the virulent coronavirus as a “hoax” to damage him and his administration.

“The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he said from a campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina.

One of my people came up to me and said ‘Mr. President they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well.’ They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax that was on a perfect conversation,” he continued.

“This is their new hoax,” he said, referring to the coronavirus.

The coronavirus, which began in Wuhan, China, has now killed more than 2,800 people worldwide and infected more than 80,000. The latest reports from the World Health Organization show the pace of new cases in China slowing, but jumping in South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Iran.

The rest of the regime is now telling Americans that the virus is a hoax as well.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists, Mr. Mulvaney played down concerns about the virus that is spreading around the globe and panicking investors.

Mr. Mulvaney said the administration took “extraordinary steps four or five weeks ago,” to prevent the spread of the virus when it declared a rare public health emergency and barred entry by most foreign citizens who had recently visited China.

“Why didn’t you hear about it?” Mr. Mulvaney said of travel restrictions that were widely covered in the news media. “What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, that’s all the press wanted to talk about.”

The news media has been covering the global spread of coronavirus for months.

But Mr. Mulvaney claimed that the news media was too preoccupied covering impeachment, he said, “because they thought it would bring down the president.”

The media’s focus switched to the coronavirus for the same reason, he continued.

“The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president,” he added. “That’s what this is all about it.”

Following the president’s lead, Mr. Mulvaney also brushed off concerns over the virus; there have been 60 cases identified in the United States.

“The flu kills people,” he said. “This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence, it’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.”

Vice-President Pence and his task force are now laser-focused on the real problem: reinflating the stock market bubble that resulted in the worst week for stocks since the Great Recession.

Trump administration officials are holding preliminary conversations about economic responses to the coronavirus, as the stock market fell sharply again on Friday amid international fears about the outbreak, according to five people with knowledge of the planning.

Among the options being considered are pursuing a targeted tax cut package, these people said. They have also discussed whether the White House should lean even harder on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, though the central bank on Friday afternoon said it would step in if necessary.
No decisions at the White House have been reached on these options, and officials stressed conversations remained preliminary and extremely fluid.

Vice President Pence’s office is involved in the discussion of possible responses, two people said.

These ideas would not be designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but they would seek to arrest the economic fears spreading through the economy. And some of the ideas would need cooperation from Congress or the Fed, as the White House has limited powers to unilaterally rewrite tax policy or direct the central bank to act. 

In short, shut up about the virus, it's a hoax, it's not Ebola, go about your business as normal, like climate change it's overblown by the evil Democrat party and the liberal Trump-hating media, buy the dip and you'll make a mint when this rocket goes back up again, don't miss out, chump!

Seems like a totally great federal government response.

Please address any questions or issues to Trump's White Supremacy Czar Stphen Miller and his new wife Katie, who is now the woman in charge of all coronavirus communications from the regime.

Do your part, citizen!  Buy stocks today!

Sarcasm aside, the Cult of Trump that see him as some sort of messianic figure, the true believers?  They're going to assume Trump will protect them from the virus.  When this starts killing people, significant numbers of people if epidemiologists' worst fears come true in a pandemic scenario, all bets are off as to what happens next.

The disease reappears in discharged patients because they are catching it again. 

A growing number of discharged coronavirus patients in China and elsewhere are testing positive after recovering, sometimes weeks after being allowed to leave the hospital, which could make the epidemic harder to eradicate.

On Wednesday, the Osaka prefectural government in Japan said a woman working as a tour-bus guide had tested positive for the coronavirus for a second time. This followed reports in China that discharged patients throughout the country were testing positive after their release from the hospital.

An official at China’s National Health Commission said on Friday that such patients have not been found to be infectious.

Experts say there are several ways discharged patients could fall ill with the virus again. Convalescing patients might not build up enough antibodies to develop immunity to SARS-CoV-2, and are being infected again. The virus also could be “biphasic”, meaning it lies dormant before creating new symptoms.

But some of the first cases of “reinfection” in China have been attributed to testing discrepancies.

On Feb. 21, a discharged patient in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu was readmitted 10 days after being discharged when a follow-up test came back positive.

Lei Xuezhong, the deputy director of the infectious diseases center at the West China Hospital, told People’s Daily that hospitals were testing nose and throat samples when deciding whether patients should be discharged, but new tests were finding the virus in the lower respiratory tract.

Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia who has been closely following the outbreak, told Reuters that although the patient in Osaka could have relapsed, it is also possible that the virus was still being released into her system from the initial infection, and she wasn’t tested properly before she was discharged.

The woman first tested positive in late January and was discharged from the hospital on Feb. 1, leading some experts to speculate that it was biphasic, like anthrax.

The world's not ready for this virus.  America is definitely not ready.  It's going to be a nightmare, and we're just in the opening few minutes of this horror movie.

Buckle in.  This one will test America like it hasn't been tested in your lifetime.

Retribution Execution, Con't

If House Democrats want to hear testimony from Trump White House employees, they'll have to go to the Supreme Court or use inherent contempt in order to force it.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Friday dismissed a lawsuit from House Democrats who were seeking testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn as part of a broader investigation into President Donald Trump.

In a 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case, agreeing with the Trump administration’s position that the U.S. Constitution forbids federal courts from resolving interbranch information disputes.

“The Committee’s suit asks us to settle a dispute that we have no authority to resolve,” the opinion states.

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed McGahn in 2019 as part of its investigation into Trump’s potential obstruction of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. McGahn previously told Mueller’s grand jury that Trump ordered him to direct the Department of Justice to fire Mueller in 2017 in order to end the probe. He did not carry out the order. This incident appeared as one of 10 potentially obstructive acts committed by Trump in Mueller’s final report.

Democrats sought to bring McGahn before the committee to get his testimony on this alleged obstruction. But the White House declared that the president and his direct aides had an “absolute immunity” from congressional investigation and ordered McGahn not to honor the subpoena. The administration never made a formal declaration of executive privilege over McGahn’s testimony.

The court said Democrats will just have to find some other way to force the administration to comply with their demands.

“Congress (or one of its chambers) may hold officers in contempt, withhold appropriations, refuse to confirm the President’s nominees, harness public opinion, delay or derail the President’s legislative agenda, or impeach recalcitrant officers,” the court wrote. “And Congress can wield these political weapons without dragging judges into the fray.”
Democrats haven’t embraced the use of hardball legislative tactics to gain leverage. For a time last year, they entertained the idea of using their own power to arrest or fine recalcitrant administration officials, but ultimately rejected using the so-called “inherent contempt” power.

Democrats point out that they expected to lose this case on the merits cited, but then again, they could have always gone to inherent contempt and put McGahn in jail. The DC Circuit Court is straight up telling House Democrats that the nuclear option of inherent contempt is an option, but they will never use it.

Meanwhile, Trump knows now he can block any and every House subpoena, because at this point they are both meaningless and unenforceable.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

In a post-impeachment trial world, Donald Trump is collecting what he feels is his due, and while the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and stock market crash this week are top stories, Trump got a massive victory this week with Ukraine giving in and gifting Trump with that investigation into Joe Biden that Trump wanted anyway.

A court ruling in Ukraine has forced state investigators to open a probe into alleged pressure by then-vice president Joe Biden that led to the 2016 dismissal of Viktor Shokin as the country’s prosecutor general, officials said Thursday.

President Trump last year pressed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky for an investigation of this kind, leading to Trump’s impeachment by the House and his eventual acquittal in a Senate trial.

Shokin’s firing, however, was not a unilateral action directed by Biden. It was prompted by a push for anti-corruption reforms developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Shokin’s lawyer, Oleksandr Teleshetsky, said the probe was launched in response to a court order, after an appeal for action by Shokin. The State Bureau of Investigations confirmed a case was opened.

Trump and his allies have put intense pressure on Zelensky’s administration to open investigations into Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

From late 2018 Shokin met with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, as Giuliani sought political dirt on the Bidens. Shokin has long been angered by what he sees as an unfair dismissal following foreign pressure.

Shokin has claimed he was pushed out by Biden because he tried to launch a probe into Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma. In fact, Ukrainian investigations into Burisma related to the period before Hunter Biden joined the board.

“They need to investigate this. They have no other alternative. They are required to do this by the decision of the court. If they don't, then they violate a whole string of procedural norms,” Teleshetsky said in an interview.

The Post story here by David Stern and Robyn Dixon makes it very clear that there's nothing to actually investigate, but it seems Rudy and his team of fixers got the job done anyway.  Trump wanted Zelensky to open a sham investigation of Biden, and it's happening.  Expect the ads soon.

Exit question:  Do Biden's 2020 Democratic primary campaign rivals jump on this garbage investigation in order to attack Biden?

Lowering The Barr, Con't

House Democrats are finally taking action against Attorney General William Barr and his reign of legal terror.  Well, sort of, anyway.

House Democrats are seeking interviews with the four career prosecutors who quit the case of Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump, after Trump and Justice Department leaders intervened to demand a lighter jail sentence.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) requested the interviews in a Friday letter to Attorney General William Barr that also included broader demands for documents and testimony about allegations of political interference by Trump in the work of the Justice Department.

In the letter, Nadler seeks access to a long list of Justice Department officials who oversaw matters involving associates of the president — like former Trump campaign national security adviser Michael Flynn — or who were tapped by Barr to review cases Trump has openly criticized.

Among the officials Nadler is seeking to interview are John Durham, the U.S. attorney from Connecticut who was picked by Barr to review the origins of the FBI's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election; Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, who Barr selected to review the case of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn; Robert Khuzami, the former New York-based prosecutor who oversaw the case against Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen; and Richard Donoghue, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who Barr picked to review all matters related to the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump's impeachment in the House last year.

But the most notable names on the list are four Stone prosecutors: Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando and Jonathan Kravis. Nadler's request for access to the career line prosecutors is an unusual step intended to circumvent the Justice Department's political leadership — and one that has been viewed with caution even by Trump critics.

It's the latest indication that House Democrats see career employees as crucial sources of information in an era in which Trump has directed his top political appointees to ignore House demands for information.

Nadler wants a response by March 13, and Barr himself is still scheduled to appear before the House on March 31.  Whether any of those will happen is anyone's guess, but don't expect to hear from any of the Stone prosecution team anytime soon, or anyone else on Nadler's extensive list.  Hell, even odds right now that Barr doesn't show up on the 31st either.

It's not like the House Democrats are going to do much, even if they could.

Scotching Trump's Plans

Scotland's Green Party wants answers on where Donald Trump is getting his money from as far as his Turnberry golf resort and other resort properties.

Patrick Harvie MSP, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, said there were reasonable grounds for suspecting that the US president, or people he is connected with, “have been involved in serious crime.”
He has called on ministers to apply to the Court of Session to seek answers as to how Mr Trump’s bankrolled his multimillion acquisitions of land and property in his mother’s homeland.

Responding at First Minister’s Questions, Nicola Sturgeon stressed she was “no defender” of Mr Trump, but said any allegations of criminality were a matter for Police Scotland and the Crown Office.

An UWO is a relatively new - and rarely used - power which has been designed to target suspected corrupt foreign officials who have potentially laundered stolen money through the UK.

The mechanism, introduced in 2018, is an attempt to force the owners of assets to disclose their wealth. If a suspected corrupt foreign official, or their family, cannot show a legitimate source for their riches, then authorities can apply to a court to seize the property.
Mr Trump and the Trump Organisation have always stressed that they did not require any outside financing for their Scottish resorts.

George Sorial, the Trump Organisation’s former chief compliance counsel, told The Scotsman in 2008 that it had £1bn “sitting in the bank and ready to go” for its inaugural Scottish course, located in Aberdeenshire.

Scotland on Sunday later revealed how the same year, Mr Trump asked the Bank of Scotland for a 15 year mortgage worth £23m, and a £15m construction loan, as part of his efforts to establish a "landmark" hotel at St Andrews in Fife, the home of golf. The bank refused, and Mr Trump's plans were never realised.

Mr Harvie, an avowed critic of Mr Trump and his administration, said that an UWO was “designed precisely for these kinds of situations.”

He told MSPs: “Trump’s known sources of income do not explain where the money came from in these huge cash transactions. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that his lawfully obtained income was insufficient.
“Trump is a politically exposed person in terms of the law, and there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that he, or people he is connected with, have been involved in serious crime. Some of them have pleaded guilty.”

He added: “We need to be given confidence that the government will show leadership and use the powers available to it.

I can't imagine Scotland going through with it as Trump would almost certainly punish the country with massively corrupt financial measures, but it sure would be funny to see Scotland seize and sell off Trump's golf resorts and make a few million for their coffers.

StupidiNews!

• At least 29 Turkish soldiers were killed in air strikes by Syrian forces, according to Turkish officials near the border.
• French President Emanuel Macron is warning the country to prepare for a coronavirus epidemic as cases are rising in neighboring Italy.
• Japanese schools are being shut down to prevent the spread of the coronavirus through at least late March as PM Shinzo Abe is recommending calm.
• Republican Sen. Richard Shelby says he could support controversial Federal Reserve board nominee Judy Shelton, Shelton's nomination has been put on hold as the White House gathers support.
• The 9th Circuit has ruled that YouTube is a private forum and not subject to free speech laws, rejecting a lawsuit by conservative media company PragerU over having their videos removed.

Last Call For The New Retail Politics

Writing in the NY Times Upshot, Cook Political Report House guru Dave Wasserman suggests that while dominating in voting precincts where there are Whole Foods and Apple Stores, Democrats must find a way to do better in precincts with Cracker Barrels and Bass Pro Shops if they stand any chance at beating Trump and taking back the Senate.

To quantify the relationship between retail locations and voting, we analyzed retail and precinct-level election data compiled for this article by the U.C.L.A. postdoctoral research fellow Ryne Rohla and Grant Gregory, a pollster for Breakthrough Campaigns.

After examining the voting patterns surrounding over 100 popular American chains, we zeroed in on eight national brands — each with retail locations in over 40 states — that proved useful predictors.

Of the eight brands, the four correlated with Democratic vote growth were the Amazon-owned organic mecca Whole Foods Market; the Canadian-based yoga and “athleisure” apparel retailer Lululemon Athletica; the hipster fashion magnet Urban Outfitters; and the glassy, minimalist Apple Store. Let’s call these “upmarket” brands.

The four brands correlated with recent Republican gains were the Southern-themed Cracker Barrel Old Country Store; the booming rural lifestyle chain Tractor Supply Company; the arts-and-crafts giant Hobby Lobby; and the outdoor recreation hub Bass Pro Shops. We’ll call these “down-home” brands.

Next, we divided the country’s electorate — based on the proximity of these stores to the geometric centers of America’s more than 169,000 voting precincts — into three groups:

• Upmarket bubbles: voters living less than five miles from a current Whole Foods, Lululemon, Apple Store or Urban Outfitters location (34 percent of the electorate in 2016).
• Down-home zones: voters living less than 10 miles from a current Cracker Barrel, Tractor Supply, Bass Pro Shop or Hobby Lobby location (these stores tend to be in less densely populated areas) — but more than five miles from the nearest “upmarket” retail location (50 percent of the electorate in 2016). 
• Chain-sparse communities: voters who don’t live close enough to any of these retail stores to fall into either category (16 percent of the electorate in 2016).

The good news for Democrats: Over the past few election cycles, they’ve gained a lot of ground among voters in upmarket bubbles. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried them by 31 percentage points, up from Barack Obama’s 26-point margin in 2012. And among the 4 percent of voters within one mile of a current Whole Foods/Lululemon/Urban Outfitters/Apple Store location, Mrs. Clinton won by 45 points, up from Mr. Obama’s 36-point margin in 2012.

This retail realignment was also on display in the 2018 midterms: Of the 43 districts Democrats wrested from G.O.P. control to take back the House, 65 percent contained a Whole Foods Market, compared with 38 percent of all districts that elected a Republican. And both states where Senate Democrats scored gains — Arizona and Nevada — have upmarket numbers above the national average. 

But the challenge for Democrats is that relatively few voters, especially in Electoral College battleground states, live in these upmarket bubbles.

Indeed, in the "Down-Home" and "Chain-Sparse" precincts in 2016, Democrats were destroyed.  Half the country lives in Down-Home areas, and Dems lost those precincts by 10 points in 2016, whereas they ended up losing by only 2 in 2008.  It got even worse in the Chain-Sparse areas, where Dems' six point loss in 2008 turned into a 22-point massacre in 2016.

And like it or not, Down-Home and Chain-Sparse areas of the country make up two-thirds of all voters nationwide.

All the Dems in the 2020 race seem to think their message is the best one to reach these voters.

Having lived in Down-Home areas in the country for 95% of my life, I can tell you nearly all of them are wrong in that assumption.

Pardon The Corruption Goes Viral

Donald Trump is apparently looking for a winning move after the multiple coronavirus cock-ups this week, including a press conference yesterday where VP Mike Pence was put in charge of the White House's response team, all white Trump was telling reporters that it's no big deal.

Amid mixed messages from the Trump administration regarding how it plans to address growing fears surrounding the spread of coronavirus in the U.S., President Trump announced Wednesday evening that Vice President Mike Pence will be in charge of addressing it.
Trump’s announcement comes on the heels of bipartisan criticism from lawmakers about his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Politico reported Tuesday that the administration was considering the creation of a “coronavirus czar” whose job would be similar to Ronald Klain’s role as the Obama White House’s Ebola Response Coordinator. Trump said he didn’t think of Pence as a “czar,” since he is in the administration.

While Trump spoke, the Washington Post reported Wednesday evening that the first coronavirus case in the U.S. of unknown origin was confirmed in northern California.

After pledging that his administration “will spend whatever is appropriate” to address the coronavirus outbreak, Trump said that Pence “has a certain talent for this.”

“My role will be to continue to bring that team together, to bring to the president the best options for action to see to the safety and well-being and health of the American people,” Pence said. “We’ll also be continuing to reach out to governors, state and local officials.”

Considering Pence's role in restarting an HIV epidemic in rural Indiana back when he was governor by refusing to expand needle exchange programs in the state and wrecking the state's health programs, Pence may actually be the worst possible choice, given his displayed ignorance on basic medical science.

No wonder then that Trump is considering pardoning Roger Stone to get the press off the virus story.

Republicans close to the White House say officials are lobbying Trump not to go ahead with a Stone rescue. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Jared Kushner have argued to Trump that a pardon or commutation would create an unnecessary scandal during an election year. “They all think it’ll be a problem and that there will be hearings,” a Republican briefed on the internal conversations told me. Another source briefed on the matter said that Trump is being told, “We don’t need the hassle. Do it after the election.” Sources also said West Wing officials have told Trump that stepping in could lead Attorney General William Barr to resign—an outcome one Republican close to the White House described as “catastrophic.”

Trump’s desire to intervene on Stone’s behalf is being stoked by Stone’s longtime friend, Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In private, Carlson has lobbied White House officials to convince Trump to keep Stone out of jail. It’s the same case he’s made on Fox News. Last week, Carlson bashed Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the federal judge presiding over Stone’s case. “She is an open partisan, who has so flagrantly violated the bounds of constitutional law and fairness, it’s shocking she’s still on the bench. If there’s anyone in Washington who deserves to be impeached, it’s Amy Berman Jackson,” he said on air. Carlson continued the attack on air Tuesday night, calling Jackson “corrupt, dishonest, and authoritarian.” Carlson has also tried to discredit the jury’s forewoman, who Stone’s lawyers claimed failed to disclose anti-Trump tweets during jury selection. (Yesterday, Jackson erupted over Carlson’s attacks during a courtroom hearing. “Any attempts to invade the privacy of the jurors or to harass or intimidate them is completely antithetical to our system of justice,” she said.)

Carlson declined to comment.

Carlson met Stone in 1996 when Stone was working on Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, which Carlson was then covering for George magazine. The two remained friendly over the years, and Stone regularly contributed to the Daily Caller, the conservative news site Carlson cofounded in 2010 (Stone has served as the Caller’s men’s fashion editor). Carlson has told people that he is frustrated that Trump didn’t immediately commute Stone’s sentence when it was handed down last week.
A source said Carlson has privately speculated that the failure to act is the result of Trump thinking like a television producer. Carlson has said to people that Trump instinctively wants to heighten drama by drawing out controversies so he can swoop in and administer justice, John Wayne–style. “The story arc isn’t complete,” a person close to Carlson told me. “The way he thinks is as a producer. It’s like, “I have to ride into the rescue.”

At the same time that Trump’s lawlessness is metastasizing, he is raging about the spread of the coronavirus. Trump has responded to criticism of how his administration is ill prepared to handle the health crisis by blaming the media for tanking the stock market. In private, Trump has blamed acting secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf for failing to have a clear message during a contentious Senate hearing yesterday, a source said.

Inside the West Wing, there’s panic that Trump’s compulsive fictionalizing could trigger an even bigger crisis if the coronavirus truly explodes. “This is a black swan event,” a former West Wing official said. “The White House is concerned because they can’t control the virus and Trump wants everyone to get out there and say positive things, but people inside don’t have confidence the statements are accurate.” The official went on: “It’s one thing to get people out there saying, ‘we’re going to win the election’ or ‘the economy is great.’ It’s another to have the government say, ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ but then people start dying.” While we spoke, the official told me that he was searching for face masks on Amazon, but the site was sold out. “I have to go,” he said, and hung up.

The White House declined to comment.

It would be a great dark political comedy series, like Veep, only with absolutely evil morons in charge, if it wasn't the reality we're about to crash headlong into.  And the thing that assures Trump is going to burn for the inevitable: he absolutely fired the CDC pandemic response team two years ago to "drain the swamp".

Amid warnings from public health officials that a 2020 outbreak of a new coronavirus could soon become a pandemic involving the U.S., alarmed readers asked Snopes to verify a rumor that U.S. President Donald Trump “fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”

The claim came from a series of tweets posted by Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information, a newsletter he describes as being about “politics and power.” The commentary is representative of sharp criticism from Democratic legislators (and some Republicans) that the Trump administration has ill-prepared the country for a pandemic, even as one is looming.

Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the Trump administration in preceding years that gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” is a reference to news stories from spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted.

Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton. Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, who as The Washington Post reported, “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been fired one month prior.

It’s true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.

Legum stated in a follow-up tweet, “Trump also cut funding for the CDC, forcing the CDC to cancel its efforts to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics in 39 of 49 countries in 2018. Among the countries abandoned? China.” That was confirmed in 2018 reports saying that funding for the CDC’s global disease outbreak prevention efforts were cut by 80%, which included the agency’s efforts in China.

Pence is now in charge of all information coming out of the federal government about the coronavirus and the response to it.  We'll find out months from now that information was suppressed by Pence to make Trump look better, and it won't matter when the reports of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of cases and more roll in over the next several weeks.

I am convinced more than ever that an epidemic will end badly for America, not only the possible casulaties, but given Trump's authoritarian reactionary rage when the blame falls on him like an avalanche (and deservedly so), I truly fear what he may end up doing as a result.

Deportation Nation, Con't

I've long said that the goal of the Trump regime on immigration is to not only end undocumented immigrants, not only to effectively end legal immigration, but to strip the most vulnerable US citizens of citizenship and incarcerate them en masse until they can be deported.  The Trump regime took another step closer to that dark nightmare yesterday with the announcement of a Justice Department task force dedicated to "citizenship fraud" cases.

The Department of Justice is creating a new section of attorneys to handle cases aimed at stripping naturalized citizenship from people suspected of fraud, officials announced Wednesday.

The move will likely inspire increased fear in immigrant communities already on edge over the Trump administration’s immigration restrictions.

DOJ officials framed the creation of the Denaturalization Section, which will be housed in the civil Office of Immigration Litigation, as an effort to crack down on an increase in cases of those who have engaged in fraud, human rights violations, sexual offenses, and other crimes.

“When a terrorist or sex offender becomes a U.S. citizen under false pretenses, it is an affront to our system—and it is especially offensive to those who fall victim to these criminals,” Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said in a statement. “The Denaturalization Section will further the Department’s efforts to pursue those who unlawfully obtained citizenship status and ensure that they are held accountable for their fraudulent conduct.”

DOJ officials said in a statement that “the growing number of referrals anticipated from law enforcement agencies motivated the creation of a standalone section dedicated to this important work.” Individuals can have their citizenship stripped if the government proves that naturalization was illegally received or if it was “procured by” lying or concealing a fact like a previous crime.

In its announcement of the new section, justice officials highlighted successful denaturalizations, including a person who had allegedly been associated with terrorist groups, another who had been prosecuted for executing people in Bosnia, and four people who had falsely claimed to be a family in order to gain visas.

Experts said the move appeared to be another symbolic effort aimed at targeting immigrants.

“While this effort may result in relatively few denaturalizations, it shows that the administration’s desire to keep immigrants ‘looking over their shoulder’ extends past legalization and even naturalization. If you weren’t born here, this administration is trying to keep you uncomfortable,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

If you don't think this will be used on political enemies in order to strip them of citizenship so they can be disappeared,  that only naturalized citizens will be targeted by this group, well, have I got some Chinese and Russian purges for you!

Seriously, this is going to be another terror weapon used against immigrant communities, and used against non-immigrants as well.