StupidiNews!

• California health officials say as many as 180 people may have been exposed to COVID-19 at a Mother's Day church service last weekend.
• After a weekend of lobbying by congressional Republicans, Donald Trump is expected to make permanent his decision to end all US funding for the World Health Organization this week.
• Benjamin Netanyahu's unity Israeli government has finally won approval, but the Prime Minister faces a corruption and bribery trial beginning next week.
• Donald Trump says that he will "take action" against tech giants "controlled by the Left" as multiple states and the Justice Department are expected to bring antitrust suits against Google and Facebook.
• A Minnesota man is facing felony charges for shooting down a commercial drone that was taking aerial pictures of a chicken processing plant.

Last Call For Open For Getting The Business

Texas is open for business and COVID-19 is more than happy to take new customers.

The latest number of of coronavirus cases in Texas jumped by 1,801 in a single day, the highest daily rate since the state started tracking data. The number of cases reported now stands at 46,999, according to the latest figures released by Johns Hopkins University.

There are currently 19,093 active cases statewide with 1,791 patients hospitalized -- which is an increase of 75 from yesterday.

A total of 678,471 people have been tested out of a statewide population of around 29 million people.

The state of Texas has also reported 1,305 fatalities -- an increase of 33 but down from the two day high of 58 and 56 the previous two days.

Again, the choices we made to close in April gave us good numbers in May.  The choice to reopen in May without having a testing, contact tracing, and treatment protocol in place means the numbers will get very bad in June and onward.

As in Kentucky, a federal judge in North Carolina has reopened churches despite Gov. Roy Cooper's orders.

A federal judge issued an order on Saturday that allows North Carolina religious leaders to reopen their doors to their congregations in spite of the governor’s warning that they risk spreading coronavirus.

Gov. Roy Cooper said he wouldn’t appeal the ruling blocking his restrictions on indoor religious services.

A hearing is scheduled May 29 on whether the order will become permanent.

The order prevents Cooper from taking enforcement actions against religious worshipers but also states they should observe recommendations for social distancing and reduce transmission of the virus when possible.

Governor Cooper's spokesperson issued the following statement in response to the order.

"We don't want indoor meetings to become hotspots for the virus and our health experts continue to warn that large groups sitting inside for long periods of time are much more likely to cause the spread of COVID-19. While our office disagrees with the decision, we will not appeal, but instead urge houses of worship and their leaders to voluntarily follow public health guidance to keep their members safe."

There's more and more evidence that America is simply bored of social distancing and that we refuse to do it.  Even in New York City.

Lockdown-weary New Yorkers ditched the distancing to get social instead this weekend — transforming parts of the Big Apple into a raucous, late-season Mardi Gras.

Yet the city’s COVID-be-damned attitude was nothing compared with the scene in Belmar, NJ, a beach popular with Staten Islanders and Brooklynites.

Huge crowds waited shoulder-to-shoulder on the boardwalk for their turn to buy beach badges.

“The line for beach badges was like four non-socially distanced blocks long,” tweeted Jarrett Seidler, who described the boardwalk as “obscenely packed.”

Outside popular bars on the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, the East and West Villages and in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, The Post found booze hounds arriving for the takeout cocktails and then staying — and staying — to sip drinks on packed sidewalks and soak up the lively scenes.

“How are you going to drink with a mask on?” one reveler, hairdresser Akeem ­Kelley, told The Post.

His mask dangled below his chin as he stood outside the Upper East Side’s popular Dorrian’s Red Hand bar — where crowds exceeding three dozen people, nearly all unmasked, were found in the early evenings of Friday and Saturday.

“They don’t care about us,” said Ann Trent, 72, of Manhattan, on Saturday.

She sat on a bench at the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge as a steady stream of mask-free sightseers and bicyclists passed her by, and she mused, “What happened to all of us protecting everyone else?”

The crowds, which enjoyed summer-like weather that climbed to a high of 76 degrees on Saturday, apparently had forgotten that they live in the epicenter of the pandemic.

Outside the East Village Social on St. Marks Place, two guitarists helped kick off the weekend’s festivities Friday night by plugging into a portable amplifier and jamming for tips from the gathered crowd.

“Obviously too many people,” one bartender conceded to The Post on Saturday.

Most of the bar-hopping social-distance scofflaws who were observed Friday and Saturday were young — and many chose not to wear masks.

Donald Trump and his staff consider the pandemic to be "over", so for tens of millions of Americans, the pandemic is over.

Look at Illinoisans crossing the border into Wisconsin.

On the first weekend without any statewide stay-at-home orders, Wisconsin was open for business, and at least along the southern border, people from Illinois poured in.

Hundreds of day-trippers, including many in cars with license plates from the Land of Lincoln, flocked to the tourist haven of Lake Geneva on Saturday.

They shopped, ate lunch, strolled the banks of the lake, went on boat tours and set up picnics.

And outside, at least, there wasn't a lot of social distancing.

Illinois is still locked down to fight the novel coronavirus while Wisconsin is under a patchwork of local regulations after Wednesday's decision by the state Supreme Court to throw out Gov. Tony Evers' safer-at-home order.

“Illinois is closed and we’ve been wanting to get out,” said Castano Penn, a Chicagoan who works at a senior living center and was not wearing a mask Saturday as he strolled the streets of Lake Geneva.

"I know it’s probably bad," he said. "I’m just kind of done with it all.”

But the coronavirus is certainly not done burning its way through the global population.

You may be "done" with COVID-19.  COVID-19 sure as hell isn't done with you and your family and your community.  Not by a long shot.

The second, far deadlier wave of COVID-19 infections is now open for business and that will be frighteningly apparent in a few more weeks.

Biden, His Time, Con't

CNN polling guru Harry Enten finds Joe Biden's lead not only holds up through national polling, but it holds up through various state polls as well.

In the competitive states (where most of the state polling has been conducted), there has been an average swing of 6 points toward Biden compared to Clinton's 2016 result. The same is true in the non-competitive states. 

At least from this state level data, it does not seem that either candidate is running up the score disproportionately in areas that were already friendly to him. 

Biden has posted leads of greater than 5 points in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania. He is ahead in more than enough states to capture 270 electoral votes, if the election were held today. 

We can test our data, too, to see what would happen if the polls are underestimating Trump like they did in 2016. 

What I found was Biden would still be ahead, even with a 2016 sized mishap. 

The polls underestimated Trump by 1 point (RealClearPolitics) or 2 points (FiveThirtyEight) in the aggregate of the states we currently have polling from. Applying that 2016 bias to our current data, Biden would have a 6- to 7-point lead nationally. 

Concentrating on just the competitive states, the polls undersold Trump by 2 points (RealClearPolitics) or 3 points (FiveThirtyEight). If the polls in the competitive states were off by as much as they were at the end in 2016, Biden would still be ahead in states like Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Of course, it may not be wise to expect a 2016-sized polling era in 2020. The polls in these states that had major statewide contests in 2018 were pretty much unbiased. No matter what set of states (all or just competitive) and which aggregate, the polls were not more favorable to Republicans than the final result. 

In a state like Wisconsin, the final 2018 Marquette poll nailed the final Senate margin and underestimated the Democratic candidate for governor's margin by 1 point. 

The bottom line is Biden's ahead right now nationally and in the competitive states. The good news for Trump is he has about six months to change the course of the campaign, which is more than enough time to do so.

In a regular America, Biden would be well on his way towards a decisive win.  In Trump's America in 2020, with COVID-19 and the most blatantly criminal autocrat in modern US history rigging the outcome, absolutely nothing can be taken for granted, including even having an election in the first place.

Sunday Long Read: The Man Who Saved The Internet

In 2017, Marcus Hutchins, all of 22 years old, saved the entire internet from the Wannacry ransomware cyberattack.  He was a hero, but in saving the planet, he exposed his identity, and the FBI had been wanting to talk to him for quite some time about his darker days.

AT AROUND 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on the mansion's driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a black SUV parked on the street—one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout.

He stared at the vehicle blankly, his mind still hazed from sleep deprivation and stoned from the legalized Nevada weed he'd been smoking all night. For a fleeting moment, he wondered: Is this finally it?

But as soon as the thought surfaced, he dismissed it. The FBI would never be so obvious, he told himself. His feet had begun to scald on the griddle of the driveway. So he grabbed the McDonald's bag and headed back inside, through the mansion's courtyard, and into the pool house he'd been using as a bedroom. With the specter of the SUV fully exorcised from his mind, he rolled another spliff with the last of his weed, smoked it as he ate his burger, and then packed his bags for the airport, where he was scheduled for a first-class flight home to the UK.

Hutchins was coming off of an epic, exhausting week at Defcon, one of the world's largest hacker conferences, where he had been celebrated as a hero. Less than three months earlier, Hutchins had saved the internet from what was, at the time, the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. Just as that self-propagating software had begun exploding across the planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, it was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry's global threat immediately.

This legendary feat of whitehat hacking had essentially earned Hutchins free drinks for life among the Defcon crowd. He and his entourage had been invited to every VIP hacker party on the strip, taken out to dinner by journalists, and accosted by fans seeking selfies. The story, after all, was irresistible: Hutchins was the shy geek who had single-handedly slain a monster threatening the entire digital world, all while sitting in front of a keyboard in a bedroom in his parents' house in remote western England.

Still reeling from the whirlwind of adulation, Hutchins was in no state to dwell on concerns about the FBI, even after he emerged from the mansion a few hours later and once again saw the same black SUV parked across the street. He hopped into an Uber to the airport, his mind still floating through a cannabis-induced cloud. Court documents would later reveal that the SUV followed him along the way—that law enforcement had, in fact, been tracking his location periodically throughout his time in Vegas.

When Hutchins arrived at the airport and made his way through the security checkpoint, he was surprised when TSA agents told him not to bother taking any of his three laptops out of his backpack before putting it through the scanner. Instead, as they waved him through, he remembers thinking that they seemed to be making a special effort not to delay him.

He wandered leisurely to an airport lounge, grabbed a Coke, and settled into an armchair. He was still hours early for his flight back to the UK, so he killed time posting from his phone to Twitter, writing how excited he was to get back to his job analyzing malware when he got home. “Haven't touched a debugger in over a month now,” he tweeted. He humblebragged about some very expensive shoes his boss had bought him in Vegas and retweeted a compliment from a fan of his reverse-engineering work.

Hutchins was composing another tweet when he noticed that three men had walked up to him, a burly redhead with a goatee flanked by two others in Customs and Border Protection uniforms. “Are you Marcus Hutchins?” asked the red-haired man. When Hutchins confirmed that he was, the man asked in a neutral tone for Hutchins to come with them, and led him through a door into a private stairwell.

Then they put him in handcuffs.
In a state of shock, feeling as if he were watching himself from a distance, Hutchins asked what was going on. “We'll get to that,” the man said.

Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he'd done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn't be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime. Was it that he might have left marijuana in his bag? Were these bored agents overreacting to petty drug possession?

The agents walked him through a security area full of monitors and then sat him down in an interrogation room, where they left him alone. When the red-headed man returned, he was accompanied by a small blonde woman. The two agents flashed their badges: They were with the FBI.

For the next few minutes, the agents struck a friendly tone, asking Hutchins about his education and Kryptos Logic, the security firm where he worked. For those minutes, Hutchins allowed himself to believe that perhaps the agents wanted only to learn more about his work on WannaCry, that this was just a particularly aggressive way to get his cooperation into their investigation of that world-shaking cyberattack. Then, 11 minutes into the interview, his interrogators asked him about a program called Kronos.

“Kronos,” Hutchins said. “I know that name.” And it began to dawn on him, with a sort of numbness, that he was not going home after all.

This is his own account as recorded by Wired's Andy Greenberg, and Hitchins confesses to some pretty vicious stuff he did for fun. But he's learned his lesson, and hopefully he'll stay on the side of the white hats.

Lord knows we need him there.

Amash-ed Potato, Con't

And just as quickly as Glibertarian Contrarian Scold™ Justin Amash entered the 2020 contest seeking the Libertarian ticket, the Libertarians apparently told him to go screw himself, and he's back out.

Michigan Rep. Justin Amash has announced that he will not run for president as a third party candidate. 

"After much reflection, I've concluded that circumstances don't lend themselves to my success as a candidate for president this year, and therefore I will not be a candidate," he tweeted Saturday. 

Amash announced last month that he was exploring a presidential run as a Libertarian Party candidate. 

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Amash said the decision to drop out was "difficult," but that he "believes a candidate from outside the old parties, offering a vision of government grounded in liberty and equality, can break through in the right environment." 

"Polarization is near an all-time high. Electoral success requires an audience willing to consider alternatives, but both social media and traditional media are dominated by voices strongly averse to the political risks posed by a viable third candidate," he added. 

The Libertarian Party, he added, "is well positioned to become a major and consistent contender to win elections at all levels of government." 

"I remain invested in helping the party realize these possibilities and look forward to the successes ahead," he said.

To his credit, Amash realized he was most likely going to hand over Michigan, Wisconsin, and maybe more over to Trump in November if he stayed in, so he's getting out.

It's the first real useful thing he's done since leaving the GOP.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The fuses keep on being lit by white supremacist domestic terrorists, and eventually one of these powder kegs is going to explode into horrific violence.

A man accused of making credible death threats against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel has been charged on a terrorism count, the Wayne County prosecutor’s office said Friday.

Robert Tesh made the threats via a social media message to an acquaintance on April 14 and authorities concluded the message amounted to “credible threats to kill,” prosecutor Kym Worthy said Friday in a news release.

She didn’t provide any detail about the threats or how they were determined to be credible. Further details will be presented during court proceedings, she said.

Detroit police officers arrested the 32-year-old man the same day at his home. He was arraigned April 22 on a threat of terrorism charge. If convicted, Tesh could face up to 20 years in prison.

Worthy didn’t explain the delay in releasing information about the threats, arrest and arraignment.

“Emotions are heightened on all sides now,” she told The Associated Press Friday. “These threats ... they are not funny. They are not jokes. There is nothing humorous about it. Even if you don’t carry it out, we’re going to charge you criminally.”

The threats from Tesh were not specific to Whitmer’s stay-at-home order issued in March in an effort to stem the spread of COVID-19 in the state, according to Maria Miller, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office. Whitmer has been the target of protests and rallies over her executive order which shut down most businesses in the state. The order is effective at least until May 28.

“The alleged facts in this case lay out a very disturbing scenario,” Worthy said. “We understand that these times can be stressful and upsetting for many people. But we will not and cannot tolerate threats like these against any public officials who are carrying out their duties as efficiently as they can. You can disagree with their positions or their methodology, but you absolutely cannot act as this defendant allegedly acted or you will be charged criminally.” 

One terrorist down.

A whole lot to go, especially when they openly ally with Republicans.

A Georgia state representative running for Congress is facing criticism from across the political spectrum for a photo showing him alongside a longtime white supremacist activist from Dahlonega.

The photo shows Rep. Matt Gurtler, R-Tiger, with Chester Doles, a Georgia man with longstanding ties to numerous white supremacist organizations, including the National Alliance and Hammerskins, a racist skinhead gang. It was taken earlier this year at a meeting of American Patriots USA, a group founded by Doles last year in an attempt to appeal to more mainstream conservatives in the region. Other candidates for office in Georgia also appeared in the photograph with Doles, though none as high profile as Gurtler.

The photo has been on the internet for weeks, circulated by a left-wing, anti-racist group based in Atlanta, among others. Now, Gurtler has been called out by a rival Republican also running for the 9th Congressional District seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. and GOP Senate candidate Doug Collins.

“As a Christian, I’m repulsed by bigotry and hatred in all forms, and racism has no place in our state or in the 9th District,” said State Rep. Kevin Tanner, R-Dawsonville. “North Georgians are decent, faithful and hard-working people. They deserve elected leaders who reflect that, not those who would embarrass us with their poor judgment.”

Gurtler declined to be interviewed about the photo, but in an email to the AJC he said the “context is straightforward.”

“I was asked by a voter to speak to a pro-gun, conservative group that supports President Trump. There was a group picture with all the candidates and speakers,” he wrote.

Gurtler's excuse is the much larger problem: the GOP is openly attracting vowed skinheads, neo-Nazis, and other violent white supremacist terrorists and has been for years now, well before Trump was elected.

The difference now is that they are doing it overtly.

The Actual President Weighs In

Barack Obama gave a virtual commencement speech to the nation's historically black colleges and universities today, and he didn't hold back on pointing out that the current administration is failing America's graduates and the nation as a whole.

Without the springtime rituals of traditional graduation ceremonies, former President Barack Obama delivered a virtual commencement address on Saturday, urging thousands of graduates at historically black colleges and universities “to seize the initiative” at a time when he says the nation’s leaders have fumbled the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The speech combined the inspirational advice given to graduates with pointed criticism of the handling of a public health crisis that has killed more than 87,000 Americans and crippled much of the economy.

“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Mr. Obama said in an address streamed online. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
It was one of his few public addresses to a national audience during the outbreak, and he said a leadership void had created a clear mandate for the graduates: “If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you,” he said.

Mr. Obama’s remarks were billed as a commencement speech, but they also appeared to be an effort to comfort and assure an American public divided by President Trump’s handling of the crisis. The former president also used the moment to attempt to rally the nation in an election year around values historically championed by Democrats like universal health care, and environmental and economic justice.

Since leaving office three years ago, Mr. Obama generally has avoided publicly criticizing Mr. Trump. But his jabs at the pandemic response could further inflame tensions between the two most recent occupants of the White House.

Mr. Obama called the current administration’s response to the pandemic “anemic and spotty” in a private call last week with thousands of supporters who had worked for him.

“It would have been bad even with the best of governments,” Mr. Obama said on the call. “It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mind-set — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mind-set is operationalized in our government.”

And in recent days Mr. Trump has unleashed tirades against Mr. Obama on Twitter and on television, resurrecting unfounded claims that his predecessor tried to bring him down by manufacturing the Russia investigation.

Mr. Obama’s address to more than 27,000 students at 78 participating historically black colleges and universities was the first of two commencement speeches by the former president on Saturday.

He's right of course.  I'm glad he took such an opportunity to make it clear.

His full speech is here.

Making A Mess Of Unmasking

Just Security's Ryan Goodman games out where the Trump regime goes next on the totally worthless "Obamagate" attacks, because of course the Hunter Biden/Ukraine and the Tara Reade allegations both fell through.

President Donald Trump insists, against all evidence, that there is something called “Obamagate”: some crime, or perhaps series of crimes, that the preceding administration committed against him, or against his adviser Michael Flynn, or maybe against even more of the Trump team. Yet the president fails to say what the crime(s) might be. Instead, he seizes on the language, alludes to improprieties, and—increasingly—wields it all to tar his rival for the presidency, Joe Biden. Countering Trumpian disinformation campaigns like this one demands disentangling the threads that Trump has weaved into “Obamagate,” debunking the falsehoods that Trump is propagating—and, at the same time, acknowledging where there may in fact have been serious missteps during the previous administration.

That means acknowledging that there may well be a lurking truth to a serious allegation against former government officials in how they handled the counterintelligence file involving Michael Flynn. However, there is no evidence that those actions implicate President Barack Obama or Vice President Biden personally, or discredit the legitimacy of the investigations of Russia’s 2016 election interference, the investigation of Trump campaign associates’ support for the Kremlin’s effort, officials’ requests to “unmask” a U.S. person appearing in intelligence reports who turned out to be Flynn, the FBI’s decision to interview Flynn, or the Justice Department’s charging Flynn for lying to the FBI.

That said, there has been a rush by many to say that no crime has been credibly alleged, and that no serious wrongdoing by former administration officials has been identified. That’s an oversight, and fails to grapple with a potential outcome: the prospect of well-founded criminal indictments against one or more former officials who leaked the content of the classified intercept of the Dec. 29, 2016 phone call between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Flynn’s identity in that communication.

As I’ll explain, the issue here is not limited to the initial leak by a senior government official to the journalist David Ignatius who revealed the Flynn-Kislyak phone call in the pages of the Washington Post on the evening of Jan. 12, 2017.

Independent observers and analysts should understand the strength of the allegations of misconduct, which could trigger criminal liability. Indeed, it is valuable to identify any credible complaints of official wrongdoing, and separate those from Trump’s deceptive and deliberately false accusations.

As for practitioners who are engaged in countering disinformation, they should consider how this foreseeable outcome of one or more criminal indictments will be used by Trump, his Attorney General Bill Barr, and the Director of National Intelligence (whether Rick Grenell or John Ratcliffe) to conflate truth and falsehoods. Indeed, the failure to have appreciated the seriousness of the allegations will bolster Trump and his surrogates’ disinformation campaign. It will be used to discredit analysts. They will be accused of dishonesty and bias, not just of an analytic oversight. More Americans will be encouraged to think of Trump and his political loyalists as validated sources of information. And the public will be left with even less ability to sort fact from fiction.

Indeed, a well-orchestrated disinformation tactic, pioneered by Soviet intelligence, would involve the following steps:

Phase One: Make grossly unfounded claims of misconduct by former and current US officials (such as a Deep State conspiracy to undercut the Trump 2016 campaign and the Trump presidency), anticipating a reaction among experts and partisans to challenge those claims;

Phase Two: Reveal true official misconduct that has some, even if limited, connection to the original conspiracy theory, with experts and partisans failing to adequately anticipate or recognize the true misconduct, and some even quick to dismiss it.

Phase One of this disinformation campaign is well underway.

How likely is a key step in Phase Two, namely, the genuine revelation of official misconduct? Barr’s handpicked federal prosecutor John Durham reportedly has in the crosshairs of his ongoing criminal investigation the leaks to the media. Attorney General Bill Barr has signaled confidence that Durham will find criminal wrongdoing (in gross defiance of long-standing Justice Department policy to refrain from any acknowledgement, let alone comments on the prospective outcome, of an ongoing investigation). What’s more, several former senior officials told Congress, under penalty of law, that they were not the source of the leak, either in closed testimony that the House Committee on Intelligence released last week or in prior public hearings. That may create another layer of legal vulnerability if a source of the leak denied it to Congress.

In other words:

Bill Barr finds somebody to prosecute for leaking things to the Washington Post, specifically that Michael Flynn's name was leaked to David Ignatius.

This is somehow proof of a massive conspiracy that must be investigated into the election season.

Targeted leaks from Barr and Trump will keep the "story" going, along with a trial almost certainly set for October. 

This doesn't change the fact Michael Flynn lied multiple times to FBI investigators, admitted that he did so twice, and was convicted for it.

That's it.

Repeat that to yourself daily for the rest of the year.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Yet another executive agency inspector general was fired late last night as Trump continues to try to make sure no one ever dares to question him in any way ever again, by purging all those in government who are not loyal.

President Donald Trump has removed State Department Inspector General Steve Linick and replaced him with an ally of Vice President Mike Pence — the latest in a series of moves against independent government watchdogs in recent months.

Trump informed Congress of his intent to oust Linick, a Justice Department veteran appointed to the role in 2013 by then President Barack Obama, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday night.

The president said he "no longer" had the "fullest confidence" in Linick and promised to send the Senate a nominee "who has my confidence and who meets the appropriate qualifications." The executive branch is required to notify Congress 30 days ahead of time if it intends to remove an inspector general.

Linick played a minor role in the House of Representatives' impeachment proceedings against Trump, ferrying a trove of documents to lawmakers that had been provided to the State Department by Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer.

A State Department spokesperson said that Amb. Stephen Akard, a former career Foreign Service officer, "will now lead the Office of the Inspector General at the State Department" in an acting capacity, noting that Akard was previously confirmed by the Senate as head of the department's Office of Foreign Missions. Akard’s nomination for that job angered some State Department veterans, who grumbled that he lacked the long tenure of service traditionally required in the role.

Before joining the Trump administration, Akard was chief of staff for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation under then-governor Pence.

Linick is relatively well-respected at the State Department, and his office stays busy, regularly churning out a range of inspections, audits and other types of reports.

His departure is likely to further deepen morale problems that have festered at State since the start of the Trump administration, when many career diplomats found themselves shunted aside and cast as a “deep state” bent on undermining a Trump.

Two of Linick’s most-read reports over the past year involved alleged retaliation by Trump political appointees against career employees.

House Foreign Affair Committee chairman Eliot Engel made it very clear last night that he believes Litnick was fired because he was investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo himself.

This firing is the outrageous act of a President trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the Secretary of State, from accountability. I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo. Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation. 

This President believes he is above the law. As he systematically removes the official independent watchdogs from the Executive Branch, the work of the Committee on Foreign Affairs becomes that much more critical. In the days ahead, I will be looking into this matter in greater detail, and I will press the State Department for answers.

If Pompeo was under investigation and Trump fired him, that's a gigantic red line crossed in a sea of crossed red lines. I'm not even sure it matters anymore at this point, that's how far gone we are down the road to autocratic rule. What will Engel and House Democrats do, impeach him again?

Again, Trump wouldn't be doing this if he didn't have the full support of 51 GOP senators, and all those senators care about is appointing as many federal judges as possible, so Trump can do whatever he wants as long as he keeps Mitch McConnell happy with conservative jurists who are puppets and who will hand down GOP-centric decisions for the next 40 years.

That means Trump can fire whoever he wants, including inspectors general who are openly investigating criminal wrongdoing by his own cabinet.

He will continue to purge the executive agencies until everyone is either loyal to him or too scared to act (or both!)

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Trump-backed white supremacist militias in Michigan have achieved near total victory.

The Michigan state Capitol was closed Thursday as demonstrators gathered at the steps of the building to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home order. 

The latest protest and the Capitol's closure came two weeks after protesters, some armed, entered the building and demanded to be allowed into the legislative chambers, which have been closed due to social distancing measures. Photos from the day showed some protesters, many of whom were not wearing masks or standing more than 6 feet from one another, screaming at law enforcement officers who were keeping them out of the chambers. 

The Senate and House were both out of session Thursday -- adjourned until next Tuesday -- leading Michigan State Police to close the Capitol to the public per protocol. The coronavirus pandemic has already led lawmakers to work remotely and pare down in-person sessions. 

The Michigan House previously laid out a plan to meet once a week and then other days as needed, given that it's more difficult for its 110 members to socially distance than Michigan's 38 senators, Gideon D'Assandro, spokesman for House Speaker Lee Chatfield, told CNN. 

"Since the House finished all of the votes planned for the week yesterday, it adjourned until next week," D'Assandro said Thursday. 

Michigan Senate leadership did not reply to CNN's request for comments as to why the Senate has adjourned until next week. Its online calendar shows that the chamber has been in session Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for the last two weeks and is scheduled to be in session next week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. 

Police spokeswoman Shanon Banner confirmed to CNN that because neither chamber was in session or holding committee meetings, the Capitol was closed "per the procedures of the Michigan Capitol Commission." 

The protest, organized by Michigan United for Liberty, drew a crowd of roughly 200 "at the high point" of Thursday's event, according to Michigan State Police estimates. The crowd later dwindled to about 75 people, according to the state police. 

Banner confirmed that some demonstrators were openly carrying firearms.

To recap: armed white supremacist terrorists forced the closure of Michigan's state legislature for at least several days. In any other country we'd call this a terrorist act.  And as with neighboring Wisconsin, Republicans are now trying to complete the victory.

Republicans who control the Michigan Legislature urged a judge Friday to strike down stay-home orders and other restrictions related to the coronavirus, saying Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer trampled their authority in determining statewide emergencies.

The clash in Michigan is the latest between Democratic governors who have shut down businesses and ordered people to stay home in response to COVID-19 and conservatives who believe the steps are excessive.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court this week ruled against Gov. Tony Evers, clearing the way for bars and restaurants to reopen.

The dispute in Michigan centers on two laws: a 1976 statute that gives the Legislature a role in emergency declarations after 28 days, and another from 1945 that grants broad authority to governors.

The House and Senate, which are controlled by Republicans, did not extend Whitmer's disaster emergency declaration in late April but she acted anyway.

“The governor has acted against the expressed will of the Legislature and is exercising authority that does not exist,” attorney Michael R. Williams argued on behalf of lawmakers.

So yeah, at this point we have active terrorist incursions in several states, and they are openly affecting policies in those states.

More will be coming, as Jared Yates Sexton notes.

Michigan is just the first state to experience this problem in this moment. Of course, in Oregon we saw an outlaw group led by the Bundy Clan occupy federal ground and escape consequences, but this new incident is an escalation of a trend that we should become unfortunately accustomed to. As governments and countries fall apart, the appearance of paramilitary forces is to be expected. It is a seizure of authority from citizens with plans and designs to forego democratic institutions in favor of authoritarian measures.

The danger lies not only in the physical threatening, but in the societal repercussions. It feels now almost certain that the stalemate in Michigan, between a governor protecting her constituents from a deadly pandemic and a group of armed men looking to start a race war and install a fascist dictatorship, could lead to violence. That’s what these demonstrations are about. Putting people in pressurized situations and waiting for the tinderbox to ignite. Each march and protest and siege is about upping the ante while awaiting the terrible next act.

But even if there is no violence, the political act of intimidating legislatures, of interrupting the people’s business with weapons and maneuvers intended to terrorize lawmakers, is an affront to the concept of an open and democratic society. Even while no blood has been shed, and hopefully none will be, armed men stalking the statehouse and occupying the halls of a democratically-elected legislature is a symbol of violence as a means of governing.

These moments inspire other actors to do the same, and we will probably see more incidents of mobs of Americans and terrorist organizations occupying public spaces. It is infectious and as it grows it only hastens the decline of a nation and its democratic institutions. This is the case and has always been the case. Meanwhile, the story is largely just a blip on a radar of continued coverage of Donald Trump’s lies, scandals, and conspiracy mongering. And those who should know better show concern, but are slow to admit the growing existential threat lingering over the nation.

We are watching America in decline, an empire coming apart at the seams. We can bury our heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening, but it doesn’t make it any less true. As long as criminals go unpunished, whether they be in the White House or engaging in political terrorism in the halls of statehouses around the country, it quickens our slide. This will not simply go away and it will not heal itself.

But only in states with Democratic governors, mind you.  The violence will come, and it will be lethal and breathtaking in scope.

The Village Is Still Full Of Idiots

As Greg Sargent reminds us, our media is 100% unequipped to handle Donald Trump on a daily basis and are already falling into the false equivalencies and clickbait strawmen that defined Hillary Clinton losing.

The latest developments in the Michael Flynn case should prompt us to revisit one of the most glaring failures in political journalism, one that lends credibility to baseless narratives pushed for purely instrumental purposes, perversely rewarding bad-faith actors in the process.

News accounts constantly claim with no basis that new information “boosts” or “lends ammunition” to a particular political attack, or “raises new questions” about its target. These journalistic conventions are so all-pervasive that we barely notice them.

But they’re extremely pernicious, and they need to stop. They both reflect and grotesquely amplify a tendency that badly misleads readers. That happened widely in 2016, to President Trump’s great benefit. It’s now happening again.
Republican senators have just released a declassified list of Obama administration officials — including Trump opponent Joe Biden — who requested information that ended up “unmasking” Flynn during the transition.

Trump and his campaign have seized on this to further their claim that the Russia investigation was corrupt, and that Biden was key to that. Trump rails that this “unmasking is a massive thing” that raises new questions about Biden’s role.

Meanwhile, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale insists this illustrates “the depth of Biden’s involvement in the setup of Gen. Flynn to further the Russia collusion hoax.”

This is steaming nonsense. But news accounts are reporting on this in purportedly objective ways that subtly place an editorial thumb on the scale in favor of those attacks.

For instance, the Associated Press ran this headline: “Flynn case boosts Trump’s bid to undo Russia probe narrative.” Axios told us:

Biden’s presence on the list could turn it into an election year issue, though the document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing.

CNN informed us that this is “the latest salvo to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation and accuse the previous administration of wrongdoing.”

But here’s the problem: These formulations do not constitute a neutral transmission of information, even though they are supposed to come across that way.

The new information actually does not “boost” Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation or “discredit” it. And if there is “no evidence of wrongdoing,” then it cannot legitimately be “turned into an election issue.”

There’s no way to neutrally assert that new info “boosts” an attack or constitutes a “salvo” or is “becoming an issue.” The information is being used in a fashion that is either legitimate or not, based on the known facts. Such pronouncements in a from-on-high tone of journalistic objectivity lend the dishonest weaponizing of new info an aura of credibility.

Obamagate is being sold as a product for ratings, clicks, and subscriptions.

It worked for But Her Emails.

It will work for this too.

Searching For A Whitewash

So it turns out Google's depressing lack of diversity during the Trump years, especially among female employees and African-American employees in particular, isn't just a failed commitment from the internet giant to meet its own stated goals, it's now a 100% deliberate choice to reverse those goals as the company is now dismantling diversity programs completely to keep the Trump regime happy.

Google has significantly rolled back its diversity and inclusion initiatives in an apparent effort to avoid being perceived as anti-conservative, according to eight current and former employees.

Since 2018, internal diversity and inclusion training programs have been scaled back or cut entirely, four Google employees and two people who recently left the company told NBC News in interviews. In addition, they said, the team responsible for those programs has been reduced in size, and positions previously held by full-time employees have been outsourced or not refilled after members of the diversity teams left the company.

One well-liked diversity training program at Google called Sojourn, a comprehensive racial justice program created for employees to learn about implicit bias and how to navigate conversations about race and inequality, was cut entirely, according to seven former and current employees. Sojourn offered its last training to Google workers in 2018, four current employees said, and by 2019 it was cut completely.

Seven current and former employees from across a range of teams and roles at the company said separately that they all believed the reason behind cutting Sojourn and taking employees off diversity projects to move them elsewhere at Google was to shield the company from backlash from conservatives.

The current and former employees agreed to speak to NBC News on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal for speaking to the press.

“One of the major motivations for cutting Sojourn is that the company doesn’t want to be seen as anti-conservative,” one Google employee familiar with the company’s diversity programming said in an interview. “It does not want to invite lawsuits or claims by right-wing white employees about Google discriminating against them.”
Melonie Parker, Google’s chief diversity officer, disputed the allegation that Google has scaled back its diversity and inclusion efforts. “We’re really maturing our programs to make sure we’re building our capability,” she said.

Parker added that changes Google is making to its diversity and inclusion work is focused on the need to “provide a scalable solution across the globe.”

Google acknowledged it had ended Sojourn, but said it was not in reaction to conservative criticism. Sojourn ran for three years, Google said, and it was too difficult to scale globally, since it was focused on issues of racism in the United States and didn’t apply to the rest of the world where Google has offices. Google and the majority of its workforce are based in the U.S.

It's apparently not only too hard to teach American employees to not be racist assholes, it's too hard to keep them from doing it around the globe.  Awesome.

It's inconceivable that this isn't a direct capitulation to former Google engineer James Damore, who went on a public tirade about why Google shouldn't bother with "weak" diversity candidates and was fired for it in 2017.  Turns out, the Damores are the majority of the company, because all techbro companies filled with white asshole racist techbros are going to eventually decide to embrace their inner reich.

The right-wing news website Breitbart began covering the internal tensions about Google’s efforts to become more diverse, publishing a July 2018 article on a speaker event hosted by Google on the topic of how white people can better navigate conversations about racism and privilege in the workplace. Breitbart accused Google of breaking its internal policy against using blanket statements about categories of people, such as about employees in certain racial groups.

“There was a meme going around that said white fragility shuts down discussions of white fragility,” a person involved with the event said in an interview, referring to a meme that circulated on an internal employee message board. The event wasn’t ultimately shut down, but additional security was provided.

“A hundred black employees could testify to the pain they feel in a climate that’s inadvertently hostile towards them and management will go back and say, ‘I need to get more data,’ and then three angry white men complain and everything comes to a halt,” the person close to the planning of the event said.

After the Breitbart article that summer, a raft of changes aimed at reducing the diversity and inclusion work ramped up across the entire company, according to three current and former employees. Even talking about the issue of diversity at work became strained, four sources said.

“In 2018, after all the Damore stuff, the higher-ups stopped saying the word diversity and were instead saying D&I, as in D ampersand I,” one current employee active in diversity advocacy at Google said. D&I is an acronym for diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Google has a hundred black employees?  Who are engineers?

I don't believe that for a second.

StupidiNews!

• Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred says the league is near a deal with the MLB Players' Association to start a shortened baseball season later this summer.
• Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says residents will have to use face masks when outside their homes in public as COVID-19 cases approach 35,000 in LA County.
• The global death toll from COVID-19 has exceeded 300,000 with more than a quarter of those deaths, 85,000, in the United States alone.
• The CDC has posted updated guidelines for local and state governments to reopen restaurants, bars, and other workplaces, but multiple states are falling well short of requiring these best practices.
• New digital hate speech laws in France require social media to remove flagged content from their platforms within 24 hours of being notified or face millions in euros in fines.

Last Call For Dangerous Cheesy Cheeseheads

Wisconsin's Supreme Court has voided Democratic Gov. Tony Evers stay-at-home order, declaring it to be a rule that has to first be passed by the state legislature before the governor can put it into effect, meaning that at this point, who knows because the decision was basically written in crayon by children.

On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a broad order striking down that state’s stay-at-home order, which was issued by the head of the state’s health department to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Among other things, the court’s decision concludes that the state health department exceeded its authority by instructing people to stay at home, and by “forbidding travel and closing businesses” deemed nonessential.
The case is Wisconsin Legislature v. Palm.

The Court’s order was 4-3, with Justice Brian Hagedorn, a Republican initially appointed to a lower state court by former Gov. Scott Walker (R), writing one of three dissenting opinions. Justice Daniel Kelly, a lame duck who recently lost an election to retain his seat by nearly 11 points, cast the key fourth vote to strike down the stay-at-home order. If not for a Wisconsin law that allows Kelly to serve until August, the stay-at-home order may well have been upheld.

The decision appears to be animated by the kind of political considerations that are more at home on conservative talk radio than in a court of law. During oral arguments last week, when a lawyer defending the stay-at-home order pointed out that there was recently an outbreak of coronavirus in Brown County, Wisconsin, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack dismissed the significance of that outbreak because it primarily impacted factory workers.

“These were due to the meatpacking, though,” Roggensack said. “That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

At that same oral argument, Justice Rebecca Bradley compared the state’s stay-at-home order to “‘assembling together and placing under guard all those of Japanese ancestry in assembly centers’ during World War II.”

The majority opinion, by Chief Justice Roggensack, is not at all clear as to whether this decision takes effect immediately, or whether the stay-at-home order remains in effect for another week. Roggensack also concludes that Andrea Palm, the head of the state’s health department, exceeded her lawful authority. But then Roggensack’s opinion contains this extraordinary line: “We do not define the precise scope of DHS authority under Wis. Stat. § 252.02(3), (4) and (6) because clearly Order 28 went too far.”

Thus, as Hagedorn notes in dissent, the majority opinion “has failed to provide almost any guidance for what the relevant laws mean, and how our state is to govern through this crisis moving forward.” Wisconsin now has no stay-at-home order preventing the spread of coronavirus — or maybe it does have such an order for just one more week. And it is not at all clear which powers the state health department still has to fight the spread of a pandemic.

Moreover, one consequence of the Court’s decision is that if Palm does want to take additional steps to fight the spread of a deadly disease, she will likely need to jump through a series of procedural hoops that, at best, take weeks to complete. And her decisions can now be overridden by Republicans in the state legislature.

In the meantime, there is no court decision ordering coronavirus to stop spreading.

It's a complete disaster, and Wisconsin's residents are in jeopardy of a global pandemic more than ever now.

Wisconsin law gives the state Department of Health Services extraordinarily broad power — or, at least, it did until today — to confront a public health crisis.

Among other things, the department may “close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics.” It may “issue orders ... for the control and suppression of communicable diseases,” and these orders “may be made applicable to the whole or any specified part of the state.” And, on top of all that, an additional provision permits the health department to “authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases.”

Yet the majority opinion in Wisconsin Legislature diminishes this power considerably by imposing procedural limits on Palm’s authority. Much of Roggensack’s majority opinion rests on a distinction between “rules” and mere “orders.”

The reason this distinction matters is that a mere “order” from a state agency can go into effect immediately, but a “rule” can take weeks or even months to promulgate. Even under an expedited process for “emergency” rules, a state agency must first draft a “statement of the scope of the proposed emergency rule.” That statement must be reviewed and approved by the governor and the state Department of Administration, and then appear in an official state publication that only publishes once a week.

After the statement is published, the agency must complete a 10-day waiting period before it is allowed to move forward, with no apparent way to waive this requirement. And then the rule can be delayed even longer if certain legislative leaders require the agency to hold a public hearing on the new rule. Then the new rule can potentially be suspended by a legislative committee — which may require the agency to start this process all over again.

In other words, the state's Public Health legislative committee can suspend any public health emergency orders, and any orders that are issued will now take at least ten days to go into effect at a minimum.  The state is now handcuffed in dealing with the virus by politics.

And Wisconsin's residents will pay a brutal price almost immediately.

On Wednesday night in the heart of downtown Platteville, Wis., just hours after the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the state’s stay-at-home order, Nick’s on 2nd was packed wall to wall, standing room only.

It was sometime after 10 p.m. when “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” by the Hollies came over the sound system and a bartender took out his camera. In a Twitter broadcast, he surveyed the room of maskless patrons crammed together, partying like it was 2019. A few were pounding on the bar to the beat. Some were clapping their hands in the air and some were fist-pumping, a scene so joyous they could have been celebrating the end of the worst pandemic in a century.

Instead, as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) knew, they were just celebrating the apparent end of his power over them — at least for now.

“We’re the Wild West,” Evers told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Wednesday night, reacting to the state Supreme Court’s ruling and the scenes of people partying in bars all across Wisconsin. “There are no restrictions at all across the state of Wisconsin. … So at this point in time … there is nothing that’s compelling people to do anything other than having chaos here.”

Chaos it was.

Right after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a 4-to-3 ruling, invalidating the extension of the stay-at-home order issued by Evers’s appointed state health chief, the Tavern League of Wisconsin instructed its members to feel free to “OPEN IMMEDIATELY!”

With Evers’s statewide orders kaput, local health authorities scrambled to issue or extend citywide or countywide stay-at-home orders, creating a hodgepodge of rules and regulations all across the state that are bound to cause confusion, not to mention some traffic across county lines. It’s a situation unlike any in the United States as the pandemic rages on. But most of all, Evers feared that the court’s order would cause the one thing he was trying to prevent: more death.

As cases grow and spread and deaths mount in the weeks ahead, understand that Republicans have now firmly come down on that portion of the American public have to die in order to preserve "freedoms".

Most of all, the person deciding that is Donald Trump.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

GOP senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler have both been caught up in insider trading scandals related to dumping stocks after COVID-19 briefings.  Trump hates both of them, Burr for being Senate Intel chair and subpoenaing Republicans on occasion (and even Trump's son Donald Jr.) and refusing to spike the investigation into Trump's Russia and Ukraine criminality, and Loeffler for buying her way into the Senate through Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp over Trump's preferred choice to fill Sen, Johnny Isakson's seat, Rep. Doug Collins.

Loeffler is now facing a brutal primary challenge ahead of the special election for Isakson's seat and is almost certainly doomed, but she's still stinking rich, so putting her in prison isn't going to help Trump in the long run.  She'll be gone from the Senate by January.

But putting Burr in jail for that insider trading scandal is a win-win for Trump and everyone knows it.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., on Thursday temporarily stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the FBI seized his cellphone and questioned Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as part of a possible insider trading investigation.

Burr faced pressure to step aside as head of the powerful committee after the FBI seized his cellphone as part of a search warrant, senior law enforcement official confirmed to NBC News.

"This is a distraction to the hard work of the committee, and the members and I think that the security of the country is too important to have a distraction," Burr told reporters Thursday. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Burr would step aside "during the pendency of the investigation" effective at the end of the day on Friday.

Feinstein also answered questions from the FBI about stock trades that her husband made and she provided documents to the FBI, her spokesman said Thursday.

The Los Angeles Times first reported Wednesday night that federal agents had obtained Burr's phone, indicating a major escalation of the Justice Department investigation.

A senior Department of Justice official confirms that the search warrant for Burr's phone was actually served on his attorney. But the official says the phone itself needed to be picked up by FBI agents at Burr’s home but that there was not a “raid” on the senator’s residence. Agents took possession of the cell phone and then left Burr’s home.

That same official says the search warrant was approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department, meaning Attorney General William Barr signed off on executing the warrant.

Now, regardless of the outcome of the investigation, Burr is now sidelined as Senate Intel chair. I'm not defending Barr on the trading, it's clear he and his wife dumped stocks, called his brother-in-law, and told him to dump stocks too.  But he's not being investigated for the insider trading, not in a regime where Trump regularly profits off his political knowledge. He's being removed from a position of power and oversight over this regime for a reason.

Just as the Trump regime is trying to warm up the OBAMAGATE!!!! machine.  Lindsey Graham doesn't want to dig too deep, he's trying to save his senate seat right now. Somebody is needed to spearhead the senate's efforts.  Graham is loyal for his own reasons, but Burr was not. It doesn't take a genius, guys.  Burr will be replaced by someone loyal to Trump. Or by someone who needs to prove their loyalty to Trump.

It's not immediately clear who will take over as chairman of the committee. Committee members Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho, Marco Rubio of Florida and Susan Collins of Maine are next in line in seniority, though all currently lead other committees. 

Senate Republicans reacted cautiously to the news of Burr's search warrant on Thursday, saying that the matter of his chairmanship was between Burr and McConnell. 

"There's due process he deserves like everybody else that he'll be going through, but I think ultimately that's a conversation probably between him and the leader," said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate's No. 2 Republican. 

McConnell did not respond to questions about Burr in the Capitol on Thursday. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate's top Democrat, also declined to weigh in ahead of the news Burr would step aside.

Can you imagine Rubio or Collins or as chairs?  Whoever it is will get the key into the big vault of secrets.  Collins is facing the fight of her political life right now, and Rubio's penchant for stupid grandstanding has gotten him into real trouble before. Risch might actually be the safest choice, but there's no doubt he serves Trump.

I've got zero doubts that Burr is being pushed aside for a reason related to Barr and Trump weaponizing the intelligence community against Joe Biden and Barack Obama. I don't know exactly what it is, but given the voluminous evidence we have of Barr's serving Trump instead of justice, I can't imagine it's going to be a good thing.

Burr may have been the last obstacle to whatever's coming. If Trump wanted Burr to stay, this FBI investigation would not be happening as it is right now. It sure as hell wouldn't involve Burr being issued an FBI warrant for his cell phone and a public shaming signed off on by the Attorney General against the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The final chapter of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Trump/Russia is due soon too.  The more I think about it, the more this looks like Burr is being cashiered because some major shit is coming.

It's going to get much worse from here.