America Goes Viral, Con't

We're at the point where the rest of the world is rightfully worried about America's rampant, unchecked COVID-19 spread harming efforts to protect their own citizens after Europe, Asia, and Australia have successfully flattened the curve.

As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.

“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the past three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe,” Wiles said of the U.S.-wide economic reopening. “It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”

China’s actions over the past week stand in stark contrast to those of the United States. In the wake of a new cluster of more than 150 new cases that emerged in Beijing, authorities sealed off neighborhoods, launched a mass testing campaign and imposed travel restrictions.

Meanwhile, President Trump maintains that the United States will not shut down a second time, although a surge in cases has persuaded governors in some states, including Arizona, to back off their opposition to mandatory face coverings in public.

Commentators and experts in Europe, where cases have continued to decline, voiced concerns over the state of the U.S. response. A headline on the website of Germany’s public broadcaster read: “Has the U.S. given up its fight against coronavirus?” Switzerland’s conservative Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper concluded, “U.S. increasingly accepts rising covid-19 numbers.”

“The only thing one can say with certainty: There’s nothing surprising about this development,” a journalist wrote in the paper, referring to crowded U.S. beaches and pools during Memorial Day weekend in May.

We're in absolutely dire trouble.





We're in as bad of a shape now as we were on April 1.  The EU has gotten things under control, and remember here the numbers are far worse than this graph indicated due to abandonment of testing protocols in many states.

We never should have reopened in the first place.

Now, we will pay dearly for it.  This summer will be a nightmare.

Last Call For It's Still Mueller Time, Con't

BuzzFeed News's lawsuit to get unredacted Mueller report passages finds that yes, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Cohen all told Mueller's team that Roger Stone absolutely knew WikiLeaks had the stolen 2016 DNC emails, and that yes, Roger Stone absolutely told Trump that the leaks were coming.

Donald Trump was told in advance that Wikileaks would be releasing documents embarrassing to the Clinton campaign and subsequently informed advisors that he expected more releases would be coming, according to newly unredacted portions of special counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
In July 2016, political consultant Roger Stone told Trump as well as several campaign advisors that he had spoken with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing the documents in a matter of days. Stone told the then-candidate via speakerphone that he "did not know what the content of the materials was," according to the newly unveiled portions of the report, and Trump responded "oh good, alright" upon hearing the news. WikiLeaks published a trove of some 20,000 emails Russians hacked from the Democratic National Committee on July 22 of that year.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told federal investigators that he overheard the phone call between Stone and Trump. Agents were also told by former campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates that Stone had spoken several times in early June of something “big” coming from WikiLeaks. Assange first mentioned having emails related to Clinton on June 12.

The new revelations are the strongest indication to date that Trump and his closest advisors were aware of outside efforts to hurt Clinton’s electoral chances, and that Stone played a direct role in communicating that situation to the Trump campaign. Trump has publicly denied being aware of any information being relayed between WikiLeaks and his advisors. 

Allegations of communications between Stone and Trump to discuss WIkiLeaks first surfaced early last year, when Cohen testified to a congressional committee about the June 2016 conference call. At the time, Stone denied any such involvement. “Mr. Cohen’s statement is not true,” he told BuzzFeed News.

But based on the interviews it conducted with those three men and other officials, Mueller’s report concluded it had "established that the Trump Campaign displayed interest in the WikiLeaks releases, and that former Campaign member Roger Stone was in contact with the Campaign about those releases, claiming advance knowledge of more to come."

The newly unredacted portions of the Mueller report also show that after the initial dump by WikiLeaks, Trump personally asked Manafort to keep in touch with Stone, who in turn told the then-campaign chairman to keep him “apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks.” Investigators were also told by Gates that Trump had multiple phone conversations with Stone during the campaign and that, following one call held en route to LaGuardia airport, “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.”

In written testimony to Mueller’s team in November 2018, Trump denied being aware of any communications between Stone, Manafort, Gates, or Donald Trump Jr and WikiLeaks or Assange. Yet according to the newly public portions of the Special Counsel’s report, “Trump knew that Manafort and Gates had asked Stone to find out what other damaging information about Clinton WikiLeaks possessed, and that Stone's claimed connection to WikiLeaks was common knowledge within the Campaign."

Considering the contradictory evidence, the special counsel’s office weighed the possibility that Trump “no longer had clear recollections” of what happened two years earlier, but also wondered whether “the President's conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President's denials and would link the President to Stone's efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks." The investigators stopped short of suggesting that the President may have lied or otherwise misled the special counsel, however.

It doesn't really change much, Stone has been convicted and will almost certainly be pardoned by Trump along with Flynn and Manafort, Trump's impeachment failed to garner a conviction, and Joe Biden will leave prosecuting Trump to the state of New York.

Of course after last night, maybe things are quite different in SDNY land.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Boogaloo Boys have found their two-for-one anti-government and race war target: the feds and the primarily black residents of Washington DC.

On Monday, the National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium (NTIC), a fusion center for Washington, D.C. that provides support to federal national security and law enforcement agencies, warned in an intelligence assessment that “the District is likely an attractive target for violent adherents of the boogaloo ideology due to the significant presence of US law enforcement entities, and the wide range of First Amendment-Protected events hosted here.”
The assessment, dated June 15 and obtained by Politico, reported that “recent events indicate violent adherents of the boogaloo ideology likely reside in the National Capital Region, and others may be willing to travel far distances to incite civil unrest or conduct violence encouraged in online forums associated with the movement.”

A senior DHS official forwarded the assessment to security stakeholders on Friday, noting that “while it identifies Washington D.C. as an attractive target, the boogaloo ideology is not restricted to a specific region and those who wish to cause division are routinely using peaceful protests as means of cover. Heading into a weekend of more planned protests, we believe this information to be useful to all of our membership.”

Separately on Friday, DHS published its own intelligence note assessing that “domestic terrorists advocating for the boogaloo very likely will take advantage of any regional or national situation involving heightened fear and tensions to promote their violent extremist ideology and call supporters to action.”

The note, dated June 19 and obtained by Politico, aims to “provides information regarding some domestic terrorists’ exploitation of heightened tensions during recent First Amendment-protected activities in order to threaten or incite violence to start the ‘boogaloo’—a colloquial term referring to a coming civil war or the fall of civilization.”

Participants in the boogaloo movement generally identify as anarchist, pro-Second Amendment members of citizen-militias who are preparing for a second Civil War or American revolution, extremism experts say. Several boogaloo adherents have been charged in recent weeks for acts ranging from felony murder to terrorism, and police last month seized military-style assault rifles from so-called “boogaloo bois” in Denver.

The DHS note says boogaloo tactics “likely will be repeated in future similar incidents wherein domestic terrorists attempt to shut down or endanger government operations, judging from domestic terrorists’ continued calls for attacks.”

Remember, we already have evidence that these terrorists have already killed cops in order to blame "Antifa" and Black Lives Matter protesters.  They want blood-soaked streets so they can step in and target both sides to foment a national crackdown that will leave thousands dead, and the Trump regime is playing footsie with these assholes because they think the chaos will help them in November.

To date, no federal charges have been filed against individuals linked to antifa—violent acts at Black Lives Matter protests, including setting police cars on fire, have been attributed to individuals with no clear political or ideological affiliation, according to charging documents.

But right-wing extremists, militia groups and vigilantes have become more activated, with more than half a dozen separate violent incidents across the country in the last month alone—most within the last week.

Law enforcement and government officials, moreover, are increasingly in the crosshairs. A Santa Cruz county police officer and a federal officer in Oakland were murdered, allegedly by a boogaloo adherent, earlier this month, and boogaloo members in California’s Bay Area have reportedly been plotting to kidnap elected leaders’ children.

Experts on far-right violence and extremism say the president and attorney general’s rhetoric is political, and that the real threat has been laid out in the federal charges filed in the last month and the federal alerts, such as from NTIC and DHS, being sent to law enforcement warning of far-right violence.

But some argue that the unwillingness to name and shame these far-right groups publicly and from the top is not harmless, either.

“It puts a target on the backs of law-enforcement -- whether federal, state or local -- because these individuals, with the power they have at the podium, are not speaking out about who is really carrying out these abhorrent acts of violence,” said Jason Blazakis, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, a nonprofit that studies emerging threats.

Again, the goal here is a shooting war between police/National Guard and Black Lives Matter protesters. They want a national race war going on where Black America is terrorized on a daily basis and police kill rampantly in the name of "law and order".

With Trump and Barr around, they just might get it.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Tuesday's primary here in Kentucky is going to be a disaster than makes Georgia's mess look competent: Louisville and Lexington will have one polling station open each for hundreds of thousands of voters and voting-by-mail may take weeks before the results are known, with possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands who requested ballots being disenfranchised and never getting them by Tuesday's deadline.

And all of that falls on the shoulders of our Republican Secretary of State, Michael Adams.

Fewer than 200 polling places will be open for voters in Kentucky’s primary Tuesday, down from 3,700 in a typical election year. Amid a huge influx in requests for mail-in ballots, some voters still had not received theirs days before they must be turned in. And turnout is expected to be higher than in past primaries because of a suddenly competitive fight for the Democratic Senate nomination.

The scenario has voting rights advocates and some local elections officials worried that the state is careening toward a messy day marked by long lines and frustrated voters — similar to the scenes that have played out repeatedly this spring as the novel coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the 2020 primaries.

Because of a shortage of workers willing to staff voting sites during the health crisis, each of the commonwealth’s 120 counties is opening a very limited number of polling locations. The two largest counties will have just one in-person location each.

On Thursday evening, a federal judge rejected an effort to add polling places in the state’s largest counties, citing a legal standard discouraging last-minute court intervention in election procedures.

That means Jefferson County — the state’s largest, home to 767,000 residents and the city of Louisville — will have as its sole polling location a convention and expo center where voting booths have been set up about eight feet apart in a cavernous hall. About 1 in 5 residents in the county is African American, the largest black population in the state.

In Fayette County, the state’s second-largest county and home to Lexington, voters who want to cast ballots in person will have to head to the football field at the University of Kentucky, where voters will find hand-sanitizing stations and booths where they can fill out paper ballots and scan them through machines.

One precinct for what, four hundred thousand voters?  Another for 150,000 in Fayette County?

This is absolute vote suppression and Adams is throwing up his hands.

Michael G. Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, said his office has been aggressively trying to reach voters through the news media and social media, encouraging them to vote by mail and seeking to reassure those worried that the expansion of mail voting will lead to fraud.

Adams launched an educational campaign around mail-in ballots with the slogan, “Easy to vote, hard to cheat.” The goal is to explain to voters that “absentee voting is a great concept and there are laws in place about how it works,” he said.

“I’m much more concerned about voter confusion than I am about people trying to steal an election,” Adams said.

Like many states, Kentucky relaxed the rules of who can vote absentee by applying the “medical emergency” excuse to fear of the coronavirus.

More than 937,000 voters requested early ballots as of Wednesday, or 27 percent of all registered voters in the state, Adams said.

And tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, won't get their ballot in time.

It's going to be an absolute disaster.  Adams has had months to prepare for this and he's dropped the ball. Regardless of who wins between Charles Booker and Amy McGrath for the right to take on Mitch McConnell in November, there's no reason to believe the primary results will be accurate.

It should mean Adams's resignation.

It won't, of course.

And where is Gov. Beshear in all this? Andy better get off his ass if he wants to not face a primary from either McGrath or Booker in 2023.

Come on, guys.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Good morning.  We have an active Constitutional crisis on our hands.

Another Trump Regime Friday Night Massacre, this time the Bill Barr Justice Department getting rid of Geoff Berman, the US Attorney looking into Rudy Giuliani's Ukraine criminality in the Southern District of New York. 

AG Bill Barr announced Berman's resignation late Friday night.

Only one problem. The resignation was news to Berman.

The Justice Department on Friday abruptly tried to oust the United States attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, the powerful federal prosecutor whose office sent President Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to prison and who has been investigating Mr. Trump’s current personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
But Mr. Berman said in a statement that he was refusing to leave his position, setting up a crisis within the Justice Department over one of its most prestigious jobs.

“I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position,” Mr. Berman said, adding that he learned that he was “stepping down” in a press release from the Justice Department.
Attorney General William P. Barr’s announcement that President Trump was seeking to replace Mr. Berman was made with no notice. Mr. Barr said the president intended to nominate as Mr. Berman’s successor Jay Clayton, current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Barr asked Mr. Berman to resign but he refused so Mr. Barr moved to fire him, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump had been discussing removing Mr. Berman for some time with a small group of advisers, the person said.

Mr. Berman has taken an aggressive approach in a number of cases that have vexed the Trump administration, from the prosecution and guilty pleas obtained from Mr. Cohen to a broader investigation, growing out of that inquiry, which focused on Mr. Trump’s private company and others close to him.

Over the last year, Mr. Berman’s office brought indictments against two close associates of the president’s current lawyer, Mr. Giuliani, and began an investigation into Mr. Giuliani himself, focusing on whether his efforts to dig up dirt in Ukraine on the president’s political rivals violated laws on lobbying for foreign entities.

Mr. Berman’s office also conducted an investigation into Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee, subpoenaing financial and other records as part of a broad inquiry into possible illegal contributions from foreigners.

Mr. Berman’s abrupt removal came just days after Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, alleged in his new book that Mr. Trump sought to interfere in an investigation by Mr. Berman’s office into a Turkish bank, in a bid to cut deals with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Mr. Trump has been upset with Mr. Berman ever since the Manhattan prosecutor’s office pursued a case against Mr. Cohen, according to a person familiar with their relationship.

So, Berman was leading multiple active SDNY investigations into Trump regime criminality, the Giuliani's Ukraine/Burisma circus, the Trump inaugural committee foreign pay-for-play emoluments scam, and the Erdogan/Turkey Halkbank mess, the third one being widely confirmed now by John Bolton's Mustache's book. 

The memoir was apparently the last straw. And remember, Berman was already placed as acting US Attorney by the courts because Trump fired US Attorney Preet Bharara after just three months and the Senate never confirmed a replacement.

Berman isn't leaving.  In fact, he's all but accused Barr of obstruction of justice against the cases the SDNY is overseeing against the Trump regime and their cronies.

We have that full Constitutional crisis, fully-formed, right now.

Get ready.

Last Call For Juneteenth Done Wrong

Corporate brands embarrassing themselves when it comes to Black history is nothing new, but when you factor in the tech sector's near universal anti-blackness due to an appaling lack of black employees and complete absence of black decision-makers, you get absolutely moronic crap like this.

Snapchat apologized for its now-removed Juneteenth filter, telling CNBC on Friday that it went live without being approved through its review process.

Using the Pan-African flag as the backdrop of the filter, the app prompted users to smile, which then caused chains to appear behind them and break.

“We deeply apologize to the members of the Snapchat community who found this Lens offensive. A diverse group of Snap team members were involved in developing the concept, but a version of the Lens that went live for Snapchatters this morning had not been approved through our review process. We are investigating why this mistake occurred so that we can avoid it in the future,” a Snap spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

Criticism of the filter spread when Mark Luckie, a digital strategist and former journalist, shared the filter on Twitter, calling it “interesting.”

This SnapChat #Juneteenth filter is...um...interesting.

Smile to break the chains? Okay then. pic.twitter.com/Wyob3kT3ew

— Mark S. Luckie (@marksluckie) June 19, 2020

The blunder comes after Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company will continue to keep its diversity report private, according to Business Insider. Spiegel said that releasing the data would reinforce the perception that minority groups are underrepresented in the industry.

I can't think of an industry sector that is more openly antagonistic, unrepentant, and outright racist towards Black America than Silicon Valley right now, even more so than banking or real estate, and that's only because banking and real estate face federal housing and financial civil rights regulations.

Tech does not.  They can be as awful as they want to be, and often are. 

It's About Suppression, Con't

Donald Trump is once again calling voting by mail the "biggest risk" to his reelection, and all but says his campaign will do everything in its power to stop states expanding it.

President Donald Trump called mail-in voting the biggest threat to his reelection and said his campaign's multimillion-dollar legal effort to block expanded ballot access could determine whether he wins a second term.

In an Oval Office interview Thursday focusing on the 2020 election, the president also warned his party in blunt terms not to abandon him and cast Hillary Clinton as a more formidable opponent than Joe Biden, despite Biden's commanding lead in polls.

The president’s assertion that mail-in voting will endanger his reelection comes as states across the country are rushing to accommodate remote voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of voters could be disenfranchised if they decide to stay home on Election Day rather than risk contracting the virus at crowded polling stations.

But Trump and his campaign argue, despite a lack of evidence, that widespread mail-in voting will benefit Democrats and invite fraud. The Republican Party is spending tens of millions of dollars on a multifront legal battle.

“My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.”

Trump was asked a two-part question during the interview: Would a substantial amount of mail-in voting — which is widely expected because of coronavirus — cause him to question the legitimacy of the election? And would he accept the results no matter what?

“Well, you can never answer the second question, right? Because Hillary kept talking about she’s going to accept, and they never accepted it. You know. She lost too. She lost good.” Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election.

Trump goes on to warn Republicans thinking about dumping him that they will face the wrath of"the strongest base people have ever seen" unless they remain completely loyal, taking credit for ending the political careers of former GOP senators Bob Corker, Dean Heller, and Jeff Flake.

But note Trump didn't say losing the lawsuits puts his reelection at risk, he specifically said that losing the lawsuits to block voting by mail puts "the election at risk".

That's a dead giveaway as to what's coming if and when Trump loses the electoral vote, which CNN's Harry Enten now sees as a likely outcome.

For Biden to score a huge win, very little needs to change. Biden is ahead by 10 points in an average of live interview polls nationally. The largest Democratic win in the last 56 years was Bill Clinton's 9-point win in 1996.

More impressively, Biden isn't that far from taking more than 400 electoral votes. Let's assume Biden wins all the electoral votes Hillary Clinton did four years ago (232), as polls indicate. One or more recent polls put him up as well in Arizona (11 electoral votes), Florida (29 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), Michigan (16 electoral votes), North Carolina (15 electoral votes), Ohio (18 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). 

If Biden wins all of these states, he gets to just south of 370 electoral votes.
Add on Iowa (6 electoral votes) and Texas (38 electoral votes), where Biden was down just a point in two high quality polls released in June, and he gets more than 400 electoral votes. That would beat Clinton's 379 electoral votes in 1996 as the largest since Johnson's 486 electoral vote win in 1964. 

Indeed, forecast models based on a slew of indicators (such as one put together by University of Alabama student Jack Kersting) have Biden earning more than 400 electoral votes within its 95% confidence interval.

Of course, if the models are off by only a few points, Trump wins easily.

Yet, models such as these also have Biden getting only about 200 electoral votes as a plausible scenario too. 

Remember, it was only a few months ago when Biden's lead in the live telephone national polls was 6 points. That would put Trump within the range where he could win an electoral college victory with a small polling error, even if he lost the national vote. In fact, in many of the 2016 Trump states where Biden currently leads, there were polls that favored Trump just a few months ago. 

In our fast moving news cycles, one could imagine a new unforeseen crisis arising. Likewise, a topic currently dominating the news (e.g. the protests) may fall to the background. Either of these could cause the presidential race to tighten up. 

Moreover, history tells us that it's also quite conceivable that Biden loses. Harry Truman in 1948 was facing a similar deficit in the national polls that Trump is facing now. He'd win by nearly 5 points nationally and carry the electoral college in a tight contest. More recently, Clinton was in a distant third place at this point in 1992 to Republican George H.W. Bush and independent Ross Perot. Clinton took the popular vote by 6 points and scored 370 electoral votes.

And all it takes for Trump to knock those models in his direction far enough to win is to increase GOP voter suppression efforts in the battleground states the GOP has either legislative or gubernatorial control (or both): Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all have Republican-controlled state legislatures, along with Texas, Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana.

Take nothing for granted.  Everything will be different five months from now.  Again.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

The Cook Political Report is moving Montana Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock's race against incumbent GOP Sen. Steve Daines to true toss-up status due to Bullock's increasing popularity in handling COVID-19 correctly.

Montana skyrocketed to competitive status earlier this year when Democrats finally convinced term-limited Gov. Steve Bullock to jump into the race and challenge first-term GOP Sen. Steve Daines. That decision at the beginning of March came just before the COVID pandemic spread throughout the U.S., limiting the amount of campaigning either candidate could do.

But the past few months have also highlighted the unique nature of this race, as the only contest with a sitting governor seeking a Senate seat. And like other governors who have ably handled the pandemic — especially in comparison to the Trump administration's bungling — Bullock has seen his approval ratings rise exponentially too, up to 75 percent in one poll. Montana has had one of the lowest per capita infection rates (49th out of 50), with only 20 deaths as of June 17, and Bullock has gotten plaudits for closing the state early as it began to reopen last month.

So it's not surprising that Bullock seems to have benefited from his gubernatorial leadership during this crisis and being in the news daily. Recent private Democratic polling in the contest gives Bullock a small lead and finds that Bullock's approval ratings are more than 20 points higher than Daines, though the incumbent senator remains slightly above water. GOP polling also shows that it's a close race, but one where every internal poll for them has still shown Daines leading. Yet, even some Republicans privately admit this is likely to be a margin of error race to the finish line. Each party just believes it's their candidate who will eke out the victory.

Governors races and Senate races are fundamentally different of course, but this year could be one where having such executive experience and successfully managing such a daunting crisis could help Bullock overcome the heavy Republican tilt of the state at the presidential level. Trump won the state by just over 20 points four years ago. Still, if we look at where the president is polling against Joe Biden nationally (an average Biden lead of 8.5), that would indicate Trump is on pace to win the state by double digits, but somewhere perhaps in the mid or low teens instead.

Overcoming that margin is still tough in a presidential year — when Jon Tester won a second term in 2012 with President Obama atop the ballot, he outpaced him by almost 7 points. Obama lost Montana that year by nearly 14 points. But in 2008, Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races did outpace the top of the ticket by about 12.5 points. Also, Democrats argue that Biden isn't as toxic in the state as Hillary Clinton was four years ago, and note that Obama even came within 2 points of winning the state in 2008. But Republicans say their polling from last month still had Biden far underwater in the state. Plus, if Trump's numbers continue to sour nationally, there's a chance that Republicans can make the argument that there needs to be a GOP Senate still to serve as a check on a Biden administration.

But there's some evidence that maybe Bullock's performance with handling COVID-19 and generally good favorability in the state makes this a unique situation where traditional rules may not apply. Unlike other states with candidates newer to the statewide ballot, Bullock is already well-defined in voters' minds, and it may be harder to change voters' opinions of him. Bullock's fundraising has been impressive since he got in, too — he outraised Daines by about $2.1 million in the first fundraising quarter, despite being in the race for less than a month before the deadline. In the six week pre-primary filing period too ahead of the June 2 primary, Bullock again outpaced the incumbent by a nearly two-to-one margin and pulled within $1.6 million of Daines's cash of hand advantage.

Democrats need to pick up three seats with a Biden win, or four seats otherwise, to regain control of the Senate.  The bad news is Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama is most likely going to lose his seat, meaning the Dems will have to pick up five seats.

The good news is that there are now five GOP toss-ups in play: Daines, Susan Collins in Maine, Cory Gardner in Colorado, Thom Tillis in NC and Martha McSally in Arizona.

Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is facing a challenge from Republican John James, who ran unsuccessfully against Tammy Duckworth in 2018 and is trying again now, Peters has a six-to-nine point lead or so but his seat is in play.

But on the other side of the coin, there are four more Republican seats in play like Peters's seat, including both Georgia senators (Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue), Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Kansas's open seat with Pat Roberts retiring after 24 years.

Yes, the most mathematically likely outcome is that as with 2018, the GOP picks up a senate seat with Jones losing and nearly all the incumbent Republicans hanging on.  90%+ of them get reelected and the Dems would be historically speaking lucky to break even by knocking off one of the five toss-ups, maybe two in the end for a total of +1 and a 52-48 GOP Senate in January.  Hell, the GOP gained two seats in 2018 despite a massive House shift towards the Democrats.

But I don't think 2020 is going to be a typical year at all.  Not by a long shot.  I'd much rather be the Democrats in this situation with nine seats in play for the GOP than the GOP's likely one seat and one longer shot for a total of two Democrats even remotely in trouble.

A lot can happen in the next four-and-a-half months and will happen, believe me.  But things are looking truly good for the Dems this time.

StupidiNews!

• Australian PM Scott Morrison admitted Friday that the country has come under widespread cyber attacks from "malicious" and "sophisticated" state actors in the last several weeks.
• AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron plans to reopen the chain across America next month but won't require patrons or staff to wear masks in order to "avoid political controversy".
• Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar is withdrawing her name from consideration as Joe Biden's running mate, saying Biden should select a "woman of color".
• Ten Indian soldiers have been released by the Chinese military as border tensions between Beijing and Delhi are increasing after clashes this week between the two nations.
• Robotics company Boston Dynamics is finally bringing one of its robot guard dogs to the commercial security market with the Spot model selling for a cool $74,500 on the company's website.

Last Call For That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

The Kentucky Democratic Senate primary just got heart-attack serious, if a new Charles Booker/Amy McGrath poll is to be believed.

Kentucky state Rep. Charles Booker is pulling ahead of former Marine combat pilot Amy McGrath in the state’s Democratic Senate primary, according to a new poll released Thursday by the progressive think tank Data for Progress.

The survey, conducted from June 13-15 by the online polling company Civiqs, found Booker leading McGrath 44 percent to 36 percent. It’s the latest sign that Booker is heading into the June 23 primary with significant momentum despite McGrath’s outsize fundraising advantage and longtime lead in the polls.
The Data for Progress/Civiqs poll also found McGrath’s favorability rating under water. Of the 898 registered Kentucky voters surveyed, only 24 percent said they have a favorable view of the former fighter pilot, who launched her Senate campaign last year with the support of Democratic Senate leaders in Washington. Fifty-nine percent reported having an unfavorable opinion of McGrath, while 18 percent said they were unsure.

Fewer voters, meanwhile, said they have an opinion of Booker, with 38 percent unsure of how to view him. Still, 33 percent said they have a positive opinion of him compared to 29 percent who reported an unfavorable opinion.

McGrath has long been seen as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination to take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in November. But Booker has emerged as an unexpected threat in the final weeks before the June 23 primary, especially amid ongoing protests over racial injustice and police brutality.

Louisville, Booker’s hometown, became a hotbed for those protests after 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman, was shot and killed by police in March while officers executed a no-knock search warrant at her apartment.

Booker, a freshman state lawmaker, has appeared frequently at the protests in Louisville, and has knocked McGrath for not being more present at the demonstrations. An advertisement launched this week by Booker’s campaign features a clip of McGrath from a June 1 Democratic debate explaining that she had been absent from the protests because she was spending time with her family.

McGrath’s campaign has noted that she has attended several events and met with community leaders in recent weeks about the issues of racial inequality and police practices.

Despite Booker’s lead in the latest Data for Progress/Civiqs poll, the primary is expected to be highly competitive. McGrath has a massive financial advantage over Booker – her most recent federal filings show her with more than $19 million in cash on hand. And other recent polls show her leading in the race.

A recent internal poll released by Booker’s campaign showed him trailing McGrath by 10 points. Still, that suggests that his standing in the race has improved drastically. A similar internal poll fielded in April showed him down more than 50 points.

I hate to say it, but this brings to mind the 2015 Bluegrass/Survey USA poll showing Jack Conway had an 5-point lead over Matt Bevin heading into the gubernatorial election, a race that Bevin ended up winning by 9 points.  Bluegrass was fired as a pollster and went under, their reputation in the state ruined.

On the other hand, Bevin's commanding win in 2015 because, among other things, Bluegrass's model fatally undercounted white GOP non-college men, was the canary in Coal Country that presaged the rise of Trump a year later.

It's possible that the Civiqs poll is predicting the new model correctly and that the effect of Breonna Taylor's death at the hands of LMPD will rewrite the race, not only next week, but in June as well. It's possible that it's a national trend that will wipe out the GOP, including Trump and McConnell, in November.

Or not. Booker could win and then lose to McConnell by 20 points as opposed to the somewhat closer race McGrath has been running.

We'll see what happens next week.

Another Supreme Day All Around

In a 5-4 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the US Supreme Court sided with young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children and ruled that the Trump regime has no right to arbitrarily end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program under the DREAM Act.

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to end legal protections for 650,000 young immigrants, his second stunning election-season rebuke from the court in a week after Monday’s ruling that it’s illegal to fire people because they’re gay or transgender.

For now, the young immigrants retain their protection from deportation and their authorization to work in the United States.

The 5-4 outcome, in which Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices were in the majority, seems certain to elevate the issue in Trump’s campaign, given the anti-immigrant rhetoric of his first presidential run in 2016 and immigration restrictions his administration has imposed since then.

The justices rejected administration arguments that the 8-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program is illegal and that courts have no role to play in reviewing the decision to end DACA. The program covers people who have been in the United States since they were children and are in the country illegally. In some cases, they have no memory of any home other than the U.S.

Trump didn’t hold back in his assessment of the court’s work, hitting hard at a political angle.

“These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!” he wrote on Twitter, apparently including the LGBT ruling as well.

In a second tweet, he wrote, “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”

Roberts wrote for the court that the administration did not pursue the end of the program properly.

“We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies,“ Roberts wrote. “We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients.”

The Department of Homeland Security can try again, he wrote. But any new order to end the program, and the legal challenge it would provoke, would take months, if not longer, immigration experts said.

The court’s four conservative justices dissented. Justice Clarence Thomas, in a dissent joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote that DACA was illegal from the moment it was created under the Obama administration in 2012. Thomas called the ruling “an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a separate dissent that he was satisfied that the administration acted appropriately in trying to end the program.

DACA recipents were elated by the ruling.

“We’ll keep living our lives in the meantime,” said Cesar Espinosa, who leads the Houston immigration advocacy group FIEL. “We’re going to continue to work, continue to advocate.”

The only reason DACA still exists is because SCOTUS reuled that the Trump regime was too lazy to come up with a decent legal argument as to why it should be ended.

That's it. Four justices were ready to rule that the entire program was unconstitutional, but Roberts didn't want to be the bad guy who deported two-thirds of a million people back to countries they never knew.

More importantly though, it wrecks the Stephen Miller strategy to continually use the threat of destroying DACA as a cudgel to compel the Democrats to do what the regime wants "or else".

On top of all that, Dreamers deserve to stay in the US, period. And the court agrees.

For now.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

It's amazing how national Republicans keep discovering how racist their own federal office candidates are on a regular, continuing basis and how that might be a problem in the general election and nationally overall, and still people pretend to be shocked by it. How, I have no idea, especially when Republican primary voters in deep red areas of the country keep voting for them precisely because they are as racist as the candidates they choose to represent them.

The House’s highest-ranking Republicans are racing to distance themselves from a leading GOP congressional candidate in Georgia after POLITICO uncovered hours of Facebook videos in which she expresses racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.

The candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party”; called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, a Nazi; and said she would feel “proud” to see a Confederate monument if she were black because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War.

Greene finished first in a primary for a deep-red, northwest Georgia seat last week by a nearly two-to-one margin over the second-place candidate. She is entering an August runoff as the heavy favorite to secure the Republican nomination for a district where that is tantamount to winning the general election in November. Her initial victory — which has sparked panic in GOP circles — comes as Republicans are grappling with a national reckoning over racial inequality and police brutality after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer last month.

Republicans had just felt relief after they finally ousted Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a controversial member with a long history of making racially charged remarks, in a primary earlier this month.

Yeah, like the racism "ended" with King of the Melonheads gone.  Also, a Q Anon crackpot is a racist, Islamophobic anti-Semite?

Hoocoodanode!

Now GOP lawmakers, aides and operatives fear Greene — a wealthy businesswoman who already drew national attention because of her belief in a trove of “QAnon” conspiracy theories — could create an even bigger black eye for the party if she wins the nomination. Greene will face neurosurgeon John Cowan in the Aug. 11 primary runoff.

“These comments are appalling, and Leader McCarthy has no tolerance for them,” said Drew Florio, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) went further, throwing his weight behind Greene’s opponent.

“The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting and don’t reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great,” Scalise said in a statement. “I will be supporting Dr. Cowan.”

In recordings obtained by POLITICO, Greene described Islamic nations under Sharia law as places where men have sex with "little boys, little girls, multiple women" and "marry their sisters" and "their cousins." She suggested the 2018 midterms — which ushered in the most diverse class of House freshmen — was part of “an Islamic invasion of our government” and that “anyone that is a Muslim that believes in Sharia law does not belong in our government.”

In other videos, she directly compared Black Lives Matter activists to the Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who marched at a white nationalist rally three years ago in Charlottesville, Va., denouncing them all as “idiots.” And Greene forcefully rejected the notion there are racial disparities in the U.S. or that skin color impacts the “quality” of one's life: “Guess what? Slavery is over,” she said. “Black people have equal rights.”

When asked for comment on quotes from the videos, Greene campaign manager Isaiah Wartman did not deny their veracity but declined to elaborate.

“Thank[s] for the reminder about Soros. We forgot to put him in our newest ad. We’re fixing that now,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO. “Would you like me to send you a copy?”

Suddenly, this seat might actually be in play.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• Atlanta PD are responding to 11 charges announced against Rayshard Brooks's killer with a mass sick-out Wednesday night, Mayor Keisha Bottoms is asking officers to return to duty.
• Half of the 500 Orlando International Airport employees tested this week in Florida came up positive for COVID-19, after GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered testing after a "couple" of cases were found.
• Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is warning that America faces a coin shortage due to economic shutdowns, Powell told House members that the US Mint is working to get coins in circulation.
• Canada failed to receive enough votes to earn a spot on the UN Security Council for 2021 as Norway and Ireland passed, Canada has not earned a rotating position on the UNSC since 2000.
• California power utility Pacific Gas & Electric plead guilty to manslaughter for its faulty power equipment starting the 2018 Camp Fire that killed more than 80 people.

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

The Boogaloo Boys got their first cop kill in May in the effort to start a race war.

As protests gripped Oakland on May 29, a white van pulled up outside a federal courthouse. A door slid open, and a man peppered the two security officers outside with bullets, killing one and wounding the other.

For a little over a week, the crime was a mystery. Was it tied to the protests just blocks away? Even after the suspected killer was dramatically caught in the nearby mountains eight days later, his motive was murky.

Now, federal authorities say the man, identified as Air Force Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, 32, was an adherent of the “boogaloo boys,” a growing online extremist movement that has sought to use peaceful protests against police brutality to spread fringe views and ignite a race war. Federal investigators allege that’s exactly what Carrillo was trying to do last month.

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged Carrillo with murder and attempted murder, and leveled aiding and abetting charges against Robert Alvin Justus Jr., who has admitted to serving as a getaway driver during the courthouse ambush, according to the FBI. Protective Security Officer David Patrick Underwood was killed and a second officer, who officials have not named, was critically wounded in the ambush. Inside the three vehicles Carrillo used, police found a boogaloo patch, ammunition, firearms, bombmaking equipment and three messages scrawled in blood: “I became unreasonable,” “Boog” and “Stop the duopoly.”

“The assassination and injury of federal officers who swore an oath to protect the American public will not be tolerated,” Chad Wolf, the acting secretary for homeland security, said in a statement announcing the charges. “The Department of Homeland Security will continue its mission to end violent extremism in any form.”
Carrillo’s attorney, Jeffrey Stotter, told NBC News that investigators’ claims are “accusations and allegations,” and said his client was “left deeply shaken” by his wife’s suicide in 2018. He also told the Santa Cruz Sentinel that Carrillo, who was an active-duty Air Force staff sergeant at the time of the attack, suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2009.

“All I can ask is that we avoid a rush to judgment as to what occurred,” Stotter told the Sentinel.

The newly detailed alleged motive behind the attack at the Oakland courthouse comes as concerns rise about right-wing violence at Black Lives Matter protests. On Monday, a counterdemonstrator shot a protester during a scuffle in Albuquerque, after a militia group in military-style garb and armed with semiautomatic rifles stood menacingly in the crowd throughout the afternoon. Other boogaloo boys have been charged recently with fomenting violence at other protests.

The actual domestic terrorists are out there killing cops at BLM protests in order to start a larger war that kills thousands, maybe millions of Black folks. They're out there, killing.

At some point, they're going to go all the way.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

We've had Black Lives Matter protests before, and they fell upon deaf ears. Systemic racism was dismissed completely as impossible because "We elected a Black president". It was always followed by white rage and "What more do you people want from us about something that happened 400 years ago?"

This time is different.

The Aunt Jemima brand of syrup and pancake mix will get a new name and image, Quaker Oats announced Wednesday, saying the company recognizes that "Aunt Jemima's origins are based on a racial stereotype."

The 130-year-old brand features a Black woman named Aunt Jemima, who was originally dressed as a minstrel character.

The picture has changed over time, and in recent years Quaker removed the “mammy” kerchief from the character to blunt growing criticism that the brand perpetuated a racist stereotype that dated to the days of slavery. But Quaker, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, said removing the image and name is part of an effort by the company “to make progress toward racial equality.”

“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype," Kristin Kroepfl, vice president and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a press release. “As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations."

Kroepfl said the company has worked to "update" the brand to be "appropriate and respectful" but it realized the changes were insufficient.

Aunt Jemima has faced renewed criticism recently amid protests across the nation and around the world sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

People on social media called out the brand for continuing to use the image and discussed its racist history, with the topic trending on Twitter. In one viral TikTok, a woman named Kirby discussed the history of the brand, saying "Black lives matter, people, even over breakfast."

Aunt Jemima is “a retrograde image of Black womanhood on store shelves," Riché Richardson, an associate professor at Cornell University, told the “TODAY” show on Wednesday. “It’s an image that harkens back to the antebellum plantation ... Aunt Jemima is that kind of stereotype is premised on this idea of Black inferiority and otherness.”

“It is urgent to expunge our public spaces of a lot of these symbols that for some people are triggering and represent terror and abuse," Richardson said.

In a 2015 piece for The New York Times, Richardson wrote that the inspiration for the brand's name came from a minstrel song, “Old Aunt Jemima,” in which white actors in blackface mocked and derided Black people.

The logo, Richardson wrote, was grounded in the stereotype of the “mammy ... a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own.”

Aunt Jemima is a one hundred thirty-year old brand based literally on a black house slave and America happily continued to use it for decades because everyone was used to it.

Y'all only noticed now that maybe, just maybe, it was insulting to millions of Americans, and Quaker Oats, owned by PepsiCo, owned by Yum Brands, based right here in Kentucky, finally did the right thing.

One hundred thirty years.

Taken down in a less than a month of protests.

Black Lives Matter.