Retribution Execution, Con't

At this point the Trump regime is no longer hiding behind pretense and is actively searching for legal justification to openly disenfranchise as many mail-in ballot voters in the country as it can.

Just because Trump’s claims of rampant mail-in voting fraud aren’t supported by evidence doesn’t mean election experts aren’t concerned about problems holding a presidential election during a pandemic. It’s unknown whether the United States Postal Service can handle a surge of mail-in ballots in a timely fashion, and other officials have cautioned about long lines and a shortage of workers at in-person polling stations, which have been limited during the coronavirus outbreak. 

Some have predicted the crush of remote voting could mean a final winner in the presidential race between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden won’t be known for days or even weeks. Democrats are pushing for $25 billion for USPS in the next coronavirus recovery bill to help address those concerns, but it remains a source of disagreement with Republicans. 

There have already been some some notable delays in down-ballot elections during the pandemic, including one New York race this summer. Six weeks after a Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat, all of the ballots have yet to be counted. 

“This is a rare case where the president is not overstating the case,” argued Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that has sued in North Carolina and Pennsylvania over the accuracy of voting rolls. “Frankly he’s understating the problem that I think we are going to face on Election Day. The system is going to break.”
Trump and his team are trumpeting these fears. 

The Trump campaign is holding events touting its legal actions on voting rules. And privately, the White House is debating possible further action, according to two people familiar with the situation. The White House declined to comment on whether Trump would be signing an executive order on the issue. 

“All Americans deserve an election system that is secure and President Trump is highlighting that Democrats’ plan for universal mail-in voting would lead to fraud,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews. “While Democrats continue to call for a radical overhaul of our nation’s voting system, President Trump will continue to work to ensure the security and integrity of our elections.” 

Trump has spent months railing against mail-in voting as the pandemic raged and his poll numbers dropped nationally and in battleground states. Yet on Tuesday, Trump appeared to change his mind for one battleground state: Florida. He claimed that because the state’s two back-to-back Republican governors — Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott — had managed elections professionally. Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, dubbed Trump’s action “hypocritical.”
Voting specialists also note that five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — already conduct elections entirely by mail with few problems. This fall, three additional states — California, Vermont and Nevada — plan to send ballots to registered voters because of the pandemic. 

Voters in most other states can request an absentee ballot by mail without providing a reason. And numerous states are still reviewing their voting policies as coronavirus infections continue to rise. 

Already, Democrats and left-leaning groups are pushing to make voting by mail easier and to educate voters about how to properly cast remote ballots. Republicans are fighting voting rule changes in 17 states, going to court 40 times, drawing on a recently doubled legal budget of $20 million. At the RNC and Trump campaign, 12 staff attorneys and several dozen more outside lawyers are working on the issue across the country, according to an RNC official. 

Republicans have intervened to do just that in numerous states. In Iowa, they sued to prevent third parties from filling out personal information on absentee ballot requests. In Minnesota, they tried to prevent ballots from being sent to inactive voters. And in Nevada, the Trump campaign on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the state over a plan to send ballots to active registered voters this November. 

“This unconstitutional legislation implements the exact universal vote-by-mail system President Trump has been warning against for months,” said Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser for the Trump campaign. 

Republicans have already won some battles. A Democratic super-PAC and other left-leaning groups agreed to drop a lawsuit over voting rules in Florida after a judge refused to order changes immediately, including a request that the government cover postage costs for mail-in ballots. Another lawsuit seeking to extend the state’s absentee ballot deadline was dismissed in Pennsylvania. 

“All politicians are paranoid about potential fraud in their campaigns. And sometimes rightfully so,” said Pat McCrory, the former Republican governor of North Carolina, who blamed fraud when he lost his 2016 reelection bid by 10,000 votes out of more than 4.6 million ballots cast. “He knows states like Michigan and North Carolina — like last time — could be close.”

At this point I fully expect Trump and the GOP to tie up every red state election result in so much red tape that the country is forced to go to House delegations, which favor Trump. He's going to steal an entire second term and the country will do nothing.

Actually I take that back. We'll try to resist and we'll be cut to pieces for our efforts by his fascist troops.

The Rocky Road To Republican Redemption

Hawaii Democrat (and former Republican) Beth Fukumoto explains her journey from the GOP to the Democratic Party, and unlike 99% of Never Trump Republicans, she actually is doing what it takes to earn a second chance.

I rehearsed the words over and over from the back of the black sedan, hired to take me from my red-eye flight to an event at the Republican National Committee headquarters: “We are committed to electing candidates who reflect the full diversity of our nation.”

It was June 2013. I had come from my home state to D.C., to do one job — announce a $6 million investment from the Republican Party to support candidates of color and women running at the state level.

This initiative was one of many meant to change the course of the GOP following its defeat in the 2012 presidential campaign and the subsequent release of its what-went-wrong report, known as the “Growth and Opportunity Project.”

Without a more inclusive message, better representation, less ideological rigidity, and compassionate immigration and economic policies, the report warned, Republicans would continue to lose national elections. It described a party I wanted to help build.

Over the next year, I recruited people to a party that promised diversity, dialogue and the chance to reimagine its foundation. I wanted a government that would be responsible with its power and judicious in its interventions, a leveler when our systems became unbalanced.

Instead, that party nominated a president who sends federal forces to tame American cities yet refuses to use the power of his office to coordinate an effective response to the novel coronavirus.

There are only so many ways to say, “I was wrong.” I’ve exhausted them all.

As the Republican leader in the Hawaii House, I made compromises that I regret. I spoke out when our presidential candidate said he might have supported Japanese American internment, but I couldn’t find the courage to question the implementation of voter identification laws that I should have understood weren’t designed to protect voters.

I made decisions out of political expediency, or hubris, or naivete. Republicans offered an inclusive vision of “Growth and Opportunity” for all; then we elected a man that didn’t even bother to fake it. I couldn’t make it right. I declined to endorse him and criticized his policies. Then, when he won, I continued to disagree with him in public, and my Republican colleagues said they would strip me of my leadership position unless I promised to stop speaking against him. So, I resigned from the party. A few months later, I joined the Democratic Party.

I drew my red line too late. I’ll answer for my choices publicly and privately for years to come. But admitting your mistakes is one of the best ways to keep from repeating them.

Fukumoto switched parties and was deservedly mauled in the primaries in 2018, coming in a distant 5th for the seat won by current HI-1 Democratic Rep Ed Case. She paid for her crimes with her career. She asked Hawaiian voters to give her a chance to redeem herself as a Democrat, and they told her to go straight to the nearest volcano and take a swan dive.

But at least Fukumoto, unlike 99.99% of Never Trump Republicans, isn't asking for absolution or even forgiveness. She deserves neither and has resigned herself correctly to the fact that she'll never receive either one.

Don't feel sorry for her, she's got a nice job at Harvard as a Kennedy School fellow. She's better off than the vast majority of Hawaii right now.  The point is, she correctly tried to earn a path to redemption, and was rightfully denied it.  She accepted it, and moved on, warning the remaining Republicans a similar fate awaits them this fall and in the years ahead.

I wish her well, actually.  But she can never be part of our political process like she was, and has lost the right to do so. She failed her constituents totally. She has to live with that, but so do her constituents. They are the ones we should reserve our empathy for. Not Beth Fukumoto.

We will not forgive. We will certainly not forget.

Stamp Of Disapproval

Democrats are taking aim at the Trump regime's new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor and businessman who is doing everything in his power to sabotage the US Postal Service so Americans turn against it and it can be destroyed and privatized, not to mention that DeJoy is trying assure the disenfranchisement of possibly tens of millions of voters who will attempt cast their ballot by mail this year.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s mail service, displacing the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations, according to a reorganization memo released Friday. The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.

Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.

The reshuffling threatens to heighten tensions between postal officials and lawmakers, who are troubled by delivery delays — the Postal Service banned employees from working overtime and making extra trips to deliver mail — and wary of the Trump administration’s influence on the Postal Service as the coronavirus pandemic rages and November’s election draws near.

It also adds another layer to DeJoy’s disputes with Democratic leaders, who have pushed him to rescind the cost-cutting directives that have caused days-long backlogs and steady the Postal Service in the run-up to the election. DeJoy clashed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), in a meeting on the issue earlier this week.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee responsible for postal oversight, called the reorganization “a deliberate sabotage” to the nation’s mail service and a “Trojan Horse.”

David E. Williams, formerly chief operating officer and executive vice president, will take the role of chief logistics and processing operations officer, a new position for a trusted adviser to former postmaster general Megan Brennan and members of the agency’s governing board. A new organizational chart also gives Williams the title “executive vice president,” though that role was not included in the internal restructuring announcement obtained by The Washington Post. The Postal Service’s Kevin L. McAdams, the vice president of delivery and retail operations and a 40-year USPS veteran, was not listed on the chart.

It’s not clear what the impact of all the changes will be. DeJoy wrote in an internal memo to employees obtained by The Post that the new structure would create “clear lines of authority and accountability,” but others are more skeptical. The USPS publicly released a shorter description of the changes that did not include DeJoy’s remarks to postal workers. The agency declined to comment further on the staffing changes.

“One of the things that’s led to a lot of head scratching is how some of these folks have been reassigned. We’re not sure he put the right players in the right spots, but maybe he sees something we don’t,” said one person with deep knowledge of the leadership team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment. “We’re all going to wait and see and hope he’s done the right things, but who knows? It looks as if most of the people we’ve all worked with for years and years are still there, just moved around.”

The Postal Service will implement a hiring freeze, according to the reorganization announcement, and will ask for voluntary early retirements. It also will realign into three “operating units” — retail and delivery, logistics and processing, and commerce and business solutions — and scale down from seven regions to four.

DeJoy is destroying the Postal Service so it can be replaced, and that Americans are forced to pay two to three times more for postage.  Why does Trump hate the Postal Service so much? Like most Republican politicians, Trump can't stand the idea of government that actually works.

For years, the USPS has been the most popular government agency in the United States. According to a Pew Research Center study released in April, 91 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Postal Service, and roughly the same percentage of Americans want to bail out the agency. Similarly, countless companies that do business with the Postal Service are fans. Online retailers, including Amazon, even spent millions of dollars on an ad campaign begging lawmakers to save the Postal Service.

These facts leave us with a very curious situation. The Postal Service is seriously struggling, but it’s never been more important. It’s critical to get prescriptions to the homes of people during a pandemic and to deliver ballots to state election boards. It’s even prized by huge corporations like Amazon, who could easily give their money to a competing private company but would rather work with Postal Service. At the same time, President Trump seems to disdain the agency, and the new postmaster general seems to be doing more harm than good.

The upshot of it all is that the USPS has survived difficult moments in the past. The agency can trace its roots back to the days of the American Revolution. Two and a half centuries later, mail service has never been more essential. If anything, a crisis like this could serve to remind the country how much it needs the Postal Service, despite what a handful of powerful people might believe.

Trump is taking advantage of the chaos of 2020 to wreck the Postal Service, a long-term goal of the GOP.  He wants to punish states that conduct safe and effective voting-by-mail with a postal system that's too broken to do the job correctly, and force states to end the practice for all but rich Republicans.

Turning voting-by-mail into a postal poll tax was always the plan.  Ending vote-by-mail for 99% of America is the goal.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

As the US surpasses 160,000 COVID-19 deaths, a new study from the Institutes for Health Metrics and Evaluation, operated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, finds that the US could reach 300,000 dead by December 1.

Researchers behind an influential model are projecting that the US death toll from coronavirus could reach nearly 300,000 by December 1 -- but that can be changed if Americans consistently wear masks. 

According to Johns Hopkins University, 159,990 people have died in the United States since the pandemic began. 

"The US forecast totals 295,011 deaths by December," the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation statement says. 

The model doesn't have to come true, said IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray: "The public's behavior had a direct correlation to the transmission of the virus and, in turn, the numbers of deaths. 

The statement said that if 95% of the people in the US wear face coverings, the number would decrease to 228,271 deaths, and more than 66,000 lives could be saved.
Murray told CNN his group looks at studies on the effects of mask use and the best estimate is they can cut spread by 40%. 

"You get this really huge effect that accumulates over time," he told Anderson Cooper, "because every individual that is wearing the mask is putting the brakes on transmission by 40%. That starts to add up." 

The model comes the same day the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an ensemble forecast that projects 181,031 deaths by August 29. 

"State-level ensemble forecasts predict that the number of reported new deaths per week may increase over the next four weeks in Hawaii and Puerto Rico and may decrease in Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico, the Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Texas, Vermont and the Virgin Islands." the CDC says on its forecasting website. 

The forecast relies on 24 individual forecasts from outside institutions and researchers.

Again, the biggest single factor in preventing deaths would be a national mask mandate, and that will never happen as long as Republicans are in charge.  We're looking at a third of a million deaths by the end of 2020, meaning COVID-19 would be the third leading cause of death in the US this year, behind only heart disease and cancer.

But we'd have to start now, and Donald Trump will simply never allow that to happen, so tens of thousands of Americans will die as the flu season ramps us this fall and COVID becomes even more rampant, overwhelming hospitals and clinics and people die from secondary knock-on effects.

As many people are going to die as Trump allows.

 

Last Call For Legally Bland

The good news is that House Democrats can enforce subpoenas against former Trump White House officials like former WH Legal Counsel Don McGahn.  The bad news, McGahn also gets to challenge that subpoena in court, and is doing so.

House Democrats can sue to force President Trump’s former White House counsel Donald McGahn to comply with a congressional subpoena, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a 7-2 decision, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed Congress’s oversight powers and said the House has a long-standing right to force government officials to testify and produce documents. The ruling came in one of a set of historic clashes between the White House and Democratic lawmakers.
The “effective functioning of the Legislative Branch critically depends on the legislative prerogative to obtain information, and constitutional structure and historical practice support judicial enforcement of congressional subpoenas when necessary,” Judge Judith W. Rogers wrote for the majority.

The decision is a legal victory for House Democrats, but the ruling does not mean that McGahn will immediately appear on Capitol Hill. The court sent the case back to the initial three-judge panel, which had ruled against the House, to consider McGahn’s other challenges to the subpoena. The timeline makes it unlikely that the case will be resolved before Congress adjourns in January and the subpoena expires.

The opinion also cleared the way for a second House lawsuit, finding that lawmakers are not barred from going to court to challenge the Trump administration to block the diversion of billions of dollars to build the president’s signature southern border wall. 

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose panel issued the subpoena, said the decision in the McGahn case “strikes a blow against the wall of impunity that President Trump has tried to build for himself.”

He pointed to a pair of Supreme Court decisions in July rejecting the president’s claims of sweeping immunity from investigations by a state prosecutor and Congress.

“No one—not even the President—is above the law,” Nadler said in a statement.

In response to the rulings, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said, “While we strongly disagree with the standing ruling in McGahn, the en banc court properly recognized that we have additional threshold grounds for dismissal of both cases, and we intend to vigorously press those arguments before the panels hearing those cases.”

In other words, the clock will run out before this even gets to the Supreme Court, and I suspect in any future deliberations where the House or Senate of the opposite party of the White House issues subpoenas, they can be run out within the two years of any Congress with this process.

Should Trump win in November, or if Biden wins and the GOP still controls the Senate (both I figure are about 25% chances), we will see this fight play out again in 2021 and 2022.

Householder Of Cards, Con't

The massive bribery scandal in Ohio against former State House Speaker Larry Householder has crossed state lines into Kentucky, as Republican attorney Eric Lycan is being named as the money man behind the multi-billion dollar racket.

An attorney who has served as general counsel for Republican committees and candidates in Kentucky is mentioned in a massive political bribery case in Ohio.

Eric Lycan is affiliated with a political dark money group that is accused by federal prosecutors of serving as a corporate slush fund for indicted former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder.

Lycan incorporated Generation Now as a political 501(c)(4) group in 2017 and serves as its treasurer. It is accused by the FBI of illegally funneling $60 million from FirstEnergy Corp. affiliates to assist the campaigns of political allies of Householder, so that he could pass a $1 billion bailout of two aging Ohio nuclear plants and block an anti-bailout voter referendum.

An FBI affidavit detailing the scheme referred to Lycan as "the attorney" and describes two other unnamed political committees funneling money to campaigns that were incorporated by Lycan: The Growth & Opportunity PAC and the Coalition for Growth & Opportunity. He served as treasurer for both groups.

Lycan served as the general counsel of the Republican Party of Kentucky from 2016 until April 2019 and has served for almost three years as the general counsel of the Republican majority leadership of Kentucky’s House of Representatives.

He also previously served as counsel for the 2014 campaign of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, chairing its Lawyers for Team Mitch group for attorneys supporting his reelection.
Lycan has also served as treasurer of or incorporated several political committees and groups in Kentucky such as Kentucky Rise PAC, a federal super PAC that in 2014 contributed more than $35,000 to a slew of Republican state House candidates and the House Republican Caucus Campaign Committee in the party's attempt to win back the majority in that chamber.

Lycan did not return an email seeking comment on the indictment and Generation Now.

And this all connects back to Mitch McConnell, who has been the country's biggest advocate for exactly the type of dark money groups that fueled the Householder scandal.

This one's got legs, folks.  A lot of people are going down, and not all of them are in Ohio.

Tales Of The Trump Depression, Con't

A par of researchers took a granular look at unemployment by Census tract and found that millions of Americans -- nearly all of them Black and Latino -- live in neighborhoods where unemployment in the Trump Depression is above 30%.

The economic damage from the coronavirus is most visible in areas like Midtown Manhattan, where lunch spots have closed, businesses have gone dark and once-crowded sidewalks have emptied.

But some of the worst economic pain lies in other neighborhoods, in the places where workers who’ve endured the broadest job losses live. In corners of the Bronx, South Los Angeles or the South Side of Chicago, unemployment is concentrated to a breathtaking degree. And that means that other problems still to come — a wave of evictions, deepening poverty, more childhood hunger — will be geographically concentrated, too.
Data estimating neighborhood-level unemployment rates suggests that as many as one in three workers in these areas are jobless, deeply widening economic disparities within cities.

In New York City, it’s as if parts of the Bronx were experiencing the Great Depression while the Upper East Side faced only modest drops in employment, according to Yair Ghitza and Mark Steitz, analysts who have estimated unemployment at the census tract level based on national economic statistics over the last six months.

The federal government doesn’t report unemployment data down to the neighborhood level, so the two researchers modeled these fine-grained statistics in a way that makes them consistent with state and national surveys. Through June, they found most neighborhoods in the Bronx had unemployment rates in excess of 20 percent, while most neighborhoods south of 95th Street in Manhattan had rates less than half that.

“What’s salient and visible right now is the businesses that are shuttered, and the office buildings that are empty,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at N.Y.U. “What we’re not quite seeing at least the physical manifestations of yet is the really just stark decline in incomes in so many neighborhoods around the city, and in a lot of working-class neighborhoods.”

“We will see them,” she predicted, warning that concentrated distress in these neighborhoods could also have long-term consequences for the children growing up there.

Mr. Ghitza, the chief scientist at Catalist, a Democratic data firm, and Mr. Steitz, a principal at TSD Communications, have tried to solve a large multiplication problem in modeling neighborhood-level unemployment. Official government statistics estimate, for example, the share of residents in a given census tract who are women, the share who are African-American, and the share who work in food service. Using such data, Mr. Ghitza and Mr. Steitz created an educated guess of the number of Black female food-service workers in each tract, then matched those demographics to national monthly unemployment statistics on the occupations and demographic groups most severely affected in this downturn.

The approach makes it possible to gauge employment differences at a finer level of geography than what the government reports. But these estimates also come with much wider room for error than official statistics, and the researchers warn that the results should be viewed alongside other data as policymakers try to understand an economy in free fall.

The resulting maps capture the flip side of recent analyses of private-sector data showing where restaurants have cut hours or where stores have closed their doors. Those business closings have been clustered, too, often in downtown districts where office workers no longer come in, or in wealthy neighborhoods where residents have sharply reduced their spending (or where they have left town altogether).

These maps reflect, instead, where the workers who once staffed those restaurants, bars, hotels and offices commuted home at night.

The maps also highlight how the distinct nature of the coronavirus economic shock has divided cities into neighborhoods where most people can work from home and neighborhoods where most can’t. And because the latter group is disproportionately made up of Black and Hispanic workers, those lines also largely follow patterns of racial segregation, as in Chicago.

It's very possible that these numbers get worse now that unemployment aid has lapsed thanks to the GOP. We're still very much a consumer economy, and if businesses aren't getting any business because people don't have money to spend, they go under and take jobs with them.

It's bad, absolutely bad now.  It's going to be catastrophic in a few months unless we fundamentally change the way aid works in this country.  We could lose a third of small businesses, lose 20% of existing jobs permanently.  We could see average unemployment hit 20% or more and it's awful enough at 14% now.

Another 1.2 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. More than 50 million unemployment claims have been filed in the last four months.

We'll see what Mitch McConnell and the GOP surrenders on this week, but if there's no bill and the Senate goes on vacation until after Labor Day, our economic situation may crumble.

Last Call For Going In Guns Blazing

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is suing the NRA out of existence, and it couldn't be happening to a more deserving criminal enterprise.

The Attorney General of New York took action today to dissolve the National Rifle Association, following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is "fraught with fraud and abuse."

Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars, and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three year period.
The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.

Seeking to dissolve the NRA is the most aggressive sanction James could have sought against the not-for-profit organization, which James has jurisdiction over because it is registered in New York. James has a wide range of authorities relating to nonprofits in the state, including the authority to force organizations to cease operations or dissolve. The NRA is all but certain to contest it.

NPR has reached out to the NRA for comment, but has not received a response.

"The NRA's influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets," James said in a statement. "The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse, which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organization is above the law."

James' complaint names the National Rifle Association as a whole, but also names four current and former NRA executives: Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, general counsel John Frazer, former CFO Woody Phillips, and former chief of staff Joshua Powell.

It lists dozens of examples of alleged financial malfeasance, including the use of NRA funds for vacations, private jets, and expensive meals. In a statement, her office said that the charitable organization's executives "instituted a culture of self-dealing, mismanagement and negligent oversight" that contributed to "the waste and loss of millions in assets."

The lawsuit seeks to dissolve the NRA in its entirety and asks the court to order LaPierre and other current and former executives to pay back unlawful profits. It also seeks to remove LaPierre and Frazer from the organization's leadership and prevent the four named individuals from ever serving again on the board of a charity in New York.

My question though is "What's stopping the NRA from setting up shop in Texas or North Dakota?"

We'll find out.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The comically blatant corruption at the Trump regime continues as the "new" Inspector General brought in to bury the previous IG's investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's criminality is now resigning after just three months.

After less than three months on the job, the internal watchdog of the State Department has resigned, U.S. officials said, marking another significant shake-up for an office sworn to investigate malfeasance and wrongdoing.

Stephen Akard’s departure was announced to staff by his deputy, Diana R. Shaw, who told colleagues that she will become the temporary acting inspector general effective on Friday.

Akard became inspector general after President Trump abruptly fired Steve Linick in May at the recommendation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. That decision immediately prompted criticism from lawmakers because Linick had been investigating allegations that Pompeo and his wife, Susan, had improperly used State Department resources. Linick was also examining several other issues, including Pompeo’s decision to expedite arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the objections of Congress.
Trump and his administration have come under increasing criticism for trying to evade oversight because the president has fired five officials in recent months who lead inspector general offices across the federal government.

In a note to her inspector general’s office colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post, Shaw said Akard was taking a position with a law firm in Indiana, his home state. It’s unclear whether there were other factors in his decision.

Pompeo dismissed a question about Akard’s departure during a news conference on Wednesday. “He left to go back home,” Pompeo said. “This happens. I don’t have anything more to add to that.”

Akard’s resignation again throws into turmoil an office responsible for ongoing investigations into wrongdoing at the department, including those started by Linick. Shaw told colleagues: “I will do my best not to let this latest change negatively affect our operations.”

So who knows.  We'll be on the State Department's third IG in three months, and Pompeo will continue to flout federal law while he should be in prison along with Trump and most of the rest of his Cabinet of Corruption.

Just another day in the broken executive branch.

Biden, His Time

The race for Biden's running mate is apparently down to Sen. Kamala Harris and former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice, after Rep. Karen Bass blew her shot last weekend over Cuba and Scientology and while I have to imagine both Liz Warren and Tammy Duckworth are still in play, it looks to be a two-woman race. But Republicans are especially salivating over Susan Rice so they can spend the next 90 days yelling BENGHAZI as loudly as possible.

Trump’s aides and allies accuse Rice — without delving too deeply into the evidence — of helping cover up crimes for two of the president’s favorite foils, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, making her just the kind of "deep state" villain who could fire up his MAGA base.

“She is absolutely our No. 1 draft pick,” a Trump campaign official said.
Rice, a former ambassador to the United Nations and national security adviser for Obama, is accused of revealing the identities of top Trump associates in 2016 after they were picked up as part of U.S. surveillance of foreign officials.

Four years earlier, she faced allegations that she misled Americans when she announced on national TV that the fatal attacks in Benghazi, Libya, occurred after spontaneous protests in response to an anti-Muslim video. That was determined to be inaccurate.

On Monday night, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host influential in Trump’s orbit, opened his show with a lengthy diatribe about Rice and her role in the 2012 Benghazi raid — strikingly similar to the attack Republicans lodged against Clinton in the 2016 race against Trump.

“I can’t think of anyone that is more polarizing who would fire up the base than Susan Rice,” said former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican who investigated the Obama administration as chairman of the House oversight committee. “They know her, and they don’t like her.”
Biden is nearing the end of his search for a vice president, with in-person interviews expected this week. Attention has focused on Rice, Rep. Karen Bass and Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Duckworth. Aides said Biden has pushed back his planned announcement to next week. An outside Trump adviser described Rice as the "most target-rich environment."

Biden’s campaign and Rice declined to comment. But Democrats and others have dismissed the attacks against Rice as outdated and unsubstantiated, and said they won’t matter to Americans struggling with the coronavirus outbreak.

No offense, but I'm really, really, really hoping that Biden absolutely does not pick Susan Rice.  Huckleberry Graham will have her in hearings tout suite and Bill Barr is absolutely waiting for the opportunity to make his Durham investigation dog-and-pony show into the October Surprise and "Biden Running Mate Under DOJ Investigation" would be something I absolutely expect Bill Barr to do.

And it will hurt Biden down the stretch.  I'm sorry, but our media will blow it out of proportion and it will only help Trump.

Biden's call is Biden's call, whomever he picks I will support.  And all of the running mates come with built-in GOP attack angles.  Rice seems to be the largest violation of the "first do no harm with the pick" theory.

We'll see what happens.

StupidiNews!

• Citing continued supply chain disruptions, business analysts say US grocery prices for meat, eggs, cereal and vegetables will continue to remain well above average in the third quarter.
• Iowa becomes the final state to end voting ban for felons as GOP. Gov Kim Reynolds restored voting rights to some 50,000 Iowans ahead of November's election.
• CDC medical experts say politics will not affect timing of a COVID-19 vaccine, and that regulators hope to have tens of millions of doses of a vaccine in 2021.
• Chicago's public schools will go fully online this fall, leaving New York City as the largest school system left to decide how schools will be handled reopening in September.
• A new UPenn study finds half the nation's low-income areas have no free ICU beds for COVID-19 patients, meaning that the nation's death toll will rise sharply in the weeks and months ahead.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Things are so bad in America right now that Trump is actually starting to lose his base in states like California, and that's only making things worse for Republicans down the ballot. The fever-bright, "own the libs!" faithful in the Golden State -- the kind of people so fanatical in their Trump support that they back him in a state like California -- are becoming less faithful by the day.

President Trump’s support among Republicans and other conservative voters has begun to erode amid the continued coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic havoc, a new poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies shows.
The poll shows Trump far behind Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in California. That’s no surprise — even at his strongest Trump was unlikely ever to be competitive in California, a heavily Democratic state.

What is notable, however, is the size of the gap and the degree to which approval of Trump’s work as president has declined among groups that until now have supported him.

Biden leads Trump in California by 39 percentage points, 67% to 28%, the poll found. That’s 9 points larger than the margin by which Hillary Clinton beat Trump statewide in 2016 — a record at the time. And the share of Californians who approve of Trump’s performance in office, which has held steady in the mid-to-low 30% range for nearly his entire tenure, has now ticked downward to just 29%.

That’s consistent with other polls nationally and in battleground states that show a nationwide tide lifting Biden, swelling his margin in states like California, moving him solidly ahead in close-fought states like Pennsylvania and Michigan and making him potentially competitive in states that Trump won more handily last time, such as Texas and Georgia.

“There was a question of whether his support was already so low in the state that it couldn’t go lower,” said Berkeley political scientist Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies. The poll “shows the answer is no.”

Aides to both candidates believe the biggest factor in Trump’s decline is voters’ fear of the coronavirus and belief that the administration has botched its handling of the pandemic. The poll provides further evidence of that.

About two-thirds of the state’s voters see the health threat from the coronavirus getting worse. They back Biden 84% to 11%. By contrast, about 1 in 8 say the health threat is getting less serious; they back Trump 87% to 10%. About 1 in 5 voters say the threat from the virus is about the same as it’s been; they’re closely divided.

Imagine being in California and thinking Trump is the answer, imagine how God-awful your morality system there is, now imagine that Trump has finally broken you.

Yes, I keep telling people there are more registered Republicans in California than adults in about 42 of the 50 states, and they are a special breed of reality-deniers, but they're starting to crack.

You don't get more "hardcore Trump supporter" than his California contingent.

Even they are starting to give.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

An increasingly desperate Trump White House is about to wreck COVID-19 relief package negotiations with a series of executive orders that will make both Democrats and Republicans in Congress furious and could capsize any real bill until after Labor Day.

The White House is considering a trio of executive orders aimed at shaking up coronavirus relief negotiations with Democrats, a sign of frustration within the Trump administration at the sluggish pace of the talks with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The three actions under consideration would delay the collection of federal payroll taxes, reinstitute an expired eviction moratorium, and in the riskiest gambit of them all, extend enhanced federal unemployment benefits using unspent money already appropriated by Congress.

This plan is the brainchild of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and President Donald Trump on Tuesday confirmed that he was reviewing his options for unilateral action but hadn't made any decisions to move forward yet.

"We're looking at it," Trump said at a press briefing. "Were also looking at various other things that I'm allowed to do under the system. Such as the payroll tax suspension."

Following another session with Pelosi and Schumer, Meadows called it "the most productive meeting we've had yet," and added that Trump wouldn't issue any executive orders if the negotiations with Democratic leaders are moving toward a conclusion.

"Really right now, we're continuing to consider all of the options that we have before us, but as long as we're making substantial progress in our negotiations, we're hopeful that will provide the fruit necessary to bring it to a close," Meadows told reporters after the meeting with Pelosi and Schumer.

The two Democratic leaders — who have refused to yield much ground in the discussions so far — suggested there had been positive development during Tuesday's closed-door talks.

"They made some concessions, which we appreciated. We made some concessions, which they appreciated," Schumer said. "But we're still far away on a lot of the important issues, but we're continuing to go at it."

What this says to me is if Mitch doesn't have a bill by the end of the week and August recess, the Trump regime will start doing things by executive order.  A moratorium on federal evictions in federal Section 8 housing will definitely help, as will restoring some unemployment benefit money, but the payroll tax moratorium will only blow a hole in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and everyone knows it.

The good news is Mitch knows he's going to have to give in to Democrats at this point.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded Tuesday that he will lack Republican support to pass further coronavirus aid and instead will rely on Democrats to fashion a deal with the White House.

"It's not going to produce a kumbaya moment," McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters in the Capitol. "But the American people in the end need help."

Negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House over another round of aid that could top $1 trillion continue to crawl forward, with sticking points like whether to extend the expanded unemployment benefits that expired last month.

Democrats are eager to restore the jobless payments, but Republicans have remained divided over how large they should be, as well as the level of deficit spending the federal government should undertake to finance them.

"If you're looking for total consensus among Republican senators, you're not going to find it," McConnell said after a lunch meeting with Republican senators. "We do have division about what to do."

But both Republicans and Democrats are going to like and hate the results if Mark Meadows gets his way, and that's the point.  Meadows isn't quite as blockheaded as his boss is.  It's a race now to see whether or not a package can be done before Mitch leaves town and Trump blows everything up.

The clock is ticking.

Feet Of Clay, Defeated

Ten-term St. Louis Democratic Rep. Lacy Clay has been knocked out by Ferguson, Missouri activist and nurse Cori Bush in last night's Democratic primary.

Cori Bush, a onetime homeless woman who led protests following a white police officer’s fatal shooting of a Black 18-year-old in Ferguson, ousted longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay Tuesday in Missouri’s Democratic primary, ending a political dynasty that has spanned more than a half-century.

Bush’s victory came in a rematch of 2018, when she failed to capitalize on a national Democratic wave that favored political newcomers such as Bush’s friend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But this time around, Bush’s supporters said protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis and outrage over racial injustice finally pushed her over the edge.

An emotional Bush, speaking to supporters while wearing a mask, said few people expected her to win.

“They counted us out,” she said. “They called me — I’m just the protester, I’m just the activist with no name, no title and no real money. That’s all they said that I was. But St. Louis showed up today.”

Bush’s campaign spokeswoman, Keenan Korth, said voters in the district were “galvanized.”

“They’re ready to turn the page on decades of failed leadership,” Korth said.

Bush, 44, also had backing from political action committee Justice Democrats and Fight Corporate Monopolies this election. She campaigned for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during his presidential bid.

Bush’s primary win essentially guarantees her a seat in Congress representing the heavily Democratic St. Louis area. Missouri’s 1st Congressional District has been represented by Clay or his father for a half-century. Bill Clay served 32 years before retiring in 2000. William Lacy Clay, 64, was elected that year.

Clay didn’t face a serious challenger until Bush. This year, he ran on his decades-long record in Congress.

Clay ran on his record and on support from the Congressional Black Caucus. Clay's father Bill founded the CBC more than 50 years ago when he held the seat and Clay had the open support of current CBC leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. Clay figured he had this in the bag, he beat Bush by 20 points in 2018. He had every reason to believe his legacy would secure him another term.

Precisely none of that was able to save his political career in the George Floyd era of Black Lives Matter. Not only did Clay lose, he didn't even get more than 45.5% of the vote, as a third candidate, Kat Bruckner, got 6%. Even with Bruckner splitting the anti-Clay vote, it wasn't enough. Bush won with 48.6%.

Oh, and Missourians approves a ballot measure for expanded Medicare 53-47%. You'd better believe that helped Bush too.

All legacies come to a close.

Here endeth the lesson.

StupidiNews!

• Kansas GOP Rep. Roger Marshall has defeated former Secretary od State Kris Kobach for the Senate primary, Marshall will face Democrat Dr. Barbara Boiller in November.
• Following up on questions by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the SEC is launching an investigation into Kodak over its pharmaceutical deal with the Trump Regime announced last week.
• The death toll in Tuesday Beirut explosion is up to 78 and climbing, security officials believe a warehouse full of thousands of tons of fertilizer caught fire and exploded on Tuesday.
• Congressional Democrats and the White House say they plan to have a deal by week's end on a COVID-19 bill to pass in the Senate by next week, but several GOP senators are not on board.
• Disney will release its live-action Mulan movie on Disney+ for $30 on September 4th as theaters try to figure out the best way to release box office movies in the COVID-19 era.