Thomas Moran’s The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The Trumpist regime is sneaking a lot of bad policy in while all of us are focusing on the things the media wants to put on TV, Trump is definitely feeding our Treasury, our people, and our Country’s gifts of nature to his cronies. Here’s some links on what the Bureau of Land Management is doing to roll back land and animal protection and to ensure every bit of nature in the country is turned into oil, gas, and a dust bowl.
Pendley, a 74-year-old former Marine who ran the MSLF from 1981 until his appointment last year at the BLM, pursued Watt’s vision with admirable tenacity and has continued to pursue it in his new office. This month, he greenlighted rampant expansion of oil and gas drilling on previously off-limits areas, including on one million acres in central California. On January 17, he announced the loosening of regulations for the public lands cattle industry, making it easier for livestock operators to violate federal environmental laws and not face consequences. He has sowed chaos at BLM by uprooting long-standing Washington D.C. staff with a forced move of the agency’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, where energy companies rule the roost. The goal, his critics say, is to bring BLM regulators into closer quarters with the oil and gas industry to be more easily captured. In response, staffers in the D.C. quarters have attempted to unionize: The National Treasury Employees Union filed a petition to represent BLM employees with the Federal Labor Relations Authority in December.
Pendley’s actions are accompanied by extremist and inflammatory rhetoric supporting lawlessness on the public lands. Pendley has praised the criminal Cliven Bundy clan, whose infamous armed standoffs against federal land regulators amounted to acts of domestic terrorism. When Bundyite militiamen pointed sniper rifles at BLM law officers in Nevada, in 2014, and took over at gunpoint the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016—in both instances announcing their willingness to kill federal law officers if need be—Pendley cheered in the pages of National Review, reiterating the Bundy family’s crackpot theory that the Constitution forbids federal ownership of land.
In an op-ed published last November in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Pendley stated it is now policy that BLM law officers will defer to self-proclaimed “constitutionalist” county sheriffs who have vowed not to enforce federal environmental laws on public lands. Pendley’s Review-Journal piece was “a dog whistle to the extremists of the anti-public-lands movement,” wrote Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, an environmental nonprofit in Idaho. That’s in part because of the belief system of the “constitutionalist” sheriffs, not mentioned in Pendley’s piece. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which Pendley has long claimed as an ally, declares on its website that “federal agencies now claiming control of land within a state should be drastically downsized and/or dismantled. County sheriffs in these states should take their rightful position and use their authority to assist in the transfer of control of the land.”
Dennis McLane, who was deputy chief of law enforcement at BLM from 1996 to 2003, explained to me how this would shape out on the ground. County sheriffs allied in the CSPOA, he said, would serve as the local vanguard for the evisceration of federal public lands regulations. “In many western counties,” McLane told me, “the sheriffs would use their newfound authority to just ignore the enforcement of federal resource laws.” In other words, it would be a free-for-all of extractive interests engaging in lawless behavior for maximum profits—the vision of James Watt and the MSLF.
The U.S. Interior Department on Thursday finalized land use plans for two Utah national monuments that President Donald Trump shrank soon after taking office, a move environmental groups said would leave cultural sites vulnerable to destruction and boost development in pristine wilderness.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proceeded with the plans despite pending litigation challenging the 2017 proclamation by Trump that slashed the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
BLM officials told reporters in a call that the land use plans for the Grand Staircase-Esclalante monument, as well as 860,000 acres (348,030 hectares) that were excluded from the monument by Trump, were necessary because the existing plan had not been updated in 20 years and that the number of visitors to the area had exploded in that time.
“Implementing these plans means that the BLM can improve visitor services and support local businesses and permitees and help them thrive, help the economy here, all while protecting this great American landscape,” Harry Barber, manager of BLM Utah’s Paria River District, said on the call.
Scenery in the Grand Tetons by Albert Bierstadt (MABI 2843) circa 1865 -1870
Nothing is literally sacred. Not only are lands being pillaged for greedy extraction profiteers but the wall threatens native burials as well as the land. I’ve seen this park and the ones in Utah as a kid.
The grandeur of the land in the American West is simply unimaginable until you stand on it and look around! Seeing these natural wonders and parts of our history is the single most humbling experience you can imagine. You just stand there breathless. And then, you see your first herd of buffalo, or your first family of mountain goats, or a mother bear and her young! Ever scaled a cliff dwelling or crawled through a Kentucky cave with just an oil lamp? Seen a geyser erupt, ventured to peer over the deepest part of a canyon cut from water? Seen water weep over a huge cliff? I have and I want that experience to be available to every one!
It is so worth keeping for generations ahead and I am so glad that the generations behind me felt the same. This goal to monetize everything is just surreal to me. From CBS:
A national monument in Arizona, home to rare species and sacred Native American burial sites, is being blown up this week as part of construction for President Trump’s border wall, Customs and Border Protection confirmed to CBS News. “Controlled blasting” inside Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument began this week without consultation from the Native American nation whose ancestral land it affects, according to the congressman whose district includes the reservation.
“There has been no consultation with the nation,” said Congressman Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who is the chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and whose district contains the reservation and shares 400 miles of border with Mexico. “This administration is basically trampling on the tribe’s history — and to put it poignantly, it’s ancestry.”
Customs and Border Protection told CBS News that the blasts are in preparation for “new border wall system construction, within the Roosevelt Reservation at Monument Mountain in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.”
Trump is desecrating a Indian burial site for his idiotic border wall.
But there is more. Here’s more form the desert areas and again, it’s big energy related. This is from the LA TImes.
In step with President Trump’s push for more energy development in California’s deserts, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday it wants to transform 22,000 acres of public land in the southern Owens Valley into one of the largest geothermal leasing sites in the state.
The agency has determined that the aquifer deep beneath the surface of the vintage Old West landscape of Rose Valley, about 120 miles north of Los Angeles, is a storehouse of enough volcanically heated water to spur $1 billion in investments and provide 117,000 homes with electricity.
Yet the decision is sure to set off a new water war in an arid part of the eastern Sierra Nevada that is sprinkled with dormant volcanoes, spiky lava beds and rare species, such as desert tortoises.
Trump team rolls back desert protections in bid to boost geothermal energy https://t.co/mZIEBMJ7m9
Conservation groups are suing the Trumpist Regime. This is especially true for California. This is from the NRDC:
Conservation groups sued the Trump administration today challenging the last step in the administration’s plan to allow oil drilling and fracking on more than 1 million acres of public lands and minerals in Central California.
Today’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, says the Bureau of Land Management violated federal law by failing to consider fracking’s potential harm to public health and recreation in the region, as well as harm to the climate and possible groundwater and air pollution. The suit also notes the potential for oil-industry-induced earthquakes.
The BLM plan would allow drilling and fracking on public lands across eight counties in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast: Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Tulare and Ventura.
“Trump’s illegal, deeply unjust fracking plan would be a disaster for Central Valley communities, as well as our climate, wildlife and water,” said Clare Lakewood, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We need to phase out fracking and oil drilling, not throw open our public lands to polluters. The future of our beautiful state and our children depends on it.”
The Trump administration also plans to allow fracking on an additional 725,500 acres across 11 counties in California’s Central Coast and Bay Area. In October conservation groups filed suit to challenge that decision.
“BLM’s ill-considered plan to fling wide the door to fracking on public lands is yet another assault on California’s efforts to protect its environment and move away from dirty fossil fuels,” said Ann Alexander, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Gov. Newsom just announced curbs on oil drilling, but BLM is charging full speed ahead with it. California is trying to find a way to rationally address its limited water supply, and now BLM is greenlighting activities that can contaminate it with toxic chemicals. This federal war on California really needs to stop.” In an expert blog, Alexander further explains the implications of this rash move by the administration.
Under Trump’s plan, theadministration predicts the federal deficit would shrink to $966 billion next fiscal year and to $261 billion by 2030.That gap between government spending and revenue is forecast to exceed $1 trillion this year.
As with his previous budget proposals, Trump is once again seeking deep and unrealistic cuts to most federal agency budgets, according to the budget summary tables. The cuts are unlikely to be embraced by Congress.
For example, the administration is seeking an 8 percent cut to USDA’s budget over current funding levels. Trump’s plan would cut the Commerce Department by 37 percent, the Education Department by 8 percent, the Energy Department by 8 percent, the Department of Housing and Urban Development by 15 percent, and the Department of Health and Human Services by 9 percent.
The administration is also seeking a 13 percent cut to the Interior Department, a 2 percent cut to the Justice Department, an 11 percent cut to the Labor Department, a nearly 21 percent cut to the State Department and a 13 percent cut to the Department of Transportation. The EPA’s budget would see a nearly 27 percent chop, the Army Corps of Engineers would see a 22 percent reduction and the Small Business Administration would see an 11 percent decrease.
On immigration, health care, infrastructure and the deficit, the final budget pitch of Trump’s first term will look much different from the campaign platform he offered four years ago.
The president’s 2015 promise to protect Medicaid from cuts has been repeatedly ignored, as he has sought to slash some $800 billion over a decade from the health program for low-income Americans. The latest evidence of this came on Saturday, when he wrote on Twitter that the budget proposal “will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare.” He made no mention of protecting Medicaid, even though he had vowed to guard it during his first presidential campaign.
He is also seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act through the courts despite pledging to safeguard one of its key tenets: insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions.
Seniors arise! Trump is comin' after your Social Security and your Medicare. https://t.co/lcLyf6GPS8
While it is important to focus on things that remove this abomination from the White House. We cannot ignore what is being pushed through by the white nationalist, radical rightist republican party. Please watch for these actions and write and call your congress critters as required!
Sen. Susan Collins on Friday defended her decision to vote to acquit President Trump during his Senate impeachment trial this week, but she declined to respond to questions later in the day about the sudden ouster of two key impeachment witnesses who testified against the president.
In her first public appearance in Maine since the trial ended Wednesday, Collins spoke at a chiefs of police conference in South Portland before answering questions from the media in which she condemned the notion of retribution against witnesses who came forward and defended her voting record.
By the end of the day, the Trump administration had removed Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, both of whom worked for the National Security Council in the White House. Later Friday, European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland announced that he was being recalled to Washington. Sondland and Alexander Vindman testified during the House impeachment hearings against Trump.
“I think it’s important to understand that when you’re in an impeachment trial, you consider the evidence that is before you,” Collins, a Republican, said after an event in South Portland. “You don’t try to make predictions. You consider the evidence that’s before you. In this case, the evidence did not meet the high bar that’s established by the Constitution for immediate removal of the president from office. So that was the basis for my decision.”
She then added: “I obviously am not in favor of any kind of retribution against anyone who came forward with evidence.”
Poor Susan. How was she supposed to know that Trump would act like Trump? Read more at the Portland Press Herald link above.
Trump’s push to remove Sondland and Vindman — and to exact punishment on other figures involved in the nearly five-month impeachment process — underscored how his fixation with settling scores is outweighing any effort to move on to less divisive issues in the wake of his acquittal.
Vindman’s twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, was also removed from his job at the National Security Council, where he worked as a lawyer, and was escorted off the grounds Friday afternoon.
The firings of Sondland and Alexander Vindman amounted to a post-impeachment bloodletting of key figures who complied with congressional subpoenas and testified in a process that Trump sought to delegitimize as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”
“I’m not happy with him,” Trump said earlier Friday when asked about Vindman’s future. “You think I’m supposed to be happy with him? I’m not.”
There was little resistance from within the Republican Party to the idea of punishing Vindman, a Purple Heart recipient and Ukraine expert, after The Washington Post reported Thursday night that he could soon be removed from his White House job. Some GOP lawmakers egged the president on — a sign of how much Trump has asserted his influence on the party.
And get this: Trump wants to fire the inspector general who accepted the whistleblower complaint about the Ukraine call along with purging the NSC.
The president and his advisers have also discussed removing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, though no final decision has been made, officials said. Trump has expressed frustration that Atkinson allowed a whistleblower report documenting Trump’s alleged misconduct toward Ukraine to be transmitted to Congress.
Some advisers have also counseled the president to remove Victoria Coates, the deputy national security adviser, who has told others in the White House that she fears her job is in jeopardy.
Trump has regularly asked aides to continue slashing the size of the NSC, and national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien has said he plans to do so, telling NPR in an interview last month that the policy staff, which he put at about 180 people when he took over in September, was bloated.
By the end of February, O’Brien said, he hoped to have cut it by a third. A senior administration official said there will be widespread departures at the NSC in the next week.
President Donald Trump said Friday that his impeachment should be invalidated, and he gave an ominous warning when asked how he’ll pay back those responsible, saying, “You’ll see.”
“Should they expunge the impeachment in the House? They should because it was a hoax,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing on Marine One.
When asked about his press secretary’s comments that the president was suggesting in his remarks Thursday on impeachment that his Democratic political opponents “should be held accountable,” Trump said, “Well, you’ll see. I mean, we’ll see what happens.”
Trump showed little sign of wanting to mend fences with the Democrats, saying they suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome” and that there is “a lot of evil on that side.” When asked how he was going to unify the country following his divisive impeachment, Trump said he would do it by “great success.”
Their firings and forced departures from their jobs are, by any definition, retaliation against witnesses in the case against the president. That’s a crime. But of course, that crime will never be enforced because the U.S. government agency responsible for enforcing such laws, the Department of Justice, has been taken over by an attorney general who has perjured himself before Congress, violated his oath and placed the protection of the president ahead of the interests of the American people to whom he owes his highest duty. This week, just after the Senate’s “total acquittal,” Barr issued a memo saying that no further investigations into any presidential or vice-presidential candidate or his staff could be issued without his express approval.
Between Barr and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump has been given free rein to be his worst self. And Trump never disappoints those who expect the worst of him. In the past few days he used a prayer breakfast to attack his enemies and question their faith. He awarded a racist the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the middle of a rambling, vapid State of the Union that had more in common with a television game show than with anything the Capitol building had ever seen before him. He held a press event to celebrate the Senate vote that was by turns vituperative against his opponents and so deranged that you expected the men with the butterfly nets to burst into the East Room of the White House and escort Trump to a quiet place where there were no sharp objects.
As the week drew to a close, a chilling realization settled in on the nation. Our most corrupt, unfit, demented and malevolent president has been given more power than any other human being in our history. He has been told he is above the law, incapable of committing a crime. He has been told that Article II of the Constitution grants him unlimited powers. He has been told he does not have submit to the oversight of the Congress.
He is, in other words, free to be himself. And we all know who that is—except perhaps Senator Susan Collins and the other Senate suckers who expected that somehow our felon-in-chief had learned a lesson from this impeachment ordeal. Trump is a man who thinks the law is for little people, that the rich can buy their way out of any legal predicament. He thinks character and courage and duty, the traits displayed by Yovanovitch and the Vindmans, are for suckers.
For more than 200 years, our republic has endured, not only because of the wisdom of our Founders and the brilliance of our Constitution, but because of the generations of patriotic Americans who have had the courage to risk their lives to defend it.
But, tragically, the American people have watched President Trump and Republicans in Congress dismantle the Constitution that we cherish.
The House impeachment managers, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), presented to the Senate and the public an incontrovertible truth that the president himself has admitted: President Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign power to help him cheat in an American election. And when he was caught, the president launched an unprecedented coverup to block Congress from holding him accountable. The president’s actions undermined our national security, jeopardized the integrity of our elections and violated the Constitution.
The Democrats in the Senate under the leadership of Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) patriotically voted unanimously to honor the oath to support and defend the Constitution. They, along with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), deserve our gratitude for their moral courage.
The president’s lawyers all but concede his misconduct. Their argument was only that Congress and the American people have no right to stop him from using his power to cheat in our elections. With their vote, Senate Republicans embraced this darkest vision of power: that if the president believes his reelection is good for the country, he can then use any means necessary to win, with no accountability or consequences.
“When Trump won, it changed the whole ballgame for me,” McGinty told The Washington Post. “I thought to myself, ‘This was supposed to be a joke. What’s wrong with these people?’ ”
In the three years since then, the once-quiet political observer has transformed into the best-known Trump protester in The Villages, a sprawling, meticulously planned and maintained retirement community that lies about 45 miles northwest of Orlando. McGinty’s daily vigil with signs blasting the president as a “SEXUAL PREDATOR” (among other things) has drawn ire in the Trump-loving Florida town he has called home since 2016. It has also brought viral fame.
For his one-man protest against the president, McGinty has been berated as a baby killer and a “dumb a–,” decried in letters to the editor of a local news site and hit with an anonymous, handwritten threat — a sign that even a town that is described as Disney World for retirees and markets itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown” is not immune to the divisiveness of this political era.
“There was always a divide, but we coexisted,” said Chris Stanley, president of The Villages Democratic Club. “There would be some good-natured back and forth, but your neighbors were your friends. You’d have dinner with the Republicans because it wasn’t a big deal. … These days, the division in the country shows up best in The Villages because now the Republicans, they won’t golf with you anymore, or you don’t want to golf with them.” [….]
These days, McGinty devotes about two hours a day to protesting, crashing rallies planned by the Villagers for Trump group and parking his golf cart in well-trafficked areas where people are most likely to see his signs: “TRUMP BIGOT AND RACIST,” “TRUMP IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR” and “TRUMP COMPULSIVE LIAR.” He said he rotates between about 30 posters carrying various anti-Trump sentiments. He sits in his cart reading while he puts them on display, enjoying the confrontations that follow.
Ed McGinty is the man in the golf cart. He destroyed this Trumptwat with facts.
Marsha Hill said “That’s blasphemy,” lol @Marlyn1313 has since deleted the video after unsuccessfully trying to get BingoBongo’s attention and has locked her account.
The off route Krewes of Mardi Gras have started rolling. They’re the only parades I really attend these days. Krewe de Boheme’s second parade will take the Marigny/French Quarter route tonight and Krewe du Vieux rolls tomorrow night where I will nest at the Spanktuary with feast, libation, and friends. I need a break from the rest of the country right now and this is exactly what Dr Kat ordered. Nothing beats a downtown krewe!
In a rant on MSNBC that went viral on Tuesday evening, the longtime Democratic strategist vented his concerns about the party’s prospects for beating Donald Trump, taking particular aim at the party’s leftward lurch.
“Eighteen percent of the population controls 52 senate seats,” Carville said. “We’ve got to be a majoritarian party. The urban core is not gonna get it done. What we need is power! Do you understand? That’s what this is about.”
His diatribe took place against the backdrop of an Iowa caucus that had fallen into chaos and amid a rancorous ongoing debate among Democrats over the party’s direction. He took particular aim at Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom he fears could lead the party to defeat in November.
Carville’s lament distills a concern among the Democratic Party’s establishment: Will ideological purity and playing to the base cost the Democrats victory in November? For Carville at least, “We have one moral imperative and that’s to beat Donald Trump.” That his comments went viral speaks to the sense of urgency among Democrats, even as it only fuels the debate over the direction of the party.
I still don’t see what any one sees in Bernie Sanders other than he’s a cranky old man of few accomplishments and a hell a lot of angry words mostly displaying the politics and economic stuff of the wobblies. He’s a walk to the past. And, he’s not a Democrat!
James Carville
We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.
For fuck’s sake, we’ve got Trump at Davos talking about cutting Medicare and no one in the party has the sense to plaster a picture of him up there sucking up to the global elites, talking about cutting taxes for them while he’s talking about cutting Medicare back home. Jesus, this is so obvious and so easy and I don’t see any of the candidates taking advantage of it.
The Republicans have destroyed their party and turned it into a personality cult, but if anyone thinks they can’t win, they’re out of their damn minds.
Sean Illing
I wouldn’t endorse everything every Democrat is doing or saying, but are they really destroying the party? What does that even mean?
James Carville
Look, Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat. He’s never been a Democrat. He’s an ideologue. And I’ve been clear about this: If Bernie is the nominee, I’ll vote for him. No question. I’ll take an ideological fanatic over a career criminal any day. But he’s not a Democrat.
Sean Illing
You know people are going to read this and say, “Carville backed Clinton in 2016. So did the Democratic establishment. They blew it in 2016. Why should I care what any of them think now?”
James Carville
I don’t give a shit. People will say anything. And first of all, Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million. And secondly, the Russians put Jill Stein in front of Clinton’s campaign to depress votes. And thirdly, the New York Times a week before an election, assured its readers that the Russians were not even trying to help Trump. And then they wrote 15,000 stories about Hillary’s emails.
But back to Sanders — what I’m saying is the Democratic Party isn’t Bernie Sanders, whatever you think about Sanders.
Sean Illing
A lot of threads there. First, a lot of people don’t trust the Democratic Party, don’t believe in the party, for reasons you’ve already mentioned, and so they just don’t care about that. They want change. And I guess the other thing I’d say is, 2016 scrambled our understanding of what’s possible in American politics.
Are we really sure Sanders can’t win?
James Carville
Who the hell knows? But here’s what I do know: Sanders might get 280 electoral votes and win the presidency and maybe we keep the House. But there’s no chance in hell we’ll ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public. Eighteen percent of the country elects more than half of our senators. That’s the deal, fair or not.
So long as McConnell runs the Senate, it’s game over. There’s no chance we’ll change the courts and nothing will happen, and he’ll just be sitting up there screaming in the microphone about the revolution.
The purpose of a political party is to acquire power. Alright? Without power, nothing matters.
I’ve been saying the same damn things but not so colorfully. So, why is the media chasing Buttigieg and Bernie while writing off Amy and Elizabeth and kind’ve ignoring the disappearing act that is Biden? This is a disgusting bit from Boston CBS.
Hoosier daddy now? In the latest exclusive WBZ/Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll, Pete Buttigieg continues his remarkable post-Iowa surge.
Bernie Sanders is holding steady at 24 percent, but Buttigieg is up four points over last night with 23 percent, a virtual tie in a survey with a margin of error of 4.4 percent.
Elizabeth Warren takes over third place with 13 percent, and Joe Biden slips to fourth with 11 percent.
Mayor Pete’s gains don’t seem to be coming at the expense of Sanders, whose numbers haven’t changed much all week. Instead, Buttigieg seems to be attracting registered Democrats. And his biggest gains appear to be raided from key backers of Warren and Biden.
Among women, Warren is down four points from Wednesday night and Buttigieg is up six.
And among voters over 65, a core source of Biden backers, Buttigieg has doubled his support overnight, a 16 point jump.
Biden spent Thursday gathered with his top advisers at his home in Wilmington, Del., seeking a reset and perhaps a last-ditch effort to save his candidacy, beginning with a debate Friday night. He held no public events.
Following dismal results in the Iowa caucuses that have rattled many in his orbit, his campaign is now simultaneously trying to lower expectations here — with some suggesting they would consider a finish as low as third place a victory — while also bracing for a second straight difficult Election Day.
In one troublesome sign for the financially strapped campaign, it canceled nearly $150,000 in television ads in South Carolina, which votes Feb. 29, and moved the spending to Nevada, whose Feb. 22 contest follows New Hampshire’s. The move seemed to acknowledge that Biden’s campaign cannot sustain a continued run of bad news.
“From a Biden perspective, there’s going to be a course correction in all three states before Super Tuesday,” said Dick Harpootlian, a South Carolina state senator who is in regular contact with Biden’s campaign. “He’s got to have sharper elbows.”
He suggested that those inside the campaign realized the gravity of the moment and that Biden had to better “explain the difference with his opponents.”
“History may write that the best thing that ever happened to Joe Biden was getting gut-punched in Iowa,” he added. “It woke him up, it woke his campaign up and his supporters up. They were complacent. . . . You’ve got to talk about the other guy.”
But, at least on Thursday, it was the other guy talking about Biden.
Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) finished at the top in Iowa, continued his media blitz, appearing on shows from ABC’s “The View” to the gossip site TMZ, where he argued that he — not Biden — was the most electable Democratic candidate.
I did hear Biden go after both of them yesterday the few times I turned the TV on to see if the hapless Democratic Party of Iowa had finished trying to unclusterfuck the caucus clusterfuck that has now given BernieBros the chance to attack the rest of the world because every one they see as establishment is against them. Don’t try mentioning that all this changes were made to appease the Berntrocity of 2016. We’re undoubtedly going to get a lot of whining right up to November. From the Hill’s Jonathan Easley: “Iowa debacle deepens division between Sanders, national party”
The vote-counting debacle around the Iowa caucuses has furthered distrust and hardened anger between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the national Democratic Party.
There is deep frustration among Sanders’s supporters and allies over the historic meltdown of the first-in-the-nation caucuses.
The early reported results found former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg with a small lead over Sanders — a dynamic that has been reflected in the news media for several days.
The race is too close to call, but the late results trickling in appeared to be breaking in Sanders’s direction and there’s still a chance he could win both the popular vote and a plurality of delegates.
Sanders’s allies believe he was deprived of valuable momentum he should have had coming out of Iowa.
And progressives are livid, viewing the fiasco as endemic of a party that’s been run by establishment figures whose unchecked power has bred incompetence and laziness.
Adding to the frustration is the fact that a handful of former Hillary Clinton aides are involved with the company that developed the failed app being blamed for the reporting irregularities that led to the slow and confusing release of results.
At some point, they need to stop dragging Hillary and any one that worked for her around. Joan Walsh discusses “The Erasure of Elizabeth Warren Continues” at The Nation. I’m still waiting for the moment every one realizes that she’s just about the 5th candidate in line for that right after Kamala, Corey, Julio, Amy, and Kristen. Lost in the media narrative is that she beat Biden and Amy was right there on his tail.
Coming out of the disastrous Iowa caucuses this week, media coverage of the Democratic presidential race turned back the clock almost a year: Suddenly everyone was again focused on “the B-Boys,” as Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan lamented last March: Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden, with a fourth killer B, Mike Bloomberg, replacing the departed Beto O’Rourke. Since Monday night, there’s been breathless coverage of the race between Sanders and Buttigieg to see who, finally, comes out on top in Iowa, plus endless hand-wringing over Biden’s disastrous fourth-place showing, and whether that opens the door to the billionaire Bloomberg’s buying the nomination.
Iowa conventional wisdom says there are only “three tickets out” of the caucuses, and yet coverage has curiously overlooked the woman who got one of them: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. From the moment cable networks switched from her caucus night rally speech to Biden’s, Warren has been virtually erased. As the fight for first place continued into Thursday, I have watched cable news panels mention Warren only in passing, if at all (MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell had been one exception, featuring an interview with Warren Wednesday night, and then on Thursday night she was hosted by Chris Hayes).
This despite the fact that Warren clearly beat the Democratic front-runner, Biden, and outperformed her numbers in the final Des Moines Register poll (spiked because of one complaint—one—from a Buttigieg supporter who said she wasn’t asked about him by a pollster), which had Warren in second at 18 percent; with 97 percent of the results in, she finished at 20 percent, in third, with Sanders and Buttigieg effectively tied (though Sanders on Thursday declared victory, and he may ultimately be right). Despite being derided as a New England progressive who might not connect with heavily rural and suburban Iowa, she beat two rivals who were said to have the inside track with those voters—Biden and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who came in at a disappointing fifth place.
“From the beginning, all of the women in the race—Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Klobuchar, Warren—have known they were facing erasure,” says former Iowa Democratic Party chair Sue Dvorsky, who switched her support from Harris to Warren after Harris left the race in December. “Elizabeth has known she has to just stay in there and keep fighting and just not quit.”
But since getting one of the “three tickets out” hasn’t earned her much of a bump, Warren will have a harder road ahead in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and the Super Tuesday states.
Finishing a distant fifth, Klobuchar did herself a big favor by jumping out on Monday night and claiming some sort of victory, in a speech networks took live and in full, in an absence of other clear news at that point. Biden, Warren and Sanders got less time; Buttigieg, who appeared last and claimed a victory he hadn’t been granted, actually got more.
Volunteers in the sleety rain hours before tonight’s big debate at St. Anselm College. pic.twitter.com/fEmGkykJVy
NEW: @realdonaldtrump’s company charges Trump’s own Secret Service agents while they protect him — at rates as high as $650/night for a room and $17,000/month for a cottage. Taxpayers pay. https://t.co/JIOHe66Hjx
I had almost no sleep last night, and I’m not thinking that clearly. Trump has been “acquitted” by the GOP Senate, and he is now free to threaten his political opponents and sic his cult followers on them, bribe people for votes, and threaten foreign countries into helping his reelection campaign. He is also suffering from obvious dementia and yet he’s in charge the U.S. military and the nuclear codes. We are in big trouble as a country.
Here’s the latest:
Capitol Police officers are now ordering reporters farther away from the scene — but not answering questions about whether there is a threat to the general public or giving any other reason.
Trump spoke at the the “national prayer breakfast” this morning, and he sounded like a lunatic. He began by holding up newspaper headlines about his “acquittal.” His speech was slow and halting as he issued thinly veiled threats to Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney.
The audience stood clapped in unison at the beginning like Kim Jong Un’s audiences. It was frightening.
One immediate consequence of Trump's impeachment acquittal: The entirely debunked claim that there's any evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens in Ukraine goes on the offensive. The information war just leaped a few circles of Dante's hell https://t.co/tmKf0s77JH@JeanineSantucci
The U.S. Treasury Department has complied with Republican Senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely-held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.
For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate.
Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Finance Committee, Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the US government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from cabinet departments and agencies, including the Department of State, the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Archives, and the Secret Service.
Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement–highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.
The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic Senator on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican Senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.
Where does this malignant conspiracy theory come from in the first place? Maybe Paul Manafort. Probably 4chan. Regardless, it has since stuck in the president’s brain like a Ceti eel placed by a wrathful Khan, burrowing deeper until it consumes whatever remains of rational thought. The story, as Trump recently posited on a marathon call-in to Fox and Friends, goes something like this:
“A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting. They have the server, right? From the DNC, Democratic National Committee. The FBI went in, and they told them, ‘Get out of here, we’re not giving it to you.’ They gave the server to CrowdStrike, or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
The conspiracy appears to have metastasized.
A light edit for coherence: Trump believes—and by all indications this is true belief, not posturing—that after the Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016, the DNC gave a physical server to Ukrainian cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and refused to let the FBI see the evidence. Trump further argues that the server in question now physically resides in Ukraine. Inside that server, Trump suggests, one would find evidence, gleaming like a Pulp Fiction briefcase, that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the DNC in 2016….
Almost every aspect of this is demonstrably wrong. CrowdStrike is not a Ukrainian company. Its cofounder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, was born in Russia and has lived in the US since his teenage years. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California, and went public this summer. As is standard in this sort of incident response, CrowdStrike never took physical possession of any DNC server. Its analysts instead captured an “image” of the hard drives and memories of affected machines, exact replicas that it could examine for signs of malfeasance. It handed all of that forensic evidence over to the FBI, which Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney general Adam Hickey confirmed just last month. And if the logical contortions required to view CrowdStrike as somehow partisan in all of this aren’t already enough, know that the company counts the Republican National Congressional Committee among its clients.
So: Not Ukrainian. No physical server. Not only was the FBI directly involved, but the DOJ indicted the Russian hackers responsible and laid out in exquisite detail how they did it—and how CrowdStrike fought them off. You can read the indictment for yourself here. Start on page 10; CrowdStrike is Company 1.
But it doesn’t matter what the truth is anymore. Trump’s idiotic propaganda is working.
Trump is going to give another “speech” at the White House soon, so he can gloat about his “great victory” over the Democrats and threaten retaliation against anyone who dares to cross him.
Pelosi said Trump "appeared sedated" at the SOTU. She knows what's going on. MSM- Ask him a/b his sedated appearance & his illicit drug combo at today's revenge speech. Guess- Levodopa, Anti-depressant, Memantine & maybe a Benzo. The coverup of his brain shutting down & continues
President Trump used his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday to lash out at House Democrats responsible for his impeachment and to praise Senate Republicans who voted to acquit him.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who was on the dais during Trump’s remarks at the annual bipartisan, multifaith event, chastised the president at a later news conference, calling his remarks “just so inappropriate.” She said he was “without class” for having criticized Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), the only Republican to vote for conviction.
Pelosi’s comments came shortly before Trump was scheduled to deliver more formal remarks from the White House about his acquittal on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in a historic Senate trial.
.@SpeakerPelosi: "I tore up a manifesto of mistruths…It was necessary to get the attention of the American people, to say this is not true…And I don't need any lessons from anybody, especially the president of the United States, about dignity." pic.twitter.com/N4PLK1wGyG
At her weekly news conference, Pelosi defended her decision to rip up Trump’s State of the Union address and told reporters she feels “liberated” in the wake of the speech.
“I feel very liberated,” Pelosi said. “I feel that I have extended every possible courtesy. I’ve shown every level of respect. I say to my members all the time, there is no such thing as an eternal animosity.”
She described her decision to tear up the speech as “a dignified act” and took aim at Trump on a personal level, noting that the president “looked to me like he was a little sedated” during the speech.
And she questioned Trump’s decision to grant the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.
“When he started talking about someone with cancer, we thought he was going to talk about John Lewis, a hero in our country,” Pelosi said, referring to the Georgia congressman and civil rights icon, who revealed in December that he has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
Pelosi also criticized Trump’s choice of venue for granting the medal to Limbaugh. “Do it in your own office! We don’t come in your office and do congressional business,” she said.
Of Trump’s National Prayer Breakfast remarks, Pelosi added that the president is “talking about things that he knows little about — faith and prayer.”
“I don’t know if the president understands about prayer or people who do pray. … I pray hard for him because he’s so off the track of our Constitution, our values, our country,” she said.
Concluding her news conference, she added: “He has shredded the truth in his speech. He’s shredding the Constitution in his conduct. I shredded his ‘state of his mind’ address.”
Trump is speaking now. I feel sick. I know this isn’t much of a post, but it’s all I can muster today. I’m grateful for this blog and for all you Sky Dancers. I don’t know how I would manage without you.
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Rainy Day, Columbus Avenue, Boston, by Frederick Child Hassam
Good Morning!!
Can we please stop letting Iowa go first now?
I’ve said it before, we don’t need an actual hack or intrusion to have chaos, we just need to doubt the results: Results for Iowa caucuses delayed as state Democratic Party finds 'inconsistencies' @NBCNews @MSNBC https://t.co/pQh7GCE2fG
Good morning. The big loser of the Iowa Caucus is Iowa. Enough. We need hand-marked paper ballots that can be audited for primaries and in general elections. Plus it’s time to end the dominance of predominantly white states in deciding which candidates are viable.
The “first-in-the-nation” Iowa caucuses died Monday night after a protracted battle with advanced-stage omnishambles.
DeMoines Skyline by Buffalo Bonker
Or so we can hope. Iowa’s eccentric, endearing — and wildly anti-democratic — nominating contest has always been an indefensible institution. There is no reason why the most politically-engaged and/or time-rich citizens of America’s 31st most populous state should have the power to veto presidential candidates before anyone else in the country has a say. And yet, few of Iowa’s bitterest critics ever dreamed it would subject the country to something like this.
As of this writing, we are one hour into Tuesday morning and only a small fraction of Iowa precincts have reported their results. Officials currently say that they hope to have the numbers by “some time Tuesday.” The ostensible reasons for this are twofold. 1) This year, for the first time ever, the Iowa Democratic Party was required to report three distinct sets of results — the vote tally on “first alignment,” the vote tally on “final alignment” (when backers of candidates who lack 15% support redistribute their votes to higher-polling candidates), and the final delegate tally. In the past, the party was only on the hook for that last metric, which is much easier to tabulate. 2) To ease the burden of logging all this information from more than 1,600 precincts, the party developed an app for reporting results — which many precinct chairs could not figure out how to use. Thus, they began calling in the results on a telephone hotline. Much waiting on hold ensued.
Between the coin flipping, the picking of names out of hats, the gamesmanship to deny certain candidates votes, the hurdles for people who work at night and have children and the demographics, it is tough to really make a case for Iowa tonight.
Guess who pushed for the changes in the vote counting and reporting?
Agreed. Many of us urged the @DNC to no longer have caucuses because they’re thoroughly undemocratic; that IA shouldn’t be first as it’s not representative of this elections demographics. It was Bernie Sanders who pushed the DNC for changes that lead to this #IowaCaucusDisasterhttps://t.co/q4Ip8MIi7Ppic.twitter.com/kvkJiirYLO
No results had been reported by midnight Eastern, and two campaigns told POLITICO that after a conference call with the Iowa Democratic Party, they didn’t expect any returns until Tuesday morning at the earliest.
Candidates stepped into the void. Pete Buttigieg went first by claiming victory — misleadingly, in the view of Bernie Sanders, whose campaign responded by releasing unofficial figures showing his strength. Amy Klobuchar also joined in by citing unverified results she said demonstrated a robust performance.
Edward Hopper cityscape
The biggest “winner” might have been Joe Biden. According to the Iowa entrance poll, he was hovering close to the viability threshold of 15 percent statewide. But the questions surrounding the vote-counting served to obscure a potentially poor performance. The former vice president, facing potentially ugly headlines going into New Hampshire and beyond, couldn’t get out of Iowa fast enough.
“We’re going to walk out of here with our share of delegates,” Biden declared to a packed room on the Drake University campus. “It’s on to New Hampshire!”
Conversely, it might have delivered a blow to Sanders and Buttigieg, who appeared on track to do well in the state. Whether the victor turns out to be Sanders or Buttigieg or someone else, that candidate was denied the chance to give an election night victory speech to a nationwide audience — a springboard heading into New Hampshire.
Read more at Politico.
The New York Times:
The app that the Iowa Democratic Party commissioned to tabulate and report results from the caucuses on Monday was not properly tested at a statewide scale, said people who were briefed on the app by the state party.
It was quickly put together in just the past two months, said the people, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Life in the Suburbs, by Leonard Koscianski
And the party decided to use the app only after another proposal for reporting votes — which entailed having caucus participants call in their votes over the phone — was abandoned, on the advice of Democratic National Committee officials, according to David Jefferson, a board member of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization.
The Des Moines Register spiked its poll Saturday night, but by the next day it seemed most reporters here had seen the numbers — or something purporting to be the numbers.
Here’s what happened: As the Des Moines Register readied a cover story and CNN prepped for an hourlong special about the time-honored poll, Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained that his name hadn’t been offered to some poll recipients. The pollster, Ann Selzer, quickly discovered the glitch in a Florida call center that triggered the error. It seemed likely to be just a minor error — but everyone involved cares about their reputation for trustworthiness, and they quickly decided to pull the poll rather than publish with doubts.
But the news organizations had already been preparing to publish the numbers, and a version of them began to circulate almost instantly. I won’t print those numbers: I haven’t been able to confirm that the numbers I’ve seen are the already-questionable official ones.
And yet, most veterans of coverage here trust Selzer’s surveys. So many acknowledged to me last night that they’d quietly taken the unreleased and possibly wrong numbers into account.
“Nobody was talking about Elizabeth Warren and now everybody thinks she has a shot because of those numbers,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive political consultant who supports Warren. (It’s not the only reason, I should note: Other polls this week also showed Warren in a strong position, as did the last published Selzer poll in January.)
Read more at the link.
I feel like turnout being rather low in Iowa is a theme of underrated importance.
In trying to build a forecast model of the Democratic primaries, we literally had to think about the entire process from start (Iowa) to finish (the Virgin Islands on June 6). Actually, we had to do more than that. Since the nomination process is sequential — states vote one at a time rather than all at once — we had to determine, empirically, how much the results of one state can affect the rest.
By Ron Francis
The answer in the case of Iowa is that it matters a lot. Despite its demographic non-representativeness, and the quirks of the caucuses process, the amount of media coverage the state gets makes it far more valuable a prize than you’d assume from the fact that it only accounts for 41 of the Democrats’ 3,979 pledged delegates.
More specifically, we estimate — based on testing how much the results in various states have historically changed the candidates’ position in national polls — that Iowa was the second most-important date on the calendar this year, trailing only Super Tuesday. It was worth the equivalent of almost 800 delegates, about 20 times its actual number.
Everything was a little weird in Iowa this year, however. And there were already some signs that the Iowa bounce — which essentially results from all the favorable media coverage that winning candidates get — might be smaller than normal….
But we weren’t prepared for what actually happened, which is that — as I’m writing this at 3:15 a.m. on Tuesday — the Iowa Democratic Party literally hasn’t released any results from its caucuses. I’m not going to predict what those numbers will eventually be, although early indications are that Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and perhaps Elizabeth Warren had good results. The point is that the lead story around the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses is now — and will forever be — the colossal shitshow around the failure to release results in a timely fashion.
Last April, congressional Democrats subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for its records on Trump, his family members and his businesses. The Trump family sued to block the bank from complying; after two federal courts ruled against the Trumps, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, with oral arguments expected in the spring. State prosecutors, meanwhile, are investigating the bank’s ties with Trump, too. The F.B.I. has been conducting its own wide-ranging investigation of Deutsche Bank, and people connected to the bank told me they have been interviewed by special agents about aspects of the Trump relationship.
If they ever become public, the bank’s Trump records could serve as a Rosetta Stone to decode the president’s finances. Executives told me that the bank has, or at one point had, portions of Trump’s personal federal income tax returns going back to around 2011. (Deutsche Bank lawyers told a federal court last year that the bank does not have those returns; it is unclear what happened to them. The Trump Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The bank has documents detailing the finances and operations of his businesses. And it has records about internal deliberations over whether and how to do business with Trump — a paper trail that most likely reflects some bank employees’ concerns about potentially suspicious transactions that they detected in the family’s accounts.
One reason all these files could be so illuminating is that the bank’s relationship with Trump extended well beyond making simple loans. Deutsche Bank managed tens of millions of dollars of Trump’s personal assets. The bank also furnished him with other services that have not previously been reported: providing sophisticated financial instruments that shielded him from risks and outside scrutiny, and making introductions to wealthy Russians who were interested in investing in Western real estate. If Trump cheated on his taxes, Deutsche Bank would probably know. If his net worth is measured in millions, not billions, Deutsche Bank would probably know. If he secretly got money from the Kremlin, Deutsche Bank would probably know.
Also, Trump will give his fake state of the union address tonight, and I won’t be watching. What are you thinking and reading today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Almost every aspect of this is demonstrably wrong. CrowdStrike is not a Ukrainian company. Its cofounder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, was born in Russia and has lived in the US since his teenage years. The company is based in Sunnyvale, California, and went public this summer. As is standard in this sort of incident response, CrowdStrike never took physical possession of any DNC server. Its analysts instead captured an “image” of the hard drives and memories of affected machines, exact replicas that it could examine for signs of malfeasance. It handed all of that forensic evidence over to the FBI, which Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney general Adam Hickey confirmed just last month. And if the logical contortions required to view CrowdStrike as somehow partisan in all of this aren’t already enough, know that the company counts the Republican National Congressional Committee among its clients.
She described her decision to tear up the speech as “a dignified act” and took aim at Trump on a personal level, noting that the president “looked to me like he was a little sedated” during the speech.
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