Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

Election Interference:  The midterm elections aren’t over yet, two more House seats went blue yesterday, a few more still remain up in the air, and one, Republican Mia Love’s Utah seat may be joining the Florida and Georgia races in the courts.  If Mia Love’s name seems familiar it might be because Trump slammed her, the sole female Black Congresswoman, attributing her “loss” to her failure to align herself with him during her campaign.  Her opponent’s lead is shrinking so, to bolster her chances of overtaking him, Love has gone to court to challenge some signatures; she might not be a great fan of Trump’s but she is certainly taking a page from his playbook.  And Trump really is doubling down on his strategy of instilling doubt in the whole US election process.  Yesterday during a White House interview with the Daily Caller he again claimed rampant voter fraud, well at least fraud by Democrats, this time saying “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”   Wow, I guess it’s time to ditch those extra hats and Groucho Marx disguises, he’s on to us.  He also went on to claim that “If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID. They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.” I haven’t bought  box of cereal in a while so I won’t pretend to be an expert but last time I checked, if you were crazy enough you could purchase Cocoa Puffs without a license and it’s certainly hard to believe that anyone wouldn’t think that Trump wasn’t sufficiently cuckoo. His insanity aside, the first round of Florida recount results are due in today, assuming that Palm Beach County manages to meet the deadline.  The county’s antiquated machines overheated, requiring officials to start their counting process all over again.  Though the Florida results remain up in the air, Governor Scott has already surfaced in Washington where he appeared in a freshman training picture, one that may or may not become a collector’s item depending on the outcome of the manual count that is likely to be required following the finalization of the mechanical count.  Georgia’s election is still up in the air as well but may be approaching finality. Last night in a split decision a US District court judge sided with Stacy Abrams’ campaign, ordering that election results could not be certified without confirming each county’s vote tally includes absentee ballots on which the voter’s date of birth is missing or incorrect but ruled against Abrams on two other points.  He will not require counties to accept absentee ballots with incorrect addresses or provisional ballots cast by people who tried to vote in the wrong county.  Despite all of Trump’s ginned up claims about fraud and frustration over how long it is taking for results to be finalized, it’s worth remembering that close elections frequently do take a while to resolve.  It took eight months to finalize the results of former Minnesota Senator Al Franken’s first very close election victory.   

Mueller Time:  No new indictments yet though expectations remain high that more are imminent assuming of course that Acting Attorney General Whitaker doesn’t get in his way.  As to Whitaker, yesterday the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel released a 20 page memo defending the legality of his questionable appointment.  That they ruled in favor of Trump’s decision isn’t all that surprising, however, it’s still not clear that their argument will hold up in court in part because they based part of their conclusion on one 1800s era precedent.  Shortly after the memo was released Senators Flake and Coons called for a vote on their Mueller protection legislation, legislation that Lindsey Graham still says that he supports.  To no one’s surprise, Majority Leader McConnell refused to bring the legislation to the floor of the Senate so no vote took place. Lame duck Flake then announced plans to bring the legislation to the floor everyday going forward and more significantly he also said that he will not vote to confirm any of Trump’s judicial nominees on the Senate floor or advance them in the Senate Judiciary Committee if the legislation does not receive a Senate floor vote.  Flake has a history of flaking out but this time he seems genuine, or at least convincingly genuine.  As to future indictments something is up with the Roger Stone, Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, the triumvirate of wackos who are thought to have been involved with or know too much about WikiLeaks and the release of the DNC emails. Corsi who has told just about anyone who would listen that he expects to be indicted momentarily cancelled a planned interview with an MSNBC correspondent minutes before it was scheduled on the advice of his counsel who was on the phone with some of Mueller’s attorneys.  Stone, who continues to deny that he had prior knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans provided a series of text conversations to NBC that reveal or seem to reveal that he was told by Credico in August 2016 that “Julian Assange has kryptonite on Hillary,” and by kryptonite think emails, not that shiny green stuff.  And to further complicate this already murky story, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mueller’s team is now looking into whether Stone tried to intimidate and discredit a witness who is contradicting his version of events about his contacts with WikiLeaks.  That witness is thought to be Credico. Intimidation is one of the things that Stone is very good at and it would fit right in with his typical modus operandi. Scrolling back the clock to the 2000 Bush v Gore election, it was Stone who organized the so-called “Brooks Brothers” riots that successfully cut short the vote count in Miami-Dade County, an early step in the process that resulted in the election being called for Bush.  The participants in those demonstrations weren’t local outraged Floridians but were instead made up of young Republican agitators flown down from New York to cause trouble, thus the Brooks Brothers moniker.  Not only are the current crop of demonstrators in Broward, the ones that are again claiming that Democrats are committing voter fraud, following the Brooks Brothers’ playbook, at least one of them admitted yesterday on camera that he was a friend and admirer of Stone’s.   

Other News:  From Asia where he is standing in for Trump, VP Pence said that the election results prove how much the country loves Trump and everything that he is doing.  He also said that Trump plans to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the new year but won’t repeat past mistakes of allowing promises to be broken on pledges to end arms programs.  Wow, mistakes, does Trump ever make mistakes?   This morning  Saudi Arabian prosecutors announced plans to seek the death penalty for five of the people responsible for the murder and dismembering of journalist/dissident Jamal Khashoggi. None of those people are named Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  Lastly, Republicans and Democrats are in the process of selecting their new leaders.  Congressman Kevin McCarthy will replace outgoing Paul Ryan as the leader of what will soon be the House minority party. Senator McConnell will remain as the majority leader and Senator Schumer will retain his Democratic leadership role.  Though she still expects to emerge victorious, Nancy Pelosi is facing pushback from a number of House Democrats including some of the newbies who promised that they would vote against her retaining her leadership position and becoming Speaker of the House.  Oh the irony, Nancy Pelosi who orchestrated the Democratic takeover of the House is the one leader facing headwinds.