You Say You Want a Revolution

New World Order:  Nancy Pelosi still has to nail down a few more votes to ensure her ascension to Speaker of the House.  Though she probably didn’t need his help, yesterday, during an unexpectedly televised session at the White House, Trump helped her solidify her position.  The showman in chief thought that inviting the press into the meeting would give him an opportunity to look like he had things under control, instead it gave the press and the rest of us a view of the new world order and what Trump will have to deal with now that he’s lost control of one of the three branches of government.  The topic at hand was Trump’s threat to shut the government down unless he gets $5 billion in funding for his wall.  Pelosi and her partner in crime Chuck Schumer made it clear that $5 billion wasn’t happening, that Trump would be lucky to get $1.5 billion, the same amount that he got last year, an amount that they pointed out has yet to be spent. Then, after Pelosi suggested that any shutdown would bear his name, Trump condescendingly suggested that he understood that she was in a bind, unable to make any concessions given her “tenuous” position due to the upcoming speaker vote. Not one to suffer fools gladly, Pelosi slammed back saying “please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”  For his part Chuck Schumer, piled on, infuriating Trump by refusing to make eye contact, instead fixing his gaze on the Trump invited cameras and goading Trump into saying “If we don't get what we want ... I will shut down the government,” I’d be proud to do it.  While the back and forth went on, VP Mike Pence channeled Weekend at Bernies, he didn’t speak, move or even blink. Once the meeting ended, a smiling Pelosi sashayed out looking better than ever in her stylish red power coat and Anna Wintour dark sunglasses.  She went directly to a meeting with her leadership crew, telling them that the wall is “like a manhood thing with him (Trump), as if manhood can be associated with him.” A number of White House leakers reported that Trump stormed out of the meeting angry that his TV gambit hadn’t worked, enraged that he’d been goaded into taking ownership of his threatened shutdown, taking his fury out on Pence for his “Bernie” routine.  Score this one advantage Chuck and Nancy. While Trump was hosting his meeting, the House Judiciary Committee was grilling, or at least trying to grill Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Although the hearing was supposed to be about privacy and data collection, Republicans spent much of their time accusing Google of manipulating its search engine to make Conservatives look bad.  Their case was inadvertently bolstered when Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lefgron asked “If you Google the word ‘idiot' under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up. How would that happen? How does search work so that that would occur?”  Pichai then launched into a technical explanation of Google’s algorithms, he would have been better off saying that the appearance of Trump’s images under idiot just proves how well Google’s search engine works.  For the record, images of Trump image do appear when you Google idiot, a few also show up when you Google “white supremacist.”  Advantage Google.   

Mueller Time:  One time campaign manager Paul Manafort’s lawyers were supposed to provide Judge Amy Berman Jackson with a  written response challenging Mueller’s assertion that he had violated the terms of his cooperation agreement.  Instead one of his lawyers told the judge that they had nothing to present, that they needed more time, presumably because they had discovered that Manafort had lied to them and had violated his agreement.  The judge pushed Manafort’s next hearing date off to the end of January.  It’s unlikely that Manafort’s lawyers will argue that he didn’t violate his agreement at that time, instead the subject at hand is expected to be sentencing.  There is some thought that Manafort might start talking to Mueller’s team again, however, though his statements could fill in some holes in Mueller’s timeline, they would be totally useless unless they could be corroborated by others with a lower propensity for lying.  Former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s lawyers presented their argument for leniency to his judge last night.  His lawyers threw a few zingers into their one hundred plus page document, implying that Flynn was trapped into lying to those very manipulative FBI agents, naming in particular Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, because they didn’t expressly tell him that lying to them was against the law.  Flynn’s lawyers didn’t explain why Flynn lied in the first place but did not deny that Flynn screwed up, instead they pointed out how much he had cooperated with Mueller’s investigators, saying that he spent over 60 hours with them during his many sessions, highlighting the reams of transcripts and electronic evidence he provided.   Trump’s former lawyer/fixer is due to get sentenced today for his crimes, including the one in which he implicated Individual 1.  As to that violation of campaign finance laws, Individual 1 weighed in on it yesterday during an interview with Reuters saying “Michael Cohen is a lawyer. I assume he would know what he’s doing.” Adding “It wasn’t a campaign contribution. If it were, it’s only civil, and even if it’s only civil, there was no violation based on what we did. OK?” In other words, Trump has gone from denying that he even knew Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal to admitting that he might have paid them off, but that it was for personal reasons, to admitting that it might have been for campaign purposes but wasn’t a bigly deal because that’s only a civil thing.  Separately, Trump who is reported to be growing increasingly concerned about impeachment, said that “the people would revolt if he was impeached.”  Time for a revolution?