Snow Globes and Conspiracies

2020: Massachusetts’ Senator Elizabeth Warren has stop exploring a presidential run, on Saturday she announced that she is officially running.  Trump of course couldn’t let her announcement go without a comment, so he pulled out his Pocahontas jab, but added to it, throwing in a reference to the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of Native Americans.  Some on twitter excused him, insisting that he was too ignorant to even know what the Trail of Tears was but that’s a stretch, he may be ignorant about many things but is a virtual genius when it comes to race baiting and dog whistling.  As expected, Minnesota’s Senator Amy Klobuchar formally announced her candidacy over the weekend too.  Standing in what appeared to be a snow globe but was just a normal winter day in Minnesota, Klobuchar positioned herself as an effective legislator with more moderate views than some of the other Democratic candidiates, kind of a younger, female version of Joe Biden and with Trump branding the Democrats as “radical” and “socialist” by calling their aspirational plans for Medicare for all and new Congressional darling Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal extreme, a moderate in the mix is a good thing right about now.  Klobuchar also rebuffed recent criticism that she’s a too tough taskmaster and hard to work for by saying that she’s just a bit of a perfectionist, so live with it.  An aside here, is it my imagination or is the media going after female candidates for things that that guys get away with daily?  Gilibrand who eats her fried chicken too daintily isn’t electable, Warren isn’t likeable enough, Harris has dated influential men, and now Klobuchar is too tough. #JustSaying  Anyway, Trump responded to Klobuchar’s announcement by saying that since she was standing in a “virtual blizard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures”  looking like a “snowman (woman)” as she  “talked proudly of flighting global warming” global warming couldn’t possibly be a thing to which Klobuchar tweeted back “Science is on my side, @realDonaldTrump. Looking forward to debating you about climate change (and many other issues). And I wonder how your hair would fare in a blizzard?”  Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke has not announced a presidential run yet but is planning to participate in an anti-Wall rally today in El Paso while Trump holds his pro-WALL rally in the same city, more of his give me WALL money or I’ll close down the government tour.  To that end, the Mayor of El Paso, a Republican, isn’t happy that Trump has been misstating El Paso’s crime statistics to justify more wall construction, he says that his city is and has been safe, and asserts that if Trump uses false statistics again in his presence, he will have no problem publicly correcting him.   As to another shutdown, it appears that negotiations to resolve the budget funding crisis hit a snag this weekend.  This time the sticking point doesn’t appear to be about the amount of money, a lower number in the $2 billion range is now on the table, instead it’s about the number and purpose of immigration detention beds. Democrats are seeking a cap to force ICE to limit detention to criminals rather than all undocumented immigrants. Republicans are resisting a limit saying ICE should have the discretion to detain anyone they want. Over the weekend, Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney, who maintains that he’s still only the acting chief because everyone serves only at Trump’s discretion not because he’s seeking another job, said that another shutdown is not out of the question. That said, absent a resolution of the “snag” another short term funding resolution is more likely than a shutdown because Republican leadership, that is everyone but Trump, doesn’t have an appetite for more stories about distressed government workers and more airport disruptions.  Two border state Democratic governors are making it clear that they aren’t interested in participating in Trump’s border security crisis charade anymore.  Last week saying that she’s had it with Trump’s “border fearmongering” New Mexico’s Governor Grisham pulled her National Guard troops from border duty.  Over the weekend California’s Governor Newsom followed suit calling the border emergency a “manufactured crisis.”  As to his trip to El Paso, that and lunch with VP Pence are the only things on Trump’s schedule today.  We know this because despite an ongoing search for whoever at the White House has been leaking his daily schedules, the leaker has struck again, releasing four more of Trump’s not so jampacked daily planner pages.      

More Insanity:  Virginia still hasn’t lost any of its leaders yet and it’s looking more and more likely that Governor Northam and AG Herring will survive their Blackface crises, or at least hang on for a while longer although it certainly doesn’t help Northam’s case that over the weekend he referred to African slaves as “indentured servants” during an interview with CBS’s Gayle King.  Lieutenant Governor Fairfax situation is far more dire. He is now fending off the accusations of a second woman who has come forward and accused him of a “premeditated and aggressive” rape that she says occurred during their college days.  Fairfax insists that all of the “encounters” in question were consensual and says that he isn’t stepping down because he’s entitled to a full investigation but the reality is that he’s in bigly trouble.  As bad as it is to be caught in Blackface or with KKK buddies on your yearbook page, rape is an actual crime so Fairfax’s days in office are likely limited and his problems may go far beyond losing his position.  Acting AG Matt Whitaker is due to step down in a few days assuming that William Barr, Trump’s AG in waiting, is confirmed this week, but he was clearly auditioning for another job in the Trump orbit on Friday during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.  He stalled for time, was combative and admitted little despite intensive questioning and some impressive grandstanding from members of the committee.  No one believes that his credentials or lack therefof had anything to do with his appointment, a fact that Congressman Hakeem Jeffries drove home when he asked Whitaker “how did you get here?”  Instead, most, even the Republicans on the committee know that he was appointed to serve as Acting Attorney General because of comments that he’d made on CNN that were incredibly Trump friendly and just as incredibly Mueller critical.  Nevertheless,  Whitaker insisted that as far as he knows Trump was unaware of his views before he  was hired first as former AG’s Sessions’ chief of staff and then as Acting AG.  He also asserted that he and Trump never discussed the Mueller investigation during his time as Acting AG and that he’s done nothing to interfere with Mueller’s investigation.  He was more vague when asked if he’d tried to do anything to interfere with the actions of the Southern District of New York, the home of the federal attorneys responsible for the Michael Cohen case and some of the other investigations into Trump Inc.  Former FBI Director for Counter Intelligence Frank Figliuizzi summarized Whitaker’s testimony by saing “I’m not kidding when I say I have interviewed terrorists who are more cooperative and respectful than Matt Whitaker was.” adding “I gotta tell you, I say that with sadness, because the attorney general role is America's lawyer.“  Over the weekend, a few more facts and theories emerged concerning the attempted extortion of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos by the David Pecker owned AMI/National Enquirer.  First, David Pecker is likely in bigly trouble with the Justice Department since the cooperation agreement, the one that gave him a free pass for helping Trump out by squelching the stories about his playmate and porn star relationships during the election, includes a provision requiring him to refrain from any criminal activity for three years. Extorting Bezos probably probably falls into the criminal activity category.  Second, it appears that Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez’ brother Michael Sanchez, a MAGA hat wearing Trump supporter who is also a friend of Trump friend/dirty tricks maven Roger Stone, was the source of the Bezos “sexts” although it’s still not clear how he got them.  On the theoretical front, Bezos believes and other also suspect that there is also a Saudi angle to the threats against him. The thought is that the Saudis wanted the Bezos owned Washington Post to stop pushing for further investigation into journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and that David Pecker was trying to curry favor with the Saudis, something he’s been doing for awhile as recently as last year he published a glossy pro-Saudi Arabia edition,  possibly out of a need for financing and possibly to help out his good friend Trump.  As to Trump, though he provides no proof, Michael Sanchez insists that Trump was in the loop on the whole Bezos thing.  Connecting the extortion dots to Trump will be difficult, if not impossible, but it does appear that Roger Stone knew a few things about the Bezos extortion.  Last week, Stone texted The Daily Beast “I do know Michael Sanchez—very good guy,” but then curiously denied that he hacked Bezos’ phone. When The Daily Beast pointed out that it had never suggested or asked if he had, Stone went on the attack, replying “You are busted. You are not a journalist. No one believes anything you write.”  Hmmm.