No tangible results

The guy who started Daily Kos signs his posts as Kos. I’ve seen the full name though I don’t have it in front of me. Kos wrote about the strange candidacy of Pete Buttigieg for president. He’s unqualified and untested (haven’t we seen that before?). He’s never had to win more than 11,000 votes. And his support from the black community, a constituency any Democrat needs to win, is zero – because Mayor Pete has a race problem.



Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave US Attorney John Huber a free hand to find something – anything – on Hillary Clinton. The nasty guy rallies still resound with chants of “Lock her up!” So there should be a reason to actually do that.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports Huber has turned in his report after two years of investigating. Short answer: “No tangible results.” He found nothing. The Clintons did not profit from the Uranium One deal. The Clinton Foundation really is a charity doing wonderful work around the world (in stark contrast to, say, the Trump Foundation). And as for her emails, the FBI investigation into that (which found no breach of security) was shown to have been conducted properly.

Alas, this report won’t stop the chanting.



Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate next week. This comes after Moscow Mitch claimed he had enough votes to start the Senate trial before he got the Articles.

This prompted news pundits to say Moscow Mitch won the round and Pelosi lost. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos tweeted that she disagrees. Her reasons:

* The impeachment trial (and we know how it will end – see cartoon here) is only one battle in the long political war of 2020. Moscow Mitch has more risk in losing his majority than Pelosi does. Her withholding of the Articles over the last few weeks has put vulnerable Republicans in a worse place. She has increased their pain while giving up little.

* Moscow Mitch had said delaying the Articles was “fine by me.” Now he’s railing at Pelosi from the Senate floor. The nasty guy is also getting more antsy by the day.

* John Bolton refused a House subpoena but said he would respond to a Senate subpoena. Pelosi now has a big reason to take him to court – which might reveal damaging info just before the fall campaign.



Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports on the 29th paragraph of a story in the Wall Street Journal about the nasty guy’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Soleimani. The article said, with no elaboration or indication of its importance:

Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said.

Clawson responds:

So Donald Trump assassinated a high-ranking foreign official, risking massive war, in part because it would help him in an impeachment trial that’s happening because he tried to use U.S. military aid to extort a foreign country into helping him win re-election.

Actually, that scans.

And then the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal reported it buried deep in a long article, as if it was no big. Actually, that also scans.

I’ve heard that this assassination is much more worthy of being an article of impeachment than the articles already passed.



Joan McCarter of Daily Kos talks about threats to our election system coming up to America’s big day in 2020. After listing yet another threat and the chaos around it she wrote:

And chaos, says Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, "is the point." She says that "You don't actually have to breach an election system in order to create the public impression that you have. […] You can imagine many different scenarios." Making populations distrust their elections systems is probably the most effective means of undermining a democracy, which in the case of Russia and the U.S. has been the underlying objective. That puts officials trying to combat the incursions in a difficult position; they’re damned if they warn the citizenry of the hacking and increase people's perceptions that the system is rigged and damned if they don't warn the populace to be aware of attempts to manipulate them.

By now you need a dose of cute.

The first time I visited Australia back in 1994 the tour I was with stayed at a resort lodge north of Melbourne. That evening a friend of the lodge owner brought over a joey, a baby kangaroo. She did it by bringing in a basket filled with small blankets that did a decent job of mimicking a kangaroo pouch.

Joshua Potash tweeted a brief video from Siobhan McKenna of nine cloth pouches each with a joey rescued from the fires.