Tuesday News Day.

There is an interesting special congressional election race going on north of Atlanta tonight. The latest democratic golden boy, Jon Ossoff , will need 50% of the votes in a crowded field to go to Washington and embarrass our sitting president. It's going to be close, but my prediction is that there will be a runoff with the republican, and she will squeeze by in a two person race.

Still, this is a district that Mitt won by 25%, and it is in the heart of republican country. Dems should take heart, though, because win or lose some good things might happen in the mid-terms for them if they actually go out to vote.

I am not sure if trump will even still be our president come mid-terms, there are some serious people trying to impeach his ass, and that Russian cloud is not going away. This latest stuff with the dossier is a doozy. 

Then there is this Devin Nunes fiasco. The guy allegedly created a fake scandal and dragged a good woman and public servant through the mud because of pressure from the trump White House. If this is true he should resign from congress immediately.  Don't even wait for the ethics committee to complete their investigation. Just get out of town and save your family and your constituents the embarrassment.   

"According to a report from The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza, an unnamed intelligence source believes Nunes may have felt some heat from the White House to “manufacture a fake scandal.”

From the report:

The intelligence source told me that he knows, “from talking to people in the intelligence community,” that “the White House said, ‘We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the President’s tweet that he was being surveilled.’ They put out an all-points bulletin”—a call to sift through intelligence reports—“and said, ‘We need to find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower.’ And I’m telling you there is no way you get that from those transcripts, which are about as plain vanilla as can be.”

Nunes recused himself from the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian manipulation in the 2016 election, and is currently the subject of a House Ethics Committee probe into whether he leaked classified information.

But according to Lizza, “this is like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. The bigger scandal is the coordinated effort to use the American intelligence services to manufacture an excuse for Trump’s original tweet.”' [Source]

Finally, the head pig over at FOX VIEWS might finally have to leave harassment central. This latest alleged incident of harassment from Billo involves sexism, misogyny, and racism.   

"In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Bloom said that the woman called in to report a complaint on the Fox News hotline (the anonymous hotline is for all of 21st Century Fox, Fox News’ parent company, according to a spokeswoman). The woman’s identity was not disclosed.

“She is an African-American woman who was a clerical worker in 2008 at Fox News,” Bloom said in an interview with HLN. “She did not work directly for Bill O’Reilly, but she worked near him and she alleges that he engaged in a campaign for months of sexual harassment against her. He wouldn’t speak to her, other than to say things like, ‘Mmm Hmm,’ make grunting noises like an animal, she alleges, leering at her, looking at her cleavage and her legs, and he would call her ‘hot chocolate,’ which she found to be very offensive.”

Bloom said that the woman found the situation “upsetting and distressing.” She said that they have spoken to a family member, a boyfriend, and a roommate who back up her claims.

“She wanted to keep her job, she didn’t complain at the time, but now she knows that Fox News is considering whether or not to keep him, and although she is very scared and wishes to remain anonymous, she felt that she had to add her story and speak out, and so we called that into the hotline today,” Bloom said. She said that her client is not asking for money, but wants “accountability.”
Bloom spurred the internal Fox News investigation by calling the company’s HR hotline with Walsh’s complaint earlier this month. That triggered an investigation by 21st Century Fox’s outside law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

In an interview, Bloom said that one or more accusers are “very likely” to come forward “soon,” although she declined to get into specifics. Responding to the statement from O’Reilly’s attorney, she said, “I am representing all of my O’Reilly accusers for free, and I am sure that Mr. Kasowitz is being compensated handsomely for his representation of accused serial harasser Bill O’Reilly.”
Bloom also has called for an independent investigation of harassment and retaliation at Fox News by state authorities in New York. She has called on O’Reilly to be fired, but says that even if that were to happen, she it would still like to see a state investigation to proceed." [Source]

It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.  

His next book will be called Killing The Urges.

Don't worry Billo, you can always get a job with the "grab em by the pussy" president.  

An editorial for the ages.

 The Los Angeles Times is not known to as a left leaning newspaper. They tend to be to the right of other leading papers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

So today, when I read their editorial about Donald trump (see below), I thought to myself that it had to be a belated April Fools' Day joke. 

"It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”

Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.

In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.

His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.

These are immensely dangerous developments which threaten to weaken this country’s moral standing in the world, imperil the planet and reverse years of slow but steady gains by marginalized or impoverished Americans. But, chilling as they are, these radically wrongheaded policy choices are not, in fact, the most frightening aspect of the Trump presidency.

What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.........Whether it is the easily disprovable boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd or his unsubstantiated assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower, the new president regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction. It’s difficult to know whether he actually can’t distinguish the real from the unreal — or whether he intentionally conflates the two to befuddle voters, deflect criticism and undermine the very idea of objective truth. Whatever the explanation, he is encouraging Americans to reject facts, to disrespect science, documents, nonpartisanship and the mainstream media — and instead to simply take positions on the basis of ideology and preconceived notions. This is a recipe for a divided country in which differences grow deeper and rational compromise becomes impossible." [Read more]

Ouch!

I guess it's safe to say that the LA Times, like the rest of us, has had enough.

And this is the first of a four part series, folks. I can't wait for the rest.

*Pic from motherjones.com