A fifth woman has come forward to accuse Roy Moore of sexual assault.
A fifth woman has come forward to accuse Roy Moore of sexual assault. SCOTT OLSON / GETTY

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT "WEIGHS INQUIRY" INTO CLINTON FOUNDATION: The toddler-in-chief spent a few days palling around with authoritarian dictators who use their "justice systems" to persecute political opponents and now it looks like Orange Julius Caesar is gonna do the same. "The Justice Department said Monday that prosecutors were looking into whether a special counsel should be appointed to investigate political rivals President Trump has singled out for scrutiny, including Hillary Clinton," reports the New York Times. This is literally what fascism looks like. The NYT piece goes into the Uranium One deal but "is a deep distortion of what happened," writes Josh Marshall at TPM, but the NYT gets the politics right: "The Times notes that the letter comes ten days after Trump publicly demanded that the DOJ go after Clinton. And then there’s this graf..."

The decision to examine those matters raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is trying to use the Justice Department to investigate his political rivals and distract from the special counsel’s investigation into his presidential campaign. It also comes at a tenuous time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Mr. Trump has hinted to advisers he may want to fire. People close to the White House believe Mr. Sessions can stop the president from firing him by appointing a special counsel to investigate the uranium deal. Before leaving for a trip to Asia this month, Mr. Trump expressed his frustration with the Justice Department.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is launching a politically-motivated investigation into Donald Trump's former opponent to distract us from the Trump campaign's collusion with a hostile foreign power—collusion Sessions is implicated in and has repeatedly lied about under oath—all to curry favor with the boss and save his job. Trump, for those of you paying attention at home, is still angry that Session recused himself from overseeing the Russian investigation and wants to replace Sessions with an AG who can oversee scuttle the Russia investigation. Gee, remember when the biggest scandal at the Justice Department was Bill Clinton running into Loretta Lynch in an airport?

THE SESSIONS: Jeff Sessions returns to Capitol Hill today to lie some more.

CONFUSED ABOUT URANIUM ONE? Think there might be something to it? Sure, the conservative movement has been pushing bullshit Clinton non-scandals for three decades now but, hey, could they be on to something this time? Joy Reid completely destroys conservative talking lying points on Uranium One in under two minutes:

THE TRUMP CAMP WAS IN CONTACT WITH WIKILEAKS: Fredo Trump swapped emails with Julian Assange. "WikiLeaks made a series of increasingly bold requests," reports the Atlantic, "including asking for Trump’s tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States." Assange asked Don Jr. to push a website, which Don Sr. immediately did. There's a timeline here.

PENCE LIED ABOUT WIKILEAKS: I'm old enough to remember when lying to the American people was a big deal—an impeachable offense even.


ANOTHER WOMAN COMES FORWARD: "An Alabama woman accused Roy S. Moore on Monday of sexually assaulting her when she was 16, the fifth and most brutal charge leveled against the Republican Senate candidate," reports the NYT. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz have all dropped the "if true" qualifier and are calling on Roy Moore to drop out of the race. Moore isn't going to drop out of the race, so there's talk of expelling him from the Senate if he wins—a move that requires a 2/3 majority and which hasn't been done since 1850s. There's also talk about appointing Jeff Sessions to the seat—his old seat—if Moore is tossed out, which would allow Trump to replace Sessions with someone who'll scuttle the Russian investigation. In a related development: Evangelical Christians are telling pollsters they're likelier to vote for Moore in the wake of these revelations.

LET'S PLAY LET'S PRETEND: Let's pretend that multiple adult men came forward to accuse a powerful gay man of sexually harassing or assaulting them when they were teens, let's pretend this gay man replied, "Not generally," when asked if he had sex with boys, let's pretend this gay man was banned from a shopping mall for harassing teenage boys. What would Evangelical Christians be telling pollsters, I wonder? I mean, besides what they already tell pollsters about the gay—we're sick, sinful, a danger to children, etc.


BOUIE ON WHAT DEFEATING MOORE WOULD MEAN FOR DEMS, WOMEN, TRUMP: "Losing the race would cut the GOP’s advantage in the Senate to a razor-thin 51–49 margin until the 2018 midterms," Jamelle Bouie writes at Slate. "Such a loss could further stall the party’s agenda, leaving Trump with a year under his belt and few accomplishments to his name. It also transforms the 2018 landscape, giving Democrats a stronger shot at winning a Senate majority. (The winner of the Alabama special election will serve until 2020.) But the stakes of this story go beyond narrow Beltway drama. The ground is shifting in American culture as a growing number of women speak out against assault, abuse, and harassment at the hands of powerful men. With Donald Trump, we have one example of what happens when politics meets accusations of sexual assault: nothing. With Roy Moore, we have a chance to see if anything has changed, or if—when it comes to choosing leaders—voters are still willing to ignore credible accusations from multiple women when a victory for their party hangs in the balance."

DEPT. OF JUSTICE (POETIC DIVISION): Sean Hannity is losing advertisers over his aggressive, tone-deaf, sexual-assault-of-minors-minimizing defense of Roy Moore.

TRUMP TEASES BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: What's it gonna be? Bombing North Korea? Firing Robert Mueller? Vote here!

THE RICH GET RICHER: "The globe’s richest 1% own half the world’s wealth, according to a new report highlighting the growing gap between the super-rich and everyone else," The Guardian reports. "The world’s richest people have seen their share of the globe’s total wealth increase from 42.5% at the height of the 2008 financial crisis to 50.1% in 2017... While the global population of millionaires has grown considerably, the number of ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWIs)—those with a net worth of $50m or more—has increased even faster." It's anyone's guess how this gilded/swindled age ends—with reforms (a la the Progressive Era) or with revolution (a la the Russian Revolution). The GOP, which is currently in the process of ramming tax cuts through Congress designed to make the already rich even richer, is upping the odds of a bloody revolution. (Does the right to bear arms cover guillotines?)


That's not how this "economy" thing works, that's not how any of this works.

"Reducing taxes on the very wealthiest on the idea that they are 'job creators' is folly," Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer wrote in a 2011 New York Times opinion piece worth revisiting. "Jobs are the consequence of an organic feedback loop between consumers and businesses, and it’s the demand from a thriving middle class that truly creates jobs. The problem with today’s severe concentration of wealth, then, isn’t that it’s unfair, though it might be; it’s that it kills middle-class demand. Lasting growth doesn’t trickle down; it emerges from the middle out."

The rich are richer than the rich have ever been. If making the rich richer created good-paying jobs and a thriving middle class, we'd have good-paying jobs and a thriving middle class. It doesn't and we don't.

BIDEN: HIS TIME? Joe Biden tells Stephen Colbert that he isn't sure he'll run for president in 2020. "Biden would also not name any specific names of candidates he thinks could unite voters against Trump, worried he’d 'leave somebody out,'", the Daily Beat reports/recaps, "but did say the Democrats have some 'really talented, relatively new people' in the party. "'Remember, no one knew who Bill Clinton was until about 15 months before he ran, before the general election,” Biden said. “No one knew who Barack—they knew the speech but didn’t have any idea of his presidential aspirations until about a year and a half out, so this is really early in the game.'"

WE HAD SOME WEATHER: Last night's windstorm knocked down trees and power lines, leaving thousands in the dark and one woman dead.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TULLS: "People familiar with the situation say the longtime Tully’s cafe at 19th and Aloha is set to close later this month," reports Capitol Hill Seattle. "According to court documents, the struggling Seattle-based coffee chain has larger problems. CHS has found a series of judgments against Global Baristas, the holding company that took over the struggling chain in 2013. They include more than $300,000 owed in taxes to the state of Washington and decisions including a $102,000 judgment for unpaid rent on the company’s Western Ave offices earlier this month." (Sorry about the headline for this item. It's early.)

OFFERED WITHOUT COMMENT: "A juvenile male has been arrested in connection with the fatal shooting of a 27-year-old Burien man in White Center Friday night," Q13 reports. "The King County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Monday that the suspect was arrested and booked into the King County Youth Detention Center.... Witnesses told police that a group of men were talking with the victim prior to the shooting. The suspect, who was with the group, fought with the victim. When the fight was over, the suspect pulled out a gun and shot the victim." Not gonna comment, nope, but gonna re-up this and this.

ARMPIT OF THE DAY: Scarlet Envy—beautiful in drag, beautiful out of drag.

BBC: FLAT EARTHERS GATHER IN NORTH CAROLINA: It's the First Annual Flat Earth Conference and the international press is there. Because unchecked American stupidity has consequences for the entire planet.

SPEAKING OF THE PLANET: "Global carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise again in 2017, climate scientists reported Monday, a troubling development for the environment and a major disappointment for those who had hoped emissions of the climate change-causing gas had at last peaked," reports the Washington Post. And emissions are expected to rise again in 2018. Looking on the bright side, this will mean fewer sexual assaults—right, Rick Perry?