Catching up

1.  Paul Ryan says he does not have the votes to keep the government running when the  continuing resolution expires on Friday.   So we have a government shutdown looming.  He will need to get some votes by compromising.   What the Democrats, and many Republicans, want is the bipartisan, compromise bill to renew the DACA program.  And throw in the renewal of the CHIP program as well.   Trump is holding on to the DACA card as his trump to try to get them to agree on his wall.   The fact is, a bipartisan senate committee has already proposed a compromise bill that could have passed.   But that's what Trump blew up last Thursday with his "shithole countries" slurs.

2.   Steve Bannon has been subpoened by House Intelligence Committee but refuses to answer most questions because the White House has put a gag order on him from testifying to them, even to conversations he had with the president after he left his job at the WH.

   However, Bannon has also been subpoened to testify before a Grand Jury by Robert Mueller.   A source has told the Daily Beast that he will talk freely to Mueller, and they may work out a deal that he will do that in an interview rather than the Grand Jury.   Some had thought Mie;;er's subpoena was a negotiating tactic.   Sounds like maybe that was right.

3.  Corey Booker gives a passionate rebuke to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen over her "failure" to remember what President Trump said in the meeting on immigration that has caused such an uproar of disapproval worldwide.   Both Sens. Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin have confirmed the language used.     Sec. Nielsen said, under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that she doesn't remember Trump making then specific "shithole" comment, but suggested that senators in the meeting were "talking over each other" and might explain her lack of hearing the word.

Booker, with intense emotion said:  "I've got a president of the United States whose office I respect, who talks about the country's origins of my fellow citizens in the most despicable manner.   You don't remember?   You can't remember the words of your commander in chief?   I find that unacceptable."

4.  In a special election for a state Senate seat in Wisconsin, Democrat Patty Schactner scored an upset victory in a district that Trump won decisively just over a year ago.  It is the latest in a string of election wins for Democrats, especially when the candidate is a woman;  and it increases the hope for big wins in the midterm elections.

5.  The number of murders committed in the U.S. by white supremacists more than doubled from 2016 to 2017 -- from 7 to 18, according to the Anti-Defamation League's report on "Murder and Extremism in the Unites States."  Included in their "white supremacists" groups are neo-Nazis, alt-right, alt-lite, and anti-government militias.

In contrast to all the anti-Muslim rhetoric, the 18 killed by white supremacists is double the nine people killed in the U.S. in 2017 by domestic Islamic extremists.  And eight of those were killed in one single attack in New York -- meaning that there were only two separate, fatal attacks by Islamic extremists in 2017

Ralph