Linkee-poo Tuesday

Alligators, they're back and bite-y as all heck.

"House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday morning, charging him with abuse of power in the Ukraine affair and obstruction of Congress." The work gets harder from here on out.

"Those relationships mean that researchers can use the mass of a white dwarf to calculate its age. And over the last decade, astronomers have discovered around 100 white dwarfs with masses so low they appear to be older than the 14.8-billion-year-old universe."

"An extended mission for the Falcon 9 rocket’s second stage after launch Thursday with a space station cargo ship helped demonstrate SpaceX’s ability to perform long-duration flight sequences to inject U.S. military payloads directly into high-altitude geosynchronous orbit."

"The missing American couple, whose families hadn’t heard from after the New Zealand volcano eruption, has been located." Joe and the Volcano Cosplay isn't to be taken lightly.

"Houston Police chief Art Acevedo on Monday lambasted Republican senators for their failure to take action on gun violence and the long-stalled Violence Against Women Act after a city police sergeant was fatally shot while responding to an incident of domestic violence." Domestic violence is all fun and games (for conservative and some liberal politicians) until they kill a cop.

How goes Brexit? "The United Kingdom will vote on December 12, and the country’s unfinalized divorce with the European Union looms over it all… These are the Brexit elections. Even if many wish they weren’t." Yep, my money is still on hard Brexit.

"President Donald Trump's support for Saudi Arabia in the wake of a deadly shooting by a Saudi national at a Florida naval base is underscoring the latitude Trump gives the Kingdom's rulers, even as Congress has pushed to limit the ties between Washington and Riyadh."

"When Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last visited the White House, President Trump had just fired his then-FBI director, James Comey. At the time, Trump bragged it would remove pressure related to an investigation into whether his campaign had ties to Moscow. But instead, it had the opposite effect, fanning the political flames over his Russia policy." Lavrov is set to visit today. Lavrov is also assumed to be a handler, one who handles Russian foreign assets. So, new orders?

"The Justice Department's internal watchdog determined the FBI had sufficient evidence to open the Russia probe but criticized the bureau over its surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser."

"But the inspector general report’s other major findings — that there were serious problems with the way the FBI obtained a secret national security warrant to spy on a Trump campaign aide — were also noteworthy, if somewhat overshadowed by the bigger headlines." It's not "spying" if there's a warrant. But, yes, we've all known since 2001 that FISA warrants are a problem. "Because the criticism of the FBI was politically beneficial to Trump, Democrats who are normally quick to seize on abuses of national security power were notably muted. One group that was not was the non-partisan American Civil Liberties Union, whose national security director, Hina Shamsi, expressed alarm." And that's why I support the ACLU.

"President Trump criticized FBI Director Christopher Wray in no uncertain terms on Tuesday morning, slamming the bureau chief for his acceptance of the findings laid out in the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the origins of the Russia probe." (Grokked from Elizabeth Bear)

And on Bullshit Mountain, "The U.S. attorney who is conducting a wide-ranging investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe released a rare statement Monday saying he disagrees with conclusions of the so-called FISA report -- after DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found in that review that the probe's launch largely complied with DOJ and FBI policies."

"With its meddling operation in 2016, Russia had planned to inject the nation with bad blood, setting Americans against one another, fanning divisions and undermining confidence in US democracy… It worked better than President Putin can have dared hope." As I said back in 2016, from Putin's standpoint the gambit is win-win. Putin would win if Trump won, Putin would win if Trump lost.

"Harry Reid, who retired in 2017 after representing Nevada for 30 years in the U.S. Senate—a dozen of them as chair of the Democratic caucus, eight of them as Senate majority leader—was supposed to be dead already; his pancreatic cancer was forecasted to prove fatal within weeks. But he’s still here, which is how I came to be talking with him, not long before Thanksgiving, in a conference room at the Bellagio, asking him why he remains the person to whom many of the Democratic presidential candidates come for advice and anointment."