Politics

Before this morning, most people in the United States had never heard of Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.  But, an ABC story (which we covered here) suggesting that Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have to recuse himself from overseeing Special Counsel Mueller's Russia probe, and that Brand would be the next inline to step into that position, changed all that.

So what do we know about Rachel Brand?  Well, we know 4 things with absolute certainty:

Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Historians of the future, huddled around their goose-fat lamps in muddy woolen cloaks, may cite this as the month that the Kardashian Dreamland formerly known as “The USA” finally lost its collective mind.

Last night, after Trump launched yet another furious tweetstorm intended to expose the double standard applied in the Hillary investigation compared to the Russia probe, we noted that Republicans might be well served to stop sitting around twiddling their thumbs and actually go on the offensive against an investigation that has obviously morphed into mass hysteria courtesy of free-flowing leaks from a conflicted "intelligence community" intent upon bringing down a presidency.  Here's what we said:

Two days after Trump ceded unilateral authority on Afghan troop deployments to the Department of Defense, the Pentagon wasted on time and according to AP, the Pentagon will send 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan to support existing forces and in hopes of breaking a stalemate in a war that has now been passed on to a third U.S. President. The deployment will be the largest of American manpower under Donald Trump’s young presidency.

Republican finally cracked. After months of extremely partisan divergence in the UMich confidence data, the loss in confidence for self-identified Republicans fell notably more than for Democrats (who were already significantly lower). Both current and future expectations tumbled to their lowest since Nov 2016.

As UMich explains...

While this break corresponds with James Comey's testimony, only a few consumers spontaneously referred to him or his testimony when asked to explain their views.