It's amazing that we are actually having a discussion over whether the US and Mexico can mend their differences over the US demand that Mexico pay what amounts to a war indemnity to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. It's not just that Mexico hasn't agreed to this. It is important to step back and realize that this is the kind of demand that usually happens in the context of punishment or exaction for losing a war or some other belligerent action.

Strategists polled by the Associated Press give Tom Perez (podcast interview) the support of 205 DNC committee members while Keith Ellison (podcast interview) has the support of 153. Jaime Harrison 27; Sally Boynton Brown 10, Pete Buttigieg (podcast interview) 8. Here's the whole story.

The winner needs 224 to win.

Your roundup of so-called crowds organized by liberal activists that don't matter at all.

Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel.’ His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently for a wide variety of publications around the world, including the New York Review of Books,National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. Ask Bill your questions about climate change, fracking, etc. here by 3:30 p.m. EST. If you'd like to participate but don't have a Prime membership, sign up here.

Republicans struggle to defuse one of the bombs they planted under the Affordable Care Act.

This evening I saw news that a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis had been vandalized overnight. Reports say that more than 100 headstones were damaged, with some substantial number toppled. This comes, as you may know, amidst an ongoing wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers across the country. To date, thankfully, all have been hoaxes. Police have yet to make a formal determination about whether this vandalism was a hate crime. Whatever the final determination, though, this incident hits very close to home. Because this is the cemetery where my mother was buried after she died in Southern California in 1981.

After writing last night's post on the various adventures and crimes of Felix Sater, something occurred to me. This is not a reported claim but a possibility to consider in light of the information that has now emerged.

With The New York Times story about Michael Cohen and Felix Sater gaining more attention, Cohen has made an abrupt shift into damage control.

If you're a reporter with an investigative bent, an interest in national security and public corruption stories, and a hunger to get to the bottom of this story and others, let me remind you were are currently looking to fill three new investigative reporter positions in our New York and DC offices. If you're interested, see the details here.

As I noted in my previous post, I've been keenly interested in Donald Trump's association with Felix Sater going back to last Spring. I also knew he had been an FBI informant and leveraged that status to dramatically reduce his sentence in a major financial crime. I didn't realize until this evening that there were more details about this part of the story in the public domain than I'd realized. It's rather mind-blowing.

I don't know how much attention it's received. But the appearance of the name of Felix Sater in this new article in the Times is one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop on the Trump story in some time.

Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) comments at the security conference in Munich in recent days garnered the most attention in the US press. But the really significant comments and warnings came from Germany and France. The countries' defense and foreign ministers respectively warned the US about trying to sow divisions in Europe or even break up the European Union. (It is worth remembering that strong words aside, McCain is still providing President Trump with strong legislative support and for all hist outspokenness was not even willing to utter President Trump's name in his speeches, despite being the main target of his remarks. He's got a good way to go.) As the storied and long-serving retired US diplomat Nicholas Burns put it in a tweet, America's erstwhile European allies are now worried about America as a threat to the international order.