Get me Roger Stone: The FBI deployed a SWAT team early this morning to arrest President Trump’s friend and adviser Roger Stone. Heavily armed agents at dawn filtered across Stone’s front lawn in Ft. Lauderdale and pounded on the front door shouting “FBI !!”

  Stone is charged by the Special Counsel’s office with seven criminal counts, including obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering. 

  The indictment says Stone made “multiple false statements” and “attempted to persuade a witness to make false testimony.”

  The longtime political trickster who dresses like a London dandy has always denied that he had any connection to the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 election. But the indictment says Stone was in touch with the Trump campaign about Wikileaks releases of stolen Democratic emails. The Special Counsel appears to be getting closer to proving a link of coordination between Russia, Wikileaks, and the Trump campaign

Let Them Eat Cake:Both the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate yesterday failed to pass bills that would have ended the government shutdown. So welcome to day 35. The roughly 800,000 furloughed federal workers miss another paycheck today.

  The Republican bill failed by 50-47 and the Democrats followed down the chute,  52-44. Both bills needed 60 votes. The Republicans would have given President Trump the $5.7 billion he wants for his border wall. The Democrats wanted just two weeks of money to run the government.

 President Trump’s popularity — never great — has taken a beating during the shutdown. His team of millionaires is not helping. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross (net worth $700 million) expressed bewilderment that unpaid federal workers are resorting to food banks when they could be taking out loans to pay their bills. Ross said on CNBC, “The 30 days of pay that people will be out — there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be able to get a loan against it, and we’ve seen a number of ads from the financial institutions doing that.”

  What he’s saying is that unpaid employees should leverage a debt from a government currently refusing to pay its bills.

  Trump daughter-in-law Lara, who is not missing any meals, added to the cluelessness.  “This is so much bigger than any one person,” she said in a television interview, basically telling federal workers to suck up and sacrifice. “It’s a little bit of pain, but it’s going to befor the future of our country,” said the wife of Eric Trump. She said, “Their children and their grandchildren will thank them for their sacrifice right now.”

  The President himself claims he has a lot of support from unpaid federal employees. “Many of those people that are not getting paid are totally in favor of what we’re doing because they know the future of this country is dependent on having a strong border,” he said.

 Funny, but you don’t see them marching with signs saying “Thank You for Not  Paying Us.”

Summoned:A day after he put off a public hearing before Congress, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was issued a subpoena to testify in private before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The panel wants Cohen to set straight the lies he admits he previously told them.

  Cohen dodged the public hearing saying he felt that members of his family were threatened by the statements of President Trump saying they may have been involved in unspecified criminal activity.

The Sunshine State:Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel resigned yesterday after the Tallahassee Democrat published photos of him at a 2005 Halloween party in blackface dressed as a victim of Hurricane Katrina. The pictures show Ertel dressed as a busty black woman wearing a bandana and a shirt with “Katrina Victim” written on the front. He was a local election supervisor at the time.

  Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people, a good number of them in Florida.

Justice Italian Style:Former college exchange student Amanda Knox, who was prosecuted for murder in Italy in 2007, has been awarded $21,000 by theEuropean Court of Human Rights as compensation for Italy’s botched investigation.

   Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of sexual assault and murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher. The case was national tabloid news for years. Knox was ultimately cleared and a man from the Ivory Coast was convicted.

   “I was interrogated for 53 hours over five days, without a lawyer, in a language I understood maybe as well as a ten-year-old,” Knox on her blog. “I trusted these people. They were adults. They were authorities. And they lied to me.” 

Spin City:The following is an exchange between CNN reporter Abby Phillip and President Trump’s close adviser, Kellyanne Conway:

AP: There’s a new poll out …

KC: Do you have that poll?

AP: It’s a CBS poll

KC: I just want to see the question.

AP: The question was is the wall worth the government shutdown.

KC: And so why would that be the question, why is that a good question? I’m asking you why you’re still saying ‘wall’ when the President has said, I’m asking you why you and the polling questions respectfully said you can call it whatever you want. Call it steel slat barriers.

AP: He calls it a wall as well, Kellyanne.

KC: Well I was in the situation  room when he said to, when he said to Leader Schumer, Minority Leader Schumer ..

AP: This morning he said it as a new slogan, ‘Build a wall and crime will fall.’

KC: Yes, it’s a great slogan, build a wall and crime will fall. We know that’s true.

AP: So why can’t we call it a wall when he calls it a wall?

-30-