Last Call For Screaming Into The Abyss

Washington Post columnist Caitlyn Dewey got a year and a half out of her weekly feature fighting The Stupid before hanging it up this week and correctly arriving at the conclusion that you can't beat confirmation bias in the age of the internet.

We launched “What was Fake” in May 2014 in response to what seemed, at the time, like an epidemic of urban legends and Internet pranks: light-hearted, silly things, for the most part, like new flavors of Oreos and babies with absurd names.

Since then, those sorts of rumors and pranks haven’t slowed down, exactly, but the pace and tenor of fake news has changed. Where debunking an Internet fake once involved some research, it’s now often as simple as clicking around for an “about” or “disclaimer” page. And where a willingness to believe hoaxes once seemed to come from a place of honest ignorance or misunderstanding, that’s frequently no longer the case. Headlines like “Casey Anthony found dismembered in truck” go viral via old-fashioned schadenfreude — even hate.

There’s a simple, economic explanation for this shift: If you’re a hoaxer, it’s more profitable. Since early 2014, a series of Internet entrepreneurs have realized that not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers. Where many once wrote celebrity death hoaxes or “satires,” they now run entire, successful websites that do nothing but troll convenient minorities or exploit gross stereotypes. Paul Horner, the proprietor of Nbc.com.co and a string of other very profitable fake-news sites, once told me he specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives. They share a lot on Facebook, he explained; they’re the ideal audience.

The primary feature of the internet is, not to put too fine a point on it, the Speed Of Total Bullshit.  It's a feature, not a bug.  It directly results in things like fewer than half of Iowa Republicans believe President Obama was born in the US.  It's demonstrably true that he was, but the people who need facts the most are the least swayed by them.

This is America, a country where quite literally the facts no longer matter.

Lone Star Gunmen

Texas, like many other red states, is in the process of putting open carry laws into effect.  Starting in 2016 the state will allow people to carry handguns in holsters.  The challenge now is for as few people to die from this law as possible, I guess.

Experts predict that open carry will most likely take place in small numbers in rural areas, but unlike Oklahoma, six of the most populous cities in the country are in Texas: Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso. And that’s not taking into account the political climate around gun control in Texas this year. There have been number of demonstrators openly carrying rifles in large cities, the most recent being a group of armed protestors in front of a mosque in Irving and demonstrators who marched with rifles near UT-Austin and later held a mock mass shooting to protest “gun-free zones.” It’s still unclear why they felt the need to protest what would soon be law.

But one of the biggest concerns of law enforcement is establishing the fine line between respecting the rights of someone legally carrying a handgun and protecting the general public. “What happens when an officer sees someone openly carrying a handgun in a holster, in accordance with the law, what can an officer legally do?” Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, told theHouston Chronicle. “We keep getting more questions than answers.”

The fear is that open carry will make it harder for police officers to tell the difference between a law-abiding citizen legally carrying a gun and someone with criminal intentions carrying a gun. In the Houston Chronicle, comments like these from Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, don’t really help to clarify things.

Houston police, he said, will not “be doing random stops of people simply to see if they have a CHL,” but they also will not “sit back for 30 minutes” if they have a reasonable suspicion to stop someone.

So, what will they do?

My guess is police in Texas are going to be much, much more likely to open fire on people carrying weapons, not less...especially if the people carrying weapons aren't white.

It's going to be tragic when it happens...and of course, for Texas, the solution will be -- all together now -- MORE GUNS.

Trapped In A Hell Of Our Own Making

The NY Times editorial board takes on Republican TRAP laws designed for one purpose: to make legal abortions impossible to get for as many women as possible. 2015 was a banner year for TRAP legislation, and the only thing preventing national versions of these ridiculous laws was a Democrat in the White House (which may not be the case in 2017.)

In many states, including Texas, these laws have resulted in the shuttering of all but a few clinics that perform abortions, forcing women to travel hundreds of miles for the procedure. Among other burdens, this increases the chance that a woman will try to end her pregnancy on her own. This is extremely risky, and in some states it is even grounds for a charge of attempted murder. One study, based on a recent survey, estimated that 100,000 to 240,000 Texas women ages 18 to 49 have attempted a self-induced abortion without medical assistance. These women, the study found, were significantly more likely than average to have less access to basic reproductive-health services like birth control.

TRAP laws are the only ones currently before the Supreme Court, but they are far from the only roadblock to reproductive health care put up in 2015.

Just a few examples: Five states enacted or extended waiting periods for abortions, joining the more than two dozen states that already had such laws. Some of these laws also require a woman to undergo in-person counseling, which means two separate trips to a clinic or hospital. Two states, Arizona and Arkansas, passed laws requiring doctors to give women misleading information about the possibility of “reversing” a medication-induced abortion. Arkansas also became the third state to ban the use of the modern, evidence-based drug protocol for medication abortion, which is cheaper and more effective than what the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2000.

And then there is the unrelenting, but politically unpopular, campaign by Republicans in Congress, in statehouses and on the presidential campaign trail to deny funding to Planned Parenthood. The organization, which is the only reproductive-health service provider for millions of poorer women, is already prohibited by law from using federal funds for almost all abortions.

We're one election away from the outlawing of legal and safe medical abortions across the country, period.  Either the GOP will impose a national ban, or a Republican president will appoint enough conservatives to make it happen.

Sunday Long Read: Suppression Procession

This week's Sunday Long Read is part 7 of Jim Rutenberg's Disenfranchised series at the NY Times Magazine on GOP voter suppression.  This time he focuses on the Hispanic vote, and how Republicans and the Supreme Court are working to wipe out Hispanic and especially Latino voting power in Texas.

The 2016 presidential election will be the first to take place after the gutting of the V.R.A. and with all of these new laws potentially in place. Civil rights lawyers are just as concerned about provisions they don’t yet know about — the last-minute changes that could deter voters in ways that were previously disallowed. North Carolina, Virginia and Florida are among the states previously covered in whole or in part by Section 5, and they will be closely contested. Marc Elias, a longtime Democratic lawyer and the lead counsel for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, told me, ‘‘You are likely to see more litigation over the fundamental right to vote this election cycle than we have seen since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.’’

But the bigger voting rights fight isn’t about the map of today. It’s about the map of tomorrow, which will be reshaped by Hispanics in ways that could realign national politics for generations. Hispanic Americans have faced a long legacy of white hostility, dating back to the mid-19th century, when Texas state and local officials began a sporadic campaign to chase Hispanic citizens from polls with threats of violence or prison. Congress placed Texas under Section 5 oversight in 1975, based partly on its continued use of English-only ballots. But even now, Hispanic citizens are registering and voting at levels that are not much better than those of blacks near the end of Jim Crow — a 38.8 percent turnout in Texas in 2012, according to the Census Bureau, as opposed to more than 60 percent for both blacks and ‘‘Anglos,’’ the widely used informal term for non-Hispanic whites. (In the census, Hispanics can be of any race, and do not count as a racial category.)

If Hispanics were to start registering and voting in the same percentages that Anglos do in Texas, and continued to prefer Democrats over Republicans in the same proportions that they do now in presidential elections, Democrats would be able to shave the 16-point deficit they saw there in 2012 to 6 points by 2024 — less than the deficit the party faced in Virginia in 2004, four years before it managed to win the state. Continuing demographic trends would push Texas toward the Democratic column by 2036, but by then national Democrats, seeing a winnable presidential race, would already be flooding the state with money, staff and volunteers — something they haven’t done in earnest in nearly 20 years — to put it in their column even sooner. Projections have shown black and Hispanic population growth combining to force a similar dynamic in Georgia by as early as 2020 and making North Carolina a safer Democratic bet by 2024 or 2028; Hispanic growth alone could make Arizona competitive for Democrats by 2024, if not sooner.

The stakes are highest in Texas. Its 38 Electoral College votes make it ‘‘the last line of defense’’ against the Democrats, its Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has said. This explains why liberal groups like Battleground Texas have started spending so much money — $10 million in 2013 and 2014 — on, among other efforts, registering new voters. It also explains why Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, would go on the conservative cable network NewsMax TV to charge that the Obama administration was encouraging undocumented immigrants to come into the country to vote illegally. The right defense against those illegal voters, he suggested, was Texas’ voter-ID law. If they’re not stopped, Gohmert warned, ‘‘it will ensure that Republicans don’t ever get elected again.’’

And that is why Republicans are doing everything they can to lock in voter suppression now.  If they do not, the country belongs to Democrats in 20 years.  It is the last gasp of a dying party, a party that will scorch the earth rather than hand over power.

The Hispanic vote is key.  Republicans have no chance at it.  So they must destroy it.

Berning On The Hill

David Atkins explains the really idiotic "scandal" that has erupted over the last 24 hours in the land of the Democrats, and it turns out that having the Democratic National Committee keeping all the campaign data for the Donks is a bad, outdated idea.

The first thing to understand is that NGPVAN is a creaky voter database system that looks, and feels like it was put together in the 1990s. It has been the mainstay of Democratic campaigns all across the country and has intense loyalty among national campaign professionals—though it should be noted that the California Democratic Party uses one of its more robust and more expensive competitors PDI (PDI, hilariously, sent an email this morning to its users with the subject line “At PDI Data Security Is Our Top Priority.”) I myself have extensive experience running campaigns on both platforms, both as a campaign consultant and as a county Democratic Party official in California.

The DNC contracts with NGPVAN, meaning that firewalls between competitive primary campaigns within NGPVAN are incredibly important. But they also have been known to fail. When that happens, campaign professionals are expected to behave in a moral and legal manner. But they would also be stupid not to, since every action taken by an NGPVAN user is tracked and recorded on the server side.

The other important piece of information to note is the difference between a “saved search” and a “saved list.” NGPVAN’s voter tracking has the option of being dynamic or static, meaning that you can run dynamic searches of voters whose characteristics may change as NGPVAN’s data is updated, or you can pull static lists of voters who currently fit the profile you are seeking. Most voter data pulls within an NGPVAN campaign will be dynamic searches—and in fact, that is the default setting. You really only want to pull a static list if you’re doing something specific like creating a list for a targeted mail piece—or if you want a quick snapshot in time of a raw voter list.

However, merely pulling a search or a list doesn’t mean you can automatically download all the information on those voters. You can see topline numbers. You can take a few screenshots—though it would take hundreds of screenshots and the data would be nearly useless in that format. To download the actual data, you would need to run an export—a step that requires extra levels of permissions only allowed to the highest level operatives. Despite the breach that allowed them to run lists and searches, Sanders staffers apparently did not have export access.

However, the access logs do show that Sanders staff pulled not one but multiple lists—not searches, but lists—a fact that shows intent to export and use. And the lists were highly sensitive material. News reports have indicated that the data was “sent to personal folders” of the campaign staffers—but those refer to personal folders within NGPVAN, which are near useless without the ability to export the data locally.

Even without being able to export, however, merely seeing the topline numbers of, say, how many voters the Clinton campaign had managed to bank as “strong yes” votes would be a valuable piece of oppo. While it’s not the dramatic problem that a data export would have been, it’s undeniable that the Sanders campaign gleaned valuable information from the toplines alone. It’s also quite clear that most of the statements the Sanders campaign made as the story progressed—from the claim that the staffers only did it to prove the security breach, or that only one staffer had access—were simply not true. It’s just not clear at this point whether the campaign’s comms people knew the truth and lied, or whether they were not being told the whole truth by the people on the data team who were still making up stories and excuses to cover their tracks. I suspect the latter.

In this context, it made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaign’s private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited. So it made sense and was fairly obvious that the DNC would quickly end up giving the campaign back its NGPVAN access—particularly since failing to do so would be a death sentence for the campaign and a gigantic black eye to the party.

In other words, Team Bernie got cute, got caught, and then cried foul that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was the bad guy here, and not the Sanders campaign stupidly playing fast and loose with the rules.

The Sanders campaign then completely overreacted when they got caught, period.

So bottom line, the Sanders folks are correct when they say that the DNC is favoring Hillary and Schultz has her thumb on the scale against them.  That's not up for debate in any way. I have long advocated for Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign, and the main reason she still is in charge of the DNC is that the Hillary Clinton camp will burn the place down if she goes.  It's a lousy arrangement.

However, the Hillary folks are 100% correct that if the roles had been reversed, the Sanders people would be screaming bloody murder and that the media, the Sanders campaign, and the GOP would be demanding Hillary drop out of the race immediately.  That's not up for debate either, this would have been front page news for weeks, if not months.

Finally, the DNC was right, as David says, to bust the Sanders campaign openly and publicly and then to give the data back to the Sanders campaign when they were done satisfying the Clinton team.  The Sanders camp got caught and should have taken the loss.  Instead they allowed their frustration to damage everyone involved, in the kind of petulant stunt that Sanders and his supporters are rapidly becoming infamous for.  Hillary may be a pain in the ass and all, but the Sanders folks are sore, sore losers.

Can we get back to preventing the Republicans from winning, guys?

The Worst Reporters Of 2015, Con't

The New York Times responds to this awful incidence of reporting as editor Margaret Sullivan lays out what happened and more importantly what must change at reporting at the Times.

I talked on Friday to the executive editor, Dean Baquet; to one of his chief deputies, Matt Purdy; and to the Washington editor, Bill Hamilton, who edited the article. All described what happened as deeply troubling. Mr. Baquet said that some new procedures need to be put in place, especially for dealing with anonymous sources, and he said he would begin working on that immediately.

“This was a really big mistake,” Mr. Baquet said, “and more than anything since I’ve become editor it does make me think we need to do something about how we handle anonymous sources.”

He added: “This was a system failure that we have to fix.” However, Mr. Baquet said it would not be realistic or advisable to ban anonymous sources entirely from The Times.

How did this specific mistake happen?

“Our sources misunderstood how social media works and we didn’t push hard enough,” said Mr. Baquet, who read the article before publication. He said those sources apparently did not know the difference between public and private messages on social-media platforms.

I asked him why reporters or editors had not insisted on seeing or reading the social media posts in question, or even having them read aloud to them; he told me he thought that this would have been unrealistic under the circumstances, but that without that kind of direct knowledge, more caution was required.

Mr. Purdy said “we need to have a red flag” on such stories. He said he believed The Times has an “overreliance” on anonymous sources. Mr. Hamilton sees another lesson, too. “When we don’t know the details, as we didn’t here, there’s probably a reason for that,” he said. He added: “We didn’t see the dangers.”

All the editors said that slowing down, despite the highly competitive nature of a hot news story, is a necessary measure.

Those measures for dealing with anonymous sources need to be made public.  But if you think Matt Apuzzo and Michael Schmidt will face any consequences for their actions, you don't know the news industry very well.

Never forget news is a corporate industry in this country.

Mr. Baquet staunchly defended Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Apuzzo (who, he noted, won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting at The Associated Press on the New York police’s surveillance of Muslims), calling them “really fine reporters who have broken a lot of great stories” in recent months. Mr. Hamilton agreed, and noted that Mr. Apuzzo and Mr. Schmidt cover two of the most sensitive beats in Washington — national security and law enforcement, respectively, including the F.B.I.

Mr. Baquet rejected the idea that the sources had a political agenda that caused them to plant falsehoods. “There’s no reason to think that’s the case,” he said.

This is a career newsman saying there's no story here.  That's downright laughable.

Oh well.  Keep juggling those chainsaws on your credibility, guys.

The Writing On The Wall

George Carlin said it best: "Think how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are dumber then that."

 

Apparently a hell of a lot of the people on the dumb end of that scale are in Augusta County, Virginia.

Some Augusta County parents raised concerns on Tuesday after calling a student assignment anti-American. Some called it an Islamic indoctrination, but the school superintendent says the assignments are cultural lessons, not a religious statement. 

"When I saw the language, the Arabic language, immediately, I had a bad feeling come over me," concerned parent Kimberly Herndon told WVIR. 

The assignment involved ninth-grade students at Riverheads High School to copy the Shahada. "She told us the paper meant faith, so we didn't think anything of it," ninth-grader Laurel Truxell said. Students found out they translated a message that said, "There is no other God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger." 

The assignment also involved students dressing up, wearing the Hijab, according to WVIR.

Parent Kimberly Herndon shared her feelings about the assignment on Facebook, which was shared more than 770 times. Her post sparked a community meeting Tuesday night. "These children were deceived when they were told it was calligraphy. This is not calligraphy. This is a language."

And then they CLOSED SCHOOL.  Because of CALLIGRAPHY.  Not because of the actual assignment, but because of angry anti-Muslim assholes coming to possibly do harm to the teachers and students and school officials.

Augusta County schools closed their doors Thursday and canceled all sports and activities for the day. 

All the county’s schools are closed Friday, December 18, too. Meanwhile, all school sports and activities scheduled for the weekend are also canceled. 

It all stems from a world geography class assignment at Riverheads High School that some parents called Islamic indoctrination. 

The directions read, "This should give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy.” The assignment incorporated Arabic calligraphy, but also included an Islamic proclamation of faith. 

That prompted a community meeting and a lot of anger. That anger apparently coming not just from central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley, but from outside areas too. 

The school system says it's received so many phone calls and e-mails following that controversial assignment that they felt they had to close the schools as a precautionary measure.

The fear and hatred from "Christians" in this country just makes me physically ill.

The Crossroads Of Power

NY Magazine's Rebecca Traister wastes little time explaining exactly what's at stake in 2016, whether the country merely observes what she calls the "death throes" of "white male power" in the country, or if instead America is immolated by the flames.

This is our country in an excruciating period of change. This is the story of the slow expansion of possibility for figures who have long existed on the margins, and it is also the story of the dangerous rage those figures provoke. Listen closely, and you'll hear the acknowledgment coming directly from the Republican candidates. Here was Marco Rubio in Tuesday's debate: "What's at stake in this election is not simply what party's going to be in charge but our very identity as a people and as a nation." This is not a dog whistle. This is a statement of fact.

There are those on the right and the left who love to downplay identity politics as a distraction: Do we even believe in race or gender as anything but social constructs? How do identity politics apply to Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson? Isn’t worrying about gender and race with regard to presidential politics just narcissism anyway?

But it’s not narcissism. This election is a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men — as voters, as citizens, as workers, as members of the military, as presidents.

And while the resistance may be symptomatic of death throes, a rage at the dying of the white male light, it nonetheless presents a very real threat — there is the possibility that the old and angry may triumph over the new and different. Those who are furious are not without power to effect change that lasts generations: Imagine Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio in office with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. Voting: restricted. Immigration: halted. Abortion: banned. Equal pay: unprotected. Same-sex marriage: overturned.

Imagine, on the other hand, a Clinton presidency — or even a Sanders one, though even a white male Jewish socialist may invite less ire than a woman. Clinton, like Obama before her, isn’t carrying just her own baggage, but will stand in as the symbolic target for those whose fury at increased female autonomy has been building. In a nation where women who were not permitted to cast votes still live and breathe, her campaign, as Ms. Clinton has herself declared in other contexts, is living history. If she wins, she — and we — will be forced to do battle with this rising, chilling, ever more open threat from those who feel enraged that their country is no longer their own. I fear that there’s a lot more terror ahead of us.

 Should Hillary win, there will be rage, inchoate rage with the potential to scorch this country and damage America for decades.

But that was always coming.  It metastasized during the Obama years, and will erupt in blood during the Clinton ones.  Should the GOP win however, the retaliation will be swift and deadly.

StupidiNews!

• Pope Francis has ratified a second posthumous miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, meaning that the famed nun who cared for the poor in Calcutta could be declared a saint in 2016.
• The former neighbor of the two San Bernardino shooters was formally charged with providing material support to terrorists, as well as weapon, and immigration charges on Thursday.
• US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has made a trip to Afghanistan, meeting with some 600 troops still stationed in the eastern part of the country as well as Afghan leaders.
• Sharp declines in Chinese steel manufacturing has crashed the market for molybdenum, with the price cut in half it's the worst-performing 2015 commodity tracked by Bloomberg.
• NOAA officials have agreed to hand over e-mails as Republicans are using congressional subpoena power to try to find evidence of climate change data being manipulated.

Last Call For Shelly's World

No surprise that the mystery buyer behind the recent purchase of Nevada's biggest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is none other than GOP megadonor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

The son-in-law of billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson arranged the $140 million purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Adelson's behalf, sources confirmed Wednesday.

Patrick Dumont, who is listed on the website of Las Vegas Sands Corp. as the company's senior vice president of finance and strategy, put together the deal at the behest of his father-in-law, the chairman and CEO of the casino operator.

Dumont, a 41-year-old from New York, in 2009 married Sivan Ochshorn, a daughter of Adelson's wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, from a prior marriage. Sivan Ochshorn Dumont runs the Israel Hayom, which is owned by the casino mogul.

"He (Dumont) handles all the investments for the family," said a source close to the Adelsons who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the family.

Another source familiar with the deal said Sheldon Adelson, 15th on the Forbes 400 List of Billionaires with a net worth of $24.5 billion, funded the transaction. Dumont helped create News + Media Capital Group LLC, which acquired the Review-Journal and several smaller Nevada newspapers last week from New Media Investment Corp.

A source said Dumont also led Adelson's previous attempt to acquire the Review-Journal from former owner Stephens Media LLC before the February sale to New Media Investment. He could not be reached for comment. Sivan Ochshorn Dumont, reached at the couple's Las Vegas home, hung up before answering a reporter's questions Wednesday.

Adelson, meanwhile, broke several days of silence on the newspaper purchase late Tuesday night, telling CNN media reporter Brian Stelter only that he has "no personal interest" in the RJ's new owner.

Fortune magazine on Wednesday cited "multiple sources familiar with the situation" in reporting Adelson was the newspaper's "primary buyer."

Michael Reed, CEO of New Media Investment Corp., did not respond to repeated calls for comment.

Nothing new with the richest people in America buying newspapers, after all Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought a far larger paper in the Washington Post, but Bezos was up front about it from day one, and answered questions about how the paper would treat his financial and corporate interests as part of the very public and well-covered sales process.  It hasn't been 100% smooth, but Bezos never attempted to hide or go through intermediaries, and he certainly isn't enmeshed in politics in the way Adelson is.

We'll see how this goes as far as affecting Nevada politics.

The Worst Reporters Of 2015

The New York Times is in the middle of a real problem now, as Kevin Drum notes, the same journalists who gave us "Hillary is the target of a criminal probe!" are the same Village Idiots behind "Obama failed to stop social media jihadis in San Bernardino!"

So where did this notion come from, anyway? The answer is a New York Times story on Sunday headlined "U.S. Visa Process Missed San Bernardino Wife's Zealotry on Social Media." It told us that Tashfeen Malik "talked openly" on social media about jihad and that, "Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country." The story was written by Matt Apuzzo, Michael Schmidt, and Julia Preston.

Do those names sound familiar? They should. The first two were also the authors of July's epic fail claiming that Hillary Clinton was the target of a criminal probe over the mishandling of classified information in her private email system. In the end, virtually everything about the story turned out to be wrong. Clinton was not a target. The referral was not criminal. The emails in question had not been classified at the time Clinton saw them.

Assuming Comey is telling the truth, that's two strikes. Schmidt and Apuzzo either have some bad sources somewhere, or else they have one really bad source somewhere. And coincidentally or not, their source(s) have provided them with two dramatic but untrue scoops that make prominent Democrats look either corrupt or incompetent. For the time being, Schmidt and Apuzzo should be considered on probation. That's at least one big mistake too many.

The real issue is that the Gray Lady is getting "scoops" that are 100% false, that all happen to help the GOP advance its agenda, fed through the same reporters.

It's not like that hasn't happened before or anything, guys.  Seems like there may be some exciting new career options soon for Apuzzo and Schmidt, ya know?

Marty, McFried

Looks like somebody finally knocked the smirk off Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli's face: The Feds.

A boyish drug company entrepreneur, who rocketed to infamy by jacking up the price of a life-saving pill from $13.50 to $750, was arrested by federal agents at his Manhattan home early Thursday morning on securities fraud related to a firm he founded. 

Martin Shkreli, 32, ignited a firestorm over drug prices in September and became a symbol of defiant greed. The federal case against him has nothing to do with pharmaceutical costs, however. Prosecutors in Brooklyn charged him with illegally taking stock from Retrophin Inc., a biotechnology firm he started in 2011, and using it to pay off debts from unrelated business dealings. He was later ousted from the company, where he’d been chief executive officer, and sued by its board. 

In the case that closely tracks that suit, federal prosecutors accused Shkreli of engaging in a complicated shell game after his defunct hedge fund, MSMB Capital Management, lost millions. He is alleged to have made secret payoffs and set up sham consulting arrangements. A New York lawyer, Evan Greebel, was also arrested early Thursday. He's accused of conspiring with Shkreli in part of the scheme. 

Shkreli’s lawyer and a spokesman for Retrophin didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Greebel and his firm weren’t immediately available to comment either. A spokeswoman for Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers did not immediately respond to a call and e-mail seeking comment. 

Shkreli’s extraordinary history—and current hold on the public imagination—makes the case more noteworthy than most involving securities fraud. The son of immigrants from Albania and Croatia who worked as janitors and raised him deep in working-class Brooklyn, Shkreli both epitomizes the American dream and sullies it. As a youth, he showed exceptional promise and independence and, after dropping out of an elite Manhattan high school, began his conquest of Wall Street before he was 20.

I hope the SEC lawyers have a field day with this asshole and he gets the full Bernie Madoff. Couldn't have happened to a nicer aggregate colony of sentient fungus, I say.  More truth from Steve M.:

Nothing terrible happens to you in this country if you shaft ordinary people. We saw that after the financial collapse. Shaft members of the investor class, however, and you really might face the law's wrath. Ordinary schmucks aren't full citizens. Want justice? Buy financial instruments. If you can't, tough luck -- the law doesn't care what happens to you. 

Shrkeli screwed the wrong people, so I suppose he really could go to prison. However, I expect him to play the "troubled white guy" card, in court and possibly in the media. All the "bad boy" nonsense -- the incessant boasting, the taunting tweets, the $2 million purchase of that one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan CD, the claim that he seeks to bail out imprisoned rapper Bobby Shmurda and also might pursue a rap career of his own -- I predict is going to be presented in court as a textbook case of bipolar disorder, or some condition on the autistic spectrum, that impairs Shkreli's judgment and renders him less than fully liable for his own acts. 

We know that blacks arrested for violent crimes are always "thugs" and Muslims are always "terrorists," whereas even white guys who commit mass murder are "loners," "troubled" and "misunderstood." Will Shrkeli try to play the "troubled" card? It might not work, but that's what I'm betting on.

What's good, Martin?

StupidiNews!

• A mistrial has been declared for the first of six police officers tried in connection with the death of Freddie Gray as Baltimore jurors could not agree on any charges against William Porter.
• Fed Chair Janet Yellen says the first interest rate hike in seven years is "extraordinary" as the Fed raised short-term interest rates by a quarter-point Wednesday.
• FBI investigators say they have found no evidence that the couple who killed 14 in San Bernardino earlier this month were part of a larger terrorist cell.
• Aircraft giant Boeing has won a $10 billion order from China Southern Air as Asia's largest air carrier will add more than 100 Boeing 737 jets to its fleet.
• This week's $1.1 trillion budget deal did not end funding to implement FCC net neutrality rules, opponents are instead relying on an industry lawsuit to kill the measures in 2016.

Last Call For More Gunmerica

For the first time that I can remember, Americans are now against even the most basic bans on automatic weapons. Fear now rules this country.

A majority of Americans oppose banning assault weapons for the first time in more than 20 years of ABC News/Washington Post polls, with the public expressing vast doubt that the authorities can prevent “lone wolf” terrorist attacks and a substantial sense that armed citizens can help. 

Just 45 percent in this national survey favor an assault weapons ban, down 11 percentage points from an ABC/Post poll in 2013 and down from a peak of 80 percent in 1994. Fifty-three percent oppose such a ban, the most on record.




Indeed, while the division is a close one, Americans by 47-42 percent think that encouraging more people to carry guns legally is a better response to terrorism than enacting stricter gun control laws. Divisions across groups are vast, underscoring the nation’s gulf on gun issues. 

There’s lopsided agreement on another concern: Just 22 percent express confidence in the government’s ability to prevent lone-wolf terrorist attacks, with 77 percent skeptical about it. Confidence in the government’s ability to stop a large-scale organized terrorist attack is much higher, albeit still well short of a majority -– 43 percent.

Even as recently as last year, there was still a healthy majority for doing so.  No longer in the era of Trump and Cruz, as a majority of Americans now believe they are action heroes who think the purpose of a firearm is to "kill bad guys" and not to protect a home/family or to hunt.

And of course, increasingly the people with the guns get to define who the "bad guys" are.

The increase in opposition to banning assault weapons since 2013 peaks in some groups – up 18 points among strong conservatives, 17 points among higher-income earners and 16 points in the generally more liberal Northeast. But it’s a broadly based trend. Many groups have moved from majority support for an assault weapons ban two years ago to majority opposition now: whites, 30- to 64-year-olds, suburbanites, political independents, moderates, residents of the West and Midwest, anyone without a post-graduate degree and those in $100,000-plus households.

These trends leave just seven basic demographic groups in which majorities still support banning assault weapons: women, Northeasterners, seniors, post-graduates, liberals, Democrats and blacks.

Differences among groups are extensive. Barely more than a third of men favor banning assault weapons, compared with more than half of women (35 percent vs. 53 percent). Seniors are most likely to favor banning assault weapons, while – despite their greater liberalism on many other issues – nearly six in 10 young adults oppose it. Opposition is high in rural areas (64 percent) and among those who lack a college degree.

Two observations: unprecedented fear in the 24/7 BREAKING NEWS era is exhausting, and Democrats shouldn't count on Millennials, particularly white ones, as a source of voters in the future. They've made their bed, especially white men.

Cruzin' To Get Trumped, Con't

Add Vox's Andrew Prokop to the growing list of pundits who see a GOP nomination that comes down to Trump vs. Cruz as a massive win for the Democrats in 2016.

Let's be clear on the political stakes here. It is not impossible that Trump or Cruz could win a general election. But there's ample reason to believe that a Trump or Cruz nomination makes all of the following far more likely: 

• Sweeping electoral defeat for Republicans, for the presidency and in the Senate atleast (some Democrats have even suggested to me that the House could be put in play) 
• Either a liberal takeover of the Supreme Court or a missed chance for conservatives to pad their majority (since four of the court's nine justices will be older than 80 when the next president is inaugurated) 
• A tarnishing of the GOP's image among Hispanics that will last a very long time. (This is obviously true for Trump, but Cruz is also far further to the right on immigration than any modern GOP nominee.) 

With so many other options available, nominating either Trump or Cruz would be a tremendous risk to take for a party that has any interest in winning. 

And yet somehow Trump and Cruz have ended up first and second in the polls, with one of them leading Iowa and the other ahead in New Hampshire. 

Yes, the GOP saw several extreme or seemingly unelectable candidates surge to first place during the 2011 nomination contest, but establishment favorite Mitt Romney ended up winning. Yes, past examples like Howard Dean show a poll leader really can collapse very quickly. 

Is the establishment really still willing to assume that two poll leaders will just collapse? Two poll leaders who not only have excited voters but who each has access to tens of millions in cash?

And again, there's a number of conservative pundits who are betting just that: that both Trump and Cruz will collapse and clear the way for someone like Rubio to win.  That number is shrinking, however, as more of the right are looking to choose sides between Trump and Cruz.

Still, I'm liking the Dems' chances against Cruz or Trump.  The winner here will be so ridiculously far to the right and the fight so well publicized that come next fall, the Democrats will be in a very powerful position.