Bush, Whacked? Con't

Daily Beast columnist Will Rahn doesn't pull any punches as he tells Jeb Bush to pack it in and drop out of the race for the good of the GOP.

The conventional wisdom a few months ago was that your brother’s catastrophic presidency would be your bid’s biggest hurdle. Now, in a fit of desperation, it looks like you’re about to draft him to stump for you. Putting aside that George W. is still despised by a not-insignificant swath of the Republican electorate, how is that going to play in the general should you somehow win the nomination? You’re making the Democrats’ job easy, Jeb. They’ll be more than happy to attach you to his legacy, and you’re doing that for them.

Speaking of the Democrats, we know what will happen if you drag this out through next spring. The going thinking right now is that the guys really low in the polls—your Rand Pauls and George Patakis—should be next to drop out. But what damage do they do to the GOP by staying in? You Bushes, meanwhile, for all your patrician aloofness, are some of the dirtiest campaigners out there, and every jab you get in at your fellow establishmentarians like Marco Rubio is going to be used against them by the left. It’s one thing to toughen up a nominee in a primary fight—it’s another to make them damaged goods, unready to lead. If you’ve got some golden piece of oppo that will take Rubio or John Kasich out of consideration, by all means use it now. Otherwise, time to step aside.

Electability has always been the central rationale of your candidacy. We’re reminded it’s been more than 30 years since a Republican outside the Bush family won the presidency. In 2000, your brother was able to make the case that he was the strongest candidate to take on the Democrats, particularly after he dragged John McCain’s name through the mud.

But your brother was an able campaigner, and you are not. The polls showed he had a particularly good chance of winning back the White House; the same can’t really be said of you. And again, he was a disaster as president. You were doing a decent job of shedding all that baggage, but now that’s he’s joining you on the campaign trail, you’re going to be shouldering all of it. And not for nothing, but your principal strategist, Mike Murphy, does have the distinction of being the only 2016 guru to have already run against Hillary and lost.

And even if your brother wasn’t a nincompoop, Jeb, you’re doing a fine job of messing this up on your own. You’ve already had more than your fair share of flubs. That “stuff happens” quote may have initially been taken out of context by the media, but guess what: Running for president, particularly when you’re a Republican, means dealing with a hostile press. You will not always be treated fairly, you will rarely be given the benefit of the doubt. Contrast your statement with Rubio’s nearly perfect response to a question about Black Lives Matter that was making the rounds on Twitter last week, and you see why Republicans worry about you leading the party through 2016.

I have to admit, in whatever alternate universe where the evil version of me is a Republican political blogger, I'd be giving the Bush camp the same advice.  The longer he stays in, the longet he becomes the punch line of the attacks on the GOP. "Just like his brother, only incompetent and stupid" is not exactly the best image the GOP wants to project if they want to win.

Granted, it's hard not to project that image given the people running.  But at this point, there's no way Jeb becomes the nominee.  The problem is, the Republicans have already committed millions to his campaign, so he can keep going as long as he wants to.

And keep doing damage the whole time.  Stay in Jeb, please!

StupidiNews!

• Russian Navy ships launched cruise missiles into Syria as Moscow stepped up its military strikes on Islamist rebels, despite continuing protests from the Pentagon.
• Volkswagen's US division chief is expected to testify to Congress today that he knew the company was rigging diesel emissions tests in 2014.
• Hillary Clinton says that she does not back the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in its current form, marking another major break with the Obama Administration.
• FIFA President Sepp Blatter has been suspended for 90 days by the organization as several international investigations into corruption continue.
• Members of SAG-AFTRA's voice actors union have overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, which could greatly affect a number of video game projects in negotiation.

Last Call For Soulless Lumps Of Basalt

Whenever I think to myself "Boy, Republican politicians really can't get any worse" invariably somebody proves me wrong within minutes. Charles Johnson:

Republican presidential candidates are competing to see who can say the most heartless, reprehensible things today about the gun massacre at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College. 

First, Ben Carson blamed the victims for not defending themselves. 

Yeah, Ben Carson is a bit of a douchebag.

He'd also be your next President if America voted today, too.  Keep that in mind.  Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal is on the rise from 0% in the polls too.

And now, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (a creationist like Ben Carson), has issued a statement at his website that actually goes a step further into awfulness: We Fill Our Culture With Garbage, and We Reap the Result.

And Jindal just goes off the rails and careens into the wall here.

Now, let’s get really politically incorrect here and talk specifically about this horror in Oregon. This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns. 

Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here. 

He brags that he has never held a gun in his life and that he had no idea that his son had any guns. Why didn’t he know? Because he failed to raise his son. He should be ashamed of himself, and he owes us all an apology.

Now however you feel about the killer in Oregon, the fact of the matter remains is a father has outlived his son, one of the great tragedies that can occur, and yes, the son murdered nine people and then took his own life.  But for Jindal, a man running for President, to say something so heartlessly callous just for the shock value of scoring publicity while his presidential and political aspects wither like his soul?

I've thought some terrible things about Republicans, but never that they were just unfit to be in human society.

Jindal needs to resign from this planet, let alone the office of Governor of Louisiana.

The Great Jobs Debate In Kentucky

Republican cockfighting enthusiast Matt Bevin squared off against Democratic AG Jack Conway in the second of three debates ahead of next month's gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, and things got ugly, fast.

During the debate, Bevin accused Conway of not doing his duty last year when he chose not to appeal a ruling by late U.S. District Judge John Heyburn overturning Kentucky’s gay marriage ban, all the while calling for Rowan County Clerk to issue marriage licenses as a federal judge has ordered. 

“It’s easy for you to sit here and say that indeed, she should follow the law … but frankly, you did not follow the law when you cried before the cameras and refused to uphold the constitution of this state,” Bevin said. 

Conway defended his decision saying that it was his duty under the law to decide whether to appeal based upon the chances of winning the appeal. “I did my job, Matt,” he said. “You may not have liked the way I did, but I did my job.” 

Bevin claimed the state has lost 71,000 jobs since Conway became attorney general, and he laid that at Conway’s feet.

Bevin of course is full of nonsense.  Even if employment was somehow the domain of a state's attorney general to worry about, five minutes on Google and I come up with this chart:

Jack Conway took office in January 2008, Kentucky at that point had 1,860,600 people employed. Kentucky certainly lost more than a 100,000 jobs two years later.  But since then, the state has not only added those jobs back, it caught up to that January 2008 number in July of last year.  The preliminary August jobs number in Kentucky is 1,895,700 jobs.

Which means Kentucky has actually added 35,100 jobs since Jack Conway took over as Attorney General.

Bevin can't even lie correctly.  Idiot.

No Sporting Chance

We've all seen those TV and online ads for internet daily fantasy sports leagues where people can win millions of dollars, but mostly end up throwing away good money after bad.  Turns out whenever you have that kind of money involved, somebody, somewhere is going to rig the game.

A major scandal is erupting in the multibillion-dollar industry of fantasy sports, the online and unregulated business in which players assemble their fantasy teams with real athletes. On Monday, the two major fantasy companies were forced to release statements defending their businesses’ integrity after what amounted to allegations of insider trading, that employees were placing bets using information not generally available to the public.

The statements were released after an employee at DraftKings, one of the two major companies, admitted last week to inadvertently releasing data before the start of the third week of N.F.L. games. The employee, a midlevel content manager, won $350,000 at a rival site, FanDuel, that same week.

“It is absolutely akin to insider trading,” said Daniel Wallach, a sports and gambling lawyer at Becker & Poliakoff in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It gives that person a distinct edge in a contest.”

The episode has raised questions about who at daily fantasy companies has access to valuable data, such as which players a majority of the money is being bet on; how it is protected; and whether the industry can — or wants — to police itself. 

And when it's this easy to cheat and win, of course people are going to do it.

The leagues have been swelling in popularity, their advertisements blanketing football game broadcasts.

The industry has its roots in informal fantasy games that began years ago with groups of fans playing against one another for fun over the course of a season. They assembled hypothetical teams and scored points based on how players did in actual games.

But in recent years, companies, led by DraftKings and FanDuel, have set up online daily and weekly games based on a similar concept in which fans pay an entry fee to a website — from 25 cents to $1,000 — to play dozens if not hundreds of opponents, with prize pools that can pay $2 million to the winner. Critics have complained that the setup is hardly different from Las Vegas-style gambling that is normally banned in the sports world.

On Monday, DraftKings and FanDuel released a joint statement that said “nothing is more important” than the “integrity of the games we offer,” but offered few specifics about how they keep contests on the level.

The only surprising thing about this story is that it took this long for people to get caught.

StupidiNews!

• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has gone to a team of three scientists from Turkey, Sweden, and the US for their work on mapping out how cells protect and repair DNA.
• New analysis finds that the 500 largest companies in the US are keeping some $2.1 trillion offshore in order to avoid paying $620 billion in corporate taxes yearly.
• Doctors Without Borders is calling for an independent international investigation of the bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, calling the incident a war crime.
• US and Russian military forces are trying to work out coordinated joint airstrikes against ISIS militants in Syria in talks starting today.
• Time Warner Cable is openly apologizing to customers after years of the lowest-ranked customer service in the industry, promising to not act "like a cable company" in the future.

Last Call For Courting Disaster

The Supreme Court's fall term begins this week, and after several big victories for Team Liberal last June, WaPo's Paul Waldman reminds us that this conservative SCOTUS could turn around within nine months all but put an end to affirmative action, the availability of abortion, voting rights, public sector unions, and oh yeah, Obamacare as the courts get back their normal actions of siding with Republicans.

And while they’ve had a couple of recent high-profile defeats at the Court, conservatives have enjoyed a conservative majority for a couple of decades now. Yes, Anthony Kennedy sometimes joins with liberals, as he did in the case legalizing same-sex marriage. But just in the last few years, they’ve seen the doors of campaign finance thrown open to unlimited spending by corporations and billionaires; the Voting Rights Act gutted; affirmative action all but outlawed; an individual right to own guns created for the first time in American history; corporations granted religious rights to exempt themselves from laws they don’t like and sectarian prayer allowed at government meetings; unions undermined and employment discrimination suits made more difficult; and a whole series of less well-known decisions that enhance the power of the powerful, whether it’s the government or corporations. 

Nevertheless, when you hear conservatives talk about the Court, they don’t say, “We need to make sure we get more conservative justices to keep winning.” Instead, they say, “We’ve been betrayed!” So what’s going on? 

There are a couple of answers. The first is that they’re demanding not just a record of wins, but absolute perfection. They want not justices who will bring a conservative philosophy to the Court, but justices who will never stray from whatever it is the Republican Party wants at a particular time. The recent decision in King v. Burwell is a perfect example: the lawsuit itself was a joke, based on a series of claims about the Affordable Care Act that ran from the clearly false to the laughably ridiculous. When John Roberts sided with the majority to dismiss it — despite a long record of being on the “right” side of all the cases I mentioned above, plus many more — they declared him to be an irredeemable traitor. 

The second reason is that narratives of betrayal are central to how conservatives understand history. Whenever events don’t turn out as they would like, whether it’s a foreign war or a lost election or a societal evolution, the story is always the same: We were betrayed, either by our opponents or by the people we thought were our allies. Was the Iraq War a terrible idea? No, we had it won — until Barack Obama betrayed us by pulling out. Why was George W. Bush so unpopular? Because he betrayed conservative principles by not cutting spending more, just like his father betrayed us by raising taxes (while the younger Bush was still president, longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie wrote a book entitled “Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big-Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause).” As Digby memorably wrote, “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal.)” And it goes back as far as you want. Why did the Soviet Union come to dominate Eastern Europe? Because FDR betrayed us at Yalta. 

It isn’t that there’s never any truth in this story, particularly when it comes to the Court. David Souter, for instance, turned out to be a genuine liberal, not at all what Republicans expected when he was appointed by George H. W. Bush. But they’ve gotten so used to the betrayal narrative that they place even a single setback into it. Which may explain why conservative opinions of the Court have changed so dramatically in recent years. According to Pew polls, in 2008, 80 percent of Republicans approved of the Supreme Court, compared to 64 percent of Democrats. By 2015, the views of Democrats hadn’t changed — their approval was at 62 percent. But Republican approval had fallen to 33 percent, despite all they had won at the Court over that time. A full 68 percent of conservative Republicans call the Court “liberal,” an idea that is absurd by any objective measure, but one that is regularly fed by conservative media and Republican politicians.

We'll see what happens, but let's be honest that the Roberts Court has been an utter disaster for the country, and there's little reason to think that the 2015-2016 term will be any different.

Obama's Marine Scene

Dubya certainly didn't bother with any, but President Obama has named two new federal marine sanctuaries to protect America's waters as the world's attention turns to the Our Ocean Conference in Chile this week.

In a video message to conference attendees, President Obama announced plans for two new marine sanctuaries, one off the coast of Maryland, and the other in Lake Michigan. They’ll be the first new national marine sanctuaries designated by the federal government in the past 15 years. 

One of these sanctuaries will be an 875-square mile section of Lake Michigan off the shore of Wisconsin, which is recognized for its collection of nearly 40 known shipwrecks, some of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The other sanctuary is a 14-square mile area of the Potomac River, which includes Maryland’s Mallows Bay — an area known for its ecological significance, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and home to bald eagles, herons, beavers, river otters and numerous species of fish. 

“The United States is committed to working with our international partners to protect our oceans and protect our planet,” says Obama in the video. “Because I refuse to leave our children a planet that’s beyond their capacity to repair.” 

The two areas were nominated for sanctuary status last year after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reopened the public nomination process for the first time in 20 years. Since the process was opened, seven nominations were submitted from around the country, and the two announced today were the ones so far approved by NOAA for consideration as national marine sanctuaries. At least one other nomination is still currently under review by NOAA. 

These plans come on the heels of other recent action by the Obama administration to expand protection for marine areas in the United States. Last year, President Obama made Alaska’s Bristol Bay off limits to oil and gas development, while still allowing for commercial fishing in the area. He also expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which was originally established in 2009. 

Marine national monuments differ from marine sanctuaries in that they can be established by presidential proclamation, whereas sanctuaries are designated by NOAA and require extensive public input — however, they can offer similar protections and human use restrictions over marine ecosystems. 

The United States is also announcing several other plans aimed at protecting marine resources. In Chile for the conference, Secretary of State John F. Kerry announced the launch of Sea Scout, a global initiative targeting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing by uniting world leaders, expanding technology and information-sharing and identifying illegal fishing hot spots. NOAA also has plans to expand the development of a technology known as the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, which detects boats and may help alert nations to illegal fishing activities. The technology will be implemented in several nations in 2016, including Indonesia and the Philippines.

Raise your hand if you think any additional marine sanctuaries would be approved or even reviewed by NOAA under a Republican president.  Hell, if the GOP keeps control of Congress and gets the White House, I'd expect a law preventing marine sanctuaries from being created, if not reversing the sanctuary status of existing parks for drilling and coastal land development for new McMansions for rick bankers.

Maybe after seven years people will start realizing that President Obama has been serious about the environment since day one.

Slow Bern In A Red State

WaPo's Dave Weigel discovers that Nobama Country in the Appalachians isn't interested in Hillary Clinton either, but is somehow mysteriously fertile ground for Feeling The Bern.

Shelley Brannon, 62, can sum up the Obama presidency with three words. Well, three words and an exclamation. 

“He screwed us,” said Brannon, a coal miner from Wise County, Va., as he sat outside a rally for the United Mine Workers of America. “Man, he screwed us.” 

He shook his head under a camouflage hat that matched his camouflage UMWA T-shirt, and he described his fantasy of dumping nuclear waste in the yards of environmentalists, “if they think coal’s so bad.” He mulled over the mistake UMWA had made in 2008, when it endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Then he explained why he would probably be voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the next Democratic primary. 

“For one thing, he knows what union is, and he respects it,” said Brannon. “That’s all we need is respect. He’s just a likeable fella, trustworthy. I don’t think she has the same respect for the union, and she really shot herself in the foot over, you know, all that secretive stuff.” 

West Virginia has rejected the Obama-era Democratic Party more dramatically than any state outside the South, with Appalachian counties that voted for Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale turning blood red over the past eight years. But if you think it’s in places like this that the insurgent Sanders campaign faces its most formidable test, here’s what he thinks: It is also one of his greatest opportunities. 

The Vermont socialist thinks that white, working-class voters, the sort of people Obama once self-defeatingly said “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them,” are just one honest argument away from coming back. 

“We have millions of working-class people who are voting for Republican candidates whose views are diametrically opposite to what voters want,” said Sanders in an interview. “How many think it’s a great idea that we have trade policies that lead to plants in West Virginia being shut down? How many think there should be massive cuts in Pell grants, or in Social Security? In my opinion, not too many people.”

Now this is truly weird, given Bernie's position on climate change in Coal Country is essentially the same as President Obama's and Hillary Clinton's.

The United States must lead the world in tackling climate change, if we are to make certain that this planet is habitable for our children and grandchildren. We must transform our energy system away from polluting fossil fuels, and towards energy efficiency and sustainability. Millions of homes and buildings need to be weatherized, and we need to greatly accelerate technological progress in wind and solar power generation. 

Unless we take bold action to address climate change, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back on this period in history and ask a very simple question: Where were they? Why didn’t the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, lead the international community in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating damage that the scientific community told us would surely come?

So yeah, Bernie Sanders straight up says on his website that he wants to continue to take America away from fossil fuels, but coal miners are suddenly lining up to say how awesome Bernie Sanders is going to be.

Why, it's almost like these coal miners oppose Barack Obama over something other than his environmental policy.  Weigel:

Sanders’ campaign theory of 2016 may be that there’s a larger electorate hiding in plain sight. Over the summer, as he gained in polls, Sanders was criticized for bringing seemingly every issue back to the sediment of economics and class. Black Lives Matter activist Marissa Johnson dubbed it “class reductionism.” Clinton allies had trouble seeing how Sanders’s support could grow beyond white liberals.

But they may be missing the weight of Sanders’s cardinal argument — for greater economic fairness — and the willingness of voters to look past other issues, notably the environment and gay marriage, where they disagree. 

Sanders won elections in Vermont, a white, rural and gun-owning state, as a socialist. The social issue “distractions” bemoaned by red state Democrats seemed to bounce right off his armor. (He also has taken mixed positions on gun control, supporting a ban on assault rifles, for instance, but opposing the Brady Bill). In the end, is the white guy who voted for him in Vermont any different than the white guy in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio who was told to blame liberals for his problems?

In my experience, the answer is not really.  A lot of working-class white voters left the Democrats when 2008 came down to Hillary versus Obama.  Now that Bernie is in this (and possibly Biden) hey, all of a sudden it's about working-class white values again.

I've got some bad news for folks though.  Bernie's got about as much chance of winning West Virginia or Kentucky as I do, and from an electoral standpoint, why does it matter?  Sure. Bernie will help with Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, etc. but how much nationally?

Do we want white voters who abandoned the Dems over a black president to come back to the party at all?

StupidiNews!

• Flooding rivers and breached dams in South Carolina have raised the death toll from last weekend's record rains to 12, and more rain could be on the way.
• President Obama will meet Friday with families of victims of last week's deadly shooting in Roseburg, Oregon.
• This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to two scientists for discovering that neutrinos have mass, and can change type while moving.
• The world's largest brewery merger may get skunked as SABMiller is initially rejecting rival AB InBev's bid for the company as too low.
• California Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed a package of bills designed to regulate commercial and hobbyist drone flights, saying he didn't want to create a new class of crimes.

Last Call For Taking It For Granite

Although rumored for months now as the state fought over the budget, New Hampshire Dem Gov. Maggie Hassan is going after GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte's seat in 2016.

Senate Democrats got the candidate they wanted in New Hampshire. 

Gov. Maggie Hassan announced Monday she is challenging GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte for Senate in the Granite State, rather than seek a third term as governor. It’s a move Democrats say gives the party its best shot at picking up a seat that will prove critical to Senate control.

The two-term governor had been mum on her plans as she sparred with the Republican-controlled state legislature over the budget — saying she needed to focus on the job she had rather than make plans for her political future. Republicans in the state were happy to keep Hassan’s focus on the budget for as long as possible, preventing her from publicly deciding whether to run for re-election or challenge Ayotte for Senate. 

But Hassan and the legislature came to a budget agreement, finally freeing Hassan to decide.

This is good news as Ayotte (and her "Third Amigo" to McCain/Graham shtick) is vulnerable as the GOP brand is badly damaged. If the Democrats are going to take back the Senate in 2016, this is one of the seats they'll need to pick up, and Hassan, the state's popular governor, is by far the best candidate to do so.

I've got a good feeling about this race for the Dems about getting rid of nasty corporate Republicans like Ayotte.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Sen. Shelley Moore (R-WV) introduced the Student Loan Relief Act of 2015 on Thursday, which would let borrowers refinance their federal student loans in the private market. The senators argue that if their legislation passed, students would be able to benefit from lower interest rates.

Sounds great, right?  Republicans like Ayotte are moderates who care about student loan and debt relief, see?

Although many large banks left the private student loan market after the financial crisis, plenty of politically connected organizations such as state agency lenders and nonprofits have fought to stay in the market. One example is Granite State Management, a New Hampshire nonprofit organization that does student loan servicing. GSM’s primary income is through its student loan servicing, but they would make much more through issuing loans. GSM’s status as a charitable organization was challenged by the City of Concord in 2013 but the court ultimately held up its status, saying that “servicing and administration of loans is not GSMR’s charitable purpose, but a means to achieve” the purpose of its mission to “providing low cost or alternative financial assistance to eligible students and to parents . . . and of supporting the development of higher education and educational opportunities.”

I bet you can see where this is going.

“What they’re trying to do is go back to the bad old days of a bank-based loan system. They want private banks to take over the loan and take none of the risk. So what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, it will be good for students because they will get a lower rate from the private market,'” said Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress. “But really what’s going to happen is that the private market is going to get a giant windfall and pass along a tiny slice of it to the students in the form of a lower interest rate … You would hope to do a lot more by spending the exact same amount of money and just cutting their interest rates. There is no value add from the private market.”

That's right, Ayotte's student loan bill is really a way to get Wall Street back into the student loan business.  Shocking, I know.

Can't wait for Hassan to kick her ass.

The Big Trade-Off

After years of negotiations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal has reached its final leg and just needs approval from individual member countries, just in time to become a major issue in the 2016 presidential race in both parties.

The United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations on Monday agreed to the largest regional trade accord in history, a potentially precedent-setting model for global commerce and worker standards that would tie together 40 percent of the world’s economy, from Canada and Chile to Japan and Australia. 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership still faces months of debate in Congress and will inject a new flash point into both parties’ presidential contests. 

But the accord — a product of nearly eight years of negotiations, including five days of round-the-clock sessions here — is a potentially legacy-making achievement for President Obama, and the capstone for his foreign policy “pivot” toward closer relations with fast-growing eastern Asia, after years of American preoccupation with the Middle East and North Africa. 

Mr. Obama spent recent days contacting world leaders to seal the deal. Administration officials have repeatedly pressed their contention that the partnership would build a bulwark against China’s economic influence, and allow the United States and its allies — not Beijing — to set the standards for Pacific commerce. 

The Pacific accord would phase out thousands of import tariffs as well as other barriers to international trade. It also would establish uniform rules on corporations’ intellectual property, open the Internet even in communist Vietnam and crack down on wildlife trafficking and environmental abuses. 

Several potentially deal-breaking disputes kept the ministers talking through the weekend and forced them repeatedly to reschedule the promised Sunday announcement of the deal into the evening and beyond. Final compromises covered commercial protections for drug makers’ advanced medicines, more open markets for dairy products and sugar, and a slow phaseout — over two to three decades — of the tariffs on Japan’s autos sold in North America. 

Yet the trade agreement almost certainly will encounter stiff opposition. 

Its full 30-chapter text will not be available for perhaps a month, but labor unions, environmentalists and liberal activists are poised to argue that the agreement favors big business over workers and environmental protection. Donald Trump has repeatedly castigated the Pacific trade accord as “a bad deal,” injecting conservative populism into the debate and emboldening some congressional Republicans who fear for local interests like sugar and rice, and many conservatives who oppose Mr. Obama at every turn. 

Long before an accord was reached, it was being condemned by both Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is challenging Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democrats’ nomination. Other candidates also have been critical. Mrs. Clinton, who as secretary of state promoted the trade talks, has expressed enough wariness as she has campaigned among unions and other audiences on the left that her support is now in doubt.

We'll see where the TPP goes, but as with so many other things that this President has accomplished, those who bet against the guy end up losing big when he gets the job done.  I think the TPP will pass and move on.  How good that will be for US workers?

That's far more debatable.

Doing Something About Gunmerica

If Bernie Sanders has a weakness on policy, it's his abysmal record regarding backing the NRA and gun manufacturers in his rural state of Vermont.  Both Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley are running hard to the left on Sanders on the issue of gun safety measures.  O'Malley in particular has led on this issue, calling for an outright ban on assault rifles for months now. That pressure has led to Hillary Clinton now calling for a much tougher stance against the NRA.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Monday will detail new proposals aimed at closing gun sale loopholes and holding accountable those who sell guns for violence committed with those weapons.

Seizing the moment following last week’s mass shooting in Oregon, Clinton will call for the repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which gives legal protection to gun manufacturers and dealers whose guns are used for criminal activity, said a campaign official, who asked not to be named, previewing the announcement Clinton plans to make on the campaign trail in New Hampshire.

As a senator from New York, Clinton voted against the law in 2005 and, the official said, would lead an effort to repeal it if elected president. Her closest competitor in the Democratic primary, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who served in the U.S. House at the time, voted in favor of it.

Clinton appeared viscerally frustrated as she spoke after Thursday’s shooting at Umpqua Community College, in which authorities say a student killed nine people before turning one of several guns he had with him on himself. “What is wrong with us, that we cannot stand up to the NRA and the gun lobby, and the gun manufacturers they represent?” Clinton said Friday at Broward College in Davie, Florida. “We don’t just need to pray for these people. We need to act.”

In staking out a hardline position on guns, Clinton is capitalizing on an issue where she stands to the left of Sanders. He has a mixed record on gun control—he voted against the Brady Bill in 1993 and for the liability protection law, but also in favor of restrictions on the size of gun magazines—that he attributes to the gun culture of his rural state. He responded to the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, and in Oregon with promises to implement “sensible gun-control legislation” and to improve mental health services, but has not yet offered specific proposals.

Former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, who is trailing Clinton and Sanders in polls, on Sunday in New Hampshire called on his rivals to “join me in building a new consensus” on gun control by supporting his four-point plan, his campaign said.

On Monday, the details Clinton will put behind her pitch include support for closing two sets of loopholes that allow gun purchases without background checks, according to the official.

If Congress does not pass legislation that would deem those who sell significant numbers of guns at gun shows and online to be required to operate under the same laws that apply to gun stores, Clinton would take executive action to do that under her plan. She supports congressional efforts to eliminate what’s being called the “Charleston loophole” after the June shooting at a black church there, which allows gun purchases to go forward if a background check isn’t completed within three days.

Clinton will also say she supports legislation to prohibit all people with histories of domestic abuse from buying or possessing guns, since current laws don’t apply to people in dating relationships or convicted stalkers.

I'm glad to see Clinton's proposals here, and she's definitely ahead of Sanders on this issue.  The ball's in Bernie's court now on gun safety.  We'll see if hes going to bother with specific proposals or just assume he can take a pass on this.

New long overdue tag: Gunmerica.

StupidiNews!

• Parts of South Carolina are still dealing with more than 20 inches of rain over the last several days as catastrophic flooding of rivers and streams will continue for days.
• Embattled New Mexico GOP Secretary of State Dianna Duran now faces dozens of new corruption charges including forged campaign finance reports and identity theft.
• The Nobel Prize for medicine has gone this year to three scientists for work on discovering new treatments for parasitic diseases.
• Clothing retailer American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy protection after firing founder and CEO Dov Charney last year and posting five straight years of losses.
• China is rapidly finishing construction of a second aircraft carrier as Beijing is expected to build two more carriers over the next few years.

Last Call For Podcast Versus The Stupid

This week's episode (and we're going to try to go to a weekly schedule on Sunday evenings for now) is These Disunited States Of Gunmerica.

Check Out Blogs Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

Having both grown up in red states and living in them now, Zandar and Bon talk about gun control and American gun culture in the wake of yet another mass shooting in America and find that the US is pretty disunited about the whole thing. Plus more on Springfield's Slut Walk, creepy-ass city councilmen, and more.