Last Call For A Big L On Your Forehead

Now presenting Concerned White Guy Theater, starring Bill and Don, just two regular guys.

“The jobs have been taken out of the United States like we’re a bunch of babies,” Trump said. “I’m telling you, it’s an economic message. If you look at President Obama, he’s been a President for almost 8 years, it will be 8 years, you have with black youth, with African American youth, you have a 59 percent unemployment." 

“But how are you going to get jobs for them?” O’Reilly cut in. “Many of them are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads, and I hate to be generalized about it, but it's true. If you look at all the educational statistics, how are you going to get jobs for people who aren't qualified for jobs?” 

Trump replied, “We’re going to have Apple computers made in this country, not just…” 

“But you have to have skills to make Apple computers," O’Reilly interjected again. 

“We will get the skills and we’ll develop the skills,” Trump replied, saying jobs are going to China and Mexico because of incompetent politicians. 

“It’s more challenging for a poor child in Harlem without parental guidance in a school that’s falling apart than it is for some white kid out in Garden City," O’Reilly pushed back. "You say you can bring jobs back, but if the kid isn’t qualified to do the job and can’t do the work. I mean, you’ve got to get into the infrastructure of the African-American community." 

“Well, it is true. It’s about education, but it’s also about spirit. A lot of people don’t have spirit,” Trump responded. “Not only African-Americans, they don’t have spirit in our country.”

We're all just tattooed, skill-free kids with no spirit anyway, so who really cares if a classy, yooge Trump presidency doesn't fix 59% unemployment (which is actually 22.9% by BLS March 2016 standards but hey, you can't expect Trump to be a numbers guy, he's a big picture guy that creates jobs for numbers guys without tattoos on their foreheads) or whatever.

Still can't understand why people think I'm too hung up on race here in 2016 but at least we replaced the dog whistle politics with easy-to-understand full-blown racists Bell Curve garbage for simplicity's sake.

Make America Overtly Racist Again.

Back To The Driving Range

A reminder today that driving while black or brown isn't just a problem in the South, but in diverse blue states like California too.

African Americans and Latinos in California are more likely than others to lose their driver's licenses because of unpaid tickets and then to be arrested for driving with suspended licenses, according to a report released Monday. 

The report, by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, examined U.S. Census Bureau data, records from the California Department of Motor Vehicles and information from 15 police and sheriff's departments in the state to document by race the impact of unpaid traffic fines. 

"Individuals who cannot afford to pay an infraction citation are being arrested, jailed and prosecuted, and are losing their licenses and their livelihoods," the report said. "The communities impacted by these policies are disproportionately communities of color." 

Black drivers were found to be arrested at higher rates than whites for driving with licenses suspended because of unpaid tickets, the report said. The highest suspension rates in 2014 were found in poor neighborhoods with large percentages of black and Latino residents.

It's not just selective actions like this, but police culture as a whole, even in places like LA and San Francisco.

In Los Angeles County, black people make up 9.2% of the population but accounted for 33% of those arrested for driving with a suspended license from September 2013 to September 2015, the report said. 

Whites represent 26.8% the county but accounted for only 14.8% of those arrested at that time for driving with a suspended license. During that time, 85% of 20,000 people arrested by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department for driving with suspended licenses were black and Latino, according to the report. 

In San Francisco, 5.8% of the population is black, but 48.7% of those arrested for traffic warrants in 2014 and 2015 were African American. Whites make up 41.2% of the city's population but accounted for only 22.7% of the arrests, according to the lawyers' group.

And guess what?  It's not just places like Ferguson, Missouri that made money off of traffic ticket fees, fines and warrants.

Monday's report, based on data gathered in the last year, follows anearlier study by the group that found more than 4 million Californians had their licenses suspended for unpaid tickets since 2006. The cost of tickets soared during the state's budget crisis because a variety of fees were added to the fines to pay for state programs. 

In response to the earlier report, the state created a traffic ticketamnesty program to make it easier for drivers to get their traffic fines reduced and licenses reinstated. Court leaders also ended requirements that required drivers to pay the tickets before they could contest them. 

"While these actions represent significant progress, they fail to adequately address the underlying racial and economic injustices of California's debt collection and license suspensions policies and traffic court practices," the new report said.

What a surprise.  The biggest blue state in the nation has one of the biggest problems in police racial bias. I'm very interested to see what California Attorney General Kamala Harris has to say about this, considering she's the prohibitive favorite running for Sen. Babara Boxer's seat in November.

Harris has one ugly mess to clean up before she goes to Washington, that's for damn sure.

Operation Robar Mi Voto

The more you take a look at former Kansas GOP chair and current Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the more you realize just how pervasive the Republican plan is to disenfranchise Democratic voters in red states truly is.

The Spanish-language voter guides from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's office include two errors about registering to vote in the state, while the English guides do not include the same errors. 

The Spanish-language guides said that voters could register up to 15 days before the election, while the English version included the correct deadline, 21 days before the election, as the Daily Kos flagged last week. And while the English guides told voters they could use their passport as a photo ID, the guides in Spanish did not include a passport in the list.

Kobach is notorious for his push to enact strict voter ID laws in the state, impose other voting restrictions, and pursue criminal prosecutions of alleged voting fraud. Kansas faces several challenges to its law requiring proof of citizenship for residents to register to vote. 

Craig McCullah, the official in charge of publications for the Kansas secretary of state, claimed responsibility and said that the office would correct the errors, according to the Kansas City Star. 

"It was an administrative error that I am diligently working to fix," he said.

If you believe for a microsecond that this was an "administrative error" well I've got some coastal property in Kansas to sell you.   Remember the only reason this was caught at all was because Daily Kos pointed it out.  Otherwise this would have been an "unfortunate oversight" if it had been noticed after the voter registration period.

I'm sure it was an honest screw up coming from the biggest single proponent of "preventing voter fraud" in the Republican party, too...

StupidiNews!

• Peruvian tax agents have raided the home of one of the representatives of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the heart of the international "Panama Papers" tax avoidance scandal.
• Police arrested more than 400 demonstrators at the US Capitol Monday over "Democracy Spring" protests against corruption in American politics and voter-suppressing ID laws.
• Top US health officials say the mosquito that's responsible for spreading the Zika virus is present in about 30 US states and could become a serious health issue for pregnant women.
• Subsidies for US farmers are the highest in a decade as crop surpluses and lower energy prices are leading to cheaper food and lower biofuel payments.
• Republican lawmakers will again attempt to strip net neutrality regulation authority from the FCC, as well as cutting funding for providing internet service to low-income households.

Last Call For Social Faux Pas

This Carl Bialik story at FiveThirtyEight profiling Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson and his quest to leverage his substatial social media presence into a campaign for Mayor of Baltimore may be the most FiveThirtyEight story ever:

On Twitter, Mckesson, 30, is the most prominent voice in a grass-roots movement to ensure that black lives matter. But at this stage of the race, in late March, he’d been struggling to gain an audience in his campaign to be mayor of his hometown, where he’d filed to run at the deadline in February,surprising other candidates and many of his activist allies. He was fighting criticism that he is a carpetbagger: a creature largely of Twitter and of the places other than Baltimore where he has protested and rallied. Fewer than 1 percent of voters in the most recent Baltimore Sun poll of the race had said they were going to vote for him. He had about a month to change thousands of minds.

Mckesson is bidding to lead a city of 623,000 that lost 344 of its people to homicide last year, is undertaking the most comprehensive set of agency audits in decades, is considering one of the largest taxpayer-subsidized developments in the country, is failing to help most young students meet college and career readiness standards and is still reeling from the death of Freddie Gray while in custody of the city’s police department last year. Mckesson is one of 13 contenders in the April 26 Democratic primary, effectively the general election in a city where eight of nine voters in 2012 cast a ballot for President Obama. (Five Republicans, four Green Party candidates, two independents, five unaffiliated candidates and a libertarian are also running.) 

The Sun poll showed half the vote going to two longtime political insiders: former Mayor Sheila Dixon and state Senate Majority Leader Catherine Pugh. (Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced in September that she wouldn’t run for re-election, amid low approval ratings and criticism of her leadership during the unrest after Gray’s death.)
Mckesson and many of the other candidates are trying to tap into a desire for change, citing what they say are their city government’s failings — its inability to stop the state from canceling a long-planned train line, to complete the audits to cut waste, or to protect its people from violence from one another or their police officers. 

Mckesson was part of the protests calling for police accountability after Gray’s death, as he was in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown in August 2014, and a dozen other places over the past 20 months. Last August, he and fellow activists launched a set of policy proposals,Campaign Zero, that they say will help reduce police violence. And he has met with Obama, as well as Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to press them to back Campaign Zero’s policy proposals. 

Yet he is building his mayoral campaign on a broader pitch: that he is not only the candidate best positioned to increase police accountability, but also the one who wants to get down and dirty with lower-profile issues, even ones as uncomfortable as cockroaches’ effect on asthma or as obscure asEnvironmental Protection Agency consent decrees and stormwater runoff. He says the next mayor must address problems at scale and measure outcomes. He’d assign his senior staff to meet monthly with community leaders and talk policy. “The weeds are the work,” he said.

Mckesson is a hell of an activist and more power to him.  But I'm pissed off that it takes 34 paragraphs to get down to answering the article's question:

So far, his donations and Twitter followers haven’t paid off in the polls. Thelatest Sun poll, conducted from April 1 to April 4, still showed Mckesson getting support from less than 1 percent of voters.

So you've read pages to get down to the point that Deray Mckesson has less than one percent in the polls and has no chance of becoming Mayor of Baltimore.  None.  It's a gigantic waste of time.

Data journalism at its finest.

To Live And Die In LA (And Other US Zip Codes)

A new major study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that when adjusting for race and income, where you live may have a major impact on your given life expectancy. Wealth is the number one factor and the more money you have, the longer you'll live, but the less money you have, the more geography plays a part in life expectancy.

The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.

In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.

One conclusion from this work, published on Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is that the gap in life spans between rich and poor widened from 2001 to 2014. The top 1 percent in income among American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent; for women, the gap is 10 years. These rich Americans have gained three years of longevity just in this century. They live longer almost without regard to where they live. Poor Americans had very little gain as a whole, with big differences among different places.

And it's not just race that plays a part, either.  Again the paper finds evidence that white Americans are suffering from shorter life expectancies if they are poor.  Money buys options, and being well-educated and prosperous leads to a longer life regardless of race.

Life expectancy for the poor is lowest in a large swath that cuts through the middle of the country, and it appears in pockets in the rest of the country, in places like Nevada. David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist and an author of the paper, calls it the “drug overdose belt,” because the area matches in part a map of where the nation’s opioid epidemic is concentrated.

The new findings dovetail with a much-discussed paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton published last year. That research showed rising death rates among middle-age white Americans, especially those with low education. It also showed a sharp increase in drug and alcohol poisonings, suicides and accidents in the first years of this century. Research from the Brookings Institution published in February also found a growing gap in life span between the rich and the poor. 

“There is some deeper distress going on among white middle-aged Americans that may continue to propel these mortality rates higher,” Mr. Deaton, a Princeton economist who wrote an editorial critiquing the new paper by Mr. Chetty and his colleagues, said in an interview. “If so, these people at the bottom will live even less long than they’re calculating.”

The places in America with the worst overall life expectancy aren't Detroit or the Appalachians or Chicago, like the media would have us expect.  Rather, it's the Texas-New Mexico border area (Midland-Odessa, Lubbock, and especially Pecos) and southwestern Indiana (Terra Haute and Vincennes) where your average life expectancy is 5-7 years less than New York City or San Francisco.

But if you're poor, that gets even worse no matter where you are.

Something to think about.  If you're poor, avoid the Ohio/Kentucky/Indiana tri-state.  Hell, being poor in the Midwest is worse than being poor in the South.  That should tell you something.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS, Con't

Team WIN THE MORNING details President Obama's "charm offensive" as he's personally making the rounds to visit key Republicans in the Senate, trying to work them into allowing a vote on Judge Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court.  The problem is of course it's not working in the least.

Politico queried three dozen Senate Republicans and found eight who have spoken directly with Obama about the Supreme Court vacancy and a ninth who had discussed the issue with Vice President Joe Biden, who has also been working the phones with GOP senators.

Most of Obama’s appeals have concentrated on the epicenter of the Garland blockade, the Senate Judiciary Committee, all of whose 11 Republican members signed a vow to not move his nomination this year.

The president made two calls to Flake — once before Garland was named and again shortly afterward. In the first conversation, Obama told the Arizona Republican that he would nominate a centrist candidate, perhaps someone whose name had already been out there.

“I’m going to play it straight. I’m not looking to make a political point,” Obama told Flake, according to the senator, who generally believes a president should be given deference on his nominees.

Once Garland was chosen, Obama called Flake back and told him: I did what I said I’d do.

Flake was pleased. But it was still a no-go on Garland’s nomination — at least before November.

“I’ve said in a lame duck, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Flake added.

A day or two before Garland was nominated, Obama dialed Graham, the South Carolina Republican who helped confirm his other two Supreme Court nominees. But this time was different, Graham reasoned. Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor came before Senate Democrats deployed the “nuclear option” in 2013 to lower the filibuster threshold for nearly all nominations.

“I told him that changing the rules the way y’all guys did made it harder for a guy like me to be sympathetic to something outside the normal,” Graham said in recalling his conversation. “He said one of the reasons he’s calling is because I’ve tried to be balanced in my view. And I said ‘Mr. President, when you were in the Senate, if I used your standards, you would be in trouble.’”

Nevertheless, the White House won a small victory with Graham last week when the senator reversed his initial opposition to meeting with Garland, agreeing to meet with the nominee in the coming weeks. But the president hasn’t had similar luck so far with other Judiciary Committee members.

President Obama is again trying to win the fight here by playing the game above-board, when the Republicans have already vowed not to lift a finger on Garland's nomination until after the election.

But frankly, there's little upside in the Republicans actually doing their job after all, they've been rewarded with Senate control for six years of obstruction, two more isn't going to make too much of a difference.  At the very least, Senate control does slide over to the Democrats in 2017, but not by more than a few Senators, a margin that will almost certainly be erased in another depressingly low-turnout 2018 mid-term.

I foresee a more reasonable climate after the election in the lame duck session, but a lot can happen between now and then.

Meanwhile, President Obama will keep trying, and the GOP will keep doing nothing.

StupidiNews!

• South Korean officials confirm a senior intelligence officer with North Korea has defected, the colonel is reportedly the highest-ranking known North Korean military official to do so.
• Dozens were reported injured when Macedonian police fired tear gas and stun grenades into a crowd of Syrian refugees trying to break through a border fence with Greece.
• A US Navy Lt. Commander faces espionage charges as he reportedly spied for China and Taiwan, Pentagon officials say the officer has been held in confinement for eight months.
• UK Prime Minister David Cameron will face British lawmakers Monday after a week of  statements over his personal tax information brought up in the "Panama Papers".
• With US auto regulators in the Obama administration wanting to move forward on self-driving car rules, auto industry groups are signaling a yellow light to slow down on new regulations.

Last Call For Do Red State Democrats Matter?

So many of the commenters have been dancing around this particular question over the primary season.  Do Democrats in places like Kentucky, Alabama, Oklahoma, Alaska, etc matter when it comes to presidential contests?

In a brutally pragmatic sense only, no.  Electoral votes are winner take all except in Maine and Nebraska.  Looking at the 2012 electoral vote map:




Dems in red states don't matter, Republicans in blue states don't matter, but supposedly they roughly balance each other out.  So that brings us down to representation in the House and Senate.  Gerrymandering in the House and staggered six-year Senate terms again make some places very depressing for red state Dems.

KY-4 is a good example, it's where I live, it's heavily Republican and has Mitch and Rand as Senators and Thomas Massie as the Representative. Boone County has 31k plus registered Dems, Kenton County next door has 50k Dems.  Overall it's 95% white, Charlie Cook rates it as a very partisan  R+16.

I have little to no political power as a Democrat here, admittedly.  But do I matter?

I'd like to think I do at least as a primary goes.  But here's the thing: if you're going to try to convince voters like me to vote in the primary, browbeating me with "Your vote doesn't matter in November" really isn't the way to go about doing it.

Putting out a plan to get more Dems in Congress to help me at the state and local level is.

Berning Bridges With The Southern Vote

I do not understand why Bernie Sanders keeps saying stuff like this when he's supposedly trying to convince voters to join him.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — who has run off an impressive string of primary victories — dismissed actual vote totals that show former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead, saying those votes “came from the South.”
Host George Stephanopoulos noted Clinton’s lead in delegates and asked the senator if he would take his fight for the nomination to the floor of the convention.

“Well, here’s what I think,” Sanders replied. “I think at the end of the day, what Democrats all over this country want to make sure is that somebody like a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz does not end up in the White House. And I think what more and more Democrats are seeing is that Bernie Sanders is the stronger candidate.”

“She’s getting more votes,” the host pressed.

“Well, she is getting more votes. A lot of that came from the South,” Sanders parried. “But if you look at the polling out there, we do a lot better against Trump and the other Republicans in almost every instance — not every one — than she does. And the reason is that we both get a lot of Democrats, but I get a lot more independents than she does.”

Sanders comments fall in line with statements made by his own campaign that Clinton is doing well in states that might not fall into the Democratic column in the November election despite inroads made by President Obama in 2012.

I just do not understand this constant antagonistic attitude towards red state Democrats, the vast majority of which are black voters, voters that Sanders admits he has trouble reaching.  If you know you have trouble reaching black Democrats, and you're trying to unite the party behind you, then why keep dismissing them?

Sanders also addressed the controversy from earlier in the week when he claimed Clinton is not “qualified” to be president, blaming his response on her campaign questioning his competency.

“Well, she didn’t quite say that. But her surrogates implied that,” he responded. “And all that I meant by that is that if you vote for the war in Iraq, which turned out to be the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of America, if you take, through your super PAC, tens and tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street and other special interests, if you support almost every disastrous trade agreement in this last 30 years…”

“Well, President Obama supported that,” the host interrupted. “Is he not qualified?”

“No, he is very qualified. But my point is, it is a question of judgment. It is a question of judgment,” Sanders replied.

That is also a cop out, and really, really bothers me.

Trump Cards, Con't

The behind-the-scenes fight for delegates on the GOP side is getting ugly.  Ted Cruz may have won Colorado yesterday while nobody was looking:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has swept the Colorado GOP convention, winning all 13 of the state’s at-large delegates. 

And after also winning all 21 delegates awarded at the congressional district conventions throughout the week, the Texas senator leaves Colorado with a complete shutout of his opponents.

In a statement Saturday night, Cruz said the win proves that Republicans are coming together behind him.

"Today was another resounding victory for conservatives, Republicans, and Americans who care about the future of our country," Cruz said in the statement. "Utah, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and tonight’s incredible results in Colorado have proven this: Republicans are uniting behind our campaign because they want a leader with real solutions who will bring back jobs, freedom, and security."

But meanwhile, Kasich and Trump returned the favor in the much larger Michigan:

Ted Cruz suffered a rare convention loss Saturday after delegates backing John Kasich and Donald Trump boxed him out of key positions in the Michigan delegation. 

The Texas senator's campaign ran eight delegates for eight committee spots and lost every one, alleging it was "double-crossed" by Kasich supporters. 

The Michigan delegation picked one Trump supporter, Matt Hall, and one Kasich supporter, Judi Schwalbach, for the two seats on the powerful rules committee. The Cruz campaign lost votes for both seats. 

The rules committee seats have become highly coveted prizes for their role in shaping a contested convention in Cleveland. After the delegates are selected in each state, they meet as a group and pick the members of four convention committees, the most important of which is the rules committee, which will ultimately decide who can be nominated president. 

Michigan Cruz leader Saul Anuzis said they were "double-crossed" by Kasich's campaign. The Kasich delegates were supposed to vote with Cruz delegates, he said, but switched sides and voted with Trump behind closed doors Saturday afternoon. 

The reality is that the GOP's contested convention in July in Cleveland is actually already being contested now at the state-level conventions following the primaries.  These battles are being fought in state GOP rules committees ahead of Cleveland.  The real race is controlling these committees ahead of a contested convention.

We'll see which Republican can play the game the best.

Sunday Long Read: The Department Of Voter Suppression

You'd be forgiven if you've never heard of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the agency formed after Bush v Gore to help people register for federal elections.  The reason you've probably never heard of it is because since 2010, the agency has been mutated by Republicans in Congress to the point of becoming an agency that in 2016 is now actively trying to unilaterally enforce a de facto national voter ID law that doesn't exist.

The election commission is in federal court this month, essentially accused of trying to suppress voter turnout in this November’s election. The Justice Department, its nominal legal counsel, has declined to defend it. Its case instead is being pleaded by one of the nation’s leading advocates of voting restrictions. The agency’s chairman has disavowed its actions.

The quarrel exemplifies how the mere act of voting has become enmeshed in volatile partisan politics. Seventeen states will impose new voting restrictions for November’s presidential election. Many are the object of disputes between those who say they are rooting out voter fraud and those who say the real goal is to keep Democratic-leaning voters from casting ballots.

The lawsuit’s origin is straightforward. The agency’s executive director, Brian D. Newby, had been in his job less than three months in January when he unilaterally reversed a policy that the body’s commissioners, two Democrats and two Republicans, had endorsed since the agency’s creation in 2002: that people registering to vote need offer no proof, beyond swearing an oath, that they are American citizens.

That decision gave Kansas, Georgia and Alabama officials a blessing to alter the federal voter registration applications handed out in motor vehicle offices and many other state agencies, replacing the oath with something stiffer: a demand for proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate.

There was but one problem, critics say: Mr. Newby had no authority to make policy, a power reserved for the agency’s four commissioners.

Mr. Newby calls his decision an administrative matter, not policy. He has said that he did not change the registration form, but merely its instructions, although federal administrative code calls the instructions part of the form.

“It wasn’t a ruling so much as a response to a request,” he said. “I wasn’t looking at it through the lens of proof of citizenship. I was looking at it as state law that necessitated changes in the instructions.”

Critics see something different.

“It’s trench warfare in the battle of voter suppression,” said Lloyd Leonard, the advocacy director of the League of Women Voters, the leader of the lawsuit against the commission.

The agency was effectively shuttered in 2010 when House Republicans took over, holding up appointments of commissioners for more than three years.  When a GOP Senate came along in 2015, the agency suddenly got new plans going forward, resulting in Demby's hiring and his nasty little sleight of hand in January.

It's a chilling story to read.  And the name that keeps popping up again and again is Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is on a national crusade to disenfranchise as many Democrats as possible.

Keep an eye on him.

Lyin' Ryan Rumors A-Flyin'

For a guy who surely isn't running for the Oval Office as Inflatable Backup in case of Contested Convention, GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is absolutely doing a terrible job of pretending he's not interested in the job.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is scheduled to be in Cincinnati for a private GOP fundraiser next month, The Enquirer has learned.

The Miami University graduate's Downtown visit on May 4 could have extra intrigue. Ryan isbeing mentioned as the possible Republican presidential nominee if the party ends up in a brokered convention this summer.

It's believed the visit will be Ryan's first to Cincinnati since he replaced John Boehner in October.

The fundraiser, to be held at the Queen City Club, will be for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

That's right, Ryan is fundraising here in Cincy, the swing state spot in swing state Ohio, next month.

But let's keep pretending he's not the guy the GOP establishment wants to come out of a contested convention between Cruz and Trump.

The Bruce Is Loose

The only music sweeter to my ears than the news that Bruce Springsteen cancelled his upcoming concert in Greensboro, NC over the state's anti-trans law is the plaintive whining of Republicans who think the Boss is a meany-head.

A U.S. congressman who represents portions of Greensboro, N.C., is accusing Bruce Springsteen of being a "bully," after the rock star canceled a concert there to protest a new law that's being described as anti-gay.

"It's disappointing he's not following through on his commitments," said Rep. Mark Walker, a Republican freshman congressman.

"We've got other artists coming soon — Def Leppard, Justin Bieber," the congressman told The Hollywood Reporter.

"I've never been a Bieber fan, but I might have to go. Maybe artists who weren't 'born to run' deserve a little bit more support," he said, referencing one Springsteen's most famous song titles.

"Bruce is known to be on the radical left," continued Walker, "and he's got every right to be so, but I consider this a bully tactic. It's like when a kid gets upset and says he's going to take his ball and go home."

Gosh, that's weird, Mr. Walker.  It seems to me that Mr. Springsteen is choosing to refuse service to the Tarheel State because doing so would violate his strongly held moral beliefs.

Might want to look into that.  While you're at it, listen to some of his lyrics and try to understand their message.  A lot of them are directed at assholes like yourself.

Your "free speech" law does not protect you from the consequences of exercising that "free speech".

Have a nice day.

The Privilege Of Learning

I've talked a lot about Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, but not so much about his Lt. Governor, Jenean Hampton.  She's the first African-American to be elected to statewide office, and that's a massive accomplishment.  The problem is her politics are just as awful as Bevin's, if not actually worse on the subject of education in the Bluegrass State.

After the luncheon, Hampton met with The Eastern Progress’ editorial staff and fielded questions about Bevin’s recent executive decision to impose immediate 4.5 percent budget cuts to higher education. 

When asked about the potential for rising tuition costs, some of which could stem from Bevin’s decision to cut university funding, Hampton said students who wish to attend college in Kentucky can find the resources to pay for school if they are prepared and work toward it. 

“It’s not a right, it’s a privilege,” Hampton said. “Those of us who go to work must give part of their earnings to put you through college, and I disagree with that.” 

Hampton pointed to her experiences as a student, adding that she worked while in college and paid her own way. Rising tuition costs wouldn’t necessarily serve as a deterrent to students who wish to attend college, but rather would teach students to plan ahead and work for what they want, Hampton said.

By Hampton's logic, why should Kentucky's public universities even exist?  Jesus hell.

EKU officials say they have already made moves to account for Bevin’s immediate 4.5 percent reduction to the current budget. Officials said the $3.1 million loss in funds would not affect any current programs. Instead, officials said the university would make up for the funding shortfall by tapping reserves and non-recurring funds. 

Hampton mentioned that budget cuts could push universities to innovate and make difficult decisions. Saying state institutions should focus on programs that are more likely to lead to student employment after graduation. 

“I would be looking for degrees that would land a job,” Hampton said. “I would not be studying history.” 

Hampton compared state universities to private businesses, saying they will make necessary changes to continue to attract customers. She said competition between universities should drive down costs overall. 

“Let’s inject some competition in there,” Hampton said.

Would someone please explain to me when the sole point of public education became "Get a good enough job that you repay your debt to the state that educated you"?    Republicans are bound and determined to get rid of public education in this country, and that should scare all of us.