Last Call For Vote Of No Confidence

Late this afternoon a federal judge tossed Texas's voter suppression law 2.0 as unconstitutional.

A federal judge has tossed out a new law softening Texas’ strict voter identification requirements.

U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos on Wednesday ruled that Senate Bill 5, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, doesn’t absolve Texas lawmakers from responsibility for discriminating against Latino and black voters when they crafted one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws in 2011. The judge also ruled that the state failed to prove that the new law would accommodate such voters going forward.

The Corpus Christi judge’s ruling is the latest twist in a six-year battle over Texas’ laws restricting what forms of identification are accepted at the polls, and it sets up a round of squabbling over whether the federal government should once again pre-approve the state's election laws.

SB 5 was the Legislature’s attempt to wriggle free of consequences after courts found fault with its 2011 ID law.

Last year, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the 2011 law disproportionately burdened minority voters who were less likely to have one of seven forms of identification the state required them to show at the polls. Ramos upped the ante in April, ruling the state discriminated on purpose.

As Ramos weighed possible remedies for the state's violations of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution, Texas leaders state pushed SB 5 as a solution and scrambled to get it to Abbott's desk at the end of the legislative session.

Ramos had temporarily softened the state's voter ID rules for the 2016 elections, and the new law somewhat followed her lead. It allows Texans without photo ID to vote if they present alternate forms of ID and sign affidavits swearing a “reasonable impediment” kept them from obtaining the proper ID.

Those voters could present documents such as utility bills, bank statements or paychecks to confirm their identification. Those found to have lied about not possessing the proper photo ID could be charged with a state jail felony, which carries a penalty of 180 days to two years in jail — which Ramos said "appear to be efforts at voter intimidation."

Under the new law, the permissible IDs remain the same as the earlier law: a state driver's license or ID card, a concealed handgun license, a U.S. passport, a military ID card, a U.S citizenship certificate or an election identification certificate.

Texas's goal was clearly to drag its feet until a remedy for 2018 was impossible, then repeat for 2020, then 2022 and so on.  It still may do that, but now the onus is on Texas to fix its problem, not wait for nebulous guidance from the courts.  Ramos has moved the clock forward.

Still, I fully expect Texas to push this to the US Supreme Court, which probably wouldn't rule until June 2018 at the earliest, with the court then saying Texas would have to have a real plan in place by 2020.

We'll see.

The Preacher And The Creature

Donald Trump's greatest con job (and with any great cons, it requires victims who are willing to believe) may have been convincing evangelical Christians that he was one of the faithful.  To that end, it's no wonder that megachurch-style "prosperity gospel" pastors have latched on to Trump as anointed by God to lead America.  You would think then that Trump's spiritual advisers would be the first to serve as a check on Trump's more authoritarian impulses and would act as a moral bulwark against the kind of raging darkness Trump was spewing last night in Phoenix.

If Trump advisers like Pastor Paula White are any indication however, you would be wildly incorrect.

One of President Donald Trump’s most trusted religious confidantes used ominous religious language to defend him this week, drawing on Christian nationalism to argue that resisting Trump equates resisting “the hand of God.” 

During a panel interview on the Jim Bakker show this Monday, pastor Paula White gave several full-throated defenses of the president. White, a wealthy faith leader who originally gained notoriety for preaching a much-maligned version of the “prosperity gospel,” has been described as Trump’s “God whisperer.” She is a longtime friend of the former businessman, was a regular surrogate for his campaign in 2016, and remains one of several evangelical leaders who currently advise his administration. 

But even compared to her brief stint on the campaign trail, White’s remarks this week were atypically political and represent some of the strongest statements yet making the Christian nationalist case for Trump. 

After insisting that America is more than 70 percent evangelical (a claim that is wildly false), White launched into a series of mini-sermons that described Trump’s presidency as “anointed” by God—and proclaimed that his opponents, by extension, are an affront to the Almighty. 

“We are more impressed with a Saul anointing than a David anointing because we are more impressed with what looks right than what is right,” White, whose ministries were once the subject of a failed Senate probe investigating possible financial improprieties, said. “Therefore, we choose things that we think should sound right, should act right. They say about our president, ‘Well, he is not presidential.’ Thank goodness. Thank goodness. Thank goodness … he is not a polished politician. In other words, he is authentically — whether people like it or not — has been raised up by God. Because God says that He raises up and places all people in places of authority.” 

She continued: “It is God who raises up a king. It is God that sets one down. When you fight against the plan of God, you are fighting against the hand of God.”

Now, I'm a bit rusty on my comparative theology studies from 20 years ago, but I'm pretty sure my civics lessons are still valid here, and my memory reminds me that the Constitution of the United States and the Founding Fathers who wrote it both possess a pretty dim view on monarchs in general.

Zandardad is the fellow you'd want to talk to about spirituality in general, but I'd fairly sure he'd tell you that holding up Trump as anointed by God would be incorrect on so many levels it would physically hurt to define them all.

Pastor White is coming across as fully supporting Trump's narcissism as the word of the Lord, and resistance to his rule as resistance to Him.  I wouldn't buy that nonsense even if I wasn't a lapsed Catholic, I know th difference between right and wrong and man, resisting Trump is about as right as it gets.

The Front Man For The Next Housing Crisis

The Trump regime isn't just repeating the mistakes of the Dubya years on housing by dismantling Obama-era protections, they're not just going down the same path with banks playing Big Casino games, they're gutting affordable public housing ahead of time through HUD and Ben Carson, so when this bubble does burst the pain is going to be astronomical.  Alec MacGillis:

The Trump cuts would mean that several programs would be eliminated entirely, including the home program, which offers seed money for affordable-housing initiatives, and the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program that Carla Hills, Ford’s HUD secretary, had praised to Carson at the dinner. In New York, CDBG helped pay for, among many things, housing-code enforcement, the 311 system, and homeless shelters for veterans. But the grants were also relied on in struggling small towns, where they paid for sidewalks, sewer upgrades, and community centers. In Glouster, Ohio, a tiny coal town that went for Trump by a single vote after going for Obama two to one in 2012, officials were counting on the grants to replace a bridge so weak that the school bus couldn’t cross it, forcing kids from one part of town to cluster along a busy road for pickup. “Without those funds, it would just cripple this area,” said Nathan Simons, who administers the grants for the surrounding region. HUD, for all its shrinking stature and insecurity complex, has over time worked its way into the fabric of ailing communities throughout the country, a role that has grown only larger as so much of Middle America has suffered decline, and as the capacity of so many state and local governments has withered amid dwindling tax bases and civic disengagement. On my travels through the Midwest I’ve seen how many federally subsidized housing complexes there are on the edges of small towns and cities, places very far from the Bronx or the South Side of Chicago. People living in these places rely on a functioning, minimally competent HUD no less than do the Section 8 voucher recipients in Jared Kushner’s low-income complexes in Baltimore. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, the Great Society department actually plays an even more vital role than when it was conceived. 

But if Carson was troubled by the disembowelment of his department, he showed no sign of it. Even before the final numbers were out, he had assured housing advocates that cuts would be made up for by money dedicated to housing in the big infrastructure bill Trump was promising — a notion that his fellow Republican Kemp, among others, found far-fetched. “I’m not sure he understood how that would work,” Kemp told me. “He was probably repeating what had been told to him.” Then, a day after the budget was released, Carson downplayed the importance of programs for the poor in a radio interview with Armstrong Williams, saying that poverty was largely a “state of mind.” This, more than anything, seemed to be a crystallization of the Carson philosophy of HUD: that privation would be solved by the power of positive thinking, that his own extraordinary rise was scalable and could be replicated millions of times over. 

Two weeks later, Carson went to Capitol Hill to testify on the budget proposal before Congressional panels that would have the final say on the numbers. With Kasper perched over his shoulder, he told both the Senate and House committees that they shouldn’t get overly hung up on the cuts. “We must look for human solutions, not just policies and programs,” he said. “Our programs must reach out and so must our hearts.” The budget, he added, would “help more eligible Americans achieve freedom from regulations and bureaucracy and the ability to govern themselves.” 

Members of both parties on the panels seemed dubious. Even conservative Republicans challenged the elimination of CDBG and dismissed Carson’s repeated claim that those and other cuts would be made up for with “public-private partnerships,” noting that such partnerships depended on exactly the public seed money that the budget was jettisoning.
Carson remained unruffled. The cuts were made necessary by the “atmosphere of constraint” created by a “new paradigm that’s been forced on us,” he said, presumably referring to the desire for tax cuts for the wealthy and an even larger military. “The problem that faces us now as a nation will only be exacerbated if we don’t deal with them in what appears to be a harsh manner,” he told the Senate panel. “We have to stop the bleeding to get the healing.” 

As I watched the hearings, it occurred to me that Carson was the perfect HUD secretary for Donald Trump, the real-estate-developer president who appears to care little for public housing. He offered a gently smiling refutation to accusations from any corner that the department’s evisceration would have grave consequences. After all, Ben Carson had made it from Detroit to Johns Hopkins without housing assistance, a point of pride in his family. Not to mention that Carson’s very identity — theoretically — helped inoculate the administration against charges of prejudice. (Just last week, Carson said, in the wake of racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, that the controversy over Trump’s support of white supremacists there was “blown out of proportion” and echoed the president’s “both sides” language when referring to “hatred and bigotry.”) 

Even better, Carson could be trusted not to resist Mick Mulvaney’s budget designs. At one moment in the Senate hearing, Carson noted that Congress’s recent spending package for the current year had given the department more than it had been expecting. “I’m always happy to take money,” he said, smiling. 

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s top Democrat, was unamused. “You have to ask for it first,” he said.

The cuts are going to wreck the government's capacity for responding to the massive financial damage that is assuredly coming, at the time it will need it the most.  I don't know what else to say other than this country will be in a full-blown depression if Trump's GOP has their way, and what happens after that is anyone's guess.

StupidiNews!

• In a 77-minute speech at a Phoenix campaign rally last night, Donald Trump attacked the media, threatened a government shutdown over his border wall, and hinted at ending NAFTA.
• The US Navy has relieved the commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, of his post after two recent fatal collisions involving naval craft in Asia.
• As Jared Kushner heads to the Middle East, Egypt has canceled their meetings with him after the US decision to withhold $300 million in foreign aid over human rights violations.
• Harvard University research indicates that ExxonMobil, formerly headed by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, has spent over four decades undermining climate change research.
• Identity theft and fraud arrests by New York State law enforcement using facial recognition software reached 4,000 since 2010 and is expected to rise as technology has improved.

Last Call For Barron Of Stature

This was dumb when it was Amy, it was dumb when it was Ron Jr., it was dumb, sexist, and particularly mean-spirited when it was Chelsea, it was dumb  and sexist when it was Jenna and Barb, it was dumb, mean-spirited, sexist and racist when it was Sasha and Malia, and it's dumb when the press picks on Barron Trump.  He's 11.  Go away.

The conservative politics site The Daily Caller—founded by bow-tie aficionado Tucker Carlson—published a “mean spirited” article on Monday about Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump. 

“It’s high time Barron Trump starts dressing like he’s in the White House,” the Caller’s “entertainment reporter” Ford Springer insisted, complete with a nostalgic look at how your parents probably “forced you to dress up when you were a kid for a special occasion.” 

“Is Barron just better than I ever was at rebelling against my parents?” Springer asked. 

“[Barron’s] dad is always looking dapper and his mom has become a worldwide fashion icon since becoming first lady [sic],” Springer insisted. “The youngest Trump doesn’t have any responsibilities as the president’s son, but the least he could do is dress the part when he steps out in public.”

I don't care guys, please leave the non-adult children of Oval Office inhabitants alone.  This includes Barron Trump, who didn't ask for any of this and deserves this nonsense even less.   Sure, he's a rich private school kid.  He also hasn't actually done anything to deserve the Daily Caller bitching at him for wearing a T-shirt in August.

Stupid as hell, is what this is.

By The Time Trump Gets To Arizona

Donald Trump is charging ahead on his racial gasoline and matches tour next campaign stop later today, despite being asked kindly by Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton to reschedule his visit to the Valley of the Sun in the wake of the tragic events of Charlottesville just nine days ago.  Now Mayor Stanton is being somewhat less kind about asking Donald Trump to stay away.

Nearly 50 years ago, moments after learning that an avowed racist had gunned down Martin Luther King Jr., a young presidential candidate took the stage in Indianapolis to break the news to a largely African American crowd. 

“What we need in the United States is not division,” Sen. Robert F. Kennedy implored. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.”

It was exactly what the grief-stricken crowd needed to hear. There were riots in many cities that night, but not in Indianapolis. 

President Trump’s response to Charlottesville reminds us that the words and actions of our political leaders in the wake of tragic events matter.

America is hurting. And it is hurting largely because Trump has doused racial tensions with gasoline. With his planned visit to Phoenix on Tuesday, I fear the president may be looking to light a match.

That’s why I asked the president to delay his visit. It’s time to let cooler heads prevail and begin the healing process.

Stanton's real worry is that Trump will show up with not only his usual divisive, hateful, and coded racist language, but he'll show up with a newly-minted pardon for former Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio.

Let’s be clear: A pardon of Arpaio can be viewed only as a presidential endorsement of the lawlessness and discrimination that terrorized Phoenix’s Latino community. Choosing to announce it in Phoenix — especially in the wake of Charlottesville — would add insult to very serious injury and would reveal that the president’s true intent is to further divide our nation.

For years, Arpaio illegally targeted Latinos in our community because of the color of their skin. Mothers and fathers lived in fear as they dropped off their kids at school. Kids lived in fear of their parents being arrested and taken away. 

A federal court ruled Arpaio’s tactics violated the law. After he defied a judge’s orders, he was convicted of criminal contempt. In convicting him, U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton noted that Arpaio “announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise.”

Even before his trial and conviction, voters grew tired of Arpaio’s brand of racism and blatant violation of the law. Last year, in an overwhelmingly Republican county, Arpaio lost by nearly 10 points. Although local Republicans helped defeat Arpaio, the white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other racists who shamed our country this month in Charlottesville would surely cheer a presidential pardon.

Our community is moving on and moving forward from Arpaio’s divisive legacy. A pardon won’t change the fact that Arpaio was convicted of a crime, nor will it shake our resolve to keep building a city that is welcoming, is inclusive and provides opportunities for anyone willing to work for them.

Stanton is correct, and there's no reason to make me think that Trump will take the hint, or even that he cares.  Rather, Trump will get to piss a bunch of liberals and Latinos off, and that's literally all that matters with his base.

The rest of us?  Well, we don't exactly count as "America" in Trump's version, now do we?

The New Strategy Is That There Is No New Strategy

Donald Trump's bold new plans for Afghanistan are that he doesn't really have any bold new plans for Afghanistan, but he can't really admit he's doing it the same way Bush and Obama did it.  He's fooling precisely no one, and the Democrats are calling him on it.

President Donald Trump's prime-time speech on his plan for Afghanistan split lawmakers along party lines, with Democrats criticizing the lack of real details and Republicans lauding the move away from arbitrary deadlines for drawing down troops. 

Democrats argued Trump was proposing an open-ended commitment with no exit strategy or ceiling on US troops there. 

"Tonight, the President said he knew what he was getting into and had a plan to go forward. Clearly, he did not," House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. "The President's announcement is low on details but raises serious questions."  

New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Trump's speech was "terribly lacking" in details, substance and "a vision of what success in Afghanistan looks like." 

And Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and Marine Corps veteran, accused Trump of "repeating the mistakes of previous administrations." 

"Tonight, the American people should have heard a detailed, realistic strategy with achievable objectives and measurable benchmarks," Gallego said. "Instead, we got only vague promises and wishful thinking." 

Functionally, Trump is going to be sending in about 4,000 more troops, most certainly special operations troops and their support staff, in order to lead more targeted strikes on Taliban leadership and ISIS targets of opportunity, and help Afghan forces secure territory while oh yeah, going across the border to Pakistan and keeping an eye on the mess there.  He can't actually say that, but that's what's coming and everyone knows it.

So he's going to pretend that continuing Obama's strategy is his own brilliant idea.

Leadership for a new era or something, whee.

StupidINews!

• Donald Trump outlined a US strategy last night in Afghanistan that will "change dramatically" from the last 16 years, but he announced no specifics on troop levels, timelines, or locations.
• More Native American tribes in the US are looking to get into the legal marijuana growing business, but federal laws that govern reservation land could be a major problem for growers.
• US Navy divers continue to search for 10 missing sailors after the collision of a missile destroyer and oil tanker near Singapore over the weekend.
• Angola will hold elections on Wednesday as President Jose Eduardo dos Santos will step down after 38 years, the country faces the worst economic conditions since a 2002 civil war.
• Verizon will start throttling video on all mobile plans, limiting bandwidth on both new and existing unlimited data plans to 720p video starting on Wednesday.

Last Call For Total Eclipse Of The Brain

They told Trump not to look directly into the sun without special glasses during today's eclipse, so naturally...

...he looked right into the goddamn sun without his special glasses.

Because he's Trump.

You can't tell a clinical narcissist not to do something, you know.

Trump And The US Secret Servants

It seems the US Secret Service has reached its yearly manpower budget limit for Trump's detail and there's still months to go, the payroll is exhausted due to all those golfing trips Donny Boy takes, turns out.  And while Donald seems to be convinced that the USSS stands for "United States Security Servants", the people protecting him are pretty much fed up with their "principal".

The Secret Service can no longer pay hundreds of agents it needs to carry out an expanded protective mission – in large part due to the sheer size of President Trump's family and efforts necessary to secure their multiple residences up and down the East Coast. 

Secret Service Director Randolph "Tex'' Alles, in an interview with USA TODAY, said more than 1,000 agents have already hit the federally mandated caps for salary and overtime allowances that were meant to last the entire year.

The agency has faced a crushing workload since the height of the contentious election season, and it has not relented in the first seven months of the administration. Agents must protect Trump – who has traveled almost every weekend to his properties in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia – and his adult children whose business trips and vacations have taken them across the country and overseas. 

"The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,'' Alles said. "I can't change that. I have no flexibility.''

Alles said the service is grappling with an unprecedented number of White House protectees. Under Trump, 42 people have protection, a number that includes 18 members of his family. That's up from 31 during the Obama administration.

Overwork and constant travel have also been driving a recent exodus from the Secret Service ranks, yet without congressional intervention to provide additional funding, Alles will not even be able to pay agents for the work they have already done.

The compensation crunch is so serious that the director has begun discussions with key lawmakers to raise the combined salary and overtime cap for agents, from $160,000 per year to $187,000 for at least the duration of Trump's first term.

But even if such a proposal was approved, about 130 veteran agents would not be fully compensated for hundreds of hours already amassed, according to the agency.
"I don't see this changing in the near term,'' Alles said.

Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers expressed deep concern for the continuing stress on the agency, first thrust into turmoil five years ago with disclosures about sexual misconduct by agents in Colombia and subsequent White House security breaches.
A special investigative panel formed after a particularly egregious 2014 White House breach also found that that agents and uniform officers worked "an unsustainable number of hours,'' which also contributed to troubling attrition rates. 

While about 800 agents and uniformed officers were hired during the past year as part of an ongoing recruiting blitz to bolster the ranks, attrition limited the agency's net staffing gain to 300, according to agency records. And last year, Congress had to approve a one-time fix to ensure that 1,400 agents would be compensated for thousands of hours of overtime earned above compensation limits. Last year's compensation shortfall was first disclosed by USA TODAY.

So yeah, there are agents basically working for free because after several years of USSS screw-ups during the Obama years, we've now got the oversight pendulum so far in the other direction that Trump basically gets to abuse them.

The real issue of course remains the graft this represents.  The reason why the USSS has reached its limits is because Trump is making them pay for his golf clubs, his hotel services, his NYC tower, you name it. This needs to stop, but it won't because the GOP Congress won't lift a finger.

We already know they're cowards, but this is just stupid.

Two Comedy Giants Pass On

Over the weekend the world lost not one but two comedy greats, with over a century of combined work between them.  First, legendary civil rights activist, author, satirist and stand-up comedian Dick Gregory passed at the age of 84.

Comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory, who broke barriers in the 1960s and became one of the first African-Americans to perform at white clubs, died Saturday. 

He was 84. 

Gregory recently rescheduled an event in Atlanta because he was hospitalized. He died in Washington, his son posted on social media without giving details. 

"The family appreciates the outpouring of support and love, and respectfully asks for their privacy as they grieve during this very difficult time," Christian Gregory said. "More details will be released over the next few days." 

Gregory satirized segregation and racial injustice in his acts, and was arrested several times in the 1960s for joining civil rights rallies.

Dick Gregory paved the way for pretty much every black comedian in America these days, from Cosby to Chappelle, from Pryor to Rock and everyone in between.  He was also a prolific author and activist and spoke out on injustice up until his death.  Comedy, sometimes biting and savage, sometimes subtle and thought-provoking, was his weapon of choice to change American hearts and minds.  If you can make a person laugh, you can make them understand a lot of things.  Dick Gregory will sorely be missed.

The other comedic legend that left us this weekend was none other than the legendary Jerry Lewis, who I had more than a few issues with.

Jerry Lewis, the brash slapstick comic who became a pop culture sensation in his partnership with Dean Martin and then transformed himself into an auteur filmmaker of such comedic classics as “The Nutty Professor” and “The Bellboy,” has died in Las Vegas. He was 91.

Lewis died at his home in Las Vegas at about 9:15 a.m. Sunday morning, his agent confirmed.

For most of his career, Lewis was a complicated and sometimes polarizing figure. An undeniable comedic genius, he pursued a singular vision and commanded a rare amount of creative control over his work with Paramount Pictures and other studios. He legacy also includes more than $2.5 billion raised for the Muscular Dystrophy Association through the annual Labor Day telethon that he made an end-of-summer ritual for decades until he was relieved of the hosting job in 2011.

But Lewis’ brand of humor did not always wear well as times and attitudes changed. Over the last 10 years of his life, his reputation soured slightly as he was forced to apologize for making a gay slur on camera during the 2007 telethon, continued to make racist and misogynistic jokes, and didn’t hesitate to share his right-wing political views.

Lewis too paved the way for a lot of comics, and there's no doubt his work and his charity left a huge mark on the world, but it also left a darker stain because of his problems.  He was definitely a product of his age, and a world with President Obama didn't exactly sit well with him and he made damn sure everyone knew it.

In a way, Gregory and Lewis were opposites.  Sometimes humor can change minds for the better, and sometimes it can be hurtful.  That they both passed on the same day is about as American as coincidences get.

StupidiNews!

• People from across America and around the world will be watching the skies today for the first total solar eclipse in nearly 100 years in the US this afternoon.
• At least 10 sailors are missing and 5 injured as a US Navy missile destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, collided with an oil tanker near Singapore yesterday.
• Donald Trump will make a primetime address this evening to unveil his strategy for Afghanistan, Trump is expected to announce an increase in US troops in America's longest war.
• Federal Reserve Bank chair Janet Yellen and European Central Bank head Mario Draghi will both be on hand for this week's annual Fed retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
• The US Supreme Court will decide whether or not the verb "to google" has become so ubiquitous that Google, the company, should lose its trademark.

Last Call For Running A Marathon, Not A Sprint

Staffers from Obama agencies are getting involved in running for Congress, and given how many Republicans ran unopposed in the House in the last midterm cycle in 2014 (30 House, and Jeff Sessions in the Senate) it's good to see Democrats lining up to take on Trump regime Republicans.

Some House races have even drawn multiple former Obama hands into the arena. In Texas, former Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough and ex-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have lined up behind Ed Meier, a former State Department official, while ex-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro is backing his former employee, Colin Allred, who was also an Obama White House intern and professional football player. Meier and Allred are competing in a crowded primary to take on Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who didn’t attract a single Democratic opponent last year.

Alums of Obama’s State and Veterans Affairs departments are also among nine candidates facing off for the Democratic nomination in a Northern Virginia battleground district. And outside Detroit, the former chief of staff for the Obama administration’s auto bailout raked in donations from a host of former White House officials to get her campaign off the ground.

“What drew them to the Obama world are the same qualities that make them want to run for office,” said Erik Smith, a former Obama presidential campaign consultant. “But their participation is accelerated as the Obama diaspora moved home — more so since some would’ve stayed under a Democratic administration — and with Obama’s call to action in their heads, it drove people to run earlier than they would’ve otherwise.”

They're also getting the money to take the fight to the GOP from fellow Obama folks.

Fundraising disclosures for these candidates are littered with familiar Obama-era names: Antony Blinken, Obama’s deputy secretary of state; Tara McGuinness, a senior White House communications adviser; Cheryl Mills, former State Department counselor to Secretary Hillary Clinton; and Bernadette Meehan, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, all gave to various congressional candidates who worked in the Obama administration. Donors hail from all parts of the administration, from agencies to inside the White House.

They’re giving to candidates like Andy Kim, who served on Obama’s NSC and is challenging New Jersey Rep. Tom MacArthur. In Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, a former Defense Department official, is running against Rep. Mike Bishop, and Haley Stevens, who helped administer the bailout of the automotive industry, is taking on GOP Rep. Dave Trott.

Lindsey Davis Stover, who served in the Department of Veterans Affairs under Obama, is in a nine-way primary to take on Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock, which also features former State Department official Alison Kiehl Friedman. This week, another administration official — former Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ambassador Dan Baer — started a campaign for an open seat outside Denver.

“Being on people’s radar — who either know me or are one degree away from me and who know this campaign world and know that money makes a difference and that you need resources to put up the fight — is a really wonderful resource,” said Kim, whose opponent MacArthur is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. “The reality is that money is important as a first-time candidate.”

And of course the next question is "What about state races?"  Yep. Gotcha covered.

It’s not limited to congressional candidates. Further down the ballot, Buffy Wicks, who helped craft Obama’s grass-roots-centric presidential campaigns and served in the White House, is running for a Berkeley-based state Assembly seat in California.

Her early donors include both of Obama’s presidential campaign managers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, as well as a host of other colleagues from 2008 and 2012.

Informal listservs started by various Obama officials spread campaign announcements and donation requests. The Obama Alumni Association, which doesn’t endorse candidates, regularly sends emails to “update you on Obama alumni who are running for office," adding that it’s “thrilling to see so many alums willing to run, just as Barack Obama did more than 20 years ago.” In its July email, it flagged 23 new candidates.

“There’s no doubt we’ll see Obama alums run at a much higher rate in 2018 and 2020,” said Brent Colburn, a former Obama campaign and administration official who has hosted candidate meet-and-greets in the San Francisco Bay area.

“Even those of us who aren’t running are looking for ways we can give back and support the legacy of the president, so you’re not only seeing more people likely to run, but there’s also more of us who are more likely to hold fundraisers, host events for candidates and connect people to contacts in our network,” Colburn said.

I can't stress how much of a great idea this is.  I also sense President Obama's hand informally behind this as well.  The Dems need to run folks outside Obama's network too, in places where Obama had trouble, yes.  But Dems also need to go after the places Barack Obama did well in too.

We need both, and I'm glad to see Obama alumni are holding up their end of the deal.   The win the House back, we have to field candidates, period.  No more freebies for the GOP.

The Dog Days Of Trump's Summer

Once again it's important to remember that Trump's constant garbage is just that: constant.  We keep moving on to his next daily outrage on a regular basis, but those outrages individually add up to a man who will easily go down as the worst in history.

ICYMI, let my pal @BrookeBCNN explain... pic.twitter.com/J75PqIHoFd

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) August 19, 2017

Easily the worst. And it's been only seven months.

Sunday Long Read: A New World Record

Forty years ago this month, NASA sent Voyager I into the stars, with Voyager II following the month after, and probably the most famous passengers aboard each probe are a pair of golden record discs that contain sights and sounds of Earth.  Our Sunday Long Read is Timothy Ferris's New Yorker piece on the story of the creation of those records, and how they came to represent an entire planet.

I became friends with Carl Sagan, the astronomer who oversaw the creation of the Golden Record, in 1972. He’d sometimes stop by my place in New York, a high-ceilinged West Side apartment perched up amid Norway maples like a tree house, and we’d listen to records. Lots of great music was being released in those days, and there was something fascinating about LP technology itself. A diamond danced along the undulations of a groove, vibrating an attached crystal, which generated a flow of electricity that was amplified and sent to the speakers. At no point in this process was it possible to say with assurance just how much information the record contained or how accurately a given stereo had translated it. The open-endedness of the medium seemed akin to the process of scientific exploration: there was always more to learn.

In the winter of 1976, Carl was visiting with me and my fiancée at the time, Ann Druyan, and asked whether we’d help him create a plaque or something of the sort for Voyager. We immediately agreed. Soon, he and one of his colleagues at Cornell, Frank Drake, had decided on a record. By the time nasa approved the idea, we had less than six months to put it together, so we had to move fast. Ann began gathering material for a sonic description of Earth’s history. Linda Salzman Sagan, Carl’s wife at the time, went to work recording samples of human voices speaking in many different languages. The space artist Jon Lomberg rounded up photographs, a method having been found to encode them into the record’s grooves. I produced the record, which meant overseeing the technical side of things. We all worked on selecting the music.

I sought to recruit John Lennon, of the Beatles, for the project, but tax considerations obliged him to leave the country. Lennon did help us, though, in two ways. First, he recommended that we use his engineer, Jimmy Iovine, who brought energy and expertise to the studio. (Jimmy later became famous as a rock and hip-hop producer and record-company executive.) Second, Lennon’s trick of etching little messages into the blank spaces between the takeout grooves at the ends of his records inspired me to do the same on Voyager. I wrote a dedication: “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times.”

To our surprise, those nine words created a problem at nasa. An agency compliance officer, charged with making sure each of the probes’ sixty-five thousand parts were up to spec, reported that while everything else checked out—the records’ size, weight, composition, and magnetic properties—there was nothing in the blueprints about an inscription. The records were rejected, and nasa prepared to substitute blank discs in their place. Only after Carl appealed to the nasaadministrator, arguing that the inscription would be the sole example of human handwriting aboard, did we get a waiver permitting the records to fly.

In those days, we had to obtain physical copies of every recording we hoped to listen to or include. This wasn’t such a challenge for, say, mainstream American music, but we aimed to cast a wide net, incorporating selections from places as disparate as Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Congo, Japan, the Navajo Nation, Peru, and the Solomon Islands. Ann found an LP containing the Indian raga “Jaat Kahan Ho” in a carton under a card table in the back of an appliance store. At one point, the folklorist Alan Lomax pulled a Russian recording, said to be the sole copy of “Chakrulo” in North America, from a stack of lacquer demos and sailed it across the room to me like a Frisbee. We’d comb through all this music individually, then meet and go over our nominees in long discussions stretching into the night. It was exhausting, involving, utterly delightful work.

In selecting Western classical music, we sacrificed a measure of diversity to include three compositions by J. S. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. To understand why we did this, imagine that the record were being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or who hadn’t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. They’d look for symmetries—repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities—within or between compositions. We sought to facilitate the process by proffering Bach, whose works are full of symmetry, and Beethoven, who championed Bach’s music and borrowed from it.

I’m often asked whether we quarrelled over the selections. We didn’t, really; it was all quite civil. With a world full of music to choose from, there was little reason to protest if one wonderful track was replaced by another wonderful track. I recall championing Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night,” which, if memory serves, everyone liked from the outset. Ann stumped for Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” a somewhat harder sell, in that Carl, at first listening, called it “awful.” But Carl soon came around on that one, going so far as to politely remind Lomax, who derided Berry’s music as “adolescent,” that Earth is home to many adolescents. Rumors to the contrary, we did not strive to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” only to be disappointed when we couldn’t clear the rights. It’s not the Beatles’ strongest work, and the witticism of the title, if charming in the short run, seemed unlikely to remain funny for a billion years.

The Golden Anniversary edition of the Voyage Golden Record is out, by the way, to celebrate these songs.   Good listening anywhere in the universe.