Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan

I've already talked about how here in Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin wants to dismantle state employee pensions and post-retirement health care benefits, as well as his across-the-board austerity cuts to the state budget.  Bevin says his cuts won't affect public education, but apparently that doesn't include the UK system, where the governor is warning the state's colleges and universities that the time has come to eliminate majors that don't produce money-making graduates as all of the state's higher education system faces Bevin's chainsaw austerity cuts.

Gov. Matt Bevin bluntly suggested Tuesday that some academic programs on Kentucky’s college campuses have outlived their necessity in times of tight state budgets.
With a pointed jab at the job prospects of interpretive dancers, the Republican governor challenged public university boards and presidents to consider eliminating some courses that don’t produce graduates filling high-wage, high-demand jobs. 

His message comes as the state tries to fix its failing public pension systems, and economists estimate Kentucky faces a $200 million shortfall when the fiscal year ends in mid-2018. 

“Find entire parts of your campus … that don’t need to be there,” Bevin said in a speech to a higher education conference. “Either physically as programs, degrees that you’re offering, buildings that … shouldn’t be there because you’re maintaining something that’s not an asset of any value, that’s not helping to produce that 21st century educated workforce.”

Education, critical thinking, pushing boundaries, scholarship?  Screw that, we're here to make money, you ivory tower nerds.

Bevin acknowledged such comments would be seen as “sacrilege” by some. 

It’s not the first time Bevin has urged the state’s colleges and universities to refine course offerings to create more graduates moving on to jobs “that matter” and are in demand.
“If you’re studying interpretive dance, God bless you, but there’s not a lot of jobs right now in America looking for people with that as a skill set,” he said Tuesday. 

In comments that echoed an earlier snipe at French literature students, Bevin said educators from middle school on up need to do a better job of steering students toward high-demand jobs. They need to stop perpetuating “this idea that simply going to college is enough,” Bevin said. A college degree isn’t sufficient if students “aren’t studying the right things,” he said. 

“There’s a whole lot of kids sitting in their parents’ basements and competing with people for jobs that are minimum wage or a bit better who have four-year degrees, some of them graduate-level degrees,” he said. “Some from the very universities that you all represent.” 

Bevin has made workforce development a priority of his tenure as governor. He said Tuesday he wants Kentucky to become the nation’s engineering and manufacturing epicenter, and urged the state’s engineering programs to embrace the challenge. 

“I challenge you to say to yourselves, ‘If we’re graduating 250 people out of our engineering school … why is it 250 and not 1,000? And what are we going to do between now and 2030 and a whole lot sooner to make sure it’s 1,000?’ ” Bevin said.
The University of Louisville’s interim president, Greg Postel, said the school’s engineering program has been growing, and continuing on that trajectory would be a “natural fit.” 

“Universities have to be aware of where the jobs are, and that has to advise us as to which programs we choose to grow and put resources in,” he said in an interview after Bevin’s speech. 

Asked about Bevin’s suggestion that universities look for academic programs to eliminate, Postel said: “That requires an awful lot of thought before one would do something that dramatic.”

U of L President Postel ought to know by now that "giving things a whole lot of thought" isn't Bevin's strong point.  If the only point of education is to make money as a member of the work force, then what's Bevin doing being employed?

We ain't gonna have no damn interpretive dancers in Bevinstan, ya hear?

La Brodega De La Condenación

Silicon Valley tech bros are out to kill the corner bodega, because progress and besides who needs immigrant small business owners anyway?

While it sometimes feels like we do all of our shopping on the internet, government data shows that actually less than 10%of all retail transactions happen online. In a world where we get our groceries delivered in just two hours through Instacart or Amazon Fresh, the humble corner store–or bodega, as they are known in New York and Los Angeles–still performs a valuable function. No matter how organized you are, you’re bound to run out of milk or diapers in the middle of the night and need to make a quick visit to your neighborhood retailer.

Paul McDonald, who spent 13 years as a product manager at Google, wants to make this corner store a thing of the past. Today, he is launching a new concept called Bodega with his cofounder Ashwath Rajan, another Google veteran. Bodega sets up five-foot-wide pantry boxes filled with non-perishable items you might pick up at a convenience store. An app will allow you to unlock the box and cameras powered with computer vision will register what you’ve picked up, automatically charging your credit card. The entire process happens without a person actually manning the “store.” 

Bodega’s logo is a cat, a nod to the popular bodega cat memeon social media–although if the duo gets their way, real felines won’t have brick-and-mortar shops to saunter around and take naps in much longer. “The vision here is much bigger than the box itself,” McDonald says. “Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.”

2004 Tokyo called and wants its vending machines back, guys.  And let's talk about calling these things bodegas to begin with, you assholes.

The major downside to this concept–should it take off–is that it would put a lot of mom-and-pop stores out of business. In fact, replacing that beloved institution seems explicit in the very name of McDonald’s venture, a Spanish term synonymous with the tiny stores that dot urban landscapes and are commonly run by people originally from Latin America or Asia. Some might bristle at the idea of a Silicon Valley executive appropriating the term “bodega” for a project that could well put lots of immigrants out of work. (One of my coworkers even referred to it as “Bro-dega” to illustrate the disconnect.) 

I asked McDonald point-blank about whether he’s worried that the name Bodega might come off as culturally insensitive. Not really. “I’m not particularly concerned about it,” he says. “We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’. It’s a simple name and I think it works.” 

But some members of the Hispanic community don’t feel the same way. Take Frank Garcia, the chairman of the New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, who represents thousands of bodega owners. Garcia’s grandfather was the head of the Latin Grocery Association in the 1960s and was part of the original community of immigrants who helped settle on the term “bodega” for the corner store. “To me, it is offensive for people who are not Hispanic to use the name ‘bodega,’ to make a quick buck,'”Garcia says. “It’s disrespecting all the mom-and-pop bodega owners that started these businesses in the ’60s and ’70s.” 

In fact, Garcia would consider making it harder for McDonald to set up the pantry boxes within his community. “I would ask my members not to allow these machines in any of their properties in New York State,” Garcia says. “And we would ask our Hispanic community not to use the service because they are not really bodegas. Real bodegas are all about human relationships within a community, having someone you know greet you and make the sandwich you like.” 

According to Garcia, many bodega owners are suffering because of escalating rents and competition from delivery services like Fresh Direct. A service like this could further adversely affect them. “Bodegas can’t compete with this technology, because it is so much more expensive to have a brick-and-mortar store than a small machine,” Garcia says. “To compete with bodegas and also use the ‘bodega’ name is unbelievably disrespectful.”

When your startup's public mission statement is to put thousands of corner stores out of business, you might want to pause and reassess why both the left and the right think it's time to start taking a sledgehammer to Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook the way Ma Bell got broken up when I was a kid.

More and more I'm thinking this is looking like a much better idea all the time.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Another week, another piece of the puzzle between Trump/Russia as we have a triple feature for you today.  First up, we find out now that back in April, Vladimir Putin pitched full and immediate normalization of relations between Washington and Moscow as allies to the Trump regime.

In the third month of Donald Trump’s presidency, Vladimir Putin dispatched one of his diplomats to the State Department to deliver a bold proposition: The full normalization of relations between the United States and Russia across all major branches of government. 

The proposal, spelled out in a detailed document obtained by BuzzFeed News, called for the wholesale restoration of diplomatic, military and intelligence channels severed between the two countries after Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. 

The broad scope of the Kremlin’s reset plan came with an ambitious launch date: immediately. 

By April, a top Russian cyber official, Andrey Krutskikh, would meet with his American counterpart for consultations on “information security,” the document proposed. By May, the two countries would hold “special consultations” on the war in Afghanistan, the Iran nuclear deal, the “situation in Ukraine,” and efforts to denuclearize the “Korean Peninsula.” And by the time Putin and Trump held their first meeting, the heads of the CIA, FBI, National Security Council and Pentagon would meet face-to-face with their Russian counterparts to discuss areas of mutual interest. A raft of other military and diplomatic channels opened during the Obama administration’s first-term “reset” would also be restored. 

"This document represents nothing less than a road map for full-scale normalization of US-Russian relations,” said Andrew Weiss, the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, after reviewing the proposal provided by BuzzFeed News. 

Besides offering a snapshot of where the Kremlin wanted to move the bilateral relationship, the proposal reveals one of Moscow’s unspoken assumptions – that Trump wouldn’t share the lingering US anger over Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and might accept a lightning fast rapprochement. 

“It just ignores everything that caused the relationship to deteriorate and pretends that the election interference and the Ukraine crisis never happened,” said Angela Stent, a former national intelligence officer on Russia during the George W. Bush administration who also reviewed the document.

As of today, only a small fraction of the dozens of proposed meetings have taken place — and many of the formalized talks appear unlikely to happen as Moscow and Washington expel one another's diplomats and close diplomatic facilities in a tit-for-tat downward spiral. 

The Russian Embassy in Washington declined to discuss the document. “We do not comment on closed bilateral negotiations which is normal diplomatic practice,” the embassy said in a statement.

Officials at the White House and State Department declined to say who delivered the document but did not dispute its authenticity. They denied giving the Russians explicit indications that their proposal was feasible. When asked how Moscow got the impression that its terms might be acceptable, a spokesperson for the National Security Council cited misleading news reports about Trump’s infatuation with Russia. “Frankly, I would point more to media coverage than administration overtures,” the spokesperson said.

This is what Putin thought he was going to get for his trouble and effort in helping Trump win.  Poor Vlad should have known Trump always screws his partners, investors, and contractors over in the end, but then again so does Vlad and sometimes those guys end up...well...you know.

Anyway, if there were somehow any doubts or misconceptions about what Putin expected from Trump, those just got put to rest.

And speaking of Russia and swaying the election in favor of Trump, they had to be doing it from somewhere after all.  Our good friends the Russians have long had a UN diplomatic compound in the Bronx and there's new scrutiny on activities going on there.

Russian diplomatic buildings have come under increased public scrutiny in the past year. After the U.S. accused the Kremlin of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Obama administration closed several Moscow-owned compounds, saying Russia had used them for intelligence purposes. When the Donald Trump administration took over, the U.S. further retaliated as Congress passed new sanctions against Moscow, prompting Russian vows to expel hundreds of American diplomats back home. That led the U.S. to another reprisal, this time closing Russia’s consulate general in San Francisco, along with two other buildings, one in Washington, D.C., and the other in New York. 

The residency in the Bronx, however, remains open, even though former U.S. and Russian intelligence officials suspect Moscow used it as part of the 2016 election operation. Steve Hall is one of them. He’s a retired chief of Russian operations for the CIA who oversaw the agency’s clandestine service in Moscow until last year. “It would be very likely that some of the activities that are now coming to light from the 2016 election cycle were indeed authored or supported by the Russian mission,” he says. “Not only in New York but also Washington and perhaps other places as well.” 

Complex operations require a safe haven, Hall says, somewhere people can live and communicate over a secure line back to Moscow. “If you’re doing cyberoperations,” he says, “you have to have a place where that equipment, those computers and those systems, can function.” 

A former Russian intelligence operative, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the subject’s sensitivity, agrees. “If an officer records an asset speaking during a private meeting, they may use this building to send that [conversation] back to Moscow, who will tell them if that asset is lying to them or is an informant.” He adds that the facility’s privacy and its close proximity to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan make it the perfect place to host introductory meetings and other intelligence-related conversations. 

“What the Russians do in the United States is what you saw in 2016—they recruit and run assets,” says Naveed Jamali, a former double agent for the FBI who worked against Moscow in the 2000s. “They’re looking for people who are upwardly mobile with access, who may be able to influence policy.” 

Former FBI officials, who also asked for anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on the record, say New York is the perfect location for Russia to recruit such assets and conduct intelligence operations. Moscow has an abundance of diplomatic facilities in the city, which allows it to protect more spies under diplomatic immunity than anywhere else in the country. The more diplomats Russia can place in a region, the easier it is to expand intelligence operations without American scrutiny. “Anywhere that there’s a Russian consulate,” says Jamali, “it is safe to assume that there are Russian spy handlers.” 

And if the U.S. ever tried to raid or shut down the facility, the former Russian operative claims, the residency—like other diplomatic facilities—is equipped with an incinerator to destroy sensitive documents. “If you were wondering why the annex in San Francisco had a cloud of black smoke above it [recently], it’s because the U.S. was inspecting the building [the next day],” he says.

Of course we have diplomatic compounds in Moscow and Russia too and the Russians are well aware of CIA spying there, but the question is how many of these compounds in the US played a role in Trump's win last November?

Finally, we revisit an old friend, Gen. Michael Flynn, to check to see how quickly the walls are closing in around him.

Democrats in Congress believe retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn illegally concealed more than a dozen foreign contacts and overseas trips during the process of renewing his security clearances, omissions they considered so serious they forwarded their findings to special counselRobert Mueller. 

“It appears that General Flynn violated federal law by omitting this trip and these foreign contacts from his security clearance renewal application in 2016 and concealing them from security clearance investigators who interviewed him as part of the background check process,” Reps. Elijah Cummings and Eliot L. Engel, both Democrats, wrote in a letter to Flynn’s attorney obtained by ABC News on Tuesday. 

The letter, a copy of which can be read below, highlights new information House investigators collected from executives at three private companies advised by Flynn in 2015 and 2016. The companies were pursuing a joint venture with Russia to bring nuclear power to several Middle Eastern countries and secure the resulting nuclear fuelbefore Flynn joined then-candidate Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

In other words, there's a solid chance that Michael Flynn was working for the Russians before joining the Trump campaign as a foreign policy expert, and that he continued to do so after being named Trump's National Security Adviser.  What was he up to with the Russians in the Middle East consulting on nuclear technology?

Maybe Mueller knows.  We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• A record 6.17 million job openings in the US are available but economists say either workers lack skills needed or employers aren't willing to offer higher wages in order to entice hires.
• Houston's mayor wants Congress to take a second look at constructing a coastal barrier to protect the city from future storms.
• The House has unanimously passed a joint resolution from the Senate condemning white supremacist groups and calling on Donald Trump to do the same.
• North Korea is vowing to accelerate plans to develop a nuclear ICBM capable of hitting the mainland US in defiant response to new UN sanctions passed on Monday. 
• Auto safety investigators are confirming Tesla's autopilot program was a major factor in a fatal May 2016 crash in Florida.

Last Call For Austerity In Bevinstan

And it begins.

Here in Kentucky the state is facing a $200 million shortfall, and GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is taking it out of the paychecks of state employees and the pockets of those who need state services by ordering a nearly 20% budget cut to state agencies.

The Bevin administration asked constitutional officers and cabinet secretaries Friday to cut spending in most state agencies by 17.4 percent this fiscal year to address an expected $200 million budget shortfall. 

The cuts would not affect SEEK, the state’s school funding formula; universities; Medicaid; the Department of Corrections; and debt payments, said Bevin communications director Amanda Stamper. 

In a letter to state officials, State Budget Director John Chilton said Kentucky “must start preparing for the ongoing financial challenges facing the state” and come up with a budget reduction plan by Sept. 25. 

Chilton said the cuts would save an estimated $350 million, enough to close the $200 million projected shortfall for the fiscal year that began July 1 and replenish the state’s $150 million rainy day fund for emergencies. He said the emergency fund will be spent in coming months and must be replaced to protect the state’s credit rating. 

“While challenging, the current fiscal constraints present a unique opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness and necessity of programs within state government,” Chilton said. “Limited resources must be allocated to programs providing critical services and a strong return on investment.”

Chilton said agency heads are “best positioned to make critical judgments about which programs deserve full funding, and which should be significantly reduced.”
The legislative and judicial branches of state government were also asked to make similar cuts. 

Bevin’s move to cut costs comes after a group of economists known as the Consensus Forecasting Group revised the state’s official revenue forecast downward last month by $200 million. 

Kentucky has endured repeated rounds of budget cuts since the Great Recession of 2008. In all, some state agencies will have seen more than 70 percent of their budgets disappear in the last decade, according to the liberal-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. 

House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins, D-Morehead, called Bevin’s request “unprecedented.” 

The possible cuts to services, programs and jobs “seem premature,” Adkins said. 

“We’re only in the third month of the new fiscal year and the governor’s move is based on a projection from a group of independent economists,” Adkins said. “It would seem to me to be better and more responsible to wait until more months pass in the fiscal year to get a better reading of what the shortfall might be.”

No wonder the Bluegrass State is one the unhappiest states in the nation, huh?

Attorney General Andy Beshear is probably going to have some words for Bevin's budget cutting by fiat, so we'll see how far this goes, but yeah.  Since I've moved to Kentucky, state agencies and services have been slashed and burned.  Yes, some of those cuts came under Steve Beshear, but a lot came from Bevin too and he's only been in office for a year and a half.

And you'd better believe a lot more cuts are coming as Bevin is freely going after Kentucky teachers and school employees for "creating" the state's pension shortfall, which ironically is only making things worse because retirements this fall are up sharply as people are getting out now before Bevin can scrap retirement benefits.

The guy's been a disaster for the state.  We're not as bad off as Kansas, but if Bevin has his way we will be, and worse.

Another Day In Gunmerica

There was a brutal and deadly mass shooting in Texas on Sunday and we've finally reached the point where something like that is no longer national news when it gets dismissed as a domestic violence incident that nobody wants to talk about.

Nine people are dead, including the gunman, after he opened fire on a football watching party at a Plano home Sunday night. 

The unidentified suspect was shot and killed by an officer who arrived at the home on West Spring Creek Parkway just after 8 p.m.

Monday afternoon Plano PD Chief Gregory Rushin held a press conference to notify media that an eighth victim had died at the hospital. The toll now stands at nine, including the gunman. 

Rushin says an officer found bodies in the yard and heard shots coming from inside the house. 

The Texas Rangers are assisting with the investigation, especially since it involved an officer, who Plano PD Chief Gregory Rushin says went into the house by himself and stopped the shooter before waiting for backup. 

"[He] made entry inside the house, confronted the suspect, ultimately shooting and killing him," Plano PD Officer David Tilley said. 

It is unclear whether the gunman returned fire. Rushin tells us multiple guns were recovered from the home. 

Monday, flowers marked the spot of the most unthinkable event to happen in the most unlikeliest of places -- Plano. 

"We've never had a shooting of this magnitude. We've never seen this many victims before," Chief Rushin said. 

Behind the police tape outside the home are still cars that line up against the road marking the spot of the shooting. These are the cars of the victims who did not make it home. 

Lane told WFAA that her daughter, 27-year-old Meredith Hight, owned the home and had recently filed for divorce from her husband. She says he showed up at her daughter's home and opened fire.

"As time passed we assumed the worst," said Meredith's mother Debbie Lane.

Even the real lede of the story is buried nearly ten paragraphs deep: the shooter was recently divorced from one of the victims and he showed up with a gun and slaughtered everyone before a police officer was able to shoot and kill him.

No national outpouring of grief, and after Harvey and Irma (and Jose on the way) maybe we don't have much grief left, but this was unfathomably tragic.  It wasn't terrorism.  It wasn't Antifa or Black Lives Matter.  It wasn't any of the usual bogeymen the right blame for this.

It was a pissed off guy with a gun who went to his wife's place where he knew she would be watching football and killed eight people, a cowardly, despicable act of a truly evil person.

We don't have just a domestic terrorism problem in America, we have a domestic violence problem in America, and in both cases firearms only make these problems exponentially more deadly.

Check The Vote '17

I don't think most Americans are truly cognizant of the level of danger posed by Trump's "voter integrity commission" scam run by VP Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  They want to make it as impossible as they can for regular Americans and in particular poor, elderly, and young Americans to be able to vote at all without going through the kinds of hassles and hurdles put up in the Jim Crow era. 

I've long been warning about Republicans crafting a federal Jim Crow voting law in the wake of the annihilated Voting Rights Act, and it looks like that proposal will take the form of federal background checks before being allowed to vote in this country.

President Donald Trump’s controversial voting commission will weigh a proposal Tuesday about requiring a background check before a person can register to vote — similar to buying a gun. 

John Lott, the president of the Pennsylvania-based Crime Prevention Research Center, will present the concept when the commission holds its second meeting of the year in New Hampshire. 

Lott’s PowerPoint, which was posted on the White House’s website in advance of the meeting, includes a slide titled “How to check if the right people are voting.” 

He notes that Republicans worry that ineligible people are voting, while Democrats contend “that Republicans are just imagining things.” Lott proposes applying the federal background check system for gun purchases, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, to voter registrations. 

Lott said in a phone call that the background check system, which was established under President Bill Clinton, checks whether a person is a non-citizen and whether they have a felony conviction among other pieces of information to determine their eligibility to own a gun.

Pretty slick move, and it comes with its own strawman: How can stoopid libtards be against background checks for voting when they are the exact arguments they make for background checks for guns?

Lott, who last year published a book called “The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” said that Democrats have praised using background checks for guns and questioned why they would oppose using the same system for voting when it’s already up and running. 

“They say it does not impinge on people’s right to self-defense… It shouldn’t be any harm in their eyes to check whether people are eligible to vote,” he said. 

“It just seems like if they believe what they’re saying it seems like a win-win.” 

Dale Ho, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in an email that only four states permanently ban people from voting for felony convictions. 

“For example, in Kansas, you can register to vote after finishing your sentence (including parole); but the rules on firearms are much more complicated, and have different waiting periods for different kinds of crimes,” Ho said. 

“So it’s not obvious why this would be a helpful idea for voting at all — even if you leave aside questions about practicality and possible burden on voters. Seems more like an attempted (and nonsensical) ‘gotcha’ for liberals rather than a serious suggestion,” he said.

Of course it's a gotcha nonsense argument.  But our entire government in 2017 is built on those, and expect this to become the battle cry of the right on "voter background checks" for a very long time.

The reality though is that this allows the right to frame the argument while Pence and Kobach and company come up with the real proposals that won't get attention until it's far too late.  It's a "win-win" alright...for the GOP.

StupidiNews!

• Eight million customers are without power across five states in the wake of Irma, including 60% of Florida residents, as remnants of the storm drift towards Tennessee and Kentucky.
• The Brexit process slowly continues as lawmakers in Parliament voted Monday to formally repeal the 1972 law that allowed the UK to join the EU.
• The Trump regime is weighing a new hard line approach to Iran, including possible changes to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal set under President Obama.
• Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has ordered the Ninth Circuit to restore the Trump Regime's ban on Muslim refugees until the court can make a full decision on the case.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to announce the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus today, along with the iPhone X which is expected to cost $1,000 or more.

Last Call For More DACA Please

As expected, several states are suing the Trump regime over ending DACA but the biggest state of them all -- California -- has now entered the fray this week.

California and three other states on Monday added to a barrage of states challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind protections for undocumented people brought to the United States illegally as children.

The lawsuit, in which California was joined by Minnesota, Maryland and Maine, comes five days after 15 states and the District of Columbia first filed suit to defend the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Flanked by two DACA recipients in Sacramento, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra called Trump’s order “unlawful and mean-spirited,” arguing it violates due process provisions of the Constitution and would hurt the economy in the nation’s most populous state.

“You don’t become the sixth-largest economy in the world just because,” Becerra said. “It just so happens that one of every four of the DACA recipients in this country — some 200,000 — live and work and call California their home, and they’ve been helping California become the sixth-largest economy in the world.”

He said repealing DACA would unfairly punish productive, law-abiding young people and that the economic cost of deporting them “would be felt by California businesses, California local governments who have depended on the economic success of the DACA program.”

Again, this is one of those matters that was always going to go before the Supreme Court. Trump pulled the trigger on his six-month time bomb last week because otherwise he was going to be sued by dozens of red states, now he's being sued by blue ones. We'll see where SCOTUS stands but a 5-4 Kennedy Special seems like the most likely outcome.

Meanwhile Trump's only doing this to keep his base loyal and to piss off Mexico, and considering Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto may be one of the few world leaders with a worse approval rating than Trump, it's actually a safe bet for Donny to keep that up for the foreseeable future.

But that's what he does, lie and piss people off.

Mitt-igating Circumstances

America's favorite binder-keeping loser is back.  Well, he's sort of back, maybe.  Possibly.  I dunno.  There's caveats and such, conditions, factors even to Mitt Romney's return.

Sources tell UtahPolicy.com that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is preparing to run for Senate in 2018 if Sen. Orrin Hatch decides to retire. 

Sources close to Romney say the two-time presidential candidate will jump into the 2018 Utah Senate scrum if Hatch opts not to. 

So far, Hatch has not made up his mind as to whether he'll run for an eighth term in 2018. He has previously said he was planning on running as long as his and his wife's health holds up.

Dave Hansen, a longtime political advisor to Hatch, told UtahPolicy.com last month that he didn't expect Hatch to decide on his political future until October. However, sources now tell UtahPolicy.com that Hatch may not make up his mind until December. 

Hatch's reticence to make a definitive announcement is presenting other candidates from getting in the race, but Romney has the financial resources to mount a campaign no matter when Hatch decides. 

Rep. Chris Stewart also has said he would like to jump into the race if Hatch decides against running for an eighth term next year.

Isn't that cute.  Mitt is waiting for Orrin to retire in order to run, Orrin is waiting for Mitt to run in order to retire.  You would think they would call each other and work it out, but Utah or something.

Anyway, I thought presidential losing candidates had to shut up and go away so gosh why is Mitt allowed to do this when Hillary has to eject herself screaming into the burning heart of the sun?

It's weird I guess.  I mean it's not like Mitt isn't going to prostrate himself and vote for Trump's position 90%+ of the time like all the other Republicans in the Senate, but whatever.  Orrin Hatch's 538 Trump Score finds him taking The Donald's position nearly 96% of the time as of today, so really Mitt *might* be an improvement on a vote or two and end up in the low 90's or something.

Who knew?

Irma Was A Terrible Tourist

Hurricane Irma will weaken into a tropical storm as it crossed the Florida panhandle into Georgia today, but late last week the storm was a monster category 5 force of nature that annihilated the Caribbean and wrecked multiple islands, the damage will take years to recover from.

From Cuba to Antigua, Caribbean islanders began counting the cost of Hurricane Irma on Sunday after the brutal storm left a trail of death, destruction and chaos from which the tourist-dependent region could take years to recover.

The Category 5 storm, which killed at least 28 people across the region, devastated housing, power supplies and communications, leaving some small islands almost cut off from the world. European nations sent military reinforcements to keep order amid looting, while the damage was expected to total billions of dollars.

Ex-pat billionaires and poor islanders alike were forced to take cover as Irma tore roofs off buildings, flipped cars and killed livestock, raging from the Leeward Islands across Puerto Rico and Hispaniola then into Cuba before turning on Florida.

Waves of up to 36 feet (11 meters) smashed businesses along the Cuban capital Havana’s sea-side drive on Sunday morning. Further east, high winds whipped Varadero, the island’s most important tourist resort.

“It’s a complete disaster and it will take a great deal of work to get Varadero back on its feet,” said Osmel de Armas, 53, an aquatic photographer who works on the beach at the battered resort.

Sea-front hotels were evacuated in Havana and relief workers spent the night rescuing people from homes in the city center as the sea penetrated to historic depths in the flood-prone area.

U.S President Donald Trump issued a disaster declaration on Sunday for Puerto Rico, where Irma killed at least 3 people and left hundreds of thousands without electricity. Trump also expanded federal funds available to the U.S. Virgin Islands, which suffered extensive damage to homes and infrastructure.

Further east in the Caribbean, battered islands such as St. Martin and Barbuda were taking stock of the damage as people began emerging from shelters to scenes of devastation.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the death toll on the Dutch part of St. Martin had doubled to four, and that 70 percent of homes had been damaged or destroyed.

Puerto Rico was already in the middle of a financial hurricane, the territory was locked in a battle with Congress over the island's bankruptcy declaration last year and what impact Irma will have on that restructuring of the island's $120 billion in debt and pension liabilities is unknown.

As bad as Irma's assessments will be for Florida as nearly five million are without power, remember that in Puerto Rico residents there could be facing that situation for months.

It's been a pretty rough couple of weeks weather-wise for North America...and with flooding still continuing in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, the world.

StupidiNews!

• At least 4 million are without power this morning as Hurricane Irma ripped up Florida's western coastline and continues into southern Georgia this morning as a Category 1 storm.
• North Dakota native Cara Mund became the first Miss America pageant winner from that state, crowned last night Mund said she disagreed with Donald Trump's stance on climate change.
• Norwegians go to the polls today to elect a government in a close race, PM Erna Solberg's Conservatives are looking for re-election against the opposition Labour Party. 
• North Korea is warning that the US will face the "greatest pain" as the UN Security Council votes on strict new oil import and asset freeze sanctions against Pyongyang on Monday.
• California lawmakers are banning autonomous drone delivery of marijuana ahead of the state legalizing recreational use of the drug on January 1.

Hillary Hangs It Up

Not that anyone really expected her to try again, and not that she would or would not have succeeded, but Hillary Clinton will not be running again for office she says.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Sunday that she will not pursue the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“I am done with being a candidate,” Clinton said on CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”

Clinton — who on Tuesday will release “What Happened,” her memoir of the 2016 campaign — does plan to stay involved in national politics, just not as an “active politician” who may launch a campaign.

“But I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country’s future is at stake,” she said in an interview with Jane Pauley.

Clinton also was critical of President Trump’s preparedness for the White House.

“We have a reality show that leads to the election of a president. He ends up in the Oval Office. He says, ‘Boy, it’s so much harder than I thought it would be. This is really tough. I had no idea,’” Clinton said. “Well, yeah, because it’s not a show. It’s real. It’s reality, for sure.”

 It's reality alright, and America will be extremely lucky to survive it as a democracy of any sort.

Still, we don't much tolerate presidential losers in America, at least since America gave that Nixon guy a second crack at the brass ring, and boy was that a mistake.  Fair or not, we don't really bother to give them the time of day, and Hillary officially saying she's out was necessary if only to (temporarily) stop the noise coming from the Village.

Probably not, though.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It's hard to overstate just how much social media network and search engine advertising helped the Russians plant their fake news stories, and nobody's more guilty of this than Facebook, the tool of choice for the discriminating Russian provatskiya agent.  Now that we know Russian front companies bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ads on Zuckerberg's toy, Congress has a few questions they want answered, and they have the means to get those answers.

The discovery that a Russian company bought election-related Facebook ads in last year’s presidential race opens new avenues for Justice Department and congressional investigators and likely will lead to subpoenas for confidential records of social media advertisers, former prosecutors say.

Facebook’s disclosure, which a key Senate Democrat called “the tip of the iceberg,” appears to show that Russians searching for ways to harm Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects broke criminal laws barring foreigners from attempting to influence U.S. elections.

The findings could ease investigators’ efforts to win Facebook’s voluntary release of records showing whether Russian intelligence agencies went even further to boost Donald Trump’s chances – by buying far more ads with much stealthier methods than the easily traceable $150,000 in purchases that the company divulged on Wednesday.

If Facebook, Twitter and other social media firms don’t cooperate, subpoenas could be in the offing.

The evidence of Russian ad buys on Facebook "is likely to be of great interest to all of the entities investigating Russian interference with last year’s election,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former assistant U.S. attorney who now heads the Columbia University law school’s Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity.

“To the extent that Facebook and other social media companies don’t voluntarily cooperate, I would expect subpoenas to be issued and other legal avenues to be pursued," she added -- though it’s uncertain whether the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees would oblige Democrats' push to compel cooperation.

Russia’s use of social media is a focus of investigations into the Kremlin’s massive, multi-pronged cyberattack by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the congressional intelligence committees.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that he has believed since the beginning of his panel’s investigation that Russians were using “the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything – the Facebooks, Googles and Twitters … to intervene in our elections.”

Addressing a major intelligence conference in Washington, Warner called “the tip of the iceberg” Facebook’s revelation that it had tracked thousands of the ads to a Russian company linked to a so-called, Kremlin-directed “troll farm” that spread Russian propaganda.

The sponsored Facebook ads pop up near the top of Facebook users’ private news feeds. Ads that are targeted to a certain subset of people are known as “dark posts,” because only the recipients see them. Many such ads are designed to automatically disappear once they’ve been viewed by Facebook customers.

U.S. intelligence agencies also say Russian operatives unleashed automated attacks using computer commands known as “bots” to circulate fake news about Clinton, often via phony Twitter accounts.

Warner said he wants Facebook representatives “to come back in” for further questioning by Senate investigators.

“I want to see Twitter back in” as well, he said. “I want to see others come back in.”

My biggest hope is that subpoenas derail Zuckerberg's political aspirations for good (or at least until after 2020).  The last thing Democrats need right now is one of the world's richest white guys promising he can run America like a start-up and on the ticket by dint of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules.

Sunday Long Read: White Paper

This week's Sunday Long Read is the inimitable Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Trump regime, who he correctly classifies as America's first white president, a president for white America, of whiteness, enabled and powered by its fear of non-whiteness, and dedicated to the supremacy of whiteness in the United States.

IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuckcasts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

And this is the key to understanding Trump, his supporters, and the people who voted for him.  It is not enough to reverse the Obama era, his legacy must be burned on the White House south lawn like a Klan cross warning, immolated along with the dream of anyone who isn't white. We must have that burned out of us, we must never raise our head high enough to glimpse the path to follow Barack Obama.  That must go up in flames, for that can never be allowed again.

That is what Trump sold for years, making the power of whiteness available to the least among the small empty towns, those in places without jobs or hope or much of a future.  Trump sold being white as the ultimate insider's card.

And it's a buyer's market.