Last Call For Eight Is Enough, Con't

The Supreme Court unexpectedly dropped a decision on Obamacare's birth control coverage mandate on Monday. Well, they sort of dropped a decision, which really wasn't a decision.

The Supreme Court on Monday sent a case dealing with religious exemptions in Obamacare contraception coverage back to lower courts in an attempt to get the sides to figure out a compromise. The unsigned unanimous order, though not technically a tie, suggested the court could not reach a more definitive majority without a ninth justice.

“The Court expresses no view on the merits of the cases,” the justices wrote in their opinion in Zubik v. Burwell. 

At issue was what the Obama administration called an “accommodation” for religiously-affiliated nonprofits such as hospitals, universities and charities, who could fill out a form to opt out of paying for the coverage. The plaintiffs in the suit, citing the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, said that plan still improperly involved them in coverage that violated their religious beliefs. 

Just last month, the parties in the case submitted an unusual second round of briefs at the request of the court, which said it needed more information about a possible compromise. In its opinion Monday, the court said that middle ground would have to be worked out by a lower court.

“The parties on remand should be afforded an opportunity to arrive at an approach going forward that accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise while at the same time ensuring that women covered by petitioners’ health plans ‘receive full and equal health coverage, including contraceptive coverage,’” the justices wrote.

So the case is going back down to a lower court with instructions to work it out, which means it was a 4-4 tie and both sides agreed to punt for now.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote a separate concurrence emphasizing they joined the opinion because it did not decide the case. 

“Today’s opinion does only what it says it does: ‘afford[s] an opportunity’ for the parties and Courts of Appeals to reconsider the parties’ arguments in light of petitioners’ new articulation of their religious objection and the Government’s clarification about what the existing regulations accomplish, how they might be amended, and what such an amendment would sacrifice,” they wrote. 

The two female justices also rejected what the religious groups posited as an easy compromise, the creation of a separate, contraception-only plan. “Requiring that women affirmatively opt into such coverage would ‘impose precisely the kind of barrier to the delivery of preventive services that Congress sought to eliminate,” Sotomayor and Ginsburg wrote. 

The case could end up back at the Supreme Court, if the lower courts are still split in the new proceedings and one or the other parties appeals. For now, with a seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and Republicans refusing to even hold a hearing on President Obama’s pick to succeed him, the future is uncertain.

I would have to say that my gut is telling me this decision was a notice to the GOP Senate to get on with the replacement of Justice Scalia already, as the decision is very specific in saying that the court had no opinion yet and wanted people to find a compromise already, hint hint.

Besides, once Scalia's seat is filled, you'd better believe that any 4-4 tie cases of this magnitude would end up right back before the court again down the road, so the court is just trying to speed all this along so they can get back to work.

The Other Castro Problem

Indicating both that it's the right thing to do, and that he's serious about remaining a contender for Clinton's veep, HUD Secretary Julian Castro is tackling the issue his most strident critics on the left are blasting him over: fixing how the agency handles foreclosed homes and loans.

Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is set this week to announce changes to a hot-button Housing and Urban Development program to sell bad mortgages on its books. 

The changes, which HUD officials will brief stakeholders and activists on during a conference call on Monday, could be made public as early as Tuesday — depending on when department lawyers give the green light to publishing them in the Federal Register.
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But they won’t take effect before the next auction of HUD mortgages, scheduled for May 18. 

Castro’s actions could potentially defuse an issue that activists have been using to question his progressive credentials — and he’ll be doing it at the moment the running mate search has begun to get serious at Clinton campaign headquarters. 

Among the changes, according to people with knowledge of what’s coming: The Federal Housing Authority will put out a new plan requiring investors to offer principal reduction for all occupied loans, start a new requirement that all loan modifications be fixed for at least five years and limit any subsequent increase to 1 percent per year, and create a “walk-away prohibition” to block any purchaser of single-family mortgages from abandoning lower-value properties in the hopes of preventing neighborhood blight. 

And why does all that matter?  Because nearly all HUD foreclosed properties were being sold to the banksters and not people who needed homes, and anti-Wall Street activists were slagging Castro for the practice (rightfully, in my view.)

HUD officials say that the timing isn’t a response to the activist pressure or the presidential campaign calendar. 

“It has always been our goal to get the policy right, regardless of arbitrary deadlines, and we expect to announce those changes this week,” said HUD press secretary Cameron French. 

But the changes come after two years of calls by activists — joined last September by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — for major reforms to the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program. Their calculations — numbers that HUD says are way off — allege that during Castro’s tenure, 98 percent of problematic mortgages the department has sold went to Wall Street firms that they say were responsible for the housing crisis in the first place.

The number of people who believe that the pressure of activists didn't have anything to do with this HUD policy change can be counted on zero hands, and yes, it's something that Castro should have done two years ago, but it looks like this is getting fixed starting this week.  He gets credit for doing what activists wanted him to do here, enlightened political self-interest or not.

But it seems to me that, again, Castro remains on the short list for Clinton's veep selection in July.

We'll add our tag for him now, because I'm sure we'll be hearing more from him in the future.4:00

Dems Burning Up The Charts

It's all sunspots and predictable cycles and a massive conspiracy, so please keep rolling coal.

Another month, another new record — for rising temperatures.

The latest NASA data reveals that April was the warmest month ever recorded on Earth. The new record marks the 12th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, as the scientific consensus remains that human activity is contributing to detrimental climate change across the globe.

NASA data uses the average global temperatures between 1951 and 1980 as a control. April 2016 was 1.11 degrees Celsius above that 1951-1980 average, the sixth straight month that the average global temperature has exceeded that average.

According to Slate, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, concluded that scientists can already predict with near certainty that 2016 will be the hottest year on record — a claim that's hardly astonishing because 15 of the 16 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001, according to AccuWeather.

And so Earth keeps getting hotter every year, and I'd say it was Republicans making sure we do nothing, but there are plenty of Democrats who are climate change deniers as well, including the coal billionaire favored to win as West Virginia's governor.

On Tuesday night, Jim Justice easily won the West Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary and will face off against Republican state Senate President Bill Cole in the general election.

Justice is the richest man in West Virginia — the state’s only billionaire. He made his money as a coal executive and developer in his family’s businesses, and became a household name in the state after buying the state’s Greenbriar resort and making it profitable.

He also told West Virginians that he will make sure the state “mines more coal … than has ever been mined before.”

He denies the scientific consensus on climate change, telling the Register-Herald editorial board that he welcomes the discussion but just doesn’t know:

Until we have really accurate data to prove (that humans contribute) I don’t think we need to blow our legs off on a concept. I welcome the scientific approach to it and the knowledge. I would not sit here and say, “absolutely now, there’s no such thing” or I would no way on Earth say there is such a thing. I believe there’s an awful lot of scientists that say, “no, no, no, this is just smoke and mirrors.” I welcome the discussion, but I don’t know, I just don’t know.   

Justice beat former U.S. district attorney Booth Goodwin and state Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler, netting 51 percent of the Democratic vote, boasting a seven-fold monetary advantage largely due to his own funds. Kessler raised the least in campaign donations, and made a name for himself speaking forcefully about the need to take climate change seriously. He supported Sen. Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary, who won the state and suggesting that firm commitment to climate action was not a disqualifying trait for West Virginia voters. Booth, endorsed by former Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV), made a name for himself prosecuting former Massey Energy mine owner Don Blankenship for willfully conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards at the Upper Big Branch mine, where 29 people died in the worst mining disaster in almost a half-century.

Justice switched parties to be the Democratic party's loudest anti climate change voice, and he has the money to do it. The Republican in the race,  Bill Cole (which is really funny) is just as bad. So yes, your net governor of WV will do nothing about climate change, ever, and frankly neither will anyone in the state.

I know as a Kentucky Democrat that we can't afford to write off any state, but West Virginia makes that very, very difficult not to.

StupidiNews!

• Landmines first placed in Israel's Six-Day Way along the River Jordan will finally be removed by an NGO near the holy site of Jesus's baptism.
• The federal trial of Philadelphia House Democrat Chaka Fattah begins on Monday, Fattah is accused of taking bribes and misusing millions in campaign money over several years.
• Sweden has sentenced a 61-year old national to life in prison for his role in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
• Islamic State militants have destroyed the ancient Assyrian Mashki Gate, marking the site of King Sennacherib's Nineveh, which stood in Mosul, Iraq for more than 2,700 years.
• With three recovered booster rockets to test, commercial spaceflight company SpaceX plans to fly a reused booster rocket as soon as this summer.

Last Call For Hitting The Pub

If you want to know what our friends from across the pond think of the US election, it's quite funny and worthy of a drink or two (or five).  Here's a short YouTube clip of the latest Financial Times Pub Quiz, the subject of course being our presidential election season. Your host is Demetri Sevastopulo, the FT's Washington bureau chief.



Considering how much I complain about the American press getting Trump wrong, being terribly critical of Hillary Clinton, pretending like Bernie Sanders still has some sort of magical chance to be the Democratic party's nominee, and how much of a true non-entity Sen. Ted Cruz would be in any other capacity, well it's nice to sit back and have a laugh at their expense, courtesy of the UK.

It's pretty interesting to see what non-American news sources think about our election process. I freely admit that Britain has had some doozies in the election department with newly-minted London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and the nasty pummeling that the Labour Party received this time last year, plus the upcoming referendum on whether or not the UK will even stay in the European Union, but as much of a mess as British politics are, they simply don't hold a candle to the near 18-month insanity of our modern presidential contests.

It's definitely worthy of a drink down at the pub to keep you sane.

If you're interested in the Financial Times coverage of the 2016 election, you can find a lot more here.

One Hell Of A Bad Gamble

I understand the need for the under-represented group of America's Casino Magnates need to stick together and all that, but Sheldon Adelson putting $100 million on Trump seems like a sucker bet to me.

GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson might spend as much as $100 million to support Donald Trump's bid for the White House, according to a New York Times report, while pulling back his funding for down-the-ballot races and other Republican efforts. The casino mogul told Trump he would financially back his campaign at a closed-door meeting last week, two Republicans close to Adelson told the Times, and the amount pledged would exceed Adelson's spending on previous campaigns.

Oh this is going to be good.

The move comes as other major Republican donors, including the Koch brothers, have balked at supporting Trump. Trump bragged about being self-financed throughout the primary race (though he was receiving some contributions). He has now said he intends to fundraise for his general election battle with likely Dem nominee Hillary Clinton.

According to the New York Times report, Adelson and his advisors are still weighing which pro-Trump super PAC is best suited for his financial backing. Adelson officially declared his support of Trump in a Washington Post op-ed Friday.

"If Republicans do not come together in support of Trump, Obama will essentially be granted something the Constitution does not allow — a third term in the name of Hillary Clinton," Adelson said.

Yeah, because a third Obama term would be so bad for America (or for Sheldon Adelson, frankly).  What I don't understand is pulling back on GOP downticket races, when arguably those are far more important, especially given Trump's impending wipeout.  This seems like a fantastic disaster. I can't wait.

Sunday Long Read: Everyday Low Standards

When we talk about retailers like Wal-Mart shifting billions in operating costs to government, they usually do so with low wages, forcing employees on to SNAP benefits, which they then use to buy food at Wal-Mart.  But there are plenty of other ways Wal-Mart shifts costs to taxpayers, and one of them is using local police as store security rather than pay for it themselves, as this week's Sunday Long Read from the Tampa Bay Times finds.

Law enforcement logged nearly 16,800 calls in one year to Walmarts in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties, according to a Tampa Bay Timesanalysis. That’s two calls an hour, every hour, every day.

Local Walmarts, on average, generated four times as many calls as nearby Targets, the Times found. Many individual supercenters attracted more calls than the much larger WestShore Plaza mall.

When it comes to calling the cops, Walmart is such an outlier compared with its competitors that experts criticized the corporate giant for shifting too much of its security burden onto taxpayers. Several local law enforcement officers also emphasized that all the hours spent at Walmart cut into how often they can patrol other neighborhoods and prevent other crimes.

“They’re a huge problem in terms of the amount of time that’s spent there,” said Tampa police Officer James Smith, who specializes in retail crime. “We are, as a department, at the mercy of what they want to do.”

Even cops admit that Wal-Mart is tying up their officers and preventing them from doing other things, and responding to other calls.  And they can get away with it because they're Wal-Mart.

The Times reviewed thousands of records and interviewed dozens of officers and experts to provide an unprecedented look at the impact 53 Walmarts had on local policing.

Among the findings:

• Sheriff’s deputies in Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties were called to individual Walmart stores more than to any other location — by far. The same went for police in Largo, Pinellas Park, Tarpon Springs, Dade City, Plant City, Brooksville and Port Richey. For authorities in Pinellas and St. Petersburg, Walmarts were the second busiest locations.
• Officers logged fewer than 500 calls for violence, drugs or weapons. They took roughly another 7,000 calls for potential thefts. An even bigger category was general disorder, everything from suspected trespassing to parking violations, lost property and people sleeping outside stores. Those roughly 9,000 calls consumed hundreds of hours of officers’ time, but resulted in just a few hundred arrests.
• Many businesses paid a lot more in property taxes than the local Walmart but were much less of a burden on police. The Tyrone Square Mall in St. Petersburg, for instance, paid nearly four times as much in taxes as three nearby supercenters combined. Still, the mall attracted fewer police calls.
• Officers know Walmart is such a regular trouble spot that they routinely show up without being called.
• They simply hover around stores and parking lots to avert further issues, providing even more taxpayer-funded crime prevention. The Times found 6,200 of these unsolicited visits on top of the 16,800 other calls.

Walmart stores, with heavy foot traffic and cavernous layouts, are natural targets for shoplifters, panhandlers and other opportunists. Many are located in disadvantaged areas prone to more trouble. The retailer knows all of that, experts said, but doesn’t do enough to address the problems, despite ample resources. Walmart, they said, lays out its stores in a way that invites trouble and often doesn’t have enough uniformed employees to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Companies should do as much as they can to keep their properties in order before leaning on police, said Charles Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect, a book about the retailer’s growth and social impact. He equated Walmart’s high volume of calls to the parents of a misbehaving 11-year-old who call 911 every time their child acts out.

“That’s not what police are for,” he said.

Oh, but that's what Wal-Mart thinks they are for.  And they certainly have more pull in Florida than taxpayers.  When you refuse to secur your own stores to cut costs and make local governments handle the duties, well that's the price of a Wal-Mart in your hometown, folks.

Trump's America Gets A Lesson

And the lesson is "we are a nation of rights and laws to enforce those rights."

Near the end of his Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago to Albuquerque in December, Gill Parker Payne decided he had to take action.

Seated a few rows in front of him was a woman he had never met before. She was wearing a religious headscarf, known as a hijab, which Payne recognized as a Muslim practice. He stood up, walked down the aisle and stopped next to her seat. Looking down at the woman, Payne instructed her to remove the covering.

“Take it off! This is America!” Payne, 37, later recalled saying. When she didn’t do it herself, Payne did: He grabbed the hijab from the back and pulled it all off. Violated, the woman, identified by the Justice Department only as K.A., quickly pulled the hijab back over her head.

On Friday, as part of a plea deal with the federal government, Payne pleaded guilty to obstructing the woman’s exercise of her religious beliefs. “Because I forcibly removed K.A.’s hijab, I admit that the United States can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I intentionally obstructed K.A.’s free exercise of her religious beliefs,” he said in a written statement in the plea agreement.

If you think that an assault like this would ever be prosecuted in a Trump "Justice Department" I have some beachfront property in Colorado for you. In the end, there is a difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, and treating Islam with the same protections that are afforded to Christianity, Judaism, and all religions is one of those differences.

A Big Glass Of Nader Aid For The GOP, Con't.

Apparently there really is an effort to get a third party candidate into the race on the conservative side, and I can't wait for this to happen.

A band of exasperated Republicans — including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a handful of veteran consultants and members of the conservative intelligentsia — is actively plotting to draft an independent presidential candidate who could keep Donald Trump from the White House.

These GOP figures are commissioning private polling, lining up major funding sources and courting potential contenders, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republicans involved in the discussions. The effort has been sporadic all spring but has intensified significantly in the 10 days since Trump effectively locked up the Republican nomination.

Those involved concede that an independent campaign at this late stage is probably futile, and they think they have only a couple of weeks to launch a credible bid. But these Republicans — including commentators William Kristol and Erick Erickson and strategists Mike Murphy, Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson — are so repulsed by the prospect of Trump as commander in chief that they are desperate to take action.

Their top recruiting prospects are freshman Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a conservative who has become one of Trump’s sharpest critics, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who withdrew from the 2016 race May 4. Romney is among those who have made personal overtures to both men in recent days, according to several people with knowledge of the former Massachusetts governor’s activities.

I really is a toss-up to see which would be the bigger disaster, this or Trump losing the Senate and maybe even the House.  Ben Sasse?  Really? And John Kasich? I can't wait for this to blow up in the GOP's face.  You thought that Cleveland was going to be ugly before? Wait until they try to steal the nomination from Trump.

Popcorn and a chair, folks.  The Conserva-schism is going down.

That GOP War On Women Again, Con't

Red State Republicans sure do love the notion that women need to be protected from, above all else, themselves. Alabama is no different with what may be the goofiest TRAP law of them all regulating abortion clinics.

The Alabama legislature passed a bill Wednesday that prohibited abortion clinics from being within 2,000 feet from any K-8 public school — the same rule a sex offender must follow in the state.

If signed by anti-abortion Gov. Robert Bentley (R), the rule will force at least one abortion clinic to move — or close. This won’t be the first time the Huntsville clinic, Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives, will be forced to relocate because of an anti-abortion law. The clinic moved to its current location across the street from a new elementary school to comply with a 2013 anti-abortion bill that placed unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinic facilities.

“It disturbs me that a person has tried to abide by the law, and still gets penalized,” Democratic Rep. Laura Hall said, according to the Associated Press. “It is unfair for an individual to meet the demands of a law that we passed and when they moved, we create another law to put them basically out of business.”

Supporters argue that the regulation is meant to keep aggressive anti-abortion protesters away from children, something a clinic has no control over. But other state lawmakers have been more direct about the fact that their general dislike of abortion clinics fueled the vote.

“I don’t feel like these types of facilities need to be anywhere near our children,” said Republican Rep. Ed Henry, who carried the bill in the House.

The anti-abortion advocacy organization that fought for the bill echoed Henry’s opposition.

“Our message is to point out that killing a baby is still killing a baby whether its politically correct or not,” says local activist Rev. James Henderson, the executive director of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, the group responsible for getting the bill into the statehouse. He said it made sense that abortion clinics should have the same buffer zone from schools as sex offenders because, he said, the majority of underage girls brought to abortion clinics, “according to studies that have been done, are pregnant as a result of statutory rape anyways.”

See, abortion clinics promote rape of children, so we can't have them near schools.  Pretty soon it's going to be "can't have them near churches" and "can't have them near government buildings" and "can't have them within city limits" and so on, until they're virtually impossible to provide for 95% of women.

If there's anything that people need to understand, is that these fanatics will block Clinton or Sanders from ever appointing a Supreme Court justice to end these laws.  They are here to keep women poor, pregnant, and under control as second-class citizens whom for sex is a cardinal sin, and reserve abortions for only "the right kind of women" to be able to get.

This has always been about punishing the sluts and the whores, and it has been for thousands of years.

Any Deport In A Storm

There are times when the Obama administration has royally screwed up, and when they do, they need to be called out on it. This latest "deportation surge" is one of those times.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency will conduct a 30-day “surge” of immigration raids beginning in May, as Reuters first reported. The raids will target “single adults” and Central American mothers and children who arrived in the country after January 1, 2014 and have since “evaded their deportation orders or not shown up for court hearings,” according to theWall Street Journal. 

Many of those Central Americans are likely fleeing gang violence in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. A Salvadoran dies every 60 minutes because of the growing violence there. Immigration lawyers point out that these people are simply seeking asylum within the United States’ borders, even if U.S. officials don’t recognize that fact. 

The impending raids are similar to the large-scale immigration raids that the administration conducted at the beginning of this year, which terrorized immigrant communities across the country. Advocates are condemning the move, calling for the administration to provide legal services to mothers and children instead. 

“In January, when 121 individuals were detained in different parts of the country, our communities lived in terror,” Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement. “This tactic of keeping immigrant communities in constant fear of deportation is immoral and unjust. It does nothing to resolve the broader issues of our broken immigration system.” 

A government source indicated that ICE agents were advised to stay away from “sensitive locations” like churches, schools, and hospitals, ABC News reported.
But so far, those guidelines have not been closely followed this year. As ThinkProgress previously reported, ICE agents have lured an undocumented immigrant out of a church, and have taken Central American teenagers into custody while they’re on their way to and from school. 

In light of this, advocates are concerned that immigrants may soon be too afraid to leave their homes. During January’s large-scale immigration raids, even immigrants outside North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia — the three states that ICE targeted for its operations — found themselves taking different routes to work or avoiding dropping their kids off at school.

Having said that this solution is pretty horrific, the real issue is our terrible immigration system and the fact that Republicans have been blocking efforts for immigration reform for decades now.  We wouldn't be in this situation if we were allowed to fix immigration.  Republicans refuse to let that happen.

But that leaves the fact Obama is rounding up and deporting kids back to a violent hell, and it's something that needs to stop, outright.

Dispatches From Bevinstan,Con't

Morning Consult's regular survey of the popularity of the nation's governors finds that being in office for just six months, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin's approval rating is a dismal 33%.

Republicans take eight of the spots on the list of 10 most popular governors. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is America's most popular governor, and he is followed very closely by fellow Republican Larry Hogan of Maryland. Delaware's Jack Markell is the country's most popular Democratic governor. 

Despite national outrage being directed to Snyder and his administration, he does not have the worst approval rating. America's least popular governor is Republican Gov. Sam Brownback in Kansas, who is embroiled in ongoing budget woes that followed large tax cuts. Only 26 percent of Kansas voters approved of his job performance, compared to 65 percent who said they did not. 

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, whose state has experienced job losses to neighboring Massachusetts, is the second-least popular governor in the country and the least popular Democrat. His approval is 29 percent, while 64 percent of voters in the Nutmeg State disapprove of his performance. 

America's newest governors, Kentucky Republican Matt Bevin and Louisiana Democrat John Bel Edwards, have experienced opposite fates as voters have gotten to know them better since they were elected last fall. In the Bluegrass State, Bevin's approval rating sits at 33 percent, well below the 57 percent support which his Democratic predecessor Steve Beshear enjoyed before he left office. Edwards, meanwhile, has a 10 percent higher approval rating than the 35 percent Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal had at the end of his term.

So Bevin is in the basement with Sam Brownback and Dan Malloy, both of whom have seen major job losses in their respective states due to austerity budgets.  What a surprise, dismantling kynect (which worked great and was a model for the country) and then replacing it with a far worse system in the trainwreck that is Benefind has made Bevin a laughing stock, not to mention his austerity budget cuts set to start costing the state tens of thousands of jobs and wrecking the economy.

But once again, this is exactly what I warned Kentucky voters about for months, and people voted for the guy anyway.

Welcome to Bevinstan, Matt.  Your honeymoon is officially over.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

So the Washington Post dropped this story about Con Man Don Man this morning, it turns out he's been calling reporters and pretending to be a "Trump spokesman" for, oh, I dunno, 25 years or so.

A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron” — public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself — who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides. 

In 1991, Sue Carswell, a reporter at People magazine, called Trump’s office seeking an interview with the developer. She had just been assigned to cover the soap opera surrounding the end of Trump’s 12-year marriage to Ivana, his budding relationship with the model Marla Maples and his rumored affairs with any number of celebrities who regularly appeared on the gossip pages of the New York newspapers. 

Within five minutes, Carswell got a return call from Trump’s publicist, a man named John Miller, who immediately jumped into a startlingly frank and detailed explanation of why Trump dumped Maples for the Italian model Carla Bruni. “He really didn’t want to make a commitment,” Miller said. “He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.” 

Miller turned out to be a remarkably forthcoming source — a spokesman with rare insight into the private thoughts and feelings of his client. “Have you met him?” Miller asked the reporter. “He’s a good guy, and he’s not going to hurt anybody. . . . He treated his wife well and . . . he will treat Marla well.” 

Some reporters found the calls from Miller or Barron disturbing or even creepy; others thought they were just examples of Trump being playful. Today, as the presumptive Republican nominee for president faces questions about his attitudes toward women, what stands out to some who received those calls is Trump’s characterization of women who he portrayed as drawn to him sexually.

Two things: One, yes, the Post is right here, this is empirically relevant to Trump's presidential campaign, and  two, you've been sitting on this phone sock puppet story for 25 years, guys?  Really?

God our media sucks.  By the way, Trump may have brought this on himself:

Donald Trump on Thursday night lashed out at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, arguing that Bezos bought the Washington Post to gain political power and keep Trump from cracking down on Amazon as president. 

"Every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from The Washington Post asking ridiculous questions and I will tell you, this is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise. He’s using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed," Trump said when Fox News' Sean Hannity asked about a comment from Bob Woodward that the Post had assigned 20 reporters to cover Trump.

"He’s worried about me," Trump added. "He thinks I would go after him for antitrust because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much." 

Trump said that Bezos bought the Washington Post "for practically nothing and he’s using that as a tool for political power against me and against other people and I’ll tell you what, we can’t let him get away with it."

So Trump says he's going after the press on Thursday, specifically the Washington Post, and the next morning we get the Washington Post going right back at Trump with this fake spokseman story.

It turns out that the only thing that will make our media do its job is assholes like Trump threatening their parent companies.

That's just depressing, really.

NC Goes Straight Into The Crapper, Con't

With the Justice Department making good on their threat to sue the state over HB2's Title IX violations of the Civil Rights Act, NC GOP Gov. Pat McCrory wants Republicans in Congress to maybe, you know, get rid of that part of the law altogether.

Speaking to CNN host Jake Tapper on Wednesday, McCrory accused Democrats of starting a fight over transgender bathroom rights by passing an ordinance in the City of Charlotte that allowed transgender people to visit public restrooms that correspond to their gender identity. 

“I think that this was an argument that we didn’t need to have,” McCrory opined. “But this is an agenda by the far left. And for some reason, the national media is saying the far right brought this up. I had no interest in this subject.” 

“But the Justice Department is basically making a civil rights claim that every private sector employer in the U.S. and every university in the United States must have gender expression or gender identity bathroom choices for individuals,” the governor complained. 

Tapper pointed out that transgender children “have a very difficult time fitting in, they have very high suicide rates.” 

“What are you telling the teachers at schools in North Carolina where, say, a 12-year-old who identifies as a girl, though her birth certificate says boy, what do you tell teachers about her if she’s using the girl’s bathroom?” the CNN host wondered. 

McCrory argued that the solution was to “make special circumstances” by allowing the transgender girl to use a segregated bathroom. 

“But now the Civil Right Division of the U.S. Justice Department has deemed those types of arrangements to be discriminatory,” McCrory remarked.

Right.  Charlotte's bathroom ordinance made it necessary for Republicans to pass a law in 12 hours that dealt with eliminating local minimum wage and ending the right to sue over labor discrimination in state courts.  Yeah,  Sure.  THEY picked that fight.

“But to have the Justice Department come out with a massive interpretation of the Civil Rights Act for every employer in the United States now is something that I think need clarification by the federal courts.” 

In fact, McCrory suggested that Congress should take a look at gutting the entire Civil Rights Act over the issue. 

“I think there’s a time where the Republicans and the Democrats in this Congress need to revisit the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and revisit all this issue,” the first-term governor opined. “Because these are complex issues and North Carolina for whatever reason politically has become the target by the left on this agenda.”

Gosh, we don't know why anyone would pick on us when all we did was make a state law enshrining discrimination against a certain minority class of people.  I can't imagine why the federal government would be upset at a Southern state doing that.

Meanwhile, let's talk about who are the bullies in this scenario.

While Republican state leaders have complained about being "bullied" by the federal government over House Bill 2, lobbyists in Raleigh tell WRAL News they and the businesses they represent are being bullied by state lawmakers seeking to silence business opposition to the new law.

Lobbyists say they've been told – either directly by legislative leaders or by lawmakers' staff – that, if they or the businesses they represent speak out publicly against House Bill 2, they can expect retribution from House and Senate leaders. 

Legislation they want won't move, and other bills could actually target them. 

WRAL News spoke with 11 lobbyists who have experienced or are aware of such actions, but none would speak on the record for fear they would lose business or be targeted for retribution. One has already lost business. 

One long-time lobbyist called the pressure a "gross abuse of power." Another veteran lobbyist labeled it "vicious," adding, "I've never seen anything like it." 

Rep. Chris Sgro, D-Guilford, an outspoken critic of House Bill 2, said he's heard about the problem. 

"It's really disturbing. It's a bullying tactic that potentially leadership is using," Sgro said. "If it’s true that businesses are being threatened that they need to ignore their bottom line in favor of terrible public policy, that’s just irresponsible. That needs to stop immediately.

It's one thing for a private business to say "we don't agree with this law."  It's another thing entirely for a government to punish private businesses for disagreeing with them, and that is literally the definition of the Freedom of Speech clause in the First Amendment.

So yeah, there's yet another civil rights violation that NC can look forward to being sued over.

The Curse Of Zimmerman

Am I the only person who thinks this story should be the start of a Steven King novel?

SALE: One .9-mm pistol — and whatever’s left of George Zimmerman’s bankrupt soul. 

The Florida neighborhood watchman who fatally shot unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in 2012 is putting the killer handgun up for auction — and hoping to fetch at least $5,000.
“I am honored and humbled to announce the sale of an American Firearm Icon,” 

Zimmerman wrote in his online description of the weapon. The perverted auction opens for bids at 11 a.m. Thursday. 

“The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012 ... Many have expressed interest in owning and displaying the firearm including The Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. This is a piece of American History,” Zimmerman wrote.

Understand that the person who purchases this weapon deserves all the bad karma in the universe for doing so, and like I said, that would make for a pretty gripping modern horror novel if you ask me.

Not as gripping however as the real-life horror of lives ended daily by guns in the US.  There's 32,000 or so stories there every year there, and David "KagroX" Waldman over at Daily Kos keeps the diary of those heart-breaking stories on a daily basis.

But to profit directly off your infamy like this?  A bankrupt soul indeed.  Steven King would have a field day.