Last Call For Going Into Overtime

The Obama administration is making a huge move that will give millions of salaried US workers overtime pay they haven't been getting for years.

Under a new rule announced by the White House Tuesday, anybody making a salary of less than $47,476 ($913 a week) will automatically qualify for overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours a week. 

That's roughly double the $23,660 threshold (or $455 a week) that's currently in place.
The change -- which has been criticized as too drastic by many employers -- will go into effect on Dec. 1, 2016. It is intended to expand access to overtime pay for otherwise low-salaried workers who log long hours but have been treated as exempt from overtime because they perform some managerial duties. 

Vice President Joe Biden characterized the changes as "restoring and expanding access to the middle class." 

The percent of salaried workers automatically eligible for overtime has fallen to 7% from 62% in 1975. Under the new threshold, 35% of salaried workers will become automatically eligible, according to Labor Secretary Thomas Perez. 

The new threshold will be updated every three years to make sure it stays at the 40th percentile of full-time salaries in the lowest income region of the country. Based on wage growth projections, that means it could rise to $51,000 by 2020.

And it could add $12 billion a year to paychecks.  This is serious stuff folks.  This is going to make a big difference in the lives of retail managers, IT workers, entry level office folks, and more.  Going from 7% of salaried workers getting OT to 35% is a massive win for the working class, and the salary level for OT will keep place with inflation too.

I fully expect this to be challenged in court, and of course the second a Republican president gets into office you can kiss overtime pay goodbye.

But we'll see.  At the very least, employers won't be forcing salaried workers to put in 60-70 hours a week with no OT anymore.  Not unless they are making a significant wage to start with.

Clowns To The Left Of Them, Jokers To The Right, Here They Are

Stuck in the middle with Trump.

As Democrats portray Donald Trump as a dangerous leader for his party, most of them barely acknowledge he could be president. But some centrist Democrats say they’re ready and willing to work with the business mogul should he defeat their party’s nominee. 

“The people will have a chance to vote. If Donald Trump is elected president there will be a great opportunity to sit down and have a conversation about what that agenda looks like,” explained Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who has long backed Hillary Clinton. “If he’s president, we’re going to have disagreement. But we’d better all figure out how to come up with an agenda for the American people.”

Getting ready for a potential Trump presidency in their home states may just be good politics for moderate senators such as Heitkamp, Jon Tester of Montana and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. They’ll be top targets for Republicans in 2018, a midterm year that could favor the GOP if recent trends of lower turnouts in nonpresidential elections continue. And it’s a good bet that they’ll need Trump voters to keep their jobs. 

Trump should easily win North Dakota and neighboring Montana this fall if past is prologue: Montana went to Bill Clinton in 1992, while North Dakota hasn’t gone Democratic since 1964. He’ll also certainly win West Virginia and be favored to win Missouri as well: Both states have been in the GOP column since 2000. 

For Democrats in those states, ignoring Trump’s political success, and by extension his supporters, would be a risky move. So some Democrats say they can see some opportunities for working together during a hypothetical Trump presidency, given that the Republican front-runner has based his campaign on being a deal maker — unlike any other prominent GOP candidate this cycle.

Sure, because running away from a Democratic president worked so well in 2010 and 2014, especially if turnout is an abysmal 36% like the last midterm election.

Look, I understand the impulse to appease Trump voters if you're in friggin' West Virginia and whatnot, but odds are very, very good that Democrats are going to lose these seats, plus Joe Donelly's seat in Indiana, giving the GOP five pickups in 2018.

So unless Democrats out in those states get super-motivated, they are going to get smashed again, and acting like Trump's your buddy is only going to get you a bigger loss.

Ask Kentucky Senator Alison Lundergan Grimes and Governor Jack Conway how well it works to run screaming from a Democratic president.

On the other hand, if Trump does actually win, what Joe Manchin does in 2018 will be the least of our problems as Democrats.

A Photo Finish In This Kentucky Horse Race

Hillary Clinton is claiming victory here in Kentucky as the last few thousand votes come in from the mountain counties, but the margin of victory looks to be very, very close.



The O'Malley vote, the uncommitted vote, even the bonkers vote for Rocky De La Fuente (we do love our colorful long shot candidates here in the Bluegrass State) all could have given Sanders the win, and it didn't.  The closed primary and friendly political establishment here favored Clinton, the angry coal country vote and 90% white demographics of the state favored Sanders, and in the end it was a narrow win for Clinton.

The difference was Jefferson County, Clinton won Louisville 64k to Sanders' 45k, and that margin stood up all night. She also won Lexington's Fayette County 20k to 17k, and again that margin held. What few black voters in the state live in those two counties, and they came out big for Clinton.

Interestingly enough, Clinton also did well here in the NKY, taking Boone, Kenton, and Campbell counties, picking up a total of about 750 votes across all three over Sanders.  That means my vote counted, the first Kentucky primary I can honestly say where it did.

Sanders did well in both the east and west, particularly in Pike County (that big pointy county furthest to the east in KY). He won there by 2,400, more than doubling Clinton's total there, but there were also a whopping 1,400 uncommitted voters there as the real draw was the race for State Senator in Pike and surrounding counties.

State Senate minority leader Ray Jones was able to keep his seat against primary challenger Glenn Hammond as they argued about how much each hated Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the heart of Pikeville coal country.  Jones got 6,400 votes to Hammond's 2,900, well more than the Clinton/Sanders race. It means a hell of a lot of people turned out to vote for the local race, and could have cared less about which Dem ran for President...probably because they were going to vote for Trump anyhow.

Anyway, this win is a definite problem for Clinton.  She should be able to put Sanders away at this point and she can't.  She won here 8 years ago by 36 points over Obama.  Last night she won by .3%. I still expect Trump to win here by 15 points, if not 20 in November, so it's not like we're a good example of how Democrats think here.

But she can end this in New Jersey and California next month. The question that remains now is how much damage Bernie Sanders will do before he concedes the race.

StupidiNews!

• The vote count in Kentucky remains too close to call this morning in the Democratic primary, Clinton has a slim lead, but Bernie Sanders handily won Oregon's primary.
• South Carolina Republicans have passed legislation outlawing abortions after 19 weeks, GOP Governor Nikki Haley has indicated she will sign the bill.
• Donald Trump says if elected president, he would all but completely dismantle the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation that strengthened regulation of Wall Street.
• Mitsubishi Motors President Tetsuro Aikawa will resign in the wake of the automaker's fuel economy reporting scandal, rival Nissan will purchase a controlling stake in the company.
• A new study finds psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound in some mushrooms, may be effective in treating depression.

Orange Julius Enjoys His Retirement

So what's former GOP House Speaker John Boehner up to these days? Jeremy Fugelberg of the Cincinnati Enquirer catches up to him and finds out that ol' Orange Julius can't stay away from the game he's played nearly all of his adult life.

West Chester's own John Boehner may be out of the House, but he's certainly staying out of the house (It's a joke, folks!). 

The former House speaker plans to barnstorm across the country in late July and early August, campaigning and raising money for House Republicans, Politico reported this morning. 

He'll travel the country on his bus, Freedom One – an annual practice while he was in office.

That's right, he'll be hitting the Midwest on bus tours to help Republicans.

I wonder if that will include Don Man the Con Man?

He still has a small war chest to power his work. Our USA Today Network reporter Deirdre Shesgreen reported earlier this month that Boehner has more than $1.6 million in his House re-election account and just shy of $1 million in a leadership PAC account at the end of March, according to campaign finance disclosures. 

The bus tour news is the latest showing Boehner has no intention of staying out of the limelight. Boehner made a cameo in a skit video featuring President Barack Obama, aired at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 30.

This should be fun.  Considering Boehner was basically the second major casualty of the Trump GOP (the first being GOP House majority leader Eric Cantor, remember him? Even I missed the call that he would get primaried out in 2014, and it's one of the reasons I kept saying Trump was for real back last year!) I can't see how he's going to be of much help to Trump.

But hey, if he wants to wreck his credibility backing The Donald, let his juice get squeezed.

Can Hillary Win In Bevinstan?

As Joe Sonka points out ahead of today's Kentucky Democratic primary:

Looks like the Bluegrass Poll calamity scared off anyone from doing a public poll in Kentucky this primary season.

— Joe Sonka (@joesonka) May 16, 2016

Of course he's talking about the now infamous Bluegrass Polls showing Jack Conway with a five-point lead heading into last November, only for him to end up losing by 8.

So we don't have very much polling at all heading into today. A Public Policy Polling survey from early March had Clinton up 5.  That's it.  Nobody else has bothered to touch the state since November's catastrophe.  So I have no idea who's going to win.

Clinton, for her part, is going hard here.

Hillary Clinton, looking to stem a string of late-in-the-calendar wins by rival Bernie Sanders, is investing heavily in Kentucky ahead of its Tuesday primary. 

The former secretary of state's campaign has launched both television and radio ads in the state's major markets and dispatched more than a dozen surrogates to turn out voters in the days before the primary. Clinton has also personally invested time: She will have headlined 11 campaign stops over three trips in the last two weeks by the time Kentucky Democrats go to the polls. 

"It is a great honor to be here with you and I hope to earn your support in the primary on Tuesday," Clinton said at St. Stephens Baptist Church in Southwest Louisville on Sunday. "I hope to have the opportunity to serve you as your president." 

This investment marks a notable change from her efforts ahead of a narrow-loss in Indiana's primary two weeks ago, where Clinton spent little time campaigning and was outspent $2 million to $0 in advertising. 

After the loss some aides suggested with a little investment the former secretary of state could have won the primary and come closer to putting away Sanders, the Vermont senator who has pledged to campaign into June. Clinton and her aides don't want to make that mistake again, especially given they already anticipate a loss in Oregon, the other state voting Tuesday. 

Clinton visited Paducah, Kentucky, on Monday, stopping in at the Little Castle diner. The meeting was meant to be an off-the-record stop, but excited local Democrats told reporters and the place was filled when Clinton walked in. 

"Everybody's ready to go vote," Clinton said. "I'll tell you this: I'm not going to give up on Kentucky in November."

So she very well might win.  I don't know.  She's trying to win the state over and might have a serious chance if the Republicans really do put a third-party bid into play like Big Dog did in 1992 and 1996, but outside of that, Trump is going to win here by 15-20 points.

It's good that she's not giving up on the state.  We have too many "progressives" giving up on Kentucky as it is. And yes, this means I'm voting for her.

We'll see what happens later tonight.

StupidiNews!

• Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich says he still will not endorse presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump nor consider being his VP, saying he remains undecided at this time.
• A federal jury in California has found two LA County Sheriff's deputies guilty of beating a mentally ill inmate and then lying on reports to cover up the incident.
• The highest-ranking Chinese official to visit Hong Kong in nearly two years says he promises to listen to Hong Kong activists looking for more autonomy or even independence.
• The Port Authority of New York is leading the way on a $4 billion project to expand NYC's LaGuardia airport with a new 35-gate terminal due in 2021.
• Twitter is considering removing links and photos from counting against a tweet's 140-character limit, with CEO Jack Dorsey saying "we're going to explore" what users want.

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.
Story Continued Below

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.