Last Call For If You Can't Beat 'Em, Buy 'Em

Thanks to the Citizens United decision, the Koch Brothers are looking to more than double their war chest for buying America's elections, one race at a time.  And they have amassed a network of donors and backers that plan to spend a billion dollars to purchase your votes for the GOP in 2016.

A network of conservative advocacy groups backed by Charles and David Koch aims to spend a staggering $889 million in advance of the next White House election, part of an expansive strategy to build on its 2014 victories that may involve jumping into the Republican primaries.

The massive financial goal was revealed to donors here Monday during an annual winter meeting hosted by Freedom Partners, the tax-exempt business lobby that serves as the hub of the Koch-backed political operation, according to an attendee. The amount is more than double the$407 million that 17 allied groups in the network raised during the 2012 campaign.

The figure comes close to the $1 billion that each of the two major parties’ presidential nominees are expected to spend in 2016, and it cements the network’s standing as one of the country’s most potent political forces. With its resources and capabilities — including a national field operation and cutting-edge technology — it is challenging the primacy of the official parties. In the 2012 elections, the Republican National Committee spent $404 million, while the Democratic National Committee shelled out $319 million.

The new $889 million goal reflects the anticipated budgets of all the allied groups that the network funds. Those resources will go into field operations, new data-driven technology and policy work, among other projects, along with likely media campaigns aimed at shaping the congressional and White House elections.

So the Kochs have a billion, the Republicans are looking to put together another billion, and the Democrats are playing catch up.  So enjoy America!  If you hated negative political ads 3 years ago, that's nothing compared to the onslaught that's coming, the one designed to make you give up on voting and give up on caring about voting...unless you're a Republican looking for some revenge for the Obama administration.

Odds are pretty good the Kochs will get the best government money can buy.

Duct Tape And Disembowelment

Greg Sargent calls out Republicans who are promising to "fix" the Affordable Care Act should the Supreme Court side with the GOP and end subsidies to the majority of states that are using federally-run insurance exchanges.

Here’s something to watch for: Republicans claiming in some vague way or other that, if SCOTUS does that, they just might be open to fixing the law. This rhetoric — deliberately or not — might make a SCOTUS decision gutting the law more likely. 

National Journal reports that top Senate Republicans claim they are already eying what to do if SCOTUS rules against the law. NJ reports that a Congressional fix — which would require re-writing a few words of statute — would originate in either the Finance or Health committees. The incoming chairmen of both — Orrin Hatch and Lamar Alexander — have begun to discuss ways of responding to a SCOTUS decision gutting the law, suggesting that perhaps a fix can be had in exchange for other changes to the law Republicans want. 

We should treat such suggestions with extreme skepticism. It’s hard to imagine Republicans agreeing to any fix to the law that doesn’t require enormous concessions from Democrats in return. (Republicans will be under pressure from stakeholders in the states impacted by a SCOTUS decision to fix the law, but they may argue, perhaps understandably, that Democrats are to blame for faulty drafting, so why should Republicans salvage the law for them?) Beyond this, though, some Democrats closely following the health care debate believe there is a possible consequence — unintended or otherwise — that could follow from such rhetoric. 

It all turns on one way Chief Justice John Roberts, the expected swing vote, might decide to gut the law. He might agree with the government’s argument that, read in its larger statutory context, the disputed “exchange established by the state” language doesn’t change the fact that Congress’ obvious intent was to provide subsidies to all 50 states. But he could still say that the language says what it says; that, given its plain meaning, it is obviously a mistake; and that it is not SCOTUS’s job to fix a mistake — that’s on Congress. 

Thus, the “maybe we’ll fix it” rhetoric coming from some Republicans might make it easier to entertain the idea that Congress would fix the law in the event of a SCOTUS ruling against it. The problem is that other leading Republicans have already given away the game: GOP Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and John Barrasso have clearly stated that they view a SCOTUS decision gutting the law as accomplishing what Republicans failed to accomplish themselves through the political and legislative process. 

As Nicholas Bagley explains, not only is such a SCOTUS ruling very likely to create a huge mess that could all but destroy the law in many, many states, but Republicans have already confirmed they are anticipating this outcome. Whether or not Roberts will care about this is an open question, but it is the reality of the situation.

So no, Republicans aren't going to "fix" Obamacare should SCOTUS rip its spine out, and if they do, the toll the GOP will exact will be devastating.  Most likely the GOP will attempt to both exact a high price, then of course the Tea Party will scuttle the deal and the law will be in real trouble of collapsing.

Republicans of course are perfectly okay with that.  Fixing it would require actual governance, and that, America, is going to cost you.

Executive action is all the rage in the White House these days, and it's hard to imagine a better candidate for unilateralism than fixing the Affordable Care Act in the wake of a crippling Supreme Court decision. That scenario would check every box: Republican intransigence; a top priority for Obama; and severe disruption in real people's lives. 

There's just one problem: A good administrative solution might not exist. 

"There are no administrative fixes that are realistic," said Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. "We don't believe there's any administrative fix."

As the saying goes, now that we've determined what Republicans actually are, the only thing left to negotiate is the price.

The Year Of The Clown Van

Politico's Roger Simon laments that the Republican circus of 2012 has become the traveling freakshow of 2016, and if this weekend's Iowa Freedom Summit is any indication, for the rest of year this least we're looking at GOP politics as comedic performance art.

The Republican Party’s clown car has become a clown van.

With nearly two dozen possible presidential candidates, the GOP is having a seriousness deficit. There can’t possibly be that many people who are real candidates.

But they can ride in the clown car from event to event, and nobody can stop them.

At the Freedom Summit here Saturday, two dozen speakers ground through 10 hours of speeches in front of more than 1,000 far-right Republicans.

As it turned out, clown car candidates are not necessarily funny. Since they have nothing to lose, they can attack their fellow Republicans with abandon.

Usually they attack from the right, which can force the eventual nominee farther to the right than the nominee wants to go. This risks losing moderate voters in the general election.

This was not a concern at the Freedom Summit, however. The farther to the right, the better.

It was a classic cattle call, with speaker after speaker pandering to the crowd. Sometimes, however, pandering was not enough.

In the circus, the worse thing clowns lob is confetti. In the political circus, the clowns lob grenades. Verbal, to be sure, but they still can be deadly.

Bill O’Brien, a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, told the crowd: “I don’t know what is worse, nominating someone because he has been nominated once before (i.e., Mitt Romney) or someone who endorses Common Core (i.e., Jeb Bush). Are we going to nominate one of them?”

The audience bellowed: “Noooooo.”

Indeed, Jeb and Mittens were nowhere near this mess, but the rest of them were:  Christie,  Trump, Huckabee, Santorum, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Carly Fiorina, hell even Moose Lady was there.  The coming civil war in Reaganland is going to be brutal and bloody and when it's over the GOP is going to look as bombed-out and soulless as they are in the inside.

And we'll all have a huge laugh and figure that these freaks will be pushed aside for Mitt or more likely Jeb Bush and that the billionaires that really run the party will make their choice and get to work as soon as possible in order to go after Hillary with a united front.

But something tells me it's not going to be as easy as the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson think, especially after this.  All the money in the world might not be able to sell Jeb or Mitt to the Republicans who will be voting the primaries, which could make the July 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland into the Greatest Show on Earth.

StupidiNews!

• A massive winter nor'easter could spread record blizzard conditions from New Jersey into Maine, including several feet of snow forecast for NYC, Providence, Hartford, Portland and Boston.
• The Church of England will consecrate its first female bishop since formation in 1534 this week as the Church looks to grow in an increasingly secular Britain.
• Greece's far-left Syriza Party has won an overwhelming victory and has formed a coalition government with far-right nationalists to reject EU austerity measures after Sunday's elections.
• President Obama's trip to India has resulted in a major breakthrough with Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the US to supply fuel and reactor equipment for nuclear power projects in the country.
• Google looks to be bringing its high-speed fiber optic internet next to North Carolina, with a possible "fiber corridor" from Charlotte to the Research Triangle area of Raleigh-Durham.

Last Call For Identity Theft

And here we have NYT columnist Noam Scheiber's advice to NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio on how to win back nervous white voters.

From the get-go, Mr. de Blasio’s campaign fused two distinct strands of progressivism. The first was economic populism, not least his criticism that Michael R. Bloomberg had placed the interests of Wall Street and the wealthy above those of average New Yorkers.

The second was what some have called “identity group” liberalism, which appealed to black and Latino voters as blacks and Latinos, not on the basis of economic interests they shared with whites. The centerpiece of Mr. de Blasio’s identity-group agenda was his promise to win better treatment for minorities at the hands of the police.

The problem for Mr. de Blasio is that only the first approach has widespread appeal...

If you were to rank issues by their potential to unite whites and minority voters, the most promising would be populist economic issues like raising taxes on the rich. Somewhere in the middle would be an issue like health care, which has large economic benefits for both whites and nonwhites, even if opponents can portray it as a sop to the latter. At the very bottom would be issues with little economic content, but which different racial groups view in radically different ways.

As Nancy LeTourneau notes, this is exactly the kind of thing white progressives often tell politicians when dealing with expanding the Democratic party's big tent: that is the issues of "mainstream" white America must trump that of persons of color.

What Scheiber is basically saying is that if you want to unite whites and minority voters, you have to focus on the issues that are a priority to whites. That's pretty much white supremacy in a nutshell. His big "tell" comes in what he leaves out of that last sentence. The reason racial groups view the issues he places at the bottom differently is because they affect racial groups differently. White people never had to be concerned about "stop-and-frisk" because it almost never happened to a white person. White mothers/fathers, wives, siblings don't spend much time worrying that their son, husband, brother will be harassed/beaten/killed because some police officer jumped to the conclusion that he was a "dangerous black/brown man." But that is exactly how police actions become a priority for voters of color. The fear of what can happen becomes a life-and-death issue for them - as we've seen lately.

She's completely right.

It's easy to say "Hey, deBlasio would get a greater rater of return on his efforts for concentrating on what middle class white New Yorkers want.  They're the ones that swing vote, and they're the ones that matter."  Because deBlasio said that he'd rather do the right thing, he's being punished for it by voters who don't know about and frankly, don't care about issues important to persons of color in the Big Apple.

Therefore, he should stop doing the right thing.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Drunken Moose Lady Assaults Reality

Sarah Palin lost her marbles at the Iowa Tea Party Hoedown Freedom Summit on Saturday, and it was both amazing and depressing to remember that a couple of million votes going the other way would have put this woman one Johnny Volcano heart attack away from leading the country.



As Charles Johnson puts it:

Even by Sarah Palin’s already low standards, this speech is extraordinarily incoherent and scattered. I’ve seen a lot of her speeches (do not pity me, it is my job), and I can’t remember a more garbled, deeply weird performance from Caribou Barbie.

It's a train wreck even for her.  And yet our media treats her as a serious political force in this country instead of a sad, pathetic sideshow.

Look upon this and despair, Tea Party.  This is your face to tens of millions of Americans like myself.

Sunday Long Read: Home Wreckanomics

There's been a lot of evidence that the recovery is finally pushing forward and that America's employment picture has turned around.  But the reality is for black families in America, there's been no recovery, and in fact black wealth and the black middle class have all but vanished in just a few short years.

The recession and tepid recovery have erased two decades of African American wealth gains. Nationally, the net worth of the typical African American family declined by one-third between 2010 and 2013, according to a Washington Post analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, a drop far greater than that of whites or Hispanics.

The top half of African American families — the core of the middle class — is left with less than half of the typical wealth they possessed in 2007. The wealth of similarly situated whites declined by just 14 percent.

Overall, the survey found, the typical African American family was left with about eight cents for every dollar of wealth held by whites.

Depressing doesn't begin to describe it.  And yet just when black families need help the most, Republicans are doing everything they can to pull the ladder of success out of reach.

Many researchers say the biggest portion of the wealth gap results from the strikingly different experiences blacks and whites typically have with homeownership. Most whites live in largely white neighborhoods, where homes often prove to be a better investment because people of all races want to live there. Predominantly black communities tend to attract a narrower group of mainly black buyers, dampening demand and prices, they say.

In places such as Prince George’s County, where many people chose to live at least in part because of the comfort and familiarity they felt in a majority-black community, that meant their home brought them less wealth than if they had purchased elsewhere, economists say.

Scholars who have studied this dynamic and real estate professionals who have lived it say the price differences go beyond those that might be dictated by the perceived quality of schools, or the public and commercial investment made in particular neighborhoods. The big difference maker, they say, is race.

Race.  Even the upper-middle class black families of Prince George's County are now finding that black neighborhoods will always be worth less than white ones.  But remember, racism is over in America because we have a black president, so we don't need the outdated protections of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act or college admissions.

And now the Fair Housing Act is before the Supreme Court. with red states and banks looking to strip provisions out of that law as well.  Because racism doesn't exist anymore, you see.  We've got to cut public transportation in black neighborhoods because it's too expensive, cut schools because they're failing, cut lending protections so that they can be served by payday lenders and title loan companies, and Obamacare?  That's got to go too.  Cut this, cut that, gotta cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and when we try to fight back at the voting booth, we're told we can't vote because we haven't jumped through the correct hoops, and besides, voting machines are to expensive.  We need to cut those too. 

Not much left to be cut, you know.

Of course, that's the point.

Spy-King The Ball

James Bond has M running the show for him, and if Daily Beast's Shane Harris is right, the US equivalent of M, Frank Archibald, is retiring after the latest CIA/torture turf fight.

The director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the storied home of the agency’s most secretive intelligence operations, has announced that he plans to retire, The Daily Beast has learned.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed that the director announced his retirement “after a long and distinguished career at CIA. We thank him for this profound and lasting contributions to both CIA and to our nation’s security.”

As a practice, the CIA doesn’t identify the head of the clandestine service by name. But Frank Archibald was outed in a Twitter post in 2013, and details of his biography were known to some journalists. Archibald, who was 57 when he took the job that year, reportedly served tours in Pakistan and Africa and also headed the CIA’s Latin America division. The Associated Press reported that Archibald "once ran the covert action that helped remove Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power."

Archibald’s retirement comes at a transitional moment for the CIA. The agency’s director, John Brennan, is considering major changes to the agency’s structure, including the possible creation of new intelligence centers and doing away with the traditional division of CIA into its analysis group and the clandestine service.

Needless to say, the career spooks aren't too happy with this new plan.

Critics of the reorganization, which hasn’t been formally proposed and, officials have stressed, isn’t a done deal, see it as potentially undermining some of the CIA’s core capabilities in favor of organizing the agency around regions of the world. Some in the National Clandestine Service in particular view a reorganization as a threat to the high-degree of independence it has traditionally enjoyed within the intelligence bureaucracy.

“This would be to their mind the greatest threat to their independence since they were created as the Directorate of Plans back in 1951,” one former official said.

Brennan is slated to make public remarks on Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he’ll be interviewed by journalist Charlie Rose. The CIA hasn’t announced what, if any, news Brennan plans to make. But former officials said they’d been anticipating that he might soon unveil more of his thinking about any reorganization.

It's clear that Republicans and the American people are more than happy to keep playing "24" and torturing everyone swarthy in sight in order to stop invisible bomb countdown clocks.  But it looks like Obama has given Brennan his orders to change the agency as a result of that Senate torture report, and Brennan's going to have to deliver.

We'll see how far he gets.  If the nation's top super spy is hanging it up, the changes have to be pretty big.

On The Next Epidose Of NCIS

A dead sailor found off the coast of Cuba.  An affair with a base commander. A naval captain in disgrace.  Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, folks.

On January 11, the body of Christopher Tur, was found in the waters off of Cuba. A subsequent investigation uncovered an alleged affair between Tur’s wife and Capt John R. Nettleton, the commander of the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.

On January 21, the Navy publicly announced that Nettleton has been relieved of command.

The decision to relieve Nettleton was made by his boss “Commander, Navy Region Southeast, Rear Adm. Mary M. Jackson due to loss of confidence in Nettleton’s ability to command,” according to a statement from Navy Region Southeast Public Affairs.

Following his dismissal from Guantanamo, Nettleton was moved to Florida, where he is assigned to Jackson’s staff.

Sounds like this should be a movie (and probably will be.)

Base spokesperson Kelly Wirfel said that Tur moved to Guantanamo with his family in 2011 and worked at the base commissary. Tur’s obituary lists his job as a loss prevention officer, a title that typically means someone who prevents theft and shoplifting.. Tur’s widow, Lara, who is alleged to have carried on an affair with Capt. Nettleton, works as the director of the base’s Fleet and Family Services. That position would have her overseeing a variety of support programs for military families ranging from counseling services to financial assistance.

Lara reported her husband missing on January 10, a day before the Coast Guard discovered his body.

The adultery alone is enough to seriously ruin Nettleton's career under UCMJ, but with the other man in the picture dead, well...now things get really interesting.  Trust me when I say there are screenplays being written right now about this.

She's Always A Woman To Me

Just a reminder that while rampant, obvious racism is usually frowned upon by Republicans, rampant, obvious sexism is still widely acceptable and in fact is part and parcel of the GOP's anti-Hillary push. WaPo's Aaron Blake:

One WaPo-ABC poll question I didn't get into in this morning's post is this: Does the fact that Hillary Clinton would be the first female president make you more likely or less likely to vote for her in 2016? 

Twenty four percent of people -- including 40 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of women -- say that breaking the last, highest glass ceiling makes them more likely to back her. Two-thirds say it doesn't matter one bit to their vote. 

But if you look a little closer, you'll find something interesting: While most Republicans say Clinton's gender doesn't matter, about one-quarter of them (24 percent) say the fact that she would be the first female president makes them less likely to vote for her. Just 8 percent say it makes them more likely to back her.

Nobody should really be surprised by this, other than I think the number of Republicans admitting this is probably lower than it really is.  And yes, Republicans have a huge issue with women of their own creation.  This week's abortion bill nonsense proved that.

A symbolic messaging bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy threw the party into disarray and was abruptly pulled at the last minute after a group of GOP women and swing-district lawmakers raised hackles over a rape-exception provision that required victims of sexual assault to report the crime to authorities before they could get an abortion. 

"None of us saw it coming," Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) told reporters on Thursday.

Yes, because a woman was saying it.  Good luck in 2016, jagoffs.

Last Call For The Whole Ball Of Wax

GOP is playing with fire here, but it seems like they're confident they will keep control of the Senate in 2016.  If they get the White House too, then the game is over for the Dems if they pull this off.

Top Senate Republicans are considering gutting the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees — a move that could yield big rewards for whichever party controls the White House and Senate after 2016.

The move, still in its early stages, reflects growing GOP confidence in its electoral prospects next year. But it could also have a major immediate impact if a justice such as 81-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg steps down, making it far easier for President Barack Obama to get a replacement confirmed.

The proposed change would expand on the dramatic move Democrats made in 2013, when they killed the 60-vote hurdle for executive branch nominations and almost all judicial nominees. Republicans have complained bitterly about the Democrats’ action ever since, saying it violated the Senate’s tradition of being a deliberative body where the minority holds big sway. But now, GOP supporters contend, it may be time to bring majority rule to votes on Supreme Court nominations, too.

The 60-vote filibuster threshold would remain for legislation.

The GOP understands that there's a very good change the next President will be able to appoint 2, maybe 3 justices.  They seem to be willing to leverage blocking any further SCOTUS appointments for Obama into assuring that they have precedent for packing the court in 2016 if there's a GOP president.  And let's face it, if a Democrat wins and they still control the Senate, well Hillary or whoever isn't going to be able to appoint anyone anyway.

There is massive upside and very little downside right now for the GOP doing this.  They are counting on cover from the Village, and a short memory of the public, two extremely safe bets.

We'll see what happens, but if I were the GOP, I'd throw the dice on this.

The Mask Slips Again...

...and Republicans accidentally reveal how they really feel about the "working poor".

California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock said on Thursday that the minimum wage should not be raised because low pay was necessary for minorities and other unskilled workers who were not worth more than $7 an hour.

During an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, host Greta Brawner asked McClintock if he could get behind a presidential candidate like Mitt Romney, who is one of an increasing number of Republicans saying that the minimum wage should be at least $10.10 an hour.

But McClintock argued that raising the minimum wage would “rip the first rung in the ladder of opportunity for teenagers, for minorities, for people who are trying to get into the job market for their first job.”

The California Republican explained that the minimum wage was not supposed to be a living wage that could support families.

“It’s not supposed to support a family. The minimum wage is that first job when you have no skills, no experience, no working history. That’s how you get into the job market, that’s how you develop that experience, develop that work record, get your first raise, then your next raise, then your promotion.”

McClintock continued: “If your labor is an unskilled person just entering the workforce is worth say $7 an hour at a job and the minimum wage is $10, you have just been made permanently unemployable. That first rung of the economic ladder has been ripped out and you can’t get on it. That is a tragedy.”

We saw GOP Rep. Aaron Schock attack the minimum wage with a similar argument after the State of the Union address.  If those people were supposed to be earning more than $7.25 an hour, then God and the Free Market would pay them more then that.  The notion to pay people $10.10 anyway just hasn't accurred to Republicans, because they think the millions of families trying to live on that minimum wage aren't worth it, and don't matter.

Since the majority of them vote Democrat, no, they don't matter to Tom McClintock, nor do they matter to the GOP.  They are the enemy, and must be "dealt with".

This is how the GOP treats poor people: you're poor for a reason, and you don't count.  They're too busy sucking up to the billionaires that increasingly own more and more of America's wealth.

Weasels And Measles

Dear anti-vaxxer nut jobs:  This is why you suck and are awful people.



In all seriousness, the anti-vaccination crusade has now brought measles back to the US, a disease that was effectively eradicated here 20 years ago.

We have quadrupled the number of measles cases in the US in one year because of this idiocy, from 150 to more than 600.

Vaccinate your goddamn kids, people.

StupidiNews!

• Saudi King Abdullah has passed at age 90 according to Saudi state television, he will be succeeded by his 79-year-old half-brother Crown Prince Salman.
• An outbreak of measles in California has expanded to 59 new cases as at least two dozen of the cases are of unvaccinated people.
• The US is pulling more staff out of the embassy in Yemen's capital of Sanaa as the collapse of the government of President Hadi to anti-American rebels continues.
• The European Central Bank's $1.14 trillion bond-buying program far exceeds the expectations of most of the eurozone, taking the financial world by surprise.
• Internet security officials say as many as 5,300 gas stations could be vulnerable to internet-based attacks on fuel monitoring systems.

Last Call For A Silver, Out-Foxed

It looks like the hammer has fallen on long-time New York Assembly Speaker and Democrat Sheldon Silver, as he's surrendered himself to the FBI on federal corruption charges.

In a five-count criminal complaint outlining the charges, Mr. Silver is accused of “using the power and influence of his official position to obtain for himself millions of dollars of bribes and kickbacks masked as legitimate income.” 

He is charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and extortion. 

The complaint maintains that for more than a decade, Mr. Silver devised a scheme “to induce real estate developers with business before the state” to use a real estate law firm controlled by a lawyer who had once worked as Mr. Silver’s counsel who orchestrated payments to the speaker for referrals to the firm. 

The complaint said that “there is probable cause to believe that Silver received approximately $4 million in payments characterized as attorney referral fees solely through the corrupt use of his official position.” 

Prosecutors, according to the complaint, said that Mr. Silver did essentially no work for the payments. 

Prosecutors seized approximately $3.8 million of Mr. Silver’s money on Thursday morning.

And let's not forget the Feds were tipped off after Gov. Cuomo disbanded in last March the state's anti-corruption commission that he created to fight exactly this type of thing.  Silver needs to resign, just as much as Michael Grimm did after his tax evasion nonsense.  I'd say Silver's alleged crimes are a lot worse.

We'll see.