Last Call For Ending The Debate

Peggy Noonan is glad to see the families of the victims of last week's massacre so forgiving...but she will not extend that courtesy to those who wish to bringing up what needs to be done to prevent another one from happening.

Charleston deserves something, a bow. So too do the beautiful people who go to Wednesday night Bible study in America in 2015. They are the people who are saving America every day, completely unheralded, and we can hardly afford to lose them.

There’s only one thing Charleston doesn’t deserve. People apart from the trauma, far away, have already begun to bring their political agenda items to the tragedy and make sure they are debated. Because this is the right time for a political debate, right?

Here’s an idea: Why don’t you leave the grieving alone right now? Why don’t you not impose your agenda items on them? Why don’t you not force them to debate while they have tears in their throats?

Don’t politicize their pain. Don’t turn this into a debate on a flag or guns. Don’t use it to make your points and wave your finger from your high horse.

These people are doing it right without you.

They are loving each other and helping each other. Let them grieve in peace. And respect them as what they are, heroic.

So when is it the right time for this debate that America never seems to have?  Next week?  Next month?  Next year?  When do those of us who said time and time again that America's domestic terrorism problems and documented hate groups would become an issue get to have a word?  Every time another massacre happens, those of us who want to have the debate are told "It's too soon!" and to shut up and go away, and the speed at which this silencing happens to the black community in America often breaks the sound barrier.

Why does Peggy Noonan get to decide when America has this debate? She does not speak for me, and she will never have earned that right from me. I sure as hell won't be silenced by her arrogant ignorance, and neither should anyone else.

Stuff it, Nooners.  The President is ahead of you again.

Secret Serivce Sidearm Silliness

Tucker Carlson makes an argument fit to lose on FOX and Friends: if President Obama hates guns so much, why does the Secret Service have them?

“The president has said a number of times guns are the problem, guns cause violence,” Carlson complained. “There’s nobody in the world surrounded by more armed people than President Obama himself. I notice he’s not suggesting the people around him disarm. He wants to remain protected, but the rest of us have to go without means to self-protection.”

Left-leaning Fox News contributor Jehmu Greene found Carlson’s remarks offense.

“To say that the president of the United States is hypocritical because he has people with guns around him, Tucker, that is beneath this discussion,” Green explained. “You are trying to compared Secret Service armed people to someone who walks into a church and kills nine people.”

“And to say the president doesn’t have a right to talk about gun control because people with him have guns?” she continued. “Is that literally where we are as a country, to compare that he shouldn’t have protection?”

“The president’s position is that guns cause violence, guns are inherently bad and dangerous,” Carlson opined. “The rest of us need to disarm and not protect ourselves. And he’s exempt from that?”

“The president did not say guns are inherently bad,” Greene replied. “The president is saying we’ve had this conversation too many times and there is something we can do about it. There was something we could do about it after Newtown, there was something we could have done about it after Columbine.”

Jehmu Greene is absolutely right.  If every American who owned a firearm had the kind of firearms training that the US Secret Service does and was under the same restrictions and rules governing their use, why, we'd have something like the "well-regulated militia" mentioned in the Second Amendment.

The problem (as Greene points out) is the nation full of gun fetishist who don't want to use guns responsibly, but as a means to intimidate others, as replacements for virility, and for bullying those who otherwise may disagree.  These are not responsible gun owners.  Secret Service, police officers and military soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have firearms are trained to use them and held responsible for misusing them (and yes, I'm well aware of there's a huge debate as to the degree of responsibility police in particular are held to).

But the issue remains, if Americans had to fill out paperwork every time they had to fire their pistols or rifles, maybe we wouldn't have the gun culture that we have today.

Sunday Long Read: God Of Lightning

This week's Sunday Long Read is the story of ZeuS, the most infamous bank-robbing malware suite in the industry, that has led a nine-year campaign to plunder millions of accounts across the world.

In any global outbreak, it’s important to identify Patient Zero. In the movies, you get a leggy Gwyneth Paltrow. In the nine-year online epidemic that helped create cybercrime as we know it, you get “fliime.”

That was the name used by somebody who went on the online forum Techsupportguy.com on October 11, 2006, at 2:24 a.m., saying he’d found some bad code on his sister’s computer. “Could someone please take a look at this,” he wrote.

Fliime probably didn’t realize this was history in the making. But the malicious program that had burrowed into the PC was a new breed, capable of vacuuming up more user logins and website passwords in one day than competing malware did in weeks. With repeated enhancements, the malware and its offspring became juggernauts of cyber bank robbery—turning millions of computers into global networks of zombie machines enslaved by criminals. Conservative estimates of their haul reach well into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Investigators studying the code knew its creator only by aliases that changed almost as frequently as the malware itself: A-Z, Monstr, Slavik, Pollingsoon, Umbro, Lucky1235. But the mystery coder gave his product a name with staying power; he called it ZeuS. Like the procreation-minded god of Greek mythology, this ZeuS fathered powerful descendants—and became a case study of the modern cybercrime industry.

This is the story of a nasty piece of code, and the hunt for its creator.

Who is behind ZeuS and why?  The FBI believes it's a Russian hacker who has been on the run for years, and they are no closer to catching him now then they were in 2006. And ZeuS's source code is now all over the internet and in the hands of crooks and thieves across the globe. The big banks are scared and the small banks are terrified.

And they should be.

Check The Background For Once

President Obama addressed the issue of gun control once again in the wake of yet another massacre with a firearm, speaking to an annual meeting of the nation's mayors in San Francisco.

Wrapping together his frustrations with the country’s continuing problems with racism and his own inability to make progress on gun control in the wake of the South Carolina church shooting, President Barack Obama stood before a bipartisan gathering of mayors here Friday and declared, “It is not good enough simply to show sympathy.”

“The apparent motivations of the shooter remind us that racism remains a blight that we have to combat together. We have made great progress but we have to be vigilant because it still lingers,” Obama said.

There must be a popular outcry for gun control, Obama said, to change the minds of a Congress that he said he knows right now won’t touch the issue.

“I refuse to act as if this is the new normal or to pretend that it’s simply sufficient to grieve and that any mention of us doing something to stop it is somehow politicizing the problem,” he said.

Obama said he knew his comments about the lack of hope for gun control in the current Congress when making his initial comments about shooting at the White House on Thursday were interpreted as resignation. They weren’t, he insisted.

“I am not resigned. I have faith we will eventually do the right thing. I was simply making the point that we have to move public opinion. We have to feel a sense of urgency,” he said.

America, Obama said, is “awash with easily accessible guns.”

It's all true of course, but the reality is America no longer wants gun control regulation, especially with a black president.





As you can see, America lost its appetite for additional gun control in 2009 and support for that has been soft ever since.  Republicans voted against President Obama's package of background checks (which Americans did say they wanted) in 2013 and were rewarded by voters in 2014 with an even larger majority in the House and control of the Senate.

You tell me why we don't have national background checks.

Last Call For Free Speech For Some

Republicans keep talking about how they are constantly being "silenced by political correctness" but they sure want to use the power of government to destroy a person for their opinions when those opinions are critical of Republicans.

An African-American lawmaker in Kansas could be expelled from the statehouse for accusing supporters of legislation that eliminated tuition breaks for undocumented immigrants of being racist. State Rep. Valdenia Winn (D) of Kansas City will face a special investigative committee in a hearing June 26 that will weigh possible sanctions against the lawmaker for the remarks. 

“What’s most disturbing is the purposeful chilling effect that this type of conduct has on legislators. It’s not right,” Winn’s lawyer, Pedro Irigonegaray, told TPM.

During a March committee meeting considering the legislation, which would have repealed in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrants, Winn called the proposal "a racist, sexist, fear-mongering bill," according to the Lawrence Journal-World. 

"I want to apologize to the students and parents whose lives are being hijacked by the racist bigots who support this bill, because this bill is an act," she said, before being interrupted by Rep. John Barker (R). 

"She just referred to this committee as racist," he objected. 

She insisted she had said, "supporters," and went on, "I am not saying anything, but you know what, you can do anything you want, but I am going to say what I have to say because if the shoe fits, if the shoe fits, it fits. But this is an example of institutional racism, not individual racist, institutional racism because it deals with societal structural changes."

This opinion of the legislation was illegal, and now she's facing expulsion from the Kansas legislature.  Which goes to show you, the worst possible thing you can do to a Republican, one they will absolutely obliterate you for, is to point out their racism.

First Amendment?  That's only when it's convenient for Republicans, you know.

Capture The Flag

In the wake of the massacre at Charleston's historic Emanuel AME Church Wednesday night, Ta-Nehisi Coates says it's well past time for the state to rid itself of the Confederate battle flag flying over the statehouse in Columbia.

The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents “heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition to this act—it endorses it. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

This moral truth—“that the negro is not equal to the white man”—is exactly what animated Dylann Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored his flag in exactly the manner it always demanded—with human sacrifice.

Surely the flag’s defenders will proffer other, muddier, interpretations which allow them the luxury of looking away. In this way they honor their ancestors. Cowardice, too, is heritage. When white supremacist John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, Booth’s fellow travelers did all they could to disassociate themselves. “Our disgust for the dastardly wretch can scarcely be uttered,” fumed a former governor of South Carolina, the state where secession began. Robert E. Lee’s armies took special care to enslave free blacks during their Northern campaign. But Lee claimed the assassination of the Great Emancipator was “deplorable.” Jefferson Davis believed that “it could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South,” and angrily denied rumors that he had greeted the news with exultation.

Especially at this point in America's history, where one party gives us the constant rhetoric of "taking our country back" from those who they view as beneath them, the Confederate battle flag is a barbaric relic of a traitorous past.  Under no circumstances should it be celebrated. It is the flag of those who do not believe in the quest towards a more perfect union, but the fantasy of disunion and the poison of discord.

As Coates says:

Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.

If we cannot accomplish this at least, we have much larger problems.  The violence of the last several hundred years will never be broken unless we stop praying at the altar of those who split this country in order to defend the practice on enslaving others.

Take it down.

Weather Or Not, John Thune Is Wrong

Republicans like South Dakota Sen. John Thune have declared war on the National Weather Service over climate change and are looking to slide in a back door cut, consolidating the country's 122 weather service offices down to just six for the entire United States.

The National Weather Service Improvement Act would order the NWS to come up with a plan for establishing regional forecasting centers within a year of enactment. It recommends that these centers be co-located with a university or government lab and staffed to ensure that local forecast quality would not be not “degraded.” After a review of the plan from the National Academy of Sciences, the NOAA administrator is ordered to set up the regional hubs within a year. 

“Focusing the National Weather Service’s resources regionally would improve the public’s access to quality forecasting and reduce the danger of local staff being overwhelmed during severe weather outbreaks,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), who is sponsoring the legislation. “Reforming an agency and increasing accountability will always be a challenge, but increasing public access to quality forecasting can save lives.”

It will supposedly save money, and no offices will actually close, at least that's the plan.

The bill says cost savings from consolidating forecasting would enable NOAA to reinvest in the following areas: expanding super-computing capacity, improving weather forecasts, enhancing communication of weather forecasts to the public, and expanding the use of ground-based observations and strengthening radar coverage where necessary. 

Although the measure mandates centralizing forecasting operations at six regional offices, it would not result in closure of any of the existing 122 forecast offices. Rather, it specifies that these offices maintain a warning coordination meteorologist to serve as a liaison with emergency management for storm preparedness and response activities as well as to conduct media and public outreach. Offices also would continue to maintain radar instrumentation and launch weather balloons.

But the reality is a lot stormier.

Senate Commerce Committee staff stressed that the bill is “resource neutral” — meaning that no jobs are added or taken away. But the NWSEO says that the centralization of jobs would, in time, lead to fewer positions and a deterioration in forecasting quality. 

“Likely it would mean the elimination of over 1000 meteorologists jobs,” said Dan Sobien, president of the NWSEO. “It would take a decade for the field of meteorology to recover from a blow like that and those meteorologists to be absorbed back into the enterprise.” 

The NWSEO also worries that the consolidation would effectively sever the flow of local knowledge and expertise into the forecast process. Richard Hirn, counsel for the NSEO, wrote a commentary warning that predictions made by meteorologists unfamiliar with local geography and effects would suffer, citing academic studies.

Because what we need with stronger and more dangerous storms brought about by climate change is less weather forecasting capacity and fewer people on the ground in these local offices.  What better way to get rid of those problematic meteorologists who believe in climate change than by "streamlining" NOAA and the NWS?

Oh, and by the way, 2015 is still shaping up to be the hottest on record globally, so far ahead of 2010's record heat.

StupidiNews!

• Charleston, SC is reeling from the massacre of nine black churchgoers allegedly murdered at the hands of captured suspect Dylann Roof.
• In a 218-208 vote, the GOP-led House has passed standalone fast track legislation for the TPP trade deal, which now heads to the Senate for an uncertain vote.
• Toyota Chief Communications Office Julie Hamp has been arrested in Japan in connection with illegal pain killers found in a package addressed to her.
• Greek PM Alexis Tsipras is still optimistic that a deal can be reached at an emergency summit Monday in order to keep Greece in the European Union and avoid exit from the euro currency.
• A US Secret Service agent has plead guilty to stealing more than $800,000 in bitcoins from the now defunct Silk Road drug trafficking website.

Last Call For Like Uber, But For Employees

Glad to see that somebody's business model just got "disrupted" in their home state.  California just told ride share service Uber that yes, their drivers are employees and not contractors.

A San Francisco-based driver for smartphone-based ride-hailing service Uber is an employee, not a contractor, according to a ruling by the California Labor Commission. 

The ruling, filed on Tuesday in state court in San Francisco, was the latest in a host of legal and regulatory challenges facing Uber and other highly valued start-ups in the United States and other countries. 

The commission said Uber is "involved in every aspect of the operation."

Classifying Uber drivers as employees opens the company up to considerably higher costs, including Social Security, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. That could affect its valuation, currently above $40 billion, and the valuation of other companies that rely on large networks of individuals to provide rides, clean houses and other services. 

Uber had argued that its drivers are independent contractors, not employees, and that it is "nothing more than a neutral technology platform." 

But the commission said Uber controls the tools driver use, monitors their approval ratings and terminates their access to the system if their ratings fall below 4.6 stars.

The ruling affects only California. However, the state is Uber's home base, one of its largest markets, and sets a path often followed by regulators and courts in other states.

It's hard to overestimate just how big of a sucker punch this is to Uber's gut.  Uber is able to compete on price because it doesn't have to pay payroll taxes, FICA, worker's comp or the big one in California, provide Obamacare.  It can pay drivers straight cash and not worry about that because everyone's a contractor.

If it now has to do that, suddenly the whole Uber business model goes out of business.  They won't be able to pay drivers nearly the money they were offering before, and that's going to hurt them.  They just become a glorified taxi service after that.  It's certainly going to be a hell of a lot harder for them to raise capital in an IPO with this ruling hanging over their heads.

Imagine the press Uber's going to get when it fights this, too.  It's a lose-lose situation for them and they know it.  There was never anything super "disruptive" about Uber, they just took contractor rules to the extreme and tried to price taxis out of business with rock bottom labor costs (all assumed by the contractors of course) and they just got barbecued for it.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer company, or a nicer industry for that matter.  There's nothing revolutionary about exploiting the hell out of the people who work for you.

Out Of The Pressure Cooker

A lot of fanfare, not to mention a lot of history, occurred when the St. Louis Rams drafted Michael Sam as the first openly gay player in the NFL last summer.  Sam left the NFL almost as suddenly as he arrived however, and he drifted for months, finally ending up with the Montreal Alouettes of the CFL.

But last week Sam left Montreal with virtually no warning, and Mike Freeman of Bleacher Report believes he knows why: the relentless pressure of history was simply too much to shoulder.

This is Michael Sam's last fight, and it doesn't look good.

I believe I know what happened to Sam—why he suddenly bolted from his last, great chance to be a professional football player. 

Some of you, holding a predisposition to dislike Sam because he's gay, won't understand what I'm about to say. Some of you, who understand nuance and human frailty, will get it.

I believe that Sam has reached this point—where he left the CFL's Montreal Alouettes last week with little explanation to the team—because the pressure of being the first finally got to him. In this case, the pressure that came from becoming the first openly gay NFL player. 

Sam will always be a hero to me, but I also know he is made of flesh and blood. Like other pioneers in sports, he carried the weight of many people on his shoulders. 

My belief is that that weight, increased by the anvil of social media, is far too heavy for Sam—for the moment at least. I think he just got tired…and so he left. 

He may come back to Montreal. But for now, he's gone. The truth is, I'm surprised it took this long for the pressure to build and for Sam to finally succumb to it. 

None of this is an excuse for Sam. Some people are built to be the first. They have layers of armor under already thick skin. Insults and slurs are deflected like bullets off Superman's chest. 

Jackie Robinson was like this. Roberto Clemente was like this. James Harris, one of the pioneering black quarterbacks in the NFL and a longtime team executive, was like this. Amy Trask, the sport's first woman team executive, working for the Raiders, remained an exemplary human being in the face of bigotry. Same with Art Shell, the first black head coach in the NFL, and the first Latino coach in the league, Tom Flores. 

But not everyone is superhuman, and not every story has a perfect Hollywood ending. 

Sometimes, understandably, the hero doesn't say to the bad guys "Yippee ki-yay" and walk off into the sunset.

Michael Sam is a human being like the rest of us, and none of us are perfect.  I hope he finds the peace he is looking for in his life, and a place to showcase his obvious talent.  But for now, like the rest of us, he's still looking for where he fits in, in a sport where he is notably different from everyone else. The pressure coming from both those who despise him -- and from those who have the highest hopes for him -- seems to be too much.

I do not and cannot blame him for that.  His decisions are his own.

I only hope he finds a way.

The Legend Of The Lone Star Gold, Con't.

On Monday I talked about that truly weird state bullion depository that Texas Republicans will set up with legislation this week, a move that reeks of nullification and secession in an increasingly unhinged Republican party afflicted with Obama Derangement Syndrome. As TPM's Brian Murphy explains, the reality behind this move is far more disturbing.

As I said, if this looks like Ron Paul goldbug insanity to you, that's because it is.

According to this narrative, then, Texas isn’t just setting up its own depository, payments system, and a safe haven for gold that can’t be confiscated by the federal government. Instead, it is signaling a loss of confidence in the United States by pulling its gold out of the largest gold vault in the world eighty feet below the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Florentine-inspired headquarters in lower Manhattan. There, a special police force guards some 530,000 gold bars protected behind a 140-ton airtight steel and concrete framed door sealed with a 90-ton steel cylinder and time locks. Nobody enters the vault alone, ever; three people are present, even if it’s just to change a light bulb. Most of the gold in the vault belongs to other nations; the Fed stores and guards it as a courtesy to allies. Thus, the idea that Texas is somehow taking on an unwise risk by lodging $1 billion in bullion in the vault – so much so that it regards the New York bank as a foreign entity from whom gold ought to be justly “repatriated” – is to reject the practical and geopolitical realities of gold ownership in the 21st century. Even in fiction it is hard to recall a more secure site that has at its disposal more robust resources to guard and defend itself.

This is why, if you were suspicious about Gov. Abbott’s claim that “the [depository] law will repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York to Texas,” you were on to something.

Oh, but it gets worse.  This is all smelling like a giant gold bug con job, especially since the the work of guarding and administering the gold depository will be privatized.

But where did Texas get this gold anyhow?  That's an even stranger story.

Indeed, Texas has no gold bars in the Federal Reserve’s New York vault. And what the state has is not worth a billion dollars. Instead some 4,200 gold bars bought in 2011 by the University of Texas’s endowment fund (the second largest in the country after Harvard’s) are stored in the basement vault of HSBC’s headquarters at 450 5th Avenue in New York City, just south of the New York Public Library. For the last four years, the endowment has paid an estimated $1 million per year to store their gold there. (If it had been at the New York Fed the cost would have totaled about $15,400 over that period). And the new depository law does not require the university’s endowment fund to relocate the gold to Texas. 

In case you’re wondering why the university’s endowment fund ever bought real physical gold to begin with (not just paper assets), that's a story almost as odd as the state's new effort to bring its gold back to Texas to ward off financial Armageddon in the country's other 49 states. That story seems to begin and end with a hedge fund manager named Kyle Bass. Bass, a former Legg Mason and Bear Stearns managing director and outspoken Fed critic, was named to the endowment fund’s board of directors (listed – and pictured – here… ahem) and immediately began pressing his apparently suggestive colleagues to shift their gold options investments into a stake of physical gold.

Bass isn’t just a casual metals speculator. When he believed nickel was undervalued he bought 20 million nickel coins to prove his point (they’re stored on a pallet in a Brinks vault). A brave new world mix of country club and prepper compound, in a Michael Lewis profile, Bass revealed that he’d prepared for a collapse of the government and economy by accumulating – in his words – “guns and gold.”

Like the others mentioned in this story, Bass believes that gold has an intrinsic value. In 2010 and 2011, he steered the University of Texas Investment Management Company’s board of directors to put nearly 5% of the then-$19 billion university and pension fund they manage into physical gold by converting options into bullion. Many large institutions invest in gold through paper investments like options. But most agree that owning actual physical gold bullion is a poor choice for a number of reasons - unless you're expecting a financial cataclysm so great you need actual physical possession of the metal. But coming off the 2008 financial crisis that's what Bass was expecting and he managed to convince his fellow board members. So for $764 million, the fund bought 664,300 ounces of the stuff in 100-ounce bars. Each of those 6,643 bars has enough of what Auric Goldfinger called “divine heaviness” that they can chip a concrete vault floor if dropped.

And the best part?  Over the last couple of years that investment in physical gold has lost money.

No, this is 100% Tea Party nutjob territory we're in with this story, and it only will get worse. Remember, not even Rick Perry went this far.

StupidiNews!

• Police in Charleston, SC are looking for a white male suspect in his early 20's in connection with a shooting massacre that left nine dead at a historically black church.
• The US Treasury says the search is on to place a woman on the $10 bill by 2020, a move that is angering current portrait holder Alexander Hamilton's descendants.
• Pope Francis is calling on the world's 1.2 billion Catholics and world leaders to take "decisive action" to stop climate change.
• Lawmakers in Hong Kong have rejected China's plans to screen all candidates for 2017 elections, scuttling pro-democracy reforms as China says the screening will happen anyway.
• The White House is warning Republican in Congress not to use a budget axe to kill FCC net neutrality rules, arguing that the budget should be ideologically neutral.

Last Call For King Of Douchebags

Meet the King in King v Burwell, the man suing the federal government to take affordable health care away from millions.

Millions of people are waiting anxiously for the Supreme Court to decide the fate of President Obama’s health care law with a ruling this month on health insurance subsidies. But David M. King, a plaintiff in the case, is not among them.

Mr. King, 64, said recently that he was reasonably confident he would prevail in his challenge to the subsidies, a central element of the Affordable Care Act.

“We have a good chance of winning,” he said in an interview at his home here.

Mr. King and three other Virginia residents are challenging the payment of subsidies in states like Virginia that depend on the federal insurance marketplace. They contend that the 2010 health care law allows subsidies only in states that establish their own marketplaces.

But Mr. King said that he was not really worried about the outcome of the case, King v. Burwell, because as a Vietnam veteran, he has access to medical care through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

If he wins, Mr. King said, “the left will blow it out of proportion and claim that eight million people will lose their health insurance.” But he said lawyers had assured him that “things are in play to take care of the problem.”

Mr. King did not provide details, and supporters of the health care law have said that there are no quick or easy solutions if the Supreme Court rules against it. The president could not simply give out subsidies if the court stripped them away, so the critical decisions about how to respond “would sit with Congress and the states,” said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services.

Oh, there would be a quick way to fix it.  Republicans refuse to do it, because they want millions to lose affordable health care, and they are willing to sacrifice those people in order to attack President Obama.

Besides, Mr King will have his health care, through the VA and soon Medicare (he's 64, you see.)

Everyone else?  Go to hell.

That's your GOP.

Bernie Sanders May Have Lost My Primary Vote

Bernie Sanders has a long way to go before I'll vote for him in the Kentucky Democratic Primary, and the reason why goes back to an interview with NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep in November 2014.

Well, here's what you got. What you got is an African-American president, and the African-American community is very, very proud that this country has overcome racism and voted for him for president. And that's kind of natural. You've got a situation where the Republican Party has been strongly anti-immigration, and you've got a Hispanic community which is looking to the Democrats for help. 

But that's not important. You should not be basing your politics based on your color. What you should be basing your politics on is, how is your family doing? ... In the last election, in state after state, you had an abysmally low vote for the Democrats among white, working-class people. And I think the reason for that is that the Democrats have not made it clear that they are prepared to stand with the working-class people of this country, take on the big money interests. I think the key issue that we have to focus on, and I know people are uncomfortable about talking about it, is the role of the billionaire class in American society.

It's bad enough when Republicans suggest that the reason black voters turned out for Obama was because he's black and not because of his campaign or his policies or, when we turned out in numbers to re-elect him in 2008, his record after four years.  After Bush in 2000-2008, I took a look at "how my family was doing" and flocked to vote for Barack Obama over John McCain.  Same thing in 2012, Mitt Romney was a joke.  Race had nothing to do with it.

When a person running for the Democratic nomination makes that suggestion, I'm vastly less inclined to vote for that person.

At this point we're rapidly running out of Dems who haven't said stupid or insulting things about black voters heading into 2016.

Four Percent Is A Nice Round Number

Jeb Bush seems to think America can go back to the post-WW II industrial days of four percent plus GDP growth.  He doesn't exactly have a plan to do that, but it sure sounds good as a sound bite. Slate's Jordan Weissman explains:

See, the thing is, there are lots of reasons that the economy is probably not going to grow at 4 percent per year in the near future. The fact that Bush suggests otherwise doesn't bode well for anybody hoping that his economic vision will be any more tethered to reality than his competitors'.

But before we get into all that, you may be wondering: Why 4 percent? “It's a nice round number,” Bush explained to Reuters last month. “It's double the growth that we are growing at. It's not just an aspiration. It's doable.” To get a little more specific, the figure apparently originated during a conference call several years ago, during which Bush and several other advisers were brainstorming potential economic programs for the George W. Bush Institute, the Texas think tank named for Jeb's famously cerebral older brother. During the talk, Jeb casually tossed out the idea of 4 percent growth, which everybody loved, even though it was kind of arbitrary. The center now has a "4% Growth Project." It does stuff like publish fact sheets about all the wonderful things that would happen to our country if we could ever manage 4 percent growth year after year.

To be fair, it's not as if 4 percent growth is impossible, at least intermittently. The U.S.pulled it off a few times during the Reagan era and in the heat of the dot-com boom. The U.S. averaged 4.3 percent growth during most of its post–World War II economic expansions. But then the 21st century arrived. Between 2001 and the end of 2007, gross domestic product grew at an average rate of 2.8 percent per year. (Which makes the presence of a 4% Growth Project at the George W. Bush Institute more than a bit ironic, even if you forget that whole financial crash.) During the Obama years, the economy has expanded even more slowly.

And nobody really expects growth to rapidly shoot back up, at least unless we experience a technological revolution even more impressive than what the Internet delivered. Here's why. In the end, potential economic growth boils down to a pretty basic formula. It's productivity growth plus workforce growth. You can certainly break it down into smaller components if you want to get granular about things, but that's the big picture: productivity plus labor supply. And right now, neither of those forces is working in America's favor. Because the Baby Boomers are aging into retirement, the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the labor force to grow by 0.5 percent per year in the near future, down from the 0.7 rate we enjoyed from 2002 to 2012. To simplify a bit1, that means productivity is going to have to jump up by 3.5 percent per year if we want to hit the magic 4.0.

That just doesn't really happen. Even during the prime years of the tech boom, workers only became about 2.5 percent more productive each year, on average. Unless artificial intelligence is about to catapult us into the Player Piano–esque future economists and tech types love to theorize about, it seems pretty unlikely that the United States is about to match that sort of progress in the coming years.

And let's not forget that the big 4% growth periods in the Reagan and Clinton years were turned into big recessions and economic disasters by the previous two Presidents named Bush, all involving wars in the Middle East. What makes anyone think Jeb would be any different?

I sure don't.