Last Call For Greece Getting Das Boot

Zee Germans have decided that Greece not only must give in to eurozone demands, but that they must do so in the most ridiculous and demeaning way possible.  Yes, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras badly miscalculated the EU position on Greece with his referendum.  But German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Parliament President Martin Schulz are basically asking all but asking for Greece to be drawn and quartered for creditors and made and example of. Paul Krugman explains:

Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.

Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.

Can anything pull Europe back from the brink? Word is that Mario Draghi is trying to reintroduce some sanity, that Hollande is finally showing a bit of the pushback against German morality-play economics that he so signally failed to supply in the past. But much of the damage has already been done. Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?

In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line. This has no bearing at all on the underlying economics of austerity. It’s as true as ever that imposing harsh austerity without debt relief is a doomed policy no matter how willing the country is to accept suffering. And this in turn means that even a complete Greek capitulation would be a dead end.

Can Greece pull off a successful exit? Will Germany try to block a recovery? (Sorry, but that’s the kind of thing we must now ask.)

The solution to Greece's bad austerity is now crippling austerity that will lead to open revolt.  And at this point, you have to assume that this is what Germany wants.

European leaders gave Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras a straightforward choice on Sunday: disown his principles or quit the euro.

Euro-area leaders presented Tsipras with a laundry list of unfinished business from previous bailouts he’d pilloried in opposition and during six turbulent months in office. They gave him three days to enact their main demands into Greek law in exchange for the third bailout in five years.

No, Germany wants this to blow up so they can toss Greece out and scare Italy, Portugal and Ireland into accepting even more austerity.  Because of course Merkel wants to keep her job, you see. The pitchforks come for her next unless Greece is staked out for the slaughter.

With friends like these, I don't think the European currency is long for this world.

Grump Trump Dumps On Chumps

In an amazingly awful speech in Phoenix Saturday night, Donald Trump went from being a painfully unfunny one-man sideshow on the traveling GOP clown bus to instead becoming an uncomfortably bad reminder of who the Republican party and who the GOP's 50-state Southern Strategy is built around.

Trump’s 70-minute address here, which sounded more like a stream-of-consciousness rant than a presidential-style stump speech, put an exclamation point on his bombastic push since his presidential announcement last month to return immigration to the forefront of the national conversation.

Bush and illegal immigrants were not the only targets of Trump’s scorn: He also criticized Macy’s, NBC, NASCAR, U.S. ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and, several times, the media.

Republican leaders say they believe the celebrity billionaire has virtually no chance of being their nominee, much less of making it to the White House. And, for now at least, his following seems limited to the far right as opposed to the party’s mainstream.

Yet Trump has reignited a heated debate over an issue, immigration, that the GOP had been determined to settle after it hurt Republicans in the most recent presidential election.

Party leaders increasingly fear that Trump could do damage to more viable candidates, such as Bush, who could lose their own footing on immigration. These candidates confront a familiar challenge: During the primary season, they must deal with the anger and anxiety that many on the right feel about illegal immigration. But they must do it in a way that will not damage their appeal to a broader electorate in November 2016.

Republicans are handling Trump delicately for another reason as well: They fear that he could leave the GOP entirely and wage a well-funded third-party campaign, a possibility that Trump has not ruled out.

On the other hand, Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Robert Costa are 100% wrong on one point: being the party of white resentment towards Latinos didn't hurt the GOP one bit in 2014.  Republicans racked up the highest House margin they've had in generations and won control of the Senate.

So pay careful attention to the Republicans trying to run away from Trump's obvious hatred and bigotry.  The Rpeublican base is 100% built on this and has been for years, and the difference is they get out and vote.

This is who they always have been. And the politics of white resentment still wins in America.

Sunday Long Read: Twin Destinies

This week's Sunday Long Read is the story of two pairs of identical twins, mixed up at birth in Bogota, raised as two separate pairs of fraternal twins, and how they discovered each other.

They were two pretty young women in search of pork ribs for a barbecue later that day, a Saturday in the summer of 2013. Janeth Páez suggested that they stop by a grocery store not far from where her friend Laura Vega Garzón lived in northern Bogotá. Janeth’s boyfriend’s cousin, William, a sweet young man with a thick country accent, worked behind the butcher counter there, expertly filleting beef and cutting pigs’ feet that his customers liked to boil with beans. Janeth was sure he would give her and Laura a cut rate on the ribs.

As Laura walked into the grocery store, catching up with Janeth, she was surprised to spot someone she knew. Behind the butcher counter was a colleague from her job at Strycon, an engineering firm. She gave him a big wave. He hardly acknowledged her. ‘‘That’s Jorge!’’ she told Janeth. ‘‘He works in my office.’’ He was a well-­liked 24-year-old who worked a few floors up from her, designing pipes for oil transport, so she was surprised to see him waiting on customers in the shop.

‘‘Oh, no, that’s William,’’ Janeth said. William was a hard worker and rarely left that butcher counter, except to sleep. He definitely did not work at Strycon.

‘‘No, it’s Jorge — I know him,’’ Laura said. But he was not smiling back at her, which was strange. A few minutes later, he came out from behind the counter to say a quick hello, embracing Janeth. Janeth introduced him to Laura as William.

Laura was baffled: Why was Jorge pretending to be someone else? Maybe, she thought, he was embarrassed to be seen moonlighting this way — the bloodied apron, the white cap. Janeth insisted she was mistaken, but Laura was not convinced. It was almost easier for her to believe that Jorge was playacting as someone else, rather than that there could be two people who looked so much alike. It was not just their similar coloring or the high cheekbones. It was their frame, the texture of their hair, the set of their mouth and dozens of other details that Laura could not have readily identified but that she knew all added up to a rare likeness.

The following Monday at Strycon, Laura told Jorge about her funny misunderstanding with his double at the butcher counter. Jorge laughed and told her that he did have a twin, named Carlos, but that they looked nothing like each other.

At that moment, Jorge had before him sufficient evidence to suggest that his life was not what he thought it was, that his family was not what he thought it was. But there is a saying that Carlos, a man of many sayings, sometimes applied to Jorge: ‘‘The blindest man is the one who does not want to see.’’

Having been adopted myself at birth (along with two of my three siblings, who were adopted at ages 4 and 6) this story is fascinating to me.  I've always wondered if I ever had any biological brothers or sisters, and who they are.

A month later, Laura told Janeth that there was an opening in the drafting department at Strycon, and Janeth landed the job. Soon after, she saw Jorge for the first time and immediately understood Laura’s confusion at the butcher counter. The two men had the same soft brown eyes. Same bouncy, feet-­splayed walk. Same bright, flashy smile. She didn’t feel as though she knew Jorge well enough to bring the resemblance up with him, but she did show William a photo of Jorge; William laughed and showed it around the butcher shop but chalked it up to coincidence.

After six months, Janeth left Strycon for another job, but even then, whenever she and her boyfriend ran into William, she wondered if she should have told Jorge about his double. That question tugged at her until finally, on Sept. 9, 2014, a slow day at her new job, Janeth texted Laura an image of William to show Jorge.

Laura went upstairs to piping to get Jorge’s reaction to the photo. Jorge, smiling, took a look at her phone. He swore. ‘‘That’s me!’’ he said. He stared at the image.

William was wearing a yellow Colombian soccer jersey, practically a national uniform on the day of big matches. Jorge often wore one just like it, which made it all the more apparent just how thoroughly the young man in the photo looked like him. A friend was walking by Jorge’s desk, and Jorge flagged him down for a second opinion.

‘‘Tell me what you think of this photo,’’ he told his friend, handing him the phone.

You look fine, the friend said.

‘‘Except it’s not me,’’ Jorge said. He could not stop staring at Laura’s phone.

Jorge gave up on getting any work done. He sat down with Laura in the office kitchen so they could talk. Maybe his father, who was never more than an occasional visitor to their home, had another child he never mentioned. Jorge started flipping through more of William’s Facebook images, now on his own phone. Uneasily, he noted one of William in a butcher’s smock, looking just the way Jorge did on the rare days he had to wear a lab coat. He glanced at a picture of William holding a shot glass, a friend by his side.

Jorge moved to his desktop computer so he could see the images more closely. He clicked once more on the photo of William and the friend holding shot glasses. Now that the image was large, he could examine what he had failed, incredibly, to notice when he looked at the photo on his phone. He leaned in close, his nose practically touching the screen. The man’s hair was slicked up like a rooster’s crown, and the shirt was all wrong. But there was the full lower lip and thick brown hair that Jorge knew well. The buttons on the man’s shirt were straining slightly at the hint of a potbelly, in a way that was intimately familiar. Jorge felt a rush of confusion, and then his stomach dropped. The friend sitting next to his double had a face that Jorge knew better than his own: It was the face of his fraternal twin brother, Carlos.

This is an amazing story, so set some time aside for this one.  It's well worth it.

Last Call For Uncivil Disobedience

The big problem with the right's constant fetishization of victimhood is that it tries to pass the powerful off as suddenly powerless when their privilege is called into question.  The repeated attempts to co-opt the civil rights movement of the 60's as a conservative one, with Republicans standing for "freedom" against liberal "fascism", is part and parcel of this.

Pat Buchanan is just the latest Republican conservative to call for a "new era of civil disobedience" to somehow equate the the long journey to marriage equality as an assault on the "religious freedoms" of Americans to discriminate against the gay community. The problem of course is that if your religion calls for you to hate your fellow man, it's not exactly freedom.

Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan used his column today to praise Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, who recently announced that she will not move a Ten Commandments monument off public land even though it was found unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, explaining that she will exhaust the appeals process.

“Fallin’s action seems a harbinger of what is to come in America – an era of civil disobedience like the 1960s, where court orders are defied and laws ignored in the name of conscience and a higher law,” Buchanan wrote. “Only this time, the rebellion is likely to arise from the right.”

Buchanan particularly focused on same-sex marriage, claiming that people who want to violate nondiscrimination laws are really no different than Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Rosa Parks is celebrated. But the pizza lady who said her Christian beliefs would not permit her to cater a same-sex wedding was declared a bigot,” Buchanan lamented. “[I]f cities, states or Congress enact laws that make it a crime not to rent to homosexuals, or to refuse services at celebrations of their unions, would not dissenting Christians stand on the same moral ground as Dr. King if they disobeyed those laws?”

Insert "women" or "black people" or "Asian people" or "Native Americans" or hey, "Jews" in that last paragraph instead of "homosexuals" and you begin to see the issue.  It's the same ridiculous argument used against anti-discrimination laws 50 years ago.  It's not "civil disobedience" when it's really good old fashioned bigotry and hatred.

Besides, when the right does disobedience, it's not exactly civil.  Ask Cliven Bundy or Dylann Roof about that sometime.

Charting A Course To Obamacare Success

The latest Gallup survey on Americans and health insurance shows one reason why Republicans are terrified of Obamacare's success.

The uninsured rate among U.S. adults aged 18 and older was 11.4% in the second quarter of 2015, down from 11.9% in the first quarter. The uninsured rate has dropped nearly six percentage points since the fourth quarter of 2013, just before the requirement for Americans to carry health insurance took effect. The latest quarterly uninsured rate is the lowest Gallup and Healthways have recorded since daily tracking of this metric began in 2008.

So the percentage of uninsured Americans overall has dropped significantly, and that's helping a lot of Americans across the board.  But here's why Republicans are so desperate to sell the health care law as a taxpayer giveaway to those people:

As you can see, all age groups (other than seniors over 65, 98% of whom have health insurance through Medicare) have benefited from the ACA.  But the real winners have been black and Hispanic folks, who have seen big drops in the percentage of uninsured in America under the law.  Granted, these groups had far more uninsured before the law took effect, so it makes sense that these are the groups that have been helped the most.

Those making less than $35,000 a year have also seen a big drop in the uninsured.

Are you beginning to see why Republicans hate the law so much and want to constantly repeal it?

Getting To The Roof Of The Problem

So it turns out that the three-day waiting period built into background check laws, and gun store owners all looing the other way because of that, is exactly how Dylann Roof got a .45 caliber handgun when he should have been stopped.

The man accused of killing nine people in an historically black South Carolina church last month should not have been able to buy a gun, the F.B.I. said Friday in what was the latest acknowledgment of flaws in the national background check system.

A loophole in the check system allowed the man, Dylann Roof, to buy the .45-caliber handgun despite his having previously admitted to drug possession, the bureau said. Those conducting the background check did not have access to that police report.

“We are all sick this happened,” said the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. “We wish we could turn back time.”

Mr. Roof now faces murder charges in a case that investigators say was racially motivated. Mr. Roof, who is white, is charged with killing nine people at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

And the NRA, Republicans, and the firearms industry have long fought against any law that would make background checks easier, because firearms and ammo would be more difficult to sell due to more accurate checks.  Right now all the NRA has to do is make sure background check laws remain weak, and then complain that they don't work and "can't stop criminals".

Well no, laws that are not enforced or are not able to be enforced aren't very good at deterring crime, now are they?  Imagine if the auto industry had police speed guns and traffic stops outlawed and then complained that speed limits did nothing to stop people speeding, so why have them at all?

And so Dylann Roof bought a gun when he shouldn't have been able to because the law wasn't enforced, and the NRA buys enough lawmakers to make sure that it never will be.

Last Call For Friday News Dump Time

OPM director Katherine Archuleta resigned this afternoon over Thursday’s “Well, you remember that 4 million people’s personal data hacked thing? Turns out it was 21 million plus in addition to that” story.

Ms. Archuleta went to the White House on Friday morning to personally inform Mr. Obama of her decision, saying that she felt new leadership was needed at the federal personnel agency to enable it to “move beyond the current challenges,” the official said. The president accepted her resignation. 

Beth Cobert, the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget, will step in to temporarily replace Ms. Archuleta while a permanent replacement is found. 

Ms. Archuleta, who assumed her post in November 2013, had been under pressure to resign since last month, when she announced the first of two separate but related computer intrusions that compromised the personal information of 4.2 million current and former federal workers, including Social Security numbers, addresses, health and financial histories and other private details. 

On Thursday, she divulged the breach had also led to the theft of personal data of 21.5 million people who had applied for government background checks, likely affecting anyone subjected to such an investigation since 2000.

So yeah, that was going to happen.  She was convinced to fall on her sword after Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia started making calls, and Warner has a lot of pull when it comes to federal employees affected by the data breach, representing the state with the most in the country.

Not surprised by this in the least.  When your agency loses personal info on every active, retired and potential federal worker since 2000, most likely to China, then yeah, you're going to be asked to resign, I'm sorry.

Supposedly the thieves got away with the data by using an admin password.  Oldest trick in the book in both spycraft and social engineering.

Everyone, government and private sector, needs to up their information security game, and that means passwords and authentication methods that inconvenience you from time to time.  You don't like it?  This is what happens when the weakest link in data security comes into play: the people too lazy to protect it properly.

Get used to more and more stuff getting locked down where you work, folks.

One Hundred Fourteen Million Reasons

While The Donald may be leading the polls right now, few Republicans believe he'll end up being the nominee.  And while the guy does have his own fortune in the billions, he's no match for Jeb Bush's fundraising tsunami.

Jeb Bush raised $11.4 million in his first 16 days as a presidential candidate, and the super PAC he tirelessly fundraised for before he formally entered the race netted $103 million in the first six months of 2015. 

The combined haul of the campaign and super PAC—$114 million—is likely double his closest competitor in the money race. 

It appears Bush raised even more than what was disclosed on Thursday. That mammoth figure still doesn't include a third political committee in Bush's orbit, the Right to Rise PAC Inc. When Bush first announced last December that he was "actively" exploring a presidential run, he said he was forming a PAC to help promote "leaders, ideas and policies." Neither the super PAC nor campaign responded to an inquiry about the other PAC's fundraising figures in 2015. 

The former Florida governor, as the son and brother of the last two Republican presidents, has long been expected to be the top fundraiser in the GOP field. His campaign team had downplayed talk of raising $100 million since the figure was first floated months ago, but in the end they blew past that figure by 14 percent. 

Bush formally declared his candidacy in Miami on June 15 and raised an average of $710,000 per day for the rest of the month. To put his $11.4 million haul in perspective, it would require Bush to have raised the maximum donation of $2,700 in primary dollars from more than 4,200 donors—in 16 days.

His super PAC, Right to Rise USA, run by one of Bush's longtime confidantes, is not constrained by contribution limits. Bush had roughly 500 donors contribute more than $25,000, according to figures released by his super PAC Thursday. Of the $103 million raised, the super PAC said that it had more than $98 million cash on hand.

And keep in mind Jeb can deploy that money now, a whole 16 months before the race, and six months before the earliest primaries.  If he keeps piling on money at this rate, plus pick up the money from his competitors once winning the primary, Jeb'll have half a billion plus on hand to buy the 2016 race at minimum.

In reality, he'll probably have billions to work with through PACs.  He'll need it to try to sell himself to the America public.

Question is, will we buy another four years of Bush?

Continuing To Trump Reality

The Donald is a blustering racist meathead, and it's no wonder then that he leads yet another poll among his fellow blustering racist meatheads in the GOP 2016 primary.

Media coverage of Donald Trump's controversial immigration remarks have lifted the GOP presidential candidate to the top of the Republican field, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll. 

Trump was the preferred GOP nominee for president for 15 percent of respondents — 4 points ahead of former Gov. Jeb Bush (Fla.) and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who were tied for second place. 

Gov. Scott Walker (Wis.), Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and former Gov. Mike Huckabee (Ark.) shared the third spot with 9 percent each.

In addition to being the first choice for the majority of likely voters who participated in the poll, Trump was also the primary second choice for those who preferred another candidate as their nominee.

12 percent of respondents said Trump was second in line for their vote, while only 7 percent picked either Bush or Paul as their safety candidate.

Donald Trump is the Republican party right now.  Here's a freebie: Donald Trump has been the Republican party for years: mean-spirited, greedy racist billionaires who think they should be able to buy and sell Americans like they do everything else.  And like Trump, you're only useful to the GOP as long as they can continue to exploit you for profit and not a second longer.

So yes, Republicans, Donald Trump is your racist, birther champion and has been for years.

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that aired Thursday night, the Republican presidential candidate said he was not that interested in talking about the issue, compared to other ones.

“Honestly, I don’t want to get into it,” Trump said. 

Asked whether he thought Obama was born in the U.S., Trump responded: “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records.”

The rest of us need to keep that in mind heading into November 2016.  The jackasses who want Trump for president will be voting then.

Will you?

StupidiNews!

• After GOP Gov. Nikki Haley signed legislation yesterday, South Carolina's Confederate flag on the capitol grounds will come down this morning and be moved to a nearby Civil War museum.
• Last month's reported hack of 4 million government employee's information has now been revealed to have affected more than 25 million Americans in total.
• In what observes say is an even more harsh austerity regime than the one rejected by Greeks on Sunday, PM Alexis Tsipras has proposed new spending and pension cuts for a bailout deal.
• FBI Director James Comey says at least 10 people have been arrested in connection with possible terror plots, including some who planned attacks over the July 4th holiday.
• A broken undersea cable is being blamed for the Northern Mariana Islands losing internet this week, as service is slowly being restored to the US territory.

Last Call For Zombie Death Panels

Medicare end-of-life care is back in the news, and that's a good thing.

Six years after end-of-life planning nearly derailed development of the Affordable Care Act amid charges of "death panels," the Obama administration has revived a proposal to reimburse physicians for talking with their Medicare patients about how patients want to be cared for as they near death.

The proposal, contained in a large set of Medicare regulations unveiled Wednesday, comes amid growing public discussion about the need for medical care that better reflects patients’ wishes as they get older.

Expect Republicans to start screaming that Obama wants to murder your grandmother again. Well...maybe not all Republicans...

Two months ago, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, suggested that Medicare patients should sign so-called advance directives that spell out the care they want if they become incapacitated.

So Jeb Bush is pro-"death panels" huh.  This should be fun.

In all seriousness, as James Joyner points out, palliative care is a legitimate Medicare issue and should be discussed by doctors and their senior patients.

Aside from the cleverness of “death panels” as a mobilizing tool, capitalizing on longstanding American fears about government control of healthcare, I’ve never understood the argument against the practice. Of course physicians ought to discuss with their patients what their end-of-life options are once they become terminally ill or sufficiently advanced in age. And, so long as we maintain a fee-for-service model, of course they ought get paid for it. 

To the extent that government is a prime payer of healthcare expenses—and for those over 65, there’s little controversy over the fact that it is—there is something of a conflict of interest at work, in that care for terminal patients eats up an inordinate percentage of lifetime costs. But it strikes me as absurd that doctors are going to talk their patients into ending their lives prematurely mostly on the basis of cost savings.

Oh, an absurd idea that Republicans aren't going to run with at full throttle?  That would be a first. Because that's exactly the fear Republicans stoked in voters in 2009 and 2010 and they won huge.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, urged her supporters to oppose Democratic plans for health care reform on her Facebook page. 

"As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!" wrote Palin in a note posted Aug. 7, 2009. 

She said that the Democrats plan to reduce health care costs by simply refusing to pay for care. 

"And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

It was PolitiFact's Lie of the Year, remember?

Republicans still won 60+ House seats.

I fully expect this Medicare rule change to be quietly pulled once again.  Republicans will keep winning that PR battle until the end of time.

Not Feeling The Bern

I've said this before and I'll say it again:  Bernie Sanders will not get my vote if he continues to attack President Obama's policies and his administration (Warning, Daily Caller story).

Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders undermined a key Obama administration talking point Monday when he said the actual unemployment rate in the U.S. is double what the federal government claims. 

“When you talk about the economy we also have to have an honest assessment of unemployment in America,” Sanders told a crowd of 7,500 gathered at a presidential campaign rally in Portland, Maine. 

“Once a month the government publishes a set of figures, and the last figures they published said that official unemployment was 5.4 percent,” the Democratic nominee continued, slightly misstating the Labor Department’s most recent report which put June’s unemployment rate at 5.3 percent. 

“But there is another set of government statistics,” Sanders continued, “and that that real unemployment if you include those people who have given up looking for work and the millions of others who are working part-time 20, 25 hours a week when they want to work full-time, when you all of that together, real unemployment is 10.5 percent.”

Wow.  Straight out of the GOP playbook.  Obama is lying to you about unemployment!  Reeeeeeeeal unemployment is in double digits!  Wake up, sheeple!

Dear Bernie Sanders:  you will never raise yourself up as a Democrat by trying to bring Barack Obama down.  This is the kind of glibertarian nonsense I expect from Rand Paul or Jeb Bush.  If Bernie Sanders is using it too (and it turns out he's been using that "real unemployment" right-wing talking point for a while now) then I have yet another problem with the Sanders campaign.

The Freedom To Discriminate

Republican lawmakers are gearing up their response to the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage ruling: a federal law that would effectively eliminate punishment for discriminating against same-sex marriage.

U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, the chief Republican vote-counter in the House, has signed-on as a co-sponsor of legislation described as an effort to protect people opposed to gay marriage from being penalized by the government.

The Louisianan, who as majority whip ranks No. 3 in the his party's leadership ranks, after Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, added his name Tuesday to the bill dubbed the "First Amendment Defense Act." The two Republican lawmakers who wrote the bill, Representative Raul Labrador of Idaho and Senator Mike Lee of Utah have cast it as a way to clarify and strengthen religious liberty protections in federal law, "by safeguarding those individuals and institutions who promote traditional marriage from government retaliation."

The Senate version, S. 1598, has 24 co-sponsors, including Republican presidential aspirants Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Scalise is among 20 House Republicans who have become new co-sponsors of the bill since the Supreme Court's ruling last month legalizing same-sex marriage—bringing the total to 87.

In statement his office provided Wednesday to Bloomberg News on his decision to co-sponsor the bill, Scalise alluded to the high court's decision.

"Religious freedom is a fundamental right established in the Constitution. Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent judicial activism, defending religious liberty has become an even more pressing priority," said Scalise.

Scalise added the First Amendment Defense Act "helps ensure that Americans are not punished or discriminated against for exercising their constitutionally-protected religious beliefs.”

The measure, introduced in the House on June 17, nine days before the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage, has been referred to the committees on Ways and Means and Oversight and Government Reform. It is unclear if the bill has any chance to advance. But Scalise's co-sponsorship gives it an imprint of some House Republican leadership backing.

So the game plan is clear: sure, you can get married, but if Republicans have their way in November 2016, expect legislation that would allow all kinds of open discrimination against same-sex couples in the name of "religious freedom".  Hell, it might allow all kinds of discrimination, period.  Who draws the line and says that a person's beliefs that black people are inferior aren't worthy of protection under this legislation?  This is Indiana's comically bad law all over again. and Republicans know it.

But that's the point: nearly two-thirds of Republicans remain against same-sex marriage at all.  It's bigots like this who will decide the Republican nominee, and this nominee will almost certainly be willing to sign this legislation into law.

Republicans remain the party of legalized discrimination. That's their platform in 2016.

StupidiNews!

• South Carolina's state House has voted to remove the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds, the measure has already passed the state Senate and heads to GOP Gov. Nikki Haley's desk.
• GOP 2016 contenders have all declined to speak at this year's National Council of La Raza meeting in Kansas City despite efforts to increase the party's share of the Latino vote. 
• Pope Francis's tour of Latin America continues with a trip to Bolivia amid thawing relations with President Evo Morales, who in the past has denounced the Catholic Church.
• Australia's unemployment rate has risen slightly to six percent in June as commodity export prices are falling due to instability in China and Greece.
• A federal judge has thrown out a more than half a billion dollar patent verdict against Apple over jury instructions, the company suing the tech giant has no actual products, only patents.

Last Call For Trumping All Reality

Pretty sure I know what Saturday Night Live's cold open would be this week if the show wasn't on summer break.

Donald Trump said Wednesday that he believes he will win the Latino vote, slamming Hillary Clinton for promoting what he called an immigration policy that would "let everybody come in… killers, criminals, drug dealers." 

"I have a great relationship with the Mexican people. I have many people working for me - look at the job in Washington - I have many legal immigrants working with me. And many of them come from Mexico. They love me, I love them," the 2016 GOP contender said in an interview with NBC News. "And I'll tell you something, if I get the nomination, I'll win the Latino vote." 

Trump said that "there's nothing to apologize for" in relation to his controversial comments about Mexico, arguing that he'll win the support of Latinos because of his record creating jobs. 

"Hillary Clinton is not going to be able to create jobs, I will tell you right now," he said. "Neither is Jeb Bush going to be able to create jobs. I will create jobs and the Latinos will have jobs that they don't have right now. And I will win that vote."

Every time Trump opens his mouth he gains ground in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, and gets further behind in the general. It's amazing stuff. Calling Latinos criminals and killers and expecting to win their votes?

But remember, Trump doesn't represent the GOP position on Latinos.  Not in the least.

Turn The Machines Back On

We apologize for slightly breaking your economy.

The New York Stock Exchange shut down its main market because of a computer malfunction, forcing traders to steer orders elsewhere in the biggest disruption to an American equity venue in almost two years. 

The suspension, announced to securities firms through notices on the NYSE website around 11:32 a.m., dropped the largest U.S. share platform out of the network of trading platforms that make up the American equity market. That network kept running, however, as other exchanges such as the Nasdaq Stock Market and Bats Global Markets Inc. picked up the runoff.

It's good that the NASDAQ basically acted as a giant backup stock exchange for a while while the NYSE gets their crap sorted out, but increasingly in the world of high-speed, high-volume computerized trading, glitches like this will only keep getting more damaging to the economy.

“I don’t think it’s a hacking incident here or anything like that,” Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Chatham, New Jersey-based Themis Trading LLC, said by phone. “Based on what I’ve seen in the past, these type of things are usually some sort of issues related to an upgrade, maybe to handle the excessive traffic that’s constantly coming in with high-speed trading.” 

The stock exchange operator said in a Twitter message the issue is internal and not a “cyber breach.” The Securities and Exchange Commission is closely monitoring the situation, according to an e-mailed statement from Chair Mary Jo White.

You don't suppose it has anything to do with China melting down amidst the Greek debt crisis, right?

Fleecing The Rubios

Sen. Marco Rubio is letting us see his cards, and surprise!  It's a race to the bottom to see which Republican would destroy the nation's public schools and universities first: Rubio or Bush.

On education, Rubio said he would establish a new accreditation process that would “expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition” and create income-based loan repayment programs to make student debt more manageable.

“Our higher education system is controlled by what amounts to a cartel of existing colleges and universities, which use their power over the accreditation process to block innovative, low-cost competitors from entering the market,” he said.

“Within my first 100 days, I will bust this cartel by establishing a new accreditation process that welcomes low-cost, innovative providers. This would expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition, which would prompt a revolution driven by the needs of students — just as the needs of consumers drive the progress of every other industry in our economy,” he said.

He also called for student investment plans and an increase in vocational and apprenticeship programs to encourage high school students to begin careers as mechanics, plumbers or electricians.

It’s a message that could appeal to some of the younger voters Rubio hopes to win over.

The Florida senator focused on taxes, saying he’d cut the corporate tax rate to the 25 percent average for developed nations, establish a territorial tax system that encouraged U.S. companies to bring money they’re holding overseas home, allow companies to claim more expenses for investing in creating jobs, and put a ceiling on the amount U.S. regulations can cost.

On immigration, he said he would push for an overhaul that encourages “skill and merit-based” immigration, rather than family-based immigration.

Pretty much every check box on the Chamber of Commerce corporate bonanza right there: massive business tax cuts, corporatized schools and colleges to turn them into profit centers (and hey, lower tax revenues will mean cuts to education, making for profit schools more "competitive" as public schools are starved) and exploitation of low-cost apprenticeship and immigrant labor.

There's nothing new about Rubio's plan, it's just the business wing of the GOP all day, every day. Think Kansas, only in all 50 states!

Won't that be fun?

StupidiNews!

• Subway spokesman Jared Fogle has been dropped by the company after 15 years after an FBI raid in Fogle's home Tuesday near Indianapolis.
• Baylor University has removed "homosexual acts" from the school's code of misconduct as the world's largest Baptist university calls the change part of "a caring community".
• European Union creditors are giving Greece until Sunday to come up with reforms or risk being ejected from the euro currency at an emergency summit this weekend.
• British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will deliver the first Tory-majority budget to Parliament in nearly two decades in what is expected to be a major swing towards austerity.
• AT&T is reportedly offering a promise to make low-cost internet available to subscribers if lawmakers, the DoJ, and the FCC approve its deal to buy DirecTV.

Last Call For Hungry For More

Twinkies are back from beyond the grave, and two years into the comeback of Hostess, we finally are learning what the cost of putting Ho-Hos and Ding Dongs back on shelves really means: the new Hostess Brands, owned by a billionaire venture capitalist, who has automated more than 90% of the company's bakery jobs out of existence.

In 2012, Hostess, the iconic American bakery giant behind Ding Dongs, Ho Ho's and Twinkies, was bankrupt, with plans to slash more than 18,000 jobs and close its doors for good amid a crippling nationwide strike. 

Then, in 2013, a snack-cake savior appeared. The Missouri-based sweets maker was bought for $410 million by a partnership between private-equity giant Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulos, a billionaire turnaround artist known as "Mr. Shelf Space" for his revival of brands like Vlasic, Hungry-Man and Chef Boyardee. 

Now, the iconic dessert titan is resurgent, selling its golden, cream-filled Twinkies across the world under the name Hostess Brands and turning down $2 billion offers from a pack of hopeful buyers. On Tuesday morning, the company reached its latest peak when Reuters, citing anonymous sources, suggested Hostess would head to Wall Street with an initial public offering that would value the company at around $2.5 billion.

That's a huge turnaround, from Chapter 11 to IPO.  But the true cost has been thousands of jobs.

The Hostess Brands of today, launched in 2013 under an Apollo-Metropoulos holding company, owns sweets and cakes under the Hostess and Dolly Madison brands, including Cupcakes, Donettes, Snoballs and Zingers. 

But it looks and operates very differently than the chain from whence it came. The newer, thinner bakery giant kept only five of the 14 original dessert plants: Of those five, one was sold and another, an eight-decade-old bakery in suburban Chicago with 400 employees, closed in October. 

The investment helped bring the classic American snack food into the 21st century. One 500-worker Kansas bakery outfitted with a $20 million Auto-Bake system, according to Forbes, now spits out more than a million Twinkies a day, doing 80 percent of the work once done by 9,000 workers across 14 plants.

From 9,000 bakery employees at 14 plants to 500 at one plant in Kansas.  That's just the bakery division.  Thousands of more supporting jobs were lost when the plants closed for good. This may be an extreme example of automation in the 21st century, but more of it is coming, and it's going to put a lot of people out of work very quickly.

In fact, we're seeing it now.  How much of the "labor participation rate" being the lowest in 50 years is due to automation as a factor?

Do those Twinkies still taste good to you now?

The Revenge Of Flagging Support

Having somehow missed the cattle call when the rest of the conservative strawmen arguments were being set up on the issue of the Confederate flag,WaPo’s Marc Thiessen instead goes for sheer construct size instead.

Did you know that this newspaper is named for a slaveholder? It’s right there on our masthead, the name of a man who for 56 years held other human beings in bondage on his Virginia plantation — a man, according to the official Mount Vernon Web site, who “frequently utilized harsh punishment against the enslaved population, including whippings.” This dreaded symbol of oppression is delivered to the doorsteps and inboxes of hundreds of thousands of people each morning. 

Sure, George Washington also emancipated his slaves in his will, won our independence and became the father of our country — but no matter. It is an outrage that this paper continues to bear the name of such a man. 

It is time to rename The Washington Post! 

Think that’s stupid? You’re right. But there’s a lot of stupid going around today. The latest example: The TV Land network has pulled the plug on reruns of one of America’s most beloved shows, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” because the car in the show, the General Lee, bears a Confederate flag. There is nothing racist about “The Dukes of Hazzard.” It is a show about moonshine, short shorts and fast cars. What is accomplished by banning “The Dukes of Hazzard”? Nothing. 

Our country is in a miasma of political correctness. So where does it end? Are we going to rename our nation’s capital (and Washington state for that matter)? Should we close the Jefferson Memorial (named for a man who never freed his slaves)? How about renaming Arlington (which is named after Robert E. Lee’s estate) . . . or Washington and Lee University (names for not one, but two slave owners) . . . or Fort Hood (named for Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood) and Fort Bragg (named for Braxton Bragg, military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis). 

This impulse to wipe away history is Stalinist. Just like Joseph Stalin once erased people from photographs, we’re now erasing people from our collective history.

I mean this is a hell of a lot of straw in one place, and it’s covered in manure to boot. Nobody’s demanding we rename anything currently named for George Washington, and nobody demanded the cancellation of the Dukes of Hazzard reruns on cable, either.

Most of all, nobody’s asking to “wipe away history” of white Southerners, either. What people actually wanted was the state government of South Carolina not to fly the Confederate flag on state grounds, especially since the state only started doing that in the 60’s in order to insult and degrade the civil rights movement.

The only thing being wiped away here is the reality that this flag stands for slavery, racism, and hatred. We wiped that history away out of textbooks and social taboo quite some time ago and covered it up with idiotic platitudes like “heritage not hate”. We wiped out that history of why the South went to war in order to preserve the enslavement of human beings with moronic bleatings of “states’ rights” and “economic sabotage of the South”.

Maybe Thiessen knows. Frankly, I don’t give a damn.