Last Call For The Republican Legal Rump

A new USA TODAY poll shows that most Americans believe that June's Supreme Court decisions have put an end to the Obamacare and marriage equality fights.

Well, I take that back.  Republicans are going to fight for bigotry and being uninsured forever.

By 52%-36%, those polled say officials who oppose the Affordable Care Act should take steps to improve the law but end efforts to repeal it, given the high court's decision rejecting its most serious legal challenge. But Republicans by more than 2-1, 63%-27%, say the campaign to overturn the law should continue. 

On same-sex marriage, Americans by 51%-33% say local and state officials now should allow gay couples to wed in their jurisdictions even if they oppose gay marriage. On that, Republicans also tend to disagree: 49% say officials who oppose same-sex unions should take steps to resist the court's ruling and block them while 38% say they should allow them to take place. 

The issue of gay marriage in particular seems to have lost some of its potential to affect next year's presidential election. Four in 10 say the issue will have no impact on their vote.

So yeah, half of Republicans want to show their "civil disobedience" bigoted intolerance towards same-sex marriage, and two-thirds want to take health insurance away from millions of people.

Please make overturning marriage equality and Obamacare the central theme of the GOP in 2016, guys.  Democrats are begging you to try that. Please remaind everyone how mean-spirited and awful Republicans really are, and do it as often as possible between now and November 2016.

Just begging you.

Tragedy In Chattanooga

A pretty horrific event in Chattanooga, Tennessee this afternoon as a gunman opened fire on a series of military recruitment centers in the city.  The gunman is dead, as are four Marines, and a police officer has also been injured.

Four people plus a gunman were killed in shootings at multiple military sites in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the city's mayor announced at a Thursday afternoon press conference.

A police officer who was shot in the leg remained in stable condition at a local hospital, according to NBC’s Chattanooga affiliate WRBC. 

The attacks took place at the Naval and Marine Reserve Center on Amnicola highway and the Army Recruiting Center on Lee highway. 

Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke announced earlier today that there had been a “horrific incident in our community."

The fact that the gunman went to multiple recruitment centers for different branches of the US military doesn't really leave any room for doubt that these recruitment centers, and the personnel inside them, were being targeted deliberately.  Somebody had a definite problem with our men and women in uniform, enough to open fire on multiple recruitment centers over it.  This was a planned, domestic terrorist attack in my eyes, and the FBI is treating it as such until they otherwise have reason not to do so, according to the news conference.

JUST IN: Chattanooga, TN shooting suspect identified as Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, law enforcement sources tell @CBSNews.

— CBSN (@CBSNLive) July 16, 2015

More on this as it comes in.

Bobbying For Crapples

So on Tuesday, a heavily edited hit video was posted to YouTube, purported to show a Planned Parenthood employee discuss using late-term abortions to harvest baby parts.  Which is kind of odd, since 1) Planned Parenthood doesn't do late-term abortions (only 4 clinics in the US do period) and 2) the video is a screaming fake from the James O'Keefe School Of Complete Horsecrap.

But that's not stopping Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal from using the fake video as an excuse to harass Planned Parenthood and score cheap points.

Gov. Bobby Jindal on Tuesday announced he's directed the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals to investigate Planned Parenthood activities in the state after a video surfaced that claims the organization is selling fetal body parts. 

The video, which was posted to YouTube by the Center for Medical Progress, shows a woman discussing the harvest of fetal organs and body parts from partial-birth abortions. The Center for Medical Progress identifies the woman as Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who is Planned Parenthood Federation of America's national medical director. 

There was no indication that the video or the activities described in it had ties to Louisiana. But Jindal said he was ordering an investigation in part because Planned Parenthood is planning to open a clinic in New Orleans.

But here's the kicker (and the real reason why Jindal is pretending to believe this nonsense):

The investigation means the $4 million clinic planned for New Orleans will not be able to open because Jindal's order includes suspending the issuance of new licenses by DHH.

So yes, Jindal is a manipulative slimy bastard.  Oh, and where is he getting the money to investigate Planned Parenthood when the state is running a $1.6 billion deficit under his budget?

And he's running for President!?!?

My guess is he won't be for much longer when this blows up in his face.

StupidiNews!

• Swiss officials say that they will extradite a FIFA official to the US, the unnamed official of soccer's governing body is cooperating with law enforcement and agreed to be extradited.
• Congressional Democrats are coming out in support of the Iranian nuclear deal as Republicans continue to vow to destroy the accord.
• Former President George HW Bush is in stable condition after fracturing a bone in his neck in a fall, he is expected to recover and be in a neck brace for some time.
• Greek lawmakers have voted to accept the EU bailout deal imposing harsh austerity measures, the first 7 billion euro installment to be announced today.
• Netflix says it will support the proposed Charter/Time Warner Cable merger after the cable giants offered the streaming movie service a free network connection to its customers.

Last Call For One If By Land, Two If By Crazy

Operation Jade Helm '15 is here! Protect your precious bodily fluids from the government!

Just in time for the Wednesday kickoff of "Jade Helm 15," a YouTube user under the handle Get Right America posted an amazing parody of the breathless, Humvee-tracking conspiracy theorists who are suspicious of the U.S. military training exercise.

The videographer filmed himself driving around the parking lot of a Sam's Club in San Angelo, Texas in a nod to one of the wilder "Jade Helm 15" conspiracy theories about its parent company, Wal-Mart. There, he found a potential hiding spot for "ninjas that can take our guns" and trucks that obviously must belong to the Knights Templar.

It's hysterical stuff.



And yes, this is what the Jade Helm "truthers" sound like to the rest of us: complete nutjobs.

The Freedom To Hate

I figure one of the first things the Supreme Court will have to deal in a couple of years (with a new President in the White House) is a case defining whether or not "religious freedom" allows you to nullify anti-discrimination laws. It might even be this case.

A Christian engineer who was fired for violating Ford Motor Company’s policy against harassment based on sexual orientation is suing the company, claiming his religious rights were violated. 

In a federal lawsuit obtained by The Huffington Post, Thomas Banks explains that he was fired after posting a comment in response to an internal Ford intranet article that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the LGBT workers rights group GLOBE. 

“For this the Ford Motor should be thoroughly ashamed,” Banks wrote. “Endorsing and promoting sodomy is of benefit to no one. This topic is disruptive to the workplace and is an assault on Christians and morality, as well as antithetical to our design and our survival.” 

“Immoral sexual conduct should not be a topic for an automotive manufacturer to endorse or promote,” he continued. “And yes — this is historic — but not in a good way. Never in the history of mankind has a culture survived that promotes sodomy. Heterosexual behavior creates life — homosexual behavior leads to death.” 

Banks was fired two weeks later on the grounds that he violated the company’s policy against harassment. 

“I was stunned to realize that I was fired over expressing my faith in a single comment,” a statement from Banks said. 

The lawsuit alleges that Ford Motor Company and Rapid Global Business Solutions “acted intentionally out of malice or reckless disregard of Banks’ federally protected rights.”

So, can you claim anti-harassment policies and laws are impinging on your freedom of religion? We've already seen the Supreme Court say that your employer's religious freedom trumps federal health care law in the Hobby Lobby case.  Where does the Supreme Court draw the line, if at all?

I'm pretty sure we're going to get an answer from SCOTUS on this, so one would hope that the next President nominating justices would be a Democrat.

If not, well...

I Think He's Taking This Rather Well, Yes?

In non-breaking non-news that will not come as a shock to anyone, Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu is not a fan of the new Iran deal.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday after world powers reached a historic nuclear deal with Iran that Israel was not bound by it and signalled he remained ready to order military action. 

Netanyahu’s harsh criticism of the agreement came after he warned for months that the deal being negotiated would not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. 

While analysts say unilateral military action by Israel seems unlikely for now, Netanyahu and other officials have kept the option on the table. 

“Israel is not bound by this deal with Iran, and Israel is not bound by this deal with Iran because Iran continues to seek our destruction,” Netanyahu told reporters before a meeting of his security cabinet. 

“We will always defend ourselves.”

Not without US weapons and billions in US taxpayer dollars, you won't.  Might want to keep that in mind.

Netanyahu called the nuclear deal a “historic mistake”, and the accord drew strong criticism from across the Israeli political spectrum. 

“We did commit to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and this commitment still stands,” Netanyahu said earlier on Tuesday, even before the agreement was officially announced. 

He has taken his campaign to the US Congress and the UN General Assembly, but ultimately failed to block the agreement.

Once again, in order to accept Netanyahu's bluster as truth, you have to believe that only Israel correct, and that the entire UN Security Council is colluding on Israel's destruction, including the five permanent members of the US, France, the UK, China and Russia.

It's ridiculous theater, and he knows it.  Israel doesn't have a friend in the world on this.

Wait, I take that back.  They have the Republican Party here in the US.

That should tell you everything.

StupidiNews!

• A stampede at a Hindu river festival in the Indian city of Rajahmundry has killed at least 27 as crowds surged to wash in the sacred Godavari river.
• President Obama will hold a press conference today answering questions about yesterday's announced Iran nuclear deal before heading to Oklahoma for a Choctaw Nation event.
• A scheduled vote today by Greek lawmakers on a new bailout is facing stiff opposition from PM Alexis Tsipras's own Syriza party, a failed vote could collapse his government coalition.
• A new International Monetary Fund report blasts the Greek deal, saying that Europe will have to consider far more debt relief in order to prevent Greek debt from piling up for decades.
• One thing that wasn't at last night's AL 6-3 win at the All-Star Game here in Cincinnati: recreational drones, which the league told fans to leave at home.

Last Call For GOP Minority Outreach, Con't

Oklahoma Republicans are leading the way for the rest of the party in Big Tent theory.

The Oklahoma Republican Party compared Americans receiving food stamp benefits to park animals feed by the public in a Facebook post Monday evening. 

In the since-deleted post, the Oklahoma GOP offered a so-called “lesson in irony” by comparing the distribution of food stamps to 46 million Americans to a policy of the National Park Service to discourage the public from feeding animals “because the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves” 

Party Chairman Randy Brogdon offered a sort-of apology in another Facebook post today: “I offer my apologies for those who were offended – that was not my intention”: 

This post was supposed to be an analogy that compared two situations illustrating the cycle of government dependency in America, not humans as animals. However I do think that it’s important to have conversations about government welfare programs since our dependency on government is at its highest level ever.

Yep, that explanation (I'm sorry you people aren't so bright and clearly misunderstood us when we compared poor people to zoo animals) will make the perception of Republicans as mean-spirited dog-whistle racist assholes vanish completely by November 2016.

Please, promote Mr. Brogdon to the RNC. Give him the keys to your social media presence, immediately. Put him on TV as much as possible. Give him a white, conical hood to keep cool under those hot lights, too.

That'll help. Trust me.

Hoosier Gonna Teach Your Kids?

Next door in Indiana, Mike Pence's massive cuts to education has had a nasty secondary effect: since Republicans have demonized schoolteachers as greedy, evil union thugs for years now, the Hoosier State can't find enough qualified applicants to fill needed teaching positions.

School districts across Indiana are having trouble finding people to fill open teaching positions as the number of first-time teacher licenses issued by the state has dropped by 63 percent in recent years. 

The Indiana Department of Education reports the state issued 16,578 licenses to first-time teachers, including teachers with licenses in multiple subject areas, in the 2009-2010 school year. That number dropped to 6,174 for the 2013-14 school year, the most recent for which data were available, the Greensburg Daily News reported. 

The dwindling pool of educators is raising alarm in some school districts as they struggle to fill open positions, especially in math, science and foreign languages.

And of course these shortages are going to continue for some time as people don't want to go to college in order to be teachers anymore.  Can you blame them after the way Republicans treat education?

“It has become a real struggle,” Decatur County Community Schools Superintendent Johnny Budd told the Greensburg Daily News. “The pool of applicants is definitely dried up.” 

School leaders say state funding constraints, testing pressures and a blame-the-teachers mentality have steered people away from education as a career. 

Many education programs have seen their enrollments drop in recent years. 

Enrollment in Ball State University’s elementary and kindergarten teacher-preparation programs has fallen 45 percent in the last decade. Other schools are reporting similar declines. 

Denise Collins, associate dean with the College of Education at Indiana State University, said enrollment there has fallen 7 percent, and the number of students completing an education degree has dropped 13 percent.

Demand for qualified teachers is higher than ever, and yet across the country we're seeing school districts in red states slashing salaries, removing tenure protections, and driving teachers into retirement.  Now there aren't enough teachers to fill those teaching jobs.

What did you think was going to happen, red state America?

The Walkering Dead

I'm not sure why GOP Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker bothered to join the GOP 2016 circus this week, because after signing a brutal austerity budget for the Badger State into law over the weekend, he's got zero chance of winning. WaPo's Valerie Strauss:

If anybody was holding out any hope that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker would see even a modicum of reason and refuse to savage public education in his state, they can now let it go. A day before jumping into the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Walker on Sunday signed a new state budget that, among other things: 

* slashes $250 million from the University of Wisconsin, one of the country’s great public institutions of higher education, and ensures that most K-12 school districts will get less funding than they did last year; 

* removes from state law tenure protections for University of Wisconsin professors, a move that educators say will seriously harm the school’s ability to retain and attract talented faculty; 

* expands the state’s voucher program that uses public funds to pay for tuition at private schools, including religious schools — even though there is no evidence the program has helped improve student achievement in the past — and creates a new “special needs” voucher law that cuts into protections for special needs students. 

The Associated Press reported that Walker said in a statement that the budget he signs “brings real reform to Wisconsin and allows everyone more opportunity for a brighter future. ” Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, a Democrat, said in a statement that the budget “throws the people of Wisconsin under Governor Walker’s campaign bus.”

Walker's record in Wisconsin has been awful, but he gives really good speeches or something, so that makes him a "Republican front-runner" or something.

And actually, Walker's austerity economics and massive cuts to education is exactly what Republicans want to do to our nation's public colleges and universities and public schools anyway: trash them to the point of breaking and sell off the pieces to for-profit outfits.

Of course he's going to do well in the GOP primaries.

Not so much in the general, I'm thinking.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama will announce this morning that a landmark nuclear deal with Iran has been reached in Vienna, but the deal faces stiff opposition from Republicans and Israel.
• New York City has reached a $5.9 million settlement with the family of Eric Garner, the black man who was put in a chokehold by a white NYPD officer and later died.
• After nearly ten years of flying through space, NASA's New Horizons probe finally arrives at Pluto today to send back the most detailed pictures yet of the planetary body.
• Greek PM Alexis Tsipras will face his country's parliament today with only days left in order to sell a new austerity plan to angry lawmakers and voters.
• Automaker Audi has been testing its autonomous driving system, codenamed "Robby", in the California desert, using systems that soon could be integrated into production vehicles.

Last Call For The Bernie Coalition

If you listen closely, Bernie Sanders is telling us exactly who he is, and which Obama voters he cares about...and which ones he wants to be rid of in this conversation with NYT Upshot's Nate Cohn.

But Mr. Sanders, who has surged in the polls against Hillary Clinton, called to advance a different theory of the race. “I look at these things more from a class perspective,” he said.

“I’m not a liberal. Never have been. I’m a progressive who mostly focuses on the working and middle class.”

The difference between a liberal and a progressive focused on workers might seem slim, but it nonetheless shapes how he envisions the potential of the political coalition he hopes to assemble. He believes he can mobilize a working-class coalition spanning ideological divides.

“Ordinary people are profoundly disgusted with the state of the economy and the fact that the middle class is being destroyed and income going to the top 1 percent.”

Many of these people “may not be liberal” or may not “agree with me on gay marriage,” but “they want a fighter,” he said in the cordial conversation.

The issues that could potentially rally disaffected lower- and- middle-class voters “cross traditional liberal-conservative lines,” Mr. Sanders argued. He is in a good position to raise these issues, he said, citing his positions on trade, issues affecting older Americans and the minimum wage.

If Bernie's own words are raising alarm bells in your head right now, there's a reason for that, if you look at Cohn's analysis.

If Mr. Sanders did build a coalition of working-class voters, it would look a lot different from the coalitions assembled by recent liberal Democratic primary candidates. It would be positioned to do far better among Hispanic, black and less educated white voters than recent anti-establishment Democratic challengers, like Barack Obama, Howard Dean, Bill Bradley and Jerry Brown.

Far better among black and Latino voters than Obama?  Obama got 93% of the black vote with record black turnout in 2012 and 71% of the Latino vote, for a combined 23% of the entire 2012 electorate.  Exactly how does Sanders do "far better" than that?

In fairness to Mr. Sanders, few, if any, recent Democratic candidates represented the economic, populist left. The anti-establishment candidate of the last four competitive primaries all featured challenges from intellectual, professional-class liberals. Mr. Brown, Mr. Bradley, Mr. Dean and Mr. Obama — each educated at some point at an Ivy League university — all fared well in Marin County, Calif., and Greenwich, Conn.; none appealed much to voters in the Appalachians or along the Rio Grande.

And there we have it (despite the fact that Obama in fact did very well among voters in the Texas border area.)  It's always back to the white West Pennsatucky vote, and this is where Bernie thinks he can do better, while keeping black and Latino voters.

The problem is Bernie's idea of appealing to us isn't working real well.

When asked why his campaign was struggling to attract the working-class, less liberal voters he thought he might be reaching, Mr. Sanders acknowledged the challenges facing his campaign. “I’m not well known in the African-American community, despite a lifelong record,” he said, acknowledging one of the most consistent critiques of his chances. “That’s a real issue, and I have to deal with it.”

Maybe your support of gun manufacturers and your slagging of Obama has something to do with it, Bern.  Just saying.  When you try to broaden your appeal to voters in the Appalachians at the expense of voters in black neighborhoods, you're going to lose and keep losing.

Or, you could just go the Jim Webb route and be statistical noise and a giant joke.  Your call.

An Early Sighting Of Haley's Comment

GOP South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley knows that whatever bloody massacre happened in the state where she is in charge, the fact Dylann Roof bought a gun when the law said he shouldn't have been able to is anyone but her fault.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) said on Sunday that she did not support increasing waiting periods to allow federal officials ample time to conduct background checks even though flaws in the current law allowed Charleston shooter Dylann Roof to purchase a gun.

Not her problem, not her fault, not her job to fix it.  Leadership!

“Do you think the background check should be expanded, instead of a three day period, maybe longer?” NBC host Chuck Todd asked Haley during an interview on Sunday.

Haley insisted that she was “literally sick” to her stomach when she received the news that Roof was able to purchase a firearm because of a failed background check.

“When the feds say they are going to do something, we take them at their word that it’s going to get done,” the South Carolina Republican opined. “And the fact that it didn’t get done is terrible. And it’s one more thing that these families are going to have to go through that they don’t deserve to have to go through.”

“I think we need to look at the fact that it’s not about time,” she continued. “It’s about technology. You know, this is something, when someone has a charge filed against them, it should go into a database and it should be shown immediately to anyone that’s looking at it.”

“So, I would be more interested in what went wrong. What sort of — why are they dealing with paperwork and not dealing with technology that they wouldn’t have had this.”

Oh, so perhaps Congress should allot more money to improve the nation's background check system and pass legislation requiring states and the federal government to work together on these checks.

Except that's exactly the opposite of what the Republicans who control Congress actually did: since they took power in January they've made background checks more difficult, federal databases harder to access, and cut budget money to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  Republicans also filibustered a national background check bill in the Senate in 2013.

Perhaps Governor Haley should be speaking with Speaker Boehner and majority leader McConnell instead of wasting time with Chuck Todd whining how nothing that happens in South Carolina is actually her fault.

Senate Democrats on the other hand want to make background checks work. They will be blocked again by Republicans for sure.  And Nikki Haley will continue to blame everyone but herself.

Demography May Be Destiny, But Not Anytime Soon

I disagree strongly with former NY Times editor Howell Raines on the Democrats taking over the South.

Even more dramatic changes in voter attitudes will shift the region’s party balance, to the detriment of the Republicans. This won’t come about because current Republican voters and their elected officials now in office will somehow be converted, but because they will be overwhelmed by new voters in the burgeoning Hispanic and Asian communities, who will join the black minority. Over half of the nation’s 40 million blacks live in the South.

For the time being, however, a traveler through the South can’t help but notice that its affluent, suburban whites remain myopic about the obvious signs, like the multiracial families to be seen among Walmart shoppers on any given day in any shopping mall.

Houston and Dallas are among the 11 American cities with the largest Hispanic populations. Vibrant Vietnamese communities are all along the Gulf Coast. Major cities have Spanish-language advertising, and have or soon will have sleek Latino-oriented shopping centers, like the new one on the fashionable southern side of Birmingham. The Asian presence in the medical, academic and business communities is substantial and growing, perhaps most notably in Baton Rouge, where Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and presidential candidate (who is Asian-American, like Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina), works.

Judging from the laws they are passing, Southern Republicans seem untroubled by Mitt Romney’s 17 percent of the minority vote in the last presidential election. It seems an overstatement to say that Southern Republicans are in outright denial about the fact that whites will be a minority in America around 2043. It does seem fair to say that the national Republican Party is underreacting, and Southern Republicans seem to be especially resistant to appealing to their minority neighbors.

Like their counterparts in the national G.O.P. and the current crop of about 15 me-too Republican presidential candidates, Southern legislators seem unwilling to make any change on social welfare, retirement, health care or women’s and gay rights that would attract Southerners not voting Republican at present.

A survey of demographic and polling data in what the Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey calls a New Sunbelt, stretching across the Southern Rim from Miami to Los Angeles, makes an ironclad case for this huge recalibration in political and cultural attitudes. Yet, for example, in the Florida Panhandle the same whites who cheer the new Hispanic stars at high school soccer matches deliver a bloc vote for the most conservative-sounding candidates at local, state and national levels. Anecdotal evidence indicates that affluent Southern Republicans continue to believe that minority voters can be attracted with punitive polices based on the Paul Ryan model.

The statistical evidence shouts otherwise. “Demography is destiny” is the theme of Mr. Frey’s new book, “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America,” and another recent book, “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown,” by Paul Taylor and his colleagues at the Pew Research Center.

Did anyone Howell cited in the article pay attention to the 2010 and 2014 elections, where Republicans gained 80+ seats in the House and turned a 60-seat Democratic majority into a 54-seat Senate control, and gained governor's mansions in deep blue states like Illinois and Maryland, or did I miss that?  Did anyone pay attention to Chief Justice John Roberts gutting the Voting Rights Act and assuring the GOP will control the South for another 30+ years at the very minimum?

Yet Howell craps out this pipe dream:

In presidential politics, the transition will most likely be seen first in red states like Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, all states that could be in play next year and could become purple, if not yet blue, as early as 2020.

All three of those states will be red states for the rest of my lifetime.  Demography doesn't equal destiny when Republicans suppress the minority vote and stir white resentment politics to the max.

StupidiNews!

• After an all-night negotiating session Sunday, EU and Greek leaders have a new $96 billion bailout plan that now must be sold to Greek parliament and voters.
• With news of a possible Iran nuclear deal being announced today, GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is warning that any deal will be a tough sell in Congress.
• Notorious Mexican drug cartel kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman remains at large after his escape from Mexican prison over the weekend.
• In a speech today Hillary Clinton will outline her campaign's plan to encourage corporate profit-sharing with employees to boost wages for the middle-class.
• Nintendo of Japan president Satoru Iwata died this weekend at 55 due to complications from cancer, leaving behind a legacy that included the Nintendo GameCube, 3DS, Wii and Wii U.

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.