Last Call For Flagging Support

And in the end, after all the attention and embarrassment to Southern states still choosing to fly the flags of traitors, they still choose to fly the flag of traitors.

Mississippi’s state flag will include the Confederate battle emblem for the foreseeable future, after state lawmakers on Tuesday said they didn’t have enough support to remove the controversial symbol. 

There were 12 different bills in the Mississippi Legislature to either redesign, change, or remove the Confederate symbol from the state’s 122-year-old flag. But they all died on Tuesday, which was the deadline for lawmakers to act on bills that were stuck in legislative committees. 

The bills offered numerous different options for Mississippi’s flag. One bill would have changed it to include a magnolia tree, just like the state’s flag did from 1861 until 1865. A few bills would have provided for new design submissions, either from state universities or from a newly-created commission to find new design options. One would have even changed the flag back to the Bonnie Blue Flag, which is also a Confederate-related banner, but less recognizable. 

But none of those bills had majority support from lawmakers in either the state House or Senate, Republican Rep. Jason White told the Associated Press. “I’m not saying that all of them are necessarily bad ideas, but we don’t have a consensus on any of them,” he said. 

The speaker of Mississippi’s House of Representatives, Republican Rep. Philip Gunn, had previously expressed support for removing the Confederate symbol from the state flag. On Tuesday, he said in a statement that he had “not wavered” on that viewpoint, and has been trying to convince other lawmakers “to adopt my view.” 

“I have explored every option from taking legislative action to change the flag to adopting two official flags, but we cannot get a consensus on how to address the issue,” he said. “I will continue to stand by my view that changing the flag is the right thing to do. The flag is going to change.”

No, it's not.  You've had 150 years to do it.  You've yet to actually do it.  There's no reason for us to believe you on this.  You're racist trash, your fathers were racist trash, grandfathers, right on up the line, Phil.

Change the goddamn flag.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS, Con't

President Obama took to the excellent SCOTUSBlog today to make his case as both president and as a constitutional law scholar as to why he will nominate a successor to the late Justice Scalia.

The Constitution vests in the President the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. It’s a duty that I take seriously, and one that I will fulfill in the weeks ahead. 

It’s also one of the most important decisions that a President will make. Rulings handed down by the Supreme Court directly affect our economy, our security, our rights, and our daily lives. 

Needless to say, this isn’t something I take lightly. It’s a decision to which I devote considerable time, deep reflection, careful deliberation, and serious consultation with legal experts, members of both political parties, and people across the political spectrum. And with thanks to SCOTUSblog for allowing me to guest post today, I thought I’d share some spoiler-free insights into what I think about before appointing the person who will be our next Supreme Court Justice. 

First and foremost, the person I appoint will be eminently qualified. He or she will have an independent mind, rigorous intellect, impeccable credentials, and a record of excellence and integrity. I’m looking for a mastery of the law, with an ability to hone in on the key issues before the Court, and provide clear answers to complex legal questions. 

Second, the person I appoint will be someone who recognizes the limits of the judiciary’s role; who understands that a judge’s job is to interpret the law, not make the law. I seek judges who approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice, a respect for precedent, and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand. 

But I’m also mindful that there will be cases that reach the Supreme Court in which the law is not clear. There will be cases in which a judge’s analysis necessarily will be shaped by his or her own perspective, ethics, and judgment. That’s why the third quality I seek in a judge is a keen understanding that justice is not about abstract legal theory, nor some footnote in a dusty casebook. It’s the kind of life experience earned outside the classroom and the courtroom; experience that suggests he or she views the law not only as an intellectual exercise, but also grasps the way it affects the daily reality of people’s lives in a big, complicated democracy, and in rapidly changing times. That, I believe, is an essential element for arriving at just decisions and fair outcomes. 

A sterling record. A deep respect for the judiciary’s role. An understanding of the way the world really works. That’s what I’m considering as I fulfill my constitutional duty to appoint a judge to our highest court. And as Senators prepare to fulfill their constitutional responsibility to consider the person I appoint, I hope they’ll move quickly to debate and then confirm this nominee so that the Court can continue to serve the American people at full strength.

It's a relatively short argument and a very strong one.  It's also an example of the President going around the usual media channels to make his case to the people directly, and no president has been as effective at this as our current one. I certainly don't blame him for not depending on our awful media to get his message out, the same media tacitly enabling the unprecedented blockade now before him.

President Obama, the law professor, is definitely a subscriber to the legal theory of a "living Constitution" and is letting the largest community of Supreme Court aficionados and legal minds know that his nominee will also be such a person.

How that affects this battle with the GOP Senate remains to be seen.

The Rough Beast '16 US Tour

Donald Trump has metastasized the body politic's lingering infection of racism and bigotry into a force that's giving him the GOP nomination...and possibly the country.

Mr. Trump’s support among those who say they support a temporary ban on Muslim entry into the United States — a notion Mr. Trump first advanced in early December — is significant. He won more than twice as many supporters of the ban in South Carolina as any other candidate. Voters often echo the things candidates say on the campaign trail, so that level may not be revelatory.

Possibly more surprising are the attitudes of Mr. Trump’s supporters on things that he has not talked very much about on the campaign trail. He has said nothing about a ban on gays in the United States, the outcome of the Civil War or white supremacy. Yet on all of these topics, Mr. Trump’s supporters appear to stand out from the rest of Republican primary voters.

Data from Public Policy Polling show that a third of Mr. Trump’s backers in South Carolina support barring gays and lesbians from entering the country. This is nearly twice the support for this idea (17 percent) among Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s voters and nearly five times the support of John Kasich’s and Ben Carson’s supporters (7 percent).

Similarly, YouGov data reveal that a third of Mr. Trump’s (and Mr. Cruz’s) backers believe that Japanese internment during World War II was a good idea, while roughly 10 percent of Mr. Rubio’s and Mr. Kasich’s supporters do. Mr. Trump’s coalition is also more likely to disagree with the desegregation of the military (which was ordered in 1948 by Harry Truman) than other candidates’ supporters are.

The P.P.P. poll asked voters if they thought whites were a superior race. Most Republican primary voters in South Carolina — 78 percent — disagreed with this idea (10 percent agreed and 11 percent weren’t sure). But among Mr. Trump’s supporters, only 69 percent disagreed. Mr. Carson’s voters were the most opposed to the notion (99 percent), followed by Mr. Kasich and Mr. Cruz’s supporters at 92 and 89 percent. Mr. Rubio’s backers were close to the average level of disagreement (76 percent).

According to P.P.P., 70 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters in South Carolina wish the Confederate battle flag were still flying on their statehouse grounds. (It was removed last summer less than a month after a mass shooting at a black church in Charleston.) The polling firm says that 38 percent of them wish the South had won the Civil War. Only a quarter of Mr. Rubio’s supporters share that wish, and even fewer of Mr. Kasich’s and Mr. Carson’s do.

Nationally, the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with the freeing of slaves in Southern states after the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.

Mr. Trump’s popularity with white, working-class voters who are more likely than other Republicans to believe that whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy may make him unpopular among leaders in his party. But it’s worth noting that he isn’t persuading voters to hold these beliefs. The beliefs were there — and have been for some time.

Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism, and some voters are responding.

After eight years of a media that has relentless demonized the nation's first black president as everything from a traitor to the actual Antichrist, the racist backlash of Trump was absolutely inevitable. It's now on full grisly display for all to see, and there's nothing that the Republican party can do at this point to stop him. The big money learned their lesson after foisting Romney on the party four years ago and would rather have Trump than any Democrat.  There will be no help from the Koch or Rove machines to stop The Donald.

As Donald Trump picks up momentum, the chances of a well-funded assault to block him from the Republican presidential nomination are dramatically dwindling, according to interviews with about a dozen donors and operatives who are appalled by the billionaire real estate showman's campaign.

The party’s elite donor class has mostly closed its checkbooks to groups dedicated to stopping Trump, while the outfits that have built massive reserves are increasingly deciding to forgo anti-Trump campaigns, despite widespread fears that he is making a mockery of conservatism and could undermine Republicans up and down the ballot.

The deepest-pocketed operation on the right, the network helmed by the billionaires Charles and David Koch, had seriously debated launching an aggressive assault on Trump, but sources familiar with the network's planning tell POLITICO that’s now highly unlikely. And the Karl Rove-conceived Crossroads outfits also are sitting out the party’s bitter primary, instead spending their cash attacking Democrats.

Republican operatives have told major donors it would require an eight-figure advertising campaign or campaigns to make any kind of dent in Trump’s surprisingly durable popularity. While many of the donors have privately voiced support for the cause, most have begged off writing big checks.

Nevada had Trump at 46%, and after a slate of Super Tuesday wins next week, including in Ted Cruz's home state of Texas, and Marco Rubio's Florida on March 15th, the game will all be over.

The rough beast is slouching its way to Cleveland, folks...its hour come 'round at last.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump easily won last night's Nevada GOP caucuses, taking 46% of the vote to Marco Rubio's 24% and Ted Cruz at 21%.
• A new World Health Organization report finds one in five African children are unvaccinated, a substantial decrease from just 15 years ago, but still lagging behind the rest of the world.
• The CDC says it is tracking 14 cases of the Zika virus in the US transmitted sexually, enough to cause US health officials to reevaluate how the disease spreads.
• US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says that the Group of 20 nations are not yet in crisis mode ahead of this week's global finance meeting on China and volatile markets.
• Researchers are working with an enzyme that may cut HIV infections out of cells as a method to completely treat the 37 million current HIV patients who have not yet developed AIDS.

Last Call For League Of Their Own (Hell)

Just a reminder that the National Football League management and ownership are all repugnant, hyper-rich assholes who destroy lives on a daily basis.

The National Football League has been ordered to return what its union calculates is more than $100 million to the pool of revenue that it shares with its players.

The ruling, handed down last week by arbitrator Stephen Burbank, found that the NFL owners had mischaracterized what Players Association officials say is roughly $120 million of ticket revenue during the past three years by creating an exemption that had the effect of keeping about $50 million in salary out of players’ pockets. The NFL Players Association, which discovered the discrepancy during an ongoing audit of league finances, filed a grievance on the matter in January.

“They created an exemption out of a fiction and they got caught,” saidDeMaurice Smith,executive director of the NFLPA.

NFL officials would not confirm the figure. In an email, Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the NFL, referred to the ruling as the resolution of a “technical accounting issue under the CBA involving the funding of stadium construction and renovation projects.” He stated that the main effect was one of timing.

The ruling is the latest in a series of legal victories for the NFLPA over the league, including last year’s U.S. District Court ruling that overturned Tom Brady’s four-game suspension in the controversy known as “Deflate-gate.”

This dispute stemmed from provisions of the collective bargaining agreement that allow NFL teams to exclude certain money from the pool that determines its players’ share of revenues. Players receive 40% of local revenues, which mainly come from tickets sales, 45% of sponsorship money, revenues from the post-season and NFL Ventures, such as NFL.com and the NFL Network, and 55% of the revenues from media deals.

Teams can exclude money from the sale of personal seat licenses, premium seating, and from mega-deals with corporations to put their names on stadiums. The NFLPA agreed to these exclusions because teams often use these funds to help finance renovations and the construction of new stadiums, which significantly increase revenue and the amount of money that gets shared with the players.

Say what you will about the NFL players all being millionaire scumbags, and for the most part they are spoiled, rich hyperbros who wreck everything in their paths in the name of fleeting glory and fame.

But they will never hold a candle next to the burning sun that is the hell of billionaire NFL owners, arguably among the most rancid human excrement on earth.  Not content with their own billions, they sought to steal even more from their employees, tens of millions of dollars.

And in the end we pay them all to light up our televisions and tablets with glorified violence at the costs of cities, bodies, and souls.

They can all burn in hell, frankly.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS, Con't

Well, ol' Mitch the Turtle is certainly playing to form as the villain of our little show.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday morning reiterated that Senate Republicans will block President Obama's nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, regardless of who the president puts forward. 

"Presidents have a right to nominate just as the Senate has its constitutional right to provide or withhold consent. In this case, the Senate will withhold it," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter after the American people finish making in November the decision they've already started making today."

In his speech on the Senate floor, McConnell said that the confirmation process for the next Supreme Court justice should wait until after the 2016 election. He argued that voters should be able to select the next president to nominate a justice to the Supreme Court. He said that senators have a choice. 

"Will we allow the people to continue deciding who will nominate the next justice or will we empower a lame duck president to make that decision on his way out the door instead?" he asked.

Your move, Mr. President.

Seriously, this is unprecedented obstruction...but is there anything President Obama can honestly do until voters decide to punish the GOP?

Post-Racial America Update

It's a good thing overt racism is a thing of the past, as Chief Justice Roberts keeps telling us. Things like "getting lynched after a country music concert in Pittsburgh" are relics of America's barbarous past and in no way represent the America of 2016.

Right?

Outside, people were streaming into the nearby subway station. Among them was Kevin Lockett, an African American man who walked along the platform pulling a cooler in one hand. 

That’s the last thing he can remember with absolute certainty. The rest, according to court testimony reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, only comes back to him in bits, pieces and violent flashes. 

He thought he heard a racial slur from a group of men, and the next thing he knew, he was being thrown onto the train tracks. 

After Lockett lifted himself back onto the platform, surveillance footage shows, 21-year-old Ryan Kyle started beating him. Another 21-year-old, Matthew Laplace, pulled his cooler away. 

“I knew we’d find this [n-word],” he recalled someone saying. Then an onlooker called the police. 

The attack was brief, but its impact has stayed with Lockett. According toWTAE Pittsburgh, he has undergone four costly reconstructive surgeries since the assault, but still suffers from impaired vision. More therapy awaits. 

Four men involved in the incident — Laplace, 22, Kenneth Gault, 22, David Depretis, 21, and Christopher Laplace, 23 — were variously charged with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation, theft, reckless endangerment and criminal conspiracy. 

All four are white, as is Kyle. He is the only one who touched Lockett and the only one who could face prison time, as a result of plea deals. 

Gault and Depretis pleaded no contest and were sentenced to six months probation, WTAE reported; Matthew LaPlace pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months probation. All are required to perform 100 hours of community service to benefit a minority community. 

Christopher LaPlace, Matthew’s brother, will be sentenced on Thursday. 

“There’s no punishment,” Lockett told WTAE with a shake of the head, calling the sentences “slaps on the wrist.”

Surely this is all President Obama's fault, we all know that black people can't be anywhere near Kenny Chesney concerts.  It's in the same place in the Constitution as "Black presidents can't nominate Supreme Court justices in their final year of office."

StupidiNews!

• Pope Francis is calling for a one-year global moratorium on the death penalty, ushering in what the Catholic Church has deemed the Holy Year of Mercy.
• Pentagon officials will present an official plan today to Congress to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and to deal with the 91 detainees still there.
• The government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has agreed to the joint US-Russian cease fire starting Friday, but several terrorist groups are vowing to continue operations in Syria.
• Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates says the world needs a "miracle" on climate change in order to deal with its effects, in a letter to the world's young people asking them to help.
• Microsoft has quietly ended Skype Qik, the messaging service that even the company admits it never needed to roll out in the first place.

Last Call For Obstruction Construction

While the early primary states are in full swing right now, the real battle is for Scalia's replacement on the Supreme Court, and conservative pundits are pretty confident that there's nothing Obama can do to beat them on this.

Taking action on a Supreme Court nominee — even through the Judiciary Committee — when Obama has less than a year left in his term would be a cardinal sin, conservative activists say.

They argue the ideological balance of the court is so important that it’s not worth playing political games to take the pressure off vulnerable Republican incumbents.

“I would rank having a conservative justice as more important than having the majority in the Senate,” said David Bozell, president of For America, a conservative advocacy group. “God knows this Republican majority in the Senate hasn’t done much anyway for conservatism, period."

“If you look at some of the conservative movement’s successes, it’s in large part due to the court doing some decent things and making some good decisions,” he added.

Two of the biggest court decisions in recent years, the District of Columbia v. Heller and Citizens United v. FEC, did far more to lift restrictions on gun ownership and political spending by outside groups — two conservative priorities — than anything passed by Republicans in Congress.

“The Senate isn’t as important on a great number of issues as the Supreme Court. The Senate is not going to determine whether or not we have Second Amendment rights, the Supreme Court is. The Senate is not going to determine marriage, the Supreme Court did. The Supreme Court, not the Senate, determined abortion,” said Mike Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association.

“The issues that are of great concern to the conservative movement have all been decided by the Supreme Court,” he added.

They're correct on the stakes, at least.  A fifth liberal justice would change the face of America, and they know it.  And should the next (Democratic!) president be able to replace a retiring Ginsburg and Breyer with jurists in their 50's like Justice Kagan, on top of filling Scalia's seat, it would be a quarter-century of dominance.

And that, more than anything else, would terrify the right.

But it would begin with filling Scalia's seat, and as long as the GOP controls the Senate, they can block an appointment or simply refuse to hold hearings.

The voters would have to do something about that before this situation gets resolved.

Will they in November?

PS, for those of you worried that Clinton versus Trump wouldn't motivate voters, if winning the Supreme Court for a generation doesn't motivate them, then we deserve Trump appointing Justices.

The Pucker Factor Is Setting In

Republicans, the ones that actually see Trump as an unelectable albatross anyway, are deep into the "oh God we're screwed" stage of the race after Trump's SC win, and indications that there's no good way out.

Mainstream Republicans arose on Sunday reeling from Donald J. Trump’s sweeping victory in South Carolina, with some refusing to accept that he could be the eventual nominee and others acknowledging that his insurgent candidacy might soon be unstoppable.

With their sights set on upcoming caucuses in Nevada on Tuesday and “Super Tuesday” a week later, the Republican candidates scattered across the country to regroup and prepare to take their messages to a wider audience.

The magnitude of the implications of the results in South Carolina for Republicans had only just begun to set in on Sunday morning, as the party firmly closed the door on 25 years of Bush family primacy and turned toward a New York real estate mogul as its plurality victor.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton appeared relieved that she had won in Nevada, fending off Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and dealing a blow to his momentum with their own South Carolina showdown coming on Saturday.

But the biggest questions remain in a reshuffled Republican race that saw Jeb Bush suddenly drop out and left Mr. Trump’s remaining rivals struggling to gain momentum.  

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who finished nearly tied behind Mr. Trump in South Carolina, urged the rest of the party to coalesce around their campaigns on Sunday and tried to make the case that the nominating fight was still at an early stage.

“Last night was truly the beginning of the real Republican primary,” Mr. Rubio said on CNN. “I think the race last night was reset.”

Last night the GOP party was reset, forever set on the course of racist bigots and hate-filled rhetoric. That's always good enough for 45% of the vote and they know it, but they're unable to hide it anymore.  The beast is truly loose, and there's no way to contain it any longer. Unless you think Rubio is going to save the party.

In the coming week, the campaign plans to start rolling out a parade of new endorsements as Republican leaders make a show of coalescing around the fresh-faced Florida senator.

The backstage maneuvering to boost Rubio was described to BuzzFeed News by half a dozen GOP sources — some with official ties to the candidate, others without — who requested anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

A Rubio spokesman declined to comment Saturday night on these efforts, and the sources interviewed stressed that no one expects Rubio to become the frontrunner overnight. Last week, Rubio’s campaign manager began openly discussing the possibility that they would have to fight all the way to a brokered convention in Cleveland.

But already, Rubio’s path to the mantle of establishment savior is remarkable for its lack of modern precedent. This is a candidate who placed third in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire; who lags a mile behind the the leading candidate, and has yet to win a single primary. In fact, the closest Rubio has come so far to winning a contest was here in South Carolina, where he beat out Ted Cruz for second place by a microscopic margin — and proceed to celebrate this triumph with perhaps the loftiest victory speech ever given by a non-victor.

“If it is God’s will that we should win this election, then history will say that on this night in South Carolina,” Rubio told supporters on Saturday night.

But while he has been mocked lately for his habit of unearned end-zone dancing, Rubio had a real accomplishment to celebrate Saturday night. In an historically crowded and competitive field of contenders, he has outlasted every other viable candidate deemed acceptable by the Republican establishment. He may have gotten this far by process of elimination — but when the process is as brutal as it’s been in this race, Rubio’s team counts survival as a win.

They also know, however, that Washington Republicans’ rush to crown an establishment champion now is a direct response to Donald Trump, whose double-digit domination of the primary field in South Carolina inflamed the growing sense of panic among party elders. After two blowout victories in a row, the billionaire has revealed frighteningly few electoral vulnerabilities — winning moderates in New Hampshire, and evangelicals in South Carolina — and unless something dramatically changes soon, Trump appears poised to coast to the nomination. Impatient party leaders have determined they can’t wait for Rubio to fully prove himself, or for John Kasich and Ben Carson to drop out — they need an anti-Trump gladiator now.

Terror is setting in with Jeb out.  Absolute terror.  And their only hope is a guy who literally can't win.

The "Moderate" John Kasich

Ohio Gov. John Kasich has closed half of the state's abortion clinics and Cincinnati is in serious danger of becoming the largest metro area in the country without abortion access at all. And now Kasich wants to finish the job.

Gov. John Kasich has signed legislation to strip government money from Planned Parenthood in Ohio.

The move from the Republican presidential candidate was expected, but he made it official Sunday. It comes a day after Kasich’s weak performance in South Carolina’s GOP presidential primary and a day before he heads to Virginia to campaign.

The bill targets roughly $1.3 million in funding that Planned Parenthood receives through Ohio’s health department. The money, which is mostly federal, supports initiatives for HIV testing, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and prevention of violence against women. The legislation prohibits such funds from going to entities that perform or promote abortions.

While the measure does not specifically name Planned Parenthood, that’s who backers say would be most affected.

Never mind that similar bills in Alabama and Mississippi were overturned, but hey, he's the great moderate hope who would beat that evil Clinton bitch, right?

And yet that's what the polls show, Kasich would have by far the best shot at beating Clinton.

Go figure.

StupidiNews!

• Police are still searching for a motive in the shooting rampage by an Uber driver who apparently randomly gunned down six people in Kalamazoo, Michigan over the weekend.
• A private service was held Saturday for "To Kill A Mockingbird" author Harper Lee in her Alabama hometown, she died in her sleep on Friday at the age of 89.
• London Mayor Boris Johnson is backing the UK's exit from the EU in an upcoming referendum, becoming the highest-profile British politician to call for the "brexit".
• The death toll in Fiji is rising from super cyclone Winston as at least 20 are confirmed dead from the storm's high surf and nearly 140 MPH winds.
• Samsung is offering its Gear VR headset free with a pre-order of its new Galaxy S7 Android phone starting this week, the phone is due out March 11.

Last Call For Kim Jong Ugh

Hey nice. the North Koreans yanked our chain again and got a prize.

Days before North Korea’s latest nuclear-bomb test, the Obama administration secretly agreed to talks to try to formally end the Korean War, dropping a longstanding condition that Pyongyang first take steps to curtail its nuclear arsenal.

Instead the U.S. called for North Korea’s atomic-weapons program to be simply part of the talks. Pyongyang declined the counter-proposal, according to U.S. officials familiar with the events. Its nuclear test on Jan. 6 ended the diplomatic gambit.

The episode, in an exchange at the United Nations, was one of several unsuccessful attempts that American officials say they made to discuss denuclearization with North Korea during President Barack Obama’s second term while also negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program.

Mr. Obama has pointed to the Iran deal to signal to North Korea that he is open to a similar track with the regime of Kim Jong Un. But the White House sees North Korea as far more opaque and uncooperative. The latest fruitless exchanges typified diplomacy between the U.S. and Pyongyang in recent years.

Since taking power at the end of 2011, Mr. Kim has stepped up the North’s demands for a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, 63 years after it ended with an armistice. Many analysts see the move as an attempt to force the removal of the U.S. military in the South. The U.S. insists denuclearization must have priority, and said that has to be part of any peace talks, even while dropping the precondition that North Korea first take steps that show a willingness to give up its nuclear program.

Pyongyang rejects that. “For North Korea, winning a peace treaty is the center of the U.S. relationship,” said Go Myung-hyun, an expert on North Korea at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a Seoul-based think tank. “It feels nuclear development gives it a bigger edge to do so.”

The international reaction to North Korea’s January nuclear test and follow-up rocket launch this month was swift, with Japan imposing new penalties on Pyongyang, South Korea closing an inter-Korean industrial park that had filled the North’s coffers and American lawmakers passing a bill to tighten economic sanctions against the regime. Mr. Obama signed the bill into law last Thursday.

I would rather that the United States err on the side of being too nice than too militant, but at this point it's clear that trying to deal diplomatically with North Korea is a mistake, and that yes, President Obama absolutely got taken for a ride here.  It would explain why the new round of sanctions against the Kim Jong Un were signed with lightning speed without much complaint from either party.

Some folks just aren't worth the time for diplomacy, and I hope we've learned our lesson here. The North Koreans got their big screw you Obama moment and it worked perfectly.  Coming off Iran and expecting North Korea to follow suit?  That smacks of ego, and fighting on that level against someone like Kim Jong Un is a losing battle every time.

I love President Obama, but hey, he doesn't win them all.  And this time he got pantsed by the local bully.

The Gig Economy

Yet another reminder that the most ridiculous city to live in here in America is liberal haven San Francisco and its environs, where not everybody is a tech millionaire, but she has to pay like one.

A fired employee from the Silicon Valley tech firm Yelp! has raised anger over the $1.38 billion company’s labor practices after writing a blog that pointed out that the profitable company’s employees are struggling to survive.

The employee, known as Talia Jane online, posted on her Medium blog that many employees can’t make basic living expenses, in an open letter to the company’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, according to Business Insider. After publishing the letter, Talia Jane was fired from her post as customer service agent.

Her letter is a summary of the economic misery many millennials have found themselves in after leaving college.

“So here I am, 25-years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week,” she wrote. “Every single one of my coworkers is struggling. They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn’t pay her rent.”

But it seems San Francisco-based Yelp! didn’t appreciate her essay. No more than 2 hours after posting it, Talia went on Twitter to say she had been fired.

She had been paid just over $733 biweekly and was paying $1,245 monthly for rent.

“I make $8.15 an hour after taxes,” she said.

Among her other grievances, she writes, “I haven’t bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I’m lazy, but because I got this ten pound bag of rice before I moved here and my meals at home (including the one I’m having as I write this) consist, by and large, of that. Because I can’t afford to buy groceries.”

Business Insider says her letter and firing have led to an outpouring of support, including people donating to her PayPal account to help.

In an interview with Business Insider, she says while at Yelp, things got so bad she woke up with hunger pains.

“I brought up the wages in every quarterly meeting I had with my managers,” she said. “They were well aware that I was struggling despite doing what I could with what I had. The last straw was when I woke up yesterday two hours after going to sleep because my stomach hurt from hunger. And it’s something I’m used to, but this time it was really driving me to put something in my stomach immediately – I couldn’t wait 15 minutes for my rice to cook and it all became very clear that this shouldn’t be an issue I was dealing with to the point where I forgot it wasn’t normal.”

Here's the best part:

Yelp and its CEO both responded to Talia’s letter and firing.

“We agree with her comments about the high costs of living in San Francisco, which is why we announced in December that we are expanding our Eat24 customer support team into our Phoenix office where will pay the same wage,” Yelp said in a statement.

We can get away with $8.15 an hour in a red state.  Welcome to the gig economy, kids!

Sunday Long Read: Walls Tumblr Down

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Elspeth Reeve over at TNR, as she takes a look at teenagers who ruled kingdoms and empires on the photo blog Tumblr, made serious bank, and watched it all burn.

When Pizza reached 100,000 followers on Tumblr, she posted a picture of a pizza box, takeout chicken wings, and an orange soda spread out on her bed: “pizza and chicken wings 2 celebrate.” One fan replied, “CONGRATULATIONS GIRL! YOU DESERVE IT!” Another: “MOTHER OF GOD 100K?!?!” An anonymous user was unimpressed: “you only have 100k because of ur url.” But Pizza shot that down: “uh no i had 93k before i got this url so excuse u.”

It had taken Pizza more than two years to reach this milestone. In late 2010 she had signed up for Tumblr, the then-three-year-old social network, and secured the URL IWantMyFairyTaleEnding.tumblr.com. At first, she mostly posted photos of party outfits—hipster photos, she thought. They were the kind of images you might find under the “summery” Tumblr tag: poolside drinks, sunsets, sundresses, palm trees, tiny succulents; a shopping list of the things she wanted to buy, if only she had the money. Pizza also wrote some funny one-liners, but otherwise she reblogged jokes, switching back and forth between fashion and comedy. She tried out new names, new personas, changing her URL a few times; after a couple of years, she went all-joke. By the end of 2012, she had amassed 90,000 followers, a respectable number for a Tumblr, a sign she’d earned a certain amount of fame in her circle—the teens who reblogged her jokes. She then changed her domain to pizza.tumblr.com, her followers started to call her Pizza, and her numbers began to climb. That same year, she turned 15.

Pizza’s strategy was brilliant: When a random Tumblr would write about “pizza”—either the food or herself—she’d reblog the post to her huge audience. Once, when a user wrote “so is tumblr user pizza god or beyonce,” she dug up the post and reblogged it with the comment “I’d like to confirm that i am both.” Users marveled at how quickly she responded, how you could “summon Pizza.” It made her seem all-knowing, but not superior. After Ellen DeGeneres ordered 20 large pies at the 2014 Academy Awards, Pizza dashed off the line “did u guys see me at the Oscars.” The post received almost 500,000 notes and was reblogged by John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, with the comment “You looked great, pizza. Congrats on everything. I love you.”

One of Pizza’s most successful posts was “josh hutcherson’s parents are probably called josh hutcherdad and josh hutchermom.” It received over 419,000 notes. The joke was copied like crazy by humor accounts on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. @RelatableQuotes’s version gathered 2,958 retweets and 4,425 favorites. @SoDamnTrue tweeted it for 1,630 retweets and 2,879 favorites. In June 2014, Pizza had more than 1 million followers and was the biggest star of the Tumblr teen comedy world. Two months later, her blog was gone.

Type in pizza.tumblr.com today and you’ll get a simple, haunting message: “There’s nothing here.” The 1 million left behind began to buzz: Where was Pizza? Why did Pizza go? Who killed Pizza? Tumblr users began to piece together the mystery of her disappearance. They wrote mournful posts: “i miss tumblr user pizza *insert titanic ‘come back’ gif*.” A fake conspiracy blog joked she quit after leaving the illuminati because of a fight with Beyoncé over “how to wittily answer anonymous hate mail.” A rumor spread her blog was terminated for being racist. A Reddit user called her blog’s death “one of the biggest scandals to have ever happened on Tumblr.” Last fall, OfficialUnitedStates, another humor blog with a large following, wrote, “i miss pizza.tumblr.com … sometimes late at night i wonder what tumblr would be like if she hadnt disappeared into the night one year ago today.”

As someone who's been blogging on the net for more than seven years now, I can definitely relate to Pizza and why she quit, burnt out, depressed, obsessed.  It's a fascinating story, and there are a lot of folks out there like Pizza who all have stories of their own.

Definitely a good read this week.