Last Call For The Saudi Shuffle

Our good friends the Saudis are in the middle of a major government overhaul as the reality of long-term $45 oil settles in, and its effects on the economy in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia replaced its central bank chief and long-time oil minister as part of sweeping economic changes led by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to reduce the nation’s reliance on hydrocarbons.

King Salman appointed Ahmed Alkholifey to head the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, as the central bank is known, succeeding Fahad Al Mubarak, who had been in the role since 2011. Also out is Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi, the architect of the 2014 switch in OPEC policy that’s since roiled crude markets, replaced by Saudi Aramco Chairman Khalid Al-Falih.

Saudi Arabia is undergoing its biggest ever economic shakeup, led by the the deputy crown prince and second-in-line to the throne, as it prepares for the post-oil era following the plunge in crude prices that started in 2014. The kingdom’s energy industry, as well as its central bank, will play a “critical role in the economic transformation” plans, said Simon Kitchen, head of macro-strategy at Cairo-based investment bank EFG-Hermes.

“The deputy crown prince has now put his stamp on both institutions,” he said.

Al-Naimi, 80, retired after heading the oil ministry for almost 21 years. His departure is another sign of Prince Mohammed’s growing influence.

At the April 17 meeting in Doha where producers discussed a possible output freeze to curb the global glut, al-Naimi lacked the authority to complete any deal, according to his Russian and Venezuelan counterparts. The view of Prince Mohammed, who had insisted that no accord was possible without Iran, eventually prevailed and the talks collapsed.

As part of Saturday’s royal decrees, the name of the oil ministry becomes the Ministry of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources, and will undertake tasks and responsibilities related to electricity.

Prince Mohammed’s plans, outlined in the so-called “Vision 2030” blueprint announced on April 25, include setting up the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, transforming Aramco into an energy and industrial conglomerate, and generating an additional $100 billion in non-oil revenue by 2020.

Prince Mohammed is the future of Saudi Arabia, or at least the future of the House of Saud. Whether or not diversification away from oil will work is anyone's guess at this point, but it's clear that the man who believes that the country doesn't have a choice is now the man in charge, and King Salman has spent a lot of political capital getting the Deputy Crown Prince into that position.

The more pressing issue is Saudi's central bank, and whether or not it will keep its currency pegged to the US dollar.  Dropping the dollar peg would cause havoc with oil prices and certainly make things more difficult here in the US, just in time for the elections.

In other words, if you think the Saudis might be sore at us for crashing the price of oil, they could cause a lot of damage come this fall.

Just sayin'.

Pick Up Your Ride And Go Home

Whiny techbros don't like being told what they can and can't do in the Age of Disruption, and Austin, home of SXSW, decided that yes, ride-sharing drivers for services like Uber and Lyft need tougher background checks.  The companies spent nearly $8 million to force a ballot measure repealing the background check ordnance, and voters went to the polls on Saturday.

On-demand ride companies Uber and Lyft suffered an embarrassing defeat in a Saturday election in Austin as voters backed a measure requiring fingerprint background checks for drivers.

The two companies spent more than $8 million to repeal a city ordinance requiring the fingerprint-based criminal checks and launched what turned into the most expensive race in the Texas capital's history. Voters said by a margin of 56 to 44 percent they wanted the fingerprint checks to stay.

The companies outspent their opponents by 80-to-1 and when the votes were tallied their campaign contributions broke down to being more than $200 for each vote in favor of their position.

"Disappointment does not begin to describe how we feel about shutting down operations in Austin," Uber's Austin general manager Chris Nakutis said in a statement.

The stakes were high for the privately held Uber and Lyft, which say their background checks are already rigorous and ensure safety.

"Unfortunately, the rules passed by City Council don't allow true ridesharing to operate," Lyft said, adding it will suspend operations in Austin as of Monday.

That's right, both Uber and Lyft have long threatened to shut down their services if the repeal failed, warning that the city will lose tens of millions in business and that hundreds of drivers will lose their jobs.

Which isn't true, as the cost of the tougher background checks in Austin would have been less than the $8 million they spent lobbying for the repeal, but they figure they can force the city to come crawling back to them eventually.

Most likely I see a Republican-backed statewide measure that repeals the Austin ordnance soon.  In the meantime, the techbros will continue to whine.

Moose Versus Zombie

It seem Sarah Palin (who has been blessedly quiet these last few months because she actually looks sane next to Trump) is injecting herself into faux relevance again by going after GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Sarah Palin will work to defeat House Speaker Paul Ryan by backing his primary opponent in Wisconsin, the former Alaska governor told CNN's Jake Tapper. 

Palin said in an interview that airs Sunday on "State of the Union" that her decision was sparked by Ryan's bombshell announcement to Tapper last week that he wasn't yet ready to support Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive nominee. Palin endorsed Trump back in January. 

"I think Paul Ryan is soon to be 'Cantored,' as in Eric Cantor," Palin said, referring to the former Republican House majority leader who was ousted in a shocking upset in 2014 when challenger Dave Brat ran to his right in a Virginia primary. 

"His political career is over but for a miracle because he has so disrespected the will of the people, and as the leader of the GOP, the convention, certainly he is to remain neutral, and for him to already come out and say who he will not support is not a wise decision of his," Palin continued.

I didn't even know who Paul Ryan's primary opponent is, and I kind of thought Wisconsin's primaries were over, but it turns out the primaries for congressional districts are on August 6, and the only other Republican in the race is a guy by the name of Paul Nehlen. Nehlen it turns out is the newest Tea Party hero of the Breitbart crowd after Paul Ryan's comments on Trump.

When House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday he wasn’t ready to support Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, his Wisconsin primary opponent saw an opening.

Following the Trump campaign’s lash-out on Friday, Paul Nehlen seized that opening, suggesting he will do what Ryan won't: support Trump.

“If Mr. Trump is the nominee, I will support that decision, because it will have been the will of the voters that got him there,” the Republican challenging Ryan for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District seat in the state’s August primary said in a statement.

Nehlen is seeking to gain an edge in the primary against Ryan, who won his 2014 primary by nearly 90 percentage points. This time around, the Trump campaign and allies have aggressively attacked the House speaker and Republican National Convention chair, with Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson intimating that Ryan is unfit for his role if he can’t support the presumptive nominee.

Nehlen now has Moose Lady on his side, for better or for worse.

This is going to be fun.

Sunday Long Read: The Perfect Drug

America's long opioid abuse crisis continues, and no drug is more responsible for the abuse of prescription painkillers the way Oxycontin is.  A new major LA Times investigation into the company that developed it, Purdue Pharma, is a frightening look at to what lengths Big Pharma will go to when it knew it had a $20 billion drug on its hands.

Over the last 20 years, more than 7 million Americans have abused OxyContin, according to the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The drug is widely blamed for setting off the nation’s prescription opioid epidemic, which has claimed more than 190,000 lives from overdoses involving OxyContin and other painkillers since 1999.

The internal Purdue documents reviewed by The Times come from court cases and government investigations and include many records sealed by the courts. They span three decades, from the conception of OxyContin in the mid-1980s to 2011, and include emails, memos, meeting minutes and sales reports, as well as sworn testimony by executives, sales reps and other employees. 

The documents provide a detailed picture of the development and marketing of OxyContin, how Purdue executives responded to complaints that its effects wearoff early, and their fears about the financial impact of any departure from 12-hour dosing.
Reporters also examined Food and Drug Administration records, Patent Office files and medical journal articles, and interviewed experts in pain treatment, addiction medicine and pharmacology. 

Experts said that when there are gaps in the effect of a narcotic like OxyContin, patients can suffer body aches, nausea, anxiety and other symptoms of withdrawal. When the agony is relieved by the next dose, it creates a cycle of pain and euphoria that fosters addiction, they said. 

OxyContin taken at 12-hour intervals could be “the perfect recipe for addiction,” said Theodore J. Cicero, a neuropharmacologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a leading researcher on how opioids affect the brain. 

Patients in whom the drug doesn’t last 12 hours can suffer both a return of their underlying pain and “the beginning stages of acute withdrawal,” Cicero said. “That becomes a very powerful motivator for people to take more drugs.”

The bottom line is that Oxycontin was designed to addict patients, to hook them and reel them in and line Purdue's pockets with billions of dollars.  They knew full well that the drug wore off sooner than 12 hours and left patients in crippling pain and suffering from withdrawal symptoms, and millions were turned into addicts because of it.  They pushed this poison on to doctors and patients to deal with chronic pain of all types and counted the cash rolling in.

So yeah, don't tell me that the bad guys are street corner pushers and small-time hustlers when Big Pharma is the biggest drug kingpin of them all.

Last Call For The Guy Who Got Trump Right

If there is a reason why one person who got Donald Trump right out of all the pundits was correct, it's probably because he's not a political pundit but an economic one: The Kroog.

Finally, I can almost guarantee that we’ll see attempts to sanitize the positions and motives of Trump supporters, to downplay the racism that is at the heart of the movement and pretend that what voters really care about are the priorities of D.C. insiders — a process I think of as “centrification.”

That is, after all, what happened after the rise of the Tea Party. I’ve seen claims that Tea Partiers were motivated by Wall Street bailouts, or even that the movement was largely about fiscal responsibility, driven by voters upset about budget deficits.

In fact, there was never a hint that any of these things mattered; if you followed the actual progress of the movement, it was always about white voters angry at the thought that their taxes might be used to help Those People, whether via mortgage relief for distressed minority homeowners or health care for low-income families.

Now I’m seeing suggestions that Trumpism is driven by concerns about political gridlock. No, it isn’t. It isn’t even mainly about “economic anxiety.”

Trump support in the primaries was strongly correlated with racial resentment: We’re looking at a movement of white men angry that they no longer dominate American society the way they used to. And to pretend otherwise is to give both the movement and the man who leads it a free pass.

In the end, bad reporting probably won’t change the election’s outcome, because the truth is that those angry white men are right about their declining role. America is increasingly becoming a racially diverse, socially tolerant society, not at all like the Republican base, let alone the plurality of that base that chose Donald Trump.

Still, the public has a right to be properly informed. The news media should do all it can to resist false equivalence and centrification, and report what’s really going on.

This is exactly correct.  It has always been about race in the Age of Obama. Angry white men anting to make sure everyone else gets punished, and using every threat imaginable to discourage the rest of us.

Paul Krugman, to his credit, had Trump pegged months ago.

A Gentlemanly Disagreement Between Co-Workers

Been waiting for this one for months now: Captain America: Civil War is here.




The Non-Spoiler review:  Go see it and enjoy it, it's everything Avengers: Age of Ultron should have been and more, and ties up a lot of loose ends from Captain America: Winter Soldier to boot.

Our movie opens with some unfinished business: HYDRA agents in 1991 programming the aforementioned Winter Soldier (Sebastian Shaw, who was once Cap's faithful sidekick Bucky) to "sanction and retrieve" a target. He is ruthlessly effective, and the mission will have great repercussions 25 years later...

...which brings us to Lagos, Nigeria, present day. Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johanssen), Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) are tracking down former HYDRA mercenary Crossbones (Frank Grillo) to a chemical weapons lab.  The mission is going well until Crossbones drops Bucky's name and Cap, distracted by the news, almost gets half of a crowded marketplace blown to pieces.

As it is, the dozens of casualties are one international incident too far for the United Nations to continue to stand back and let the Avengers operate without oversight.  General "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt) drops a rather large set of United Nations accords on the team and says sign, or else.  Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Vision (Paul Bettany), War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Black Widow all decide doing so is a good idea.  Cap, Falcon, and Scarlet Witch do not.

But when the Avengers once again fail to stop people from getting killed at the accord signing ceremony, and Bucky is the prime suspect, everything goes to hell rather quickly.  Cap is willing to bet everything that Bucky is being controlled again, and he wants to find out who is pulling his strings.  Iron Man is sent to bring Bucky in, especially since the attack at the ceremony kills the King of Wakanda, leaving T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) as the new monarch and protector of the African nation, the Black Panther.

What results is a fight long brewing between the Avengers and their allies in the wake of the most recent Marvel films, and it's worth every penny, particularly the fight scene that you know is coming from the opening scene, and behind it all is a secret long buried in the past...

The SPOILERS (you have been warned!) start after the jump.

No Trump Cards For Mittens

Yes, it's a Slate Pitch, but it's Jamelle Bouie and it's right: Donald Trump is going to lose in November, and the proof of that is Mitt Romney.

Romney wasn’t a bad candidate. He ran a competent and largely professional campaign against an incumbent who presided over high unemployment and slow growth. No, Romney wasn’t favored, but he also had a better shot than most candidates who run against a sitting president. If you believe that Trump can win—absent an exogenous shock like a terrorist attack or recession—you need to show how he beats Romney. You need to move this from the realm of speculation and into the world as it exists.

The idea of Trump as a plausible winner is rooted in the same error that drove pundits to discount and dismiss him as late as the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Then, observers saw the polls—which accurately showed his appeal to a cross-section of Republican voters—but refused to believe them. It was unthinkable that a field of ostensibly talented candidates would fail to stop Trump before he gained traction.

That’s what happened. If Trump had entered the race as an Icarus-type—a candidate who shoots to the top but withers under the heat—then by the fall, he was something different. He was a genuine presence in a crowded field with real support among Republican voters. No one bothered to stop him. Afraid of alienating Trump’s supporters, GOP leaders disarmed themselves; fearful of Trump’s attacks, Republican donors refused to fund a confrontation; complacent about his threat, Republican candidates focused on clearing their respective “lanes” rather than stopping the leader in the field. By the time Republican voters went to the ballot box, Trump had cultivated a following.

None of that is operative in the general election. Unlike Republicans, Democrats plan to hit Trump with a fusillade of attacks from all directions. And they plan to exploit weaknesses that Republicans didn’t touch until it was too late to stop Trump. They’ll hit Trump for his open and vicious misogyny; they’ll publicize his history of racism and discrimination; they’ll attack him where he’s strong with stories of ordinary people he’s scammed and defrauded; they’ll emphasize the fact that he doesn’t know anything about the world or governing.

So just like the math of how Hillary and Trump are going to be the nominees, the numbers also show Hillary Clinton is going to win, unless you think that Trump is going to win the black, Latino, and woman vote.

It's not going to happen.

Like House Of Cards, Only With Idiots

The neocon branch of the foreign policy press is absolutely furious with this NY Times interview by David Samuels with White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

As the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Rhodes writes the president’s speeches, plans his trips abroad and runs communications strategy across the White House, tasks that, taken individually, give little sense of the importance of his role. He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself. The president and Rhodes communicate “regularly, several times a day,” according to Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, who is known for captaining a tight ship. “I see it throughout the day in person,” he says, adding that he is sure that in addition to the two to three hours that Rhodes might spend with Obama daily, the two men communicate remotely throughout the day via email and phone calls. Rhodes strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign, helped negotiate the opening of American relations with Cuba after a hiatus of more than 50 years and has been a co-writer of all of Obama’s major foreign-policy speeches. “Every day he does 12 jobs, and he does them better than the other people who have those jobs,” Terry Szuplat, the longest-tenured member of the National Security Council speechwriting corps, told me. On the largest and smallest questions alike, the voice in which America speaks to the world is that of Ben Rhodes.

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.

And if you're wondering why veteran foreign policy Villagers are calling for Rhodes's head on a pike, well the reaction of Tom Ricks is typical.  They hate the guy, because Rhodes called them out.

Rhodes comes off like a real asshole. This is not a matter of politics — I have voted for Obama twice. Nor do I mind Rhodes’s contempt for many political reporters: “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.

I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial-strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.

Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.

Yeah, that's right, one of the more important Pentagon/State beat writers around just called the Vice President and the Secretary of State "hacks" and "puppets" of a 38-year old creative writing graduate.

There's more.

Last Call For London Calling

London has just elected Sadiq Khan, Labour Party candidate, as Mayor of the city, and the campaign was as brutal, as nasty, and as racist as you can imagine.

Sadiq Khan, a practicing Muslim and Labour Party politician, has been elected mayor of London, marking a political milestone in the Western world. 

Londoners voted in Khan, 45, as the first Muslim mayor of a major Western capital city. He will take office in a metropolis where his fellow Muslims comprise about 12% of the population. 

His victory followed an unusually bitter campaign against Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith, the son of a billionaire, in which race and religion have proven ugly flashpoints. 

The London-born son of Pakistani immigrants, Khan grew up with his six brothers and sister in a three-bedroom, public housing apartment. He studied law, became a university lecturer and the chairman of a civil liberties group, and was elected to Parliament in 2005. 

Affordable housing in a city increasingly drawing the super-rich, aging infrastructure and transportation are top issues facing the new mayor. 

Khan is replacing incumbent Boris Johnson, a colorful and popular figure who took office in 2008 and was a rare Conservative mayor in the Labour-leaning British capital. 

Johnson is leading the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union at a referendum on June 23. He is clashing with Prime Minister David Cameron, who is in favor of the United Kingdom remaining.

By the way, Goldsmith definitely played the terror card as it became clear he was going to lose, accusing the Labour Party of allowing the city to fall to Islamic terrorists that had attacked the city on July 7, 2005.

If that wasn't bad enough, there's the whole separate issue of Labour's leader being Jeremy Corbin, somebody very much considered to be wildly far left with that party having definite problems with those who are anti-Semitic making some very ugly comments.

Even PM David Cameron stepped into the fight, openly accusing Khan of being an ISIS sympathizer.

In the end, Khan won by a nearly 60-40% margin, but I fear this is going to have a major effect on the referendum for the UK to exit the EU next month.

We'll find out soon.

A Big Glass Of Nader Aid For The GOP

You can thank Ross Perot for screwing Poppy Bush over in 1992 to the point where Bill Clinton won states like Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia on the way to taking a 200 electoral vote win, and ol' Ross came back and did it again four years later to Bob Dole, handing Clinton an even larger re-election victory.

Oh please, please please please let a third party split the GOP and put another Clinton in the White House again 20 years later.

The clock is fast ticking down for a third-party run, at least when it comes to getting on the ballot in many states. Independent candidates running for president must file applications and petitions of support in Texas, which has 38 electoral votes, the second-most of any state, by May 9, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office. 

“It’s an uphill climb, everybody recognizes that, regardless of the route we go, but there are a lot of Republican donors sitting on the sidelines who would rather fund a third party than fund Donald Trump,” said Erickson, who said campaign finance experts within the movement estimate it will cost a minimum of $250 million to fund a third-party bid. 

But even if a third-party candidate failed to make the ballot in many states, the mere presence of a prominent alternative in the race could be enough to deny Trump the White House.

Conservatives have floated several names as a potential Trump spoiler. 

They include former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (R), who is poised to become the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee; former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who was long an outspoken conservative voice in Congress; and freshman Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who early Thursday morning posted on Facebook an open letter calling for a third-party option to Trump and Clinton.

National Review, a leading conservative publication, published a piece Thursday afternoon making the case for Johnson, praising him as a self-made businessman and a fiscal conservative who favors free trade and gun rights. 

“Everybody is looking at Gary Johnson right now to see where decides to settle on some of these issues,” Erickson said.

He added that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R), who dropped his bid for the GOP nomination earlier this year, “would be viable” as well.

Erickson said the key issue is abortion. Any candidate who will at least leave it to the states instead of the federal government to set abortion laws could draw strong support, he said. 

The biggest task ahead is finding a candidate whom conservatives can rally behind, and who has the stature needed to become a national candidate and take on Trump.

I can't begin to tell you how happy I'd be to see a Tea Party v Trump third party run, it would arguably give Clinton 538 electoral votes.  It would be amazing.

So go for it, guys.  Please.

NC Goes Down The Crapper

North Carolina Republicans are calling out federal Justice Department officials, saying they will openly defy a deadline to modify the state's HB2 "bathroom bill".  At stake: billions of dollars in federal Title IX funding for state schools and universities as lawmakers face civil rights violations.

The Republican leaders of North Carolina’s General Assembly defiantly announced Thursday that they would not meet a Monday deadline to suspend or repeal a state law limiting bathroom access for transgender people, setting up a potential legal showdown over what has become one of the nation’s most explosive cultural issues.

“We will take no action by Monday,” said Tim Moore, the speaker of the State House of Representatives, referring to the deadline the Justice Department gave the state to tell federal officials whether the law would stand. “That deadline will come and go.”

Though Mr. Moore criticized the deadline as “unreasonable,” he also seemed to signal that Republicans might eventually agree to alter the law, which forbids people to use public building restrooms that do not match the gender listed on their birth certificates.

“The legislative process doesn’t work where a response can be given by just a few days,” he said, “so we’re going to move at the speed that we’re going to move at to look at what our options are at this point.”

His comments, as well as a private meeting later with a leading critic of the law, Mayor Jennifer Roberts of Charlotte, were indications that lawmakers here may be concerned about the potentially damaging consequences of keeping the law intact and defying the Justice Department.

The Obama administration contends that the law violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and its finding could push the federal government to withhold in federal aid.

The law puts more than $4.8 billion in federal funding to state and local governments at risk, according to a recent analysis by the Williams Institute, a research organization at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school that focuses on sexual orientation and gender identity law. The bulk of those losses would be from education funds, though the state could also lose money for career services, health care, housing and other purposes.

$5 billion is real money folks, and I'm not sure what's going to happen to my home state if the feds make good on this threat.  This leverage is there for a reason, but ten million people in North Carolina are going to be hurt if this happens. That's $500 a person roughly, and that's not trivial, especially in the poorer parts of the Tarheel State.

Beyond that, the political fallout isn't going to be fun either.  We'll see which side the voters blame for this, the Obama administration or GOP Gov. Pat McCrory and the NC GOP.  A major court battle isn't out of the question either, so this could drag on for years, especially if McCrory wins re-election in November and voters keep the NC GOP in power.

StupidiNews!

• Newly disclosed court documents reveal that a claim of sexual abuse by former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was brought to the university as early as 1976.
• North Korea's ruling party congress will meet formally for the first time in nearly 40 years to bestow its blessing on ruler Kim Jong Un.
• Greek workers began a 48 hour strike Friday to protest austerity measures going into effect to satisfy EU finance officials and creditors.
• As raging wildfires in Alberta, Canada continue near the city of Fort McMurray, estimates indicate the blaze could be Canada's most expensive natural disaster to date, topping $7 billion.
• Commercial rocket company SpaceX has once again successfully landed a rocket on a drone ship, this time at night, and with the rocket traveling faster and further.

Last Call For The Trump Chumps

Politico's Nick Gass calls out the major pundits who (unlike yours truly, I might add) completely dismissed Donald Trump as a threat last year and gave him no chance of winning the nomination, predicting time and again that Trump would lose.

The list of failed pundits is impressive: both Five Thirty Eight's Nate Silver and Harry Enten, CNN's Stuart Stevens, Bloomberg's Jon Bernstein, NY Times Nate Cohn, and conservative columnists Ross Douthat and of course, Bloody Bill Kristol, were all wrong again.

What Gass doesn't talk about is why these pundits were wrong, and that's the real story.

You see, what all these super-smart white guys missed, or more likely refused to see, is the seething racism that has driven the GOP in the Age of Obama.  What Trump offered was, simply, vengeance against those people who elected Obama in 2008.

Deport the Muslims, deport the Mexicans, get the jobs back, stick it to China, build the wall, all this was done to make white guys feel like they should be back on top again, where they belong.  It's not "nationalism", Trump absolutely wants America to be the top dog again in the military world, and has time and again talked about using force all the way up to nuclear weapons to deal with ISIS. Likewise, it's not "populism" either as he all but ignored the hot button Republican social wedge issues like gay marriage, abortion, and transphobia.

No, where the pundits missed everything was refusing to acknowledge Trump's combination white supremacy/prosperity gospel ticket, where Trump was literally The Rich White Guy Who Can Solve Our Problems and they all ignored the racism dripping from Trump's words from day one.  Those of us who immediately pegged Trump's real slogan as "Make America White Again" knew exactly what was going on, but the pundit corps had to tie themselves in knots trying to justify Trump's appeal without calling him a racist.

You take the racism out of Trump's pitch, he's just the Caddyshack version of Mitt Romney. And Mitt Romney is a loser.  That's why they all predicted his demise, because who wants to admit that tens of millions of Americans are racist assholes in 2016 who are super cool with "Hey let's deport people for being Hispanic or Muslim"?

So they invented reasons on paper why Trump was winning, the plaintive bleating about "working class America" which was all nonsense, for example.  It had to be something other than race, otherwise you'd basically be accusing the Republican party of being a bunch of racists.

Hey guess what, America? The Republican party is a bunch of racists, and Donald Trump neatly proves that theory.

So let's stop pretending otherwise. Let's stop pretending that openly using the Southern Strategy in 2016 was somehow not the difference in giving Trump the nomination and dispatching his opponents, because Trump had the balls to actually say what the racist base of the GOP wanted him to say: that black folks and Muslims and Hispanic folks and LGBTQ folks and all of those people needed to be put in our respective places, with rich straight white guys on top of the food chain again, unopposed.

Trump was inevitable, as Dave von Ebers said on Wednesday:

Donald Trump is Lonesome Rhodes meets Johnny Gentle from “Infinite Jest”.

— Dave (@D_v_E) May 4, 2016

The GOP was always going to disgorge someone out like Trump to vote for. And here he is, a couple of months out from being the President.  This is where the GOP nominee is here in 2016.

Police are trying to determine whether a notorious white supremacist left threatening leaflets on vehicles in a Sacramento neighborhood. 

The leaflets warned against “white genocide” — a white nationalist slogan — and threatened targeted violence against Muslims and Hispanics, reported the Sacramento Bee. 

The fliers urged “white resistance groups and lone wolves” to activate the “hundred little death camp policy” and begin slaughtering Muslims and Latinos in the U.S., Europe and Russia. 

“If you have not secured a body dump-site, do so now!” the leaflets warn. “Kidnap, rob, torture for information and execute all Muslims and Latinos. Leave no survivors.”

This is what the pundits didn't want to see when they "missed" Trump's rise.  Remember that.

Worst Kasich Scenario: The Aftermath

The Cincinnati Enquirer's Chrissie Thompson lays out the campaign epitaph of Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich, who was the last man standing between Donald Trump and the Republican nomination in Cleveland in July.

When John Kasich first was deciding to run for president, he continually told advisers: “I don’t want to embarrass myself.”

Did he, or did he not? The question, and its impact on Kasich’s legacy, lingers now that Kasich has removed himself from the Republican race, leaving Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee.

You can point to how the Ohio governor entered as the 16th of 17 major GOP candidates and outlasted all but one. How he and his allies defeated or outlasted several opponents who outspent them by more than $100 million each. And how when he launched his campaign, his national GOP polling total was within the margin of error – statistically a zero. Yet by springtime, he consistently polled as the only Republican ahead of Democrat Hillary Clinton in general election matchups.

For a few hours, Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, Kasich had the one-on-one match with Trump he had always wanted. And the general election polls seemed to show the presidency, for decades an ultimate goal, was nearly within his grasp.

But look at it from the other side.

Kasich started fading from the national consciousness weeks ago. He only won one state, his native Ohio; only picked up nine delegates after that March 15 win; only won 153 delegates total, to Trump’s 1,053 and counting. He talked of fighting for the soul of the Republican Party, yet his backers comprised the GOP of yesteryear, without many current leaders in the mix. For the last couple of months, Kasich's only hope of becoming president was helping to keep Trump from winning the nomination outright, forcing a contested convention, where he hoped to lure delegates to his side.

While some clung to Kasich as the last hope for an inclusive, pragmatic Republican Party, calling Trump a demagogue and Ted Cruz an extremist, the collective Republican voting base shrugged. Kasich’s message failed to win them. So on Wednesday evening, he suspended his presidential campaign.

“The spirit, the essence of America, lies in the hearts and souls of us. You see, some missed this message. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t a great soundbite,” Kasich said. “As I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life."

The fact that Kasich was considered in any way a moderate Republican shows just how awful the GOP clate of nominees were.  Kasich made it very clear he wanted to do to the nation what he has wanted to do to Ohio: eliminate the last vestiges of public unions, drive abortion clinics out of business with TRAP laws, slash spending for the most vulnerable citizens and most depressing, force the US into eliminating deficit spending with a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that would effectively destroy the country's economy, starting with the safety net programs of Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.

For this, he was considered a "moderate" Republican instead of a lunatic.

And yet for the GOP Kasich wasn't nearly awful enough to consider voting for.  Ironically, he would have fared the best in the general out of virtually all of the GOP nominees, arguably beating Clinton handily and giving Sanders by far his toughest opponent, but the GOP of Trump wanted nothing to do with him in the end.

So, Kasich will serve out his second term an simply wreck the Buckeye State instead as Ohio continues its descent into Red State madness and total Republican control instead.

That's Kasich's real legacy, and it's abhorrent.

Water Water Everywhere...

...but not a safe drop to drink in Flint, Michigan as President Obama visited the embattled city yesterday in order to let residents know that America will fix the problem.

Obama used his visit to the crisis-stricken city of 100,000 residents to promote the use of lead-removing faucet filters in an effort to bring some calm among residents distrustful of government.

“Although I understand the fear and concern that people have, and it is entirely legitimate, what the science tells us at this stage is you should not drink any of the water that is not filtered but if you get the filter and use it properly, that water can be consumed,” Obama said in a speech at Northwestern High School. “That’s information that I trust and I believe.”

But trust was in short supply among some Flint residents in the crowd of 1,100 that packed into Northwestern High School, many of whom booed Gov. Rick Snyder when he appeared before the president in an impromptu attempt to apologize for the public health crisis.

“When our filtered water smells like bleach, there’s no way possible it’s safe to drink,” said Lulu Brezzell, the mother of Amaryana Copeny, the 9-year-old girl known as “Little Miss Flint” who is credited with getting Obama to visit Flint. “There are so many more issues than just lead.”

Can you blame them?  Republicans made sure government doesn't work in state after state, of course people don't trust local and state governments anymore when they can't provide clean water and other basic necessities.

Obama said the Flint water crisis is the result of a limited government ideology that is as “corrosive” as the city’s river water that caused lead to leach from aging pipelines.

In a veiled shot at Republicans who run Michigan’s government and Congress, Obama said the lead-contaminated water is the product of “a corrosive attitude that exists in our politics and exists in too many levels of government.”

“That attitude is as corrosive to our democracy as the stuff that resulted in lead in your water,” Obama told Flint residents.

Obama made the comments during a speech in the city on Wednesday, a few hours after he drank filtered Flint water after a briefing by federal officials on the city’s lead-contaminated water.

The president’s hour-long speech was sometimes comedic but mostly sobering. While the commander-in-chief is popular in Flint, he was mostly greeted with silence from the crowd when he encouraged them to drink filtered water.

At one point during the speech, Obama requested a glass of filtered water. A few minutes later, after the water had not arrived, the president coughed and said: “I really did need a glass of water. This is not a stunt.”

The president vouched for the safety of certified filters and encouraged most city residents to start drinking filtered water instead of bottled water.

The reality is that months, if not years after President Obama is out of office, American cities like Flint will still have massive infrastructure problems because Republicans assure we cannot and will not spend the money needed to fix the problem.