Last Call For A Leaking Ship, Sinking

Can we finally stop pretending that WikiLeaks hasn't somehow become the very monster it supposedly set out to slay, and that Assange and company need to be shut down?

WikiLeaks' global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill, The Associated Press has found. 

In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom. 

"They published everything: my phone, address, name, details," said a Saudi man who told AP he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. "If the family of my wife saw this ... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people."

WikiLeaks' mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site's claim to have championed privacy even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site's allies.

Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn't immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks' stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material "involving war, spying and corruption" into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a "giant library of the world's most persecuted documents." 

The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the U.S. Democratic National Committee, Turkey's governing party and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records. 

The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed by AP. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children or refugees. 

"This has nothing to do with politics or corruption," said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document. 

"This is illegal what has happened," he said in a telephone interview. "It is illegal!"

Even if you still don't buy the reams of information pointing to the group as being a front to launder Russian intelligence interests against the West, the fact that they leak government information that sometimes turns out to be the very privacy violations that Assange and his friends are screaming about should be enough to turn the world against them.

I've never trusted the man, and the evidence against WikiLeaks has proven that to be a good assumption when dealing with Assange again and again.  It's awful.

And it needs to be stopped.

Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich takes to the NY Times in an op-ed where he complains that his own chief legislative accomplishment from his time in the House, the 1996 Welform Reform Bill, was a failure.  It's just not his fault, he'll tell you, even though his claim to fame as a fiscal conservative was writing this bill 20 years ago.

TWO decades ago, Republicans and Democrats in Congress came together to make historic changes to our nation’s welfare program, working to strike the right balance between helping people in need while setting standards for personal responsibility. Twenty years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed their bill into law, famously declaring, “Today, we are ending welfare as we know it.” 

Many people in both parties will look at this anniversary as a reason to celebrate one of the greatest legislative achievements of the 1990s. But I’m here to tell you that it didn’t work — our welfare system still isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. 

I should know. In 1996, as a Republican representative from Ohio and the chairman of the House Budget Committee, I was proud to be part of the bipartisan team that overhauled our federal welfare system. These reforms, for the first time, introduced personal accountability into the welfare equation and began moving America down a better path by imposing lifetime limits on cash benefits, requiring recipients to work or get training and giving flexibility to states in shaping their own welfare programs to meet their particular needs. 

But today, it’s clear that our welfare system is still deeply flawed, thanks in part to later changes from Washington. In 2005, Congress pulled power back from the states, reducing local flexibility by enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach that sets arbitrary time limits on education and training for people seeking sustainable employment. As a result, too many lives are thrown away by a rigid and counterproductive system that treats an individual as a number, not as a person who is desperate to gain new skills and opportunities in life.

Let's break this down: first of all, as Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Kasich would have been (and was) the numbers guy on the Welfare Reform bill.  Second, who controlled Congress and the White House in 2005?  That would be the Republican party itself that made the very changes Kasich is complaining about.

Kasich goes on to detail the workarounds and waivers he wants in Ohio, but let's not forget that in his recent presidential campaign Kasich ran chiefly on a balanced budget amendment, which would have drastically cut federal spending on the very same welfare programs he's complaining about not working for Ohio.

So it's hard to take Kasich's complaints seriously when he was a major author of the legislation he's moaning about, even more so when his own party made the situation worse by his own admission, and triply so when as President he was calling for making the situation of states like Ohio even more awful with a federal balanced budget amendment.

But that's Kasich for you.

The Coming Av-Hill-Lanche, Con't.

Joe Crespino at the NY Times makes the case that Georgia is truly in play for Hillary Clinton, just as it was for her husband when he won the Peach State in 1992, and argues that it may become the new key swing state going forward as Trump may have blown his chances there to lock the state down by using the Southern Strategy.

Richard M. Nixon pulled it off artfully in his two successful campaigns, appearing mostly in Southern cities and suburbs and letting Thurmond work the Deep South circuit. Ronald Reagan folded in religious conservatives in the 1980s to replace the generation of Dixiecrats dying off, thus consolidating the powerful mix of cultural reaction and economic conservatism that is modern Republicanism. 

Yet this year that mixture may not work. Mr. Trump’s extreme language and divisive policies are alienating moderate Republicans in places like the Atlanta exurbs — where Mrs. Clinton is running nearly even with Mr. Trump. And across the state, polls show a significantly low number of Republicans saying they’ll support their party’s candidate. 

Mr. Trump’s campaign most closely resembles the presidential campaigns of George C. Wallace, the arch-segregationist Alabama governor. Indeed, Wallace’s legacy is telling. An economic progressive, he remained a Democrat his entire life. True, he galvanized white working-class disenchantment and pioneered a populist, anti-liberal rhetoric that Ronald Reagan and subsequent Republicans would use to devastating effect. Yet he never had much appeal among the new class of suburban whites; the two were like oil and water. So, too, it would seem, are Donald Trump and moderate Southern Republicans today.

Whether or not Republicans hold on to Georgia and South Carolina this year, the lessons they are likely to take away are predictable. Democrats will assume that these states, like Virginia and North Carolina, are part of a long-term liberal trend and push traditional liberal ideas harder in future elections. Republicans will most likely write off Mr. Trump as a one-time phenomenon and not do anything. In doing so, both parties will ignore lessons from the history of the Southern conservative majority. 

What might be happening instead is something new in the South: true two-party politics, in which an urban liberal-moderate Democratic Party fights for votes in the increasingly multiethnic metropolitan South against an increasingly rural, nationalistic Republican Party. If that happens, it will transform not only the politics of the American South, but those of America itself.

Another thing to note is that Georgia now has 16 electoral votes, up from 13 when Bill Clinton won the state in 1992.  The new swing state axis in the future may not be Ohio-Pennsylvania-Florida anymore, but GA-NC-FL, especially given the fact Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, like Michigan and its 16 electoral votes, have been reliably Democratic since Bill Clinton's first term.

The country's new purple state battleground might be these states and maybe even the entire East Coast Southern region (including Virginia and even South Carolina) one day soon.

Speaking of Virginia, Clinton is up by a whopping 16 points, 48-32%, over Trump in that state in the latest Roanoke College poll.

We'll see how that holds up in the next few weeks.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama will tour flood-ravaged Louisiana today, having waited to do so by request of Gov. John Bel Edwards, Republicans are still criticizing the visit as too little, too late.
• A federal judge has ordered the State Department to review and release nearly 15,000 emails from Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary of State, beginning in October.
• A federal judge has denied a motion from three University of Texas professors to allow them to ban open carry in their classrooms this fall, ruling the motion is unlikely to succeed.
• The Pentagon is looking into how to defeat commercial drones possibly deployed by terrorists as weapons or flying bombs.
• Android's newest operating system, version 7.0, code name Nougat, goes live this week with new features aimed at VR headsets, Chrome web browser, and smartphones.

Last Call For Here Comes The Judge

The old saying "As goes Texas, goes America" doesn't actually apply to America mostly and doesn't even really exist, except it turns out in the mind of one fellow by the name of Reed O'Connor. Normally that cute little delusion wouldn't be an issue except for the fact he's a federal judge, and that Sunday night he issued a nationwide injunction against the Obama administration's guidance on treating trans students like actual human beings.

A federal judge in Texas Sunday blocked the Obama administration from enforcing guideline released by the Department of Education instructing public schools not to discriminate against transgender students. 

The judge, George W. Bush appointee Reed O'Connor, ruled in favor of the 13 states led by Texas suing the Obama administration over the guideline, in which the administration urged school districts across the country to permit transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms matching their identity.

The judge said his order was not yet weighing the "difficult issue of balancing the protection of students’ rights and that of personal privacy when using school bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other intimate facilities, while ensuring that no student is unnecessarily marginalized while attending school." 

Rather, Judge O'Connor said, he was placing an injunction on the directive because the states were likely to prevail on their argument that the administration did not go through proper rules and comment process for regulations, and that the Department of Education's interpretation of civil rights law was not in line with how the text was understood when it was passed. 

The Obama administration has argued that it has the authority to issue the directives protecting trans students because Title IX’s language barring discrimination on the basis of sex could be interpreted to include gender identity. The court Sunday said that the states would likely succeed in their arguments that the language was not ambiguous and thus does not lend itself to that interpretation. 

The order placed a nationwide injunction on the policy, and said that the administration cannot force the states challenging the directive to implement the policy. 

"Further, while this injunction remains in place, Defendants are enjoined from initiating, continuing, or concluding any investigation based on Defendants’ interpretation that the definition of sex includes gender identity in Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex," the order said. "Additionally, Defendants are enjoined from using the Guidelines or asserting the Guidelines carry weight in any litigation initiated following the date of this Order."

I'm assuming that the Obama Administration will appeal and probably get a stay on the order until an appellate court can make a ruling, but at some point this is going to end up in front of the Supreme Court and unless Democrats win control of the Senate back, there's no reason to believe that there will be nine justices actually deciding the case in a Hillary Clinton administration.

The larger issue is at some point America has to decide that laws protecting the right to discriminate are no longer acceptable in our society, and that's not going to happen until a number of Roberts court decisions get updated and/or reversed outright by a new liberal majority, starting with Merrick Garland replacing Antonin Scalia.

Here's hoping that's soon.

Trump Cards, Con't

Politico's Eli Stokols asks the obvious question: when Trump loses in November (hopefully) what happens when his months of "rigged election" rhetoric causes him, and his tens of millions of followers, not to concede or to recognize Clinton's win?

The implications—short- and long-term—are serious. Interviews with more than a dozen senior GOP operatives suggest growing panic that Trump’s descent down this alt-right rabbit hole and, beyond that, his efforts to de-legitimize the very institutions that undergird American democracy—the media and the electoral process itself—threaten not just their congressional majorities or the party’s survival but, potentially, the stability of the country’s political system.

“We’ve never had a presidential candidate who has questioned the legitimacy of an electoral outcome nationally,” said Dan Senor, who was a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “This does take us to a whole new world if the actual presidential candidate is questioning the legitimacy of this process, and the damage to our democracy could be substantial.”

In 2008, even as some on the far right questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy as president based on false suggestions he was not born in America, McCain conceded quickly. Most notably, after the Supreme Court’s 2001 Bush v. Gore decision, countless Democrats complained that the result was unjust—but Al Gore and Joe Lieberman did not.

“Among the values most necessary for a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power that’s gone on uninterrupted since 1797. What enables that is the acceptance of the election’s outcome by the losers,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP operative who was John McCain’s campaign strategist in 2008.

“Here you have a candidate after a terrible three weeks, which has all been self-inflicted, saying the only way we lose is if it’s ‘rigged’ or stolen—in a media culture where people increasingly don’t buy into generally accepted facts and turn to places to have their opinions validated where there’s no wall between extreme and mainstream positions. That’s an assault on some of the pillars that undergird our system. People need to understand just how radical a departure this is from the mean of American politics.”

Should Trump opt not to concede after a loss or deliberately roil his supporters and spark uprisings by refusing to accept the legitimacy of the election results, he would still have little recourse to alter a significant electoral victory for Clinton. Only if the election were close, hinging on one or two states where there were alleged voting irregularities, could Trump seriously contest the result in court.

But beyond who wins the White House in November, many Republicans fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and in politics itself will have a lasting impact.

When even Steve Schmidt, the man behind McCain's decision to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate, thinks Trump is way out of line, something is seriously wrong.  Not that Schmidt doesn't deserve a lot of blame for continuing the GOP down the path of delegitimizing elections and elevating the current bonkers Alt-Right to its place running the GOP or anything.

But if even Schmidt realizes Trump is well over the line, perhaps Republicans should ask themsleves how they plan to fix the cancer on American politics that their party has become, and that starts with getting rid of people like Trump, and the people who enabled him.

That of course won't happen.  Maybe it will after Trump's followers decide to take a few Second Amendment remedies to resolve their impending wipeout in November.  For now they can take comfort that in some swing states, there are Republicans registering to vote, or something.

For the rest of us, the watch continues. Greg Sargent figures this is all a play for Trump's white nationalist TV news network anyway, and he's probably right.

TrumpTV, the white network for the white time.

Black Lives Still Matter

Black lives still matter folks, even though we've actively got white supremacists like David Duke and Don Advo joyfully bragging about how they now control the Republican party:

Don Advo: So, something astonishing has happened. We appear to have taken over the Republican Party.

David Duke: Well, rank and file, but a lot of those boll weevils are still in those cotton balls, and, uh, the Republican Party may be a European-American populated party, but like a ball of cotton, you can have boll weevils in there that are going to rot it out from the inside.

And I see we're back to the defense of white supremacy through the ridiculous argument that the NAACP is inherently racist again. 

The Confederate flag waved in front of the NAACP office Sunday. The red flag with its blue X holding white stars hung over the shoulder of a White Lives Matter member who was joined by others in his group in a protest against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"We came out here to protest against the NAACP and their failure in speaking out against the atrocities that organizations like Black Lives Matter and other pro-black organizations have caused the attack and killing of white police officers, the burning down of cities and things of that nature," White Lives Matter member Ken Reed said. "If they're going to be a civil rights organization and defend their people, they also need to hold their people accountable."

The protest drew much attention as people took photos of the group which held assault rifles and "White Lives Matter" signs on the Third Ward block.

"We're not out here to instigate or start any problems," Reed said. "Obviously we're exercising our Second Amendment rights but that's because we have to defend ourselves. Their organizations and their people are shooting people based on the color of their skin. We're not. We definitely will defend ourselves, but we're not out here to start any problems."

So we're back to the days where white supremacists are demonstrating in front of the national office of the NAACP in Houston with rifles, Confederate flags and a big ol' "#WhiteLivesMatter" sign.
 
But they're not here "to start any problems."

They're just here to provide Second Amendment remedies for the problems they think they need to stop.

Gotcha.

StupidiNews!

• At least 53 are dead after a suicide bombing at a Kurdish wedding party in Turkey, Turkey's president is blaming ISIS and says the bomber was a boy age 12 to 14.
• The Justice Department is siding with poor defendants in misdemeanor charges, saying that states cannot jail people over failure to pay bail for those who cannot afford it.
• The Rio Olympics have officially come to a close as Brazil passed the Olympic flag on to Japan, who will host the 2020 Tokyo games.
• New data in South Korea shows that marriages and births are down sharply from 2000, the number one reason young people in South Korea are putting both off is the cost of housing.
• The latest update for Windows 10 apparently breaks the usage of most webcams, Microsoft has not indicated when a fix will be in place.

Last Call For Not-So Pro-Life

Texas's Republican rule has been deadly for women and babies, as the state GOP's Taliban-like fanaticism to end abortion has led to Texas having the highest mortality rate among childbirth in the developed world.

The rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014, a new study has found, for an estimated maternal mortality rate that is unmatched in any other state and the rest of the developed world.

The finding comes from a report, appearing in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, that the maternal mortality rate in the United States increased between 2000 and 2014, even while the rest of the world succeeded in reducing its rate. Excluding California, where maternal mortality declined, and Texas, where it surged, the estimated number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births rose to 23.8 in 2014 from 18.8 in 2000 – or about 27%.

But the report singled out Texas for special concern, saying the doubling of mortality rates in a two-year period was hard to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval”.

From 2000 to the end of 2010, Texas’s estimated maternal mortality rate hovered between 17.7 and 18.6 per 100,000 births. But after 2010, that rate had leaped to 33 deaths per 100,000, and in 2014 it was 35.8. Between 2010 and 2014, more than 600 women died for reasons related to their pregnancies.

No other state saw a comparable increase.

And you can 100% lay this at the feet of the Texas GOP.

In the wake of the report, reproductive health advocates are blaming the increase on Republican-led budget cuts that decimated the ranks of Texas’s reproductive healthcare clinics. In 2011, just as the spike began, the Texas state legislature cut $73.6m from the state’s family planning budget of $111.5m. The two-thirds cut forced more than 80 family planning clinics to shut down across the state. The remaining clinics managed to provide services – such as low-cost or free birth control, cancer screenings and well-woman exams – to only half as many women as before.

At the same time, Texas eliminated all Planned Parenthood clinics – whether or not they provided abortion services – from the state program that provides poor women with preventive healthcare. Previously, Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas offered cancer screenings and contraception to more than 130,000 women.

In 2013, Texas restored funding for the family planning budget to original levels. But the healthcare providers who survived the initial cuts reported struggles to restore services to their original levels.

When your laws cut the number of women who get health care during pregnancy in half, the number of women who die from childbirth complications doubles. 

Now understand that Texas is the second most-likely state besides Florida to have a major Zika virus outbreak this year, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Pro-life my ass.

The Right To Discriminate

As LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik reminds us, this week the most dire predictions of Justice Ginsburg's blistering dissent in the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision have come to pass as a federal judge has used the decision to rule that a funeral home has the right to discriminate against a transgender employee based solely on "sincerely held religious beliefs."

"The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”

That’s how Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concluded her dissent to the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision. That’s the case in which the court ruled that businesses have a right to their own religious beliefs, and could use them to flout otherwise generally applicable federal laws — in this particular, the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that businesses provide contraceptive coverage as part of their employees’ health insurance.

The minefield Ginsburg warned about has now detonated. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Sean F. Cox of Detroit ruled that a local funeral home was well within its rights to fire a transgender employee because its owner had a religious belief that gender transition violated biblical teachings.

Cox’s ruling puts the lie to Justice Samuel Alito’s denial, in his majority opinion in Hobby Lobby, that the ruling would provide a shield for a wide range of discriminatory practices by allowing them to masquerade as religious scruples. “Our decision today provides no such shield,” Alito wrote.

Ginsburg, who was on the short end of a 5-4 decision, knew better. She said there could be “little doubt” that religious claims would proliferate, because the court’s expansion of religious freedom to corporations “invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith.” She asked, “where is the stopping point?… Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage … or according women equal pay for substantially similar work?”

She further cited court precedents holding that “accommodations to religious beliefs or observances … must not significantly impinge on the interests of third parties.”

As it happens, the case before Cox involves all those points. At issue was the firing of Aimee Stephens by R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, which she had joined as a funeral director and embalmer under the name Anthony Stephens in 2007. In July 2013, she informed her employer that she would transition to her female identity starting in 2013, living and working as a woman for a year before undergoing sex-reassignment surgery. Within two weeks, she was fired. A year later, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the funeral homes on her behalf.

And this decision is just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm hoping the EEOC appeals the decision all the way up the the Supreme Court, but that won't be a very fun time if Donald Trump gets to name a ninth justice, will it?

Sunday Long Read: Flair Apparent

The long-running joke behind restaurant chain T.G.I.Friday's is of course, the flair (and if you've ever seen the excellent 1999 comedy Office Space, you know exactly what I mean.)  But what happens to all the little doodads and collectible items that crowd the walls of your favorite casual dining watering hole when the chain finally decides to go twenty-teens minimalist?

Tall windows flood the vast dining room with natural light, illuminating a minimalist mix of rectangular and round tables—each ringed by tasteful, Modernist chairs—beneath a grid of industrial light fixtures and exposed wooden beams. Is this the city’s hottest new restaurant that everyone’s been talking about, the one with the locally sourced ingredients served on artfully presented plates? No, it’s the new T.G.I. Friday’s.



That’s right, Friday’s, the once-popular singles bars and burger joints found in the parking lots of many a suburban mall. In March 2016, the famously clutter-filled chain introduced the first prototype for its spartan new design concept in Corpus Christi, Texas. The most startling aspect of this otherwise inoffensive space is the complete lack of Friday’s characteristic kitsch. No tin signs or pedal cars adorn the walls; there’s no dark wood or Tiffany-style lamps; there are no chipper red-and-white stripes to be found anywhere.

If you live or work in San Francisco, as I do, this bare, open look has become as cliché and unremarkable as Teslas and luxury condos. The new Millennial-approved restaurant aesthetic, which Friday’s is attempting to replicate in Corpus Christi, has become the beige-linen wall covering of choice, papering over the scruffier textures of the city’s quirky saloons, galleries, bookstores, and mom-and-pop shops. Suddenly, everything is “nice,” and the steep prices, which well-paid techies can easily afford, are guaranteed to keep the riffraff out.

For the past 40-plus years, casual-dining chain restaurants have dominated the suburban landscape. Friday’s and its ilk have served as cozy sanctums for Baby Boomer collectors and other nostalgia junkies, filled to the brim with mostly authentic antiques, which ranged from low-value, easy-to-find items to rare, high-dollar picks. Now that the sterile, clutter-free look has infected T.G.I. Friday’s—it will soon spread to each of its 900 restaurants around the globe—2010s urban Modernism is about to go suburban. FourTaco Bell prototypes in Southern California suggest that the upscale minimalist look is spiraling rapidly down-market.

Truth told, restaurant kitsch has been dying a slow death for the last decade. There are exceptions, of course—the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store brand depends on folksy nostalgia to appeal to its long-standing customer base. But less-rural restaurants felt the sting when 1999 movie “Office Space” mocked the typical chipper casual-dining atmosphere and its myriad “pieces of flair.” In 2005, Friday’s went through the first of a series of make-unders, removing the fake Tiffany lamps and reducing the number of vintage tchotchkes on its walls. In 2007, Friday’s competitor Ruby Tuesday jettisoned its Tiffany-style lamps and flea-market mementos for a more sophisticated look while offering more expensive fare. Five years later, Chili’s Bar and Grill debuted its remodeled prototype in Mesquite, Texas, replacing its jumble of Southwest kitsch with Modernist furniture in natural woods and a few well-appointed antiques like framed sepia-toned photographs.

The new Corpus Christi Friday’s, however, is the first time the restaurant has completely severed itself from its original retro, candy-striped image. Jeff Walsh, president of Hospitality Solutions Design, spent decades adorning casual-dining spots with memorabilia. After starting his career as an antiques picker 35 years ago, Walsh launched his Beverly, Massachusetts-based interior design group, which has worked with Friday’s, Chili’s, Applebee’s, Bennigan’s, and Chevy’s, among others. Today, he says, restaurant owners are asking for a completely different style.

As something of a signage history junkie (Cincinnati is home to the American Sign Museum, a absolute must-visit if you come to town) this is a pretty fascinating story here at Collector's Weekly, detailing the history of how the kitschy restaurant got started and where all that stuff comes from. Enjoy.

And as always, tip your server.

Aetna Tu, Brute? Con't

With Aetna pitching a fit and bailing on Obamacare exchanges after the Justice Department decided to fight the insurer's planned anti-competitive merger, one heath care think tank estimates as many as a third of Obamacare plan recipients will have only one provider available.

With the departure of Aetna and other major insurers from a significant swath of Obamacare exchanges, health care industry analysts anticipate a dramatic increase in regions where competition in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces is low come the 2017 plan year. According to a report released Friday by the health care consulting firm Avalere, consumers in seven states are currently expected to have only one carrier option in their ACA marketplaces.

The report additionally compared the level of marketplace competition by geographical regions within each state.

"Avalere experts predict that one-third of the country will have no exchange plan competition in 2017, leaving consumers with few options for coverage," a press release unveiling the report said.

Avalere's predictions are based on insurers' public announcements so far about their intentions for 2017. Those plans could still shift ahead of the Nov. 1 open enrollment period.

The Avalare report breaks down expected insurer competition level by exchange market rating regions, the geographic areas used to set insurance premiums. Thirty-six percent of exchange market rating regions may have only one or no carriers in 2017. Another 19 percent of market rating regions are currently expected to have two insurers, meaning less than half the market rating regions -- 45 percent -- will offer insurers three or more plans. That number could grow, however, if insurers announce plans to expand.

Competition's already a problem, but remember if these planned mergers had gone through, far more people would have only one provider choice.  We'll see who picks up the slack, if anyone, but the real issue is that the Obamacare model and the for-profit insurance model aren't co-existing well at all.

One of them is going to have to go eventually.

Last Call For Nope, Nope, Nope

From a clinical standpoint, Donald Trump's ego is fascinating.

Donald Trump on Friday predicted he would get 95 percent of the black vote after four years as president.

"At the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get 95 percent of the African-American vote, I promise you, because I will produce for the inner cities and I will produce for the African-Americans," Trump said at a campaign rally in Dimondale, Mich.

"The Democrats will not produce, and all they’ve done is taken advantage of your vote. That’s all they’ve done. And once the election is over, they got back to their palaces in Washington and they do nothing for you, remember it. So you have nothing to lose. One thing we know for sure is that if you keep voting for the same people, you’ll keep getting the same result. My administration will go to work for you as no administration has done before."

Trump also accused Clinton of favoring Syrian refugees over American minorities.

"Hillary Clinton would rather provide a job to a refugee from overseas than to give that job to unemployed African-American youth in cities like Detroit, who have become refugees in their own country."

I mean...every politician thinks they will win the current election they're in, that's fine. But for Trump to think he's going to get 95% of the black vote is ludicrous, especially in the same day he called us lazy.

But his ego can't abide the fact that an entire demographic group of tens of millions of Americans hate him.  Then again, facts aren't really the strong point of the GOP.

Counting On A Disaster

A new Pew Research poll indicates some very disturbing trends these days when it comes to election integrity, and shows just what kind of damage Donald Trump's ridiculous notion that the upcoming election is "rigged" has done to the public perception of American voting.

Only 11 percent of Donald Trump supporters said they were "very confident" that votes across the country will be counted accurately in the upcoming election, according to a new Pew survey, while half of his backers say they are "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that those votes will be counted correctly. 

The findings, released Friday, come after weeks of Trump comments in campaign speeches and in interviews that if he lost to Hillary Clinton it would be because the election was "rigged."

Comparatively, 49 percent of Clinton supporters are "very confident" votes nationwide will be counted accurately, while only 20 percent said they were "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that those votes will be counted correctly. 

Confidence levels rise among both candidates' supporters when they were asked if they believe their vote will be counted correctly, but the gap between Clinton and Trump backers remains. 

Ninety-two percent of Clinton supporters say they're "very" or "somewhat" confident that their vote will be counted, compared to the 69 percent of Trump supporters who fell into those groups. 

The survey also reflects a partisan shift in confidence in election integrity. In the 2004 and 2008 elections, supporters of the Republican nominee were more likely to say they were confident that their vote would be counted than the backers of the Democratic candidate.

The poll also shows a bare majority of Trump supporters (50%) believe that nationally votes will not be counted correctly(either "Not too confident" or "Not at all confident").

In other words, we've reached the point where half of Trump supporters believe the election is rigged. That represents tens of millions of Americans, potentially.

So what happens in November when Trump loses?

The Other Ukrainian Shoes Drop

As I noted yesterday, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort abruptly resigned from the Trump team Friday morning, and now we know why: Manafort is effectively on Putin's payroll as a foreign agent and didn't disclose it.

A firm run by Donald Trump's campaign chairman directly orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine's ruling political party, attempting to sway American public opinion in favor of the country's pro-Russian government, emails obtained by The Associated Press show. Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under federal law. 

The lobbying included attempts to gain positive press coverage of Ukrainian officials in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. Another goal: undercutting American public sympathy for the imprisoned rival of Ukraine's then-president. At the time, European and American leaders were pressuring Ukraine to free her. 

Gates personally directed the work of two prominent Washington lobbying firms in the matter, the emails show. He worked for Manafort's political consulting firm at the time.

Manafort and Gates' activities carry outsized importance, since they have steered Trump's campaign since April. The pair also played a formative role building out Trump's campaign operation after pushing out an early rival. Trump shook up his campaign's organization again this week, but Manafort and Gates retain their titles and much of their influence. The new disclosures about their work come as Trump faces criticism for his friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump said Thursday night that, if elected, he will ask senior officials in his administration not to accept speaking fees, for five years after leaving office, from corporations that lobby "or from any entity tied to a foreign government." He said it was among his efforts to "restore honor to government." 

Manafort and Gates have previously said they were not doing work that required them to register as foreign agents. Neither commented when reached by the AP on Thursday.

Manafort could be facing a felony conviction on that alone, but the fun part is he was still advising the pro-Putin section of the Ukrainian government as recently as this spring.

In an effort to collect previously undisclosed millions of dollars he’s owed by an oligarch-backed Ukrainian political party, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been relying on a trusted protégé whose links to Russia and its Ukrainian allies have prompted concerns among Manafort associates, according to people who worked with both men. 

The protégé, Konstantin Kilimnik, has had conversations with fellow operatives in Kiev about collecting unpaid fees owed to Manafort’s company by a Russia-friendly political party called Opposition Bloc, according to operatives who work in Ukraine.

A Russian Army-trained linguist who has told a previous employer of a background with Russian intelligence, Kilimnik started working for Manafort in 2005 when Manafort was representing Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, a gig that morphed into a long-term contract with Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin-aligned hard-liner who became president of Ukraine. 

Kilimnik eventually became “Manafort’s Manafort” in Kiev, and he continued to lead Manafort’s office there after Yanukovych fled the country for Russia in 2014, according to Ukrainian business records and interviews with several political operatives who have worked in Ukraine’s capital. Kilimnik and Manafort then teamed up to help promote Opposition Bloc, which rose from the ashes of Yanukovych’s regime. The party is funded by oligarchs who previously backed Yanukovych, including at least one who the Ukrainian operatives say is close to both Kilimnik and Manafort. 

Kilimnik has continued advising Opposition Bloc, which opposes Ukraine’s teetering pro-Western government, even as the party stopped fully paying Manafort’s firm, leaving it unable to pay some of its employees and rent, according to people familiar with the firm and its relationship to Opposition Bloc. 

All the while, Kilimnik has told people that he remains in touch with his old mentor. He told several people that he traveled to the United States and met with Manafort this spring. The trip and alleged meeting came at a time when Manafort was immersed in helping guide Trump’s campaign through the bitter Republican presidential primaries, and was trying to distance himself from his work in Ukraine.

So yes, Manafort was basically still on Yanukovich's payroll while working for Trump, and that ties him directly to Putin in a neat little package, all while explaining Trump's continuing love for Moscow.

No wonder Manafort bailed.  The Republican candidate for president is in Putin's pocket.  And quite frankly I think he's going to jail for this.

We'll see.

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump is making America great again in 2016, like it was in 1956, Just ask some of his followers, like this guy for example.

Daniel Rowe was apparently enraged at the sight of a black man and a white woman kissing on the streets of Olympia, Wash., Tuesday night. But police say he hid his violent intent behind a stony face until he was close enough to strike. 

The attack happened about 8:30 p.m. in the state’s capital city on Fourth Avenue, a classic downtown street busy with people going to a local movie theater or visiting bars and restaurants. 

Rowe had recently been released from Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, about 300 miles away. Police say he may have been among the ranks of the state’s homeless, who flock to Olympia for help on their way to Portland or Seattle. 

Rowe, 32, walked up to the couple and, without warning, yelled a racial slur and lunged with his knife, police say. The blade grazed the woman and went into the man’s hip, according to a news release from Olympia police. 

“The suspect is unknown to the victims and the attack appears to have been unprovoked,” police said in the statement.

After the attack, Rowe ran off as stunned onlookers dialed 911. The 47-year-old male victim, not realizing how badly he was injured, chased Rowe and “tripped him up,” said Lt. Paul Lower, a police department spokesman. Rowe hit his head on the ground and was knocked unconscious. 

No one involved had life-threatening injuries, but police said Rowe’s behavior grew stranger as officers tried to wrestle him into the back of a patrol car. 

“He tells them, ‘Yeah, I stabbed them. I’m a white supremacist,'” Lower said. “He begins talking about Donald Trump rallies and attacking people at the Black Lives Matter protest.”

Feel the greatness Donald Trump wants to bring to America.  Feel it all.

Last Call For Feeling The Miami Heat

House Republicans in Florida are starting to crumble on blocking President Obama's request for Zika funding now that the state is ground zero for the mosquito-borne infection in the mainland US, and the fact that Congress is taking a nearly two month vacation after skipping town without approving any funding at all hasn't been lost on voters there.  It's getting so bad now between the virus and Trump's scorched earth campaign to destroy the GOP that the Republican delegation from the Sunshine State wants House Speaker Paul Ryan to convene an emergency session to pass funding.

When Republicans left town this summer, they abandoned a billion-dollar Zika rescue package that had become mired in partisan infighting. But now some rank-and-file Florida Republicans — who represent scared constituents clamoring for Washington to do something — are pressuring their leaders to get a deal done, no matter what it takes. 

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) asked Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to convene an emergency session of Congress to pass a Zika bill immediately. Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) is worrying that Congress’ lack of action could cripple him in an already tough re-election battle. And a number of Florida Republicans, including Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.), want their party to fully fund President Barack Obama's larger $1.9 billion Zika request.

Since Congress split town in mid-July, the mosquito-borne virus situation has worsened: The first locally transmitted cases in Florida appeared at the end of July, with infections there now totaling more than 400 cases (though most were transmitted by people who had traveled abroad). On Thursday, Florida newspapers reported that parts of Miami beach had been infected. And last Friday, the White House declared a public health emergency in Puerto Rico, projecting 25 percent of residents will likely contract Zika this year — all just a few miles from Florida’s sandy coasts. 

“I don’t care how it gets passed, it just needs to get passed,” Curbelo said in a phone interview Wednesday. “There is so much anger and frustration in our country because most Americans feel they cannot count on the government to do very simple things… Congress has to show competence — and funding a response to a serious public health threat seems to me a very simple stand for ‘competence.'"

Now Rep. Curbelo especially is not a Trump fan, and I'm betting he's seeing some pretty worrying numbers from his district, where he narrowly won 2 years ago against Joe Garcia. Charlie Cook has Curbelo's district, Florida's 26th, as dead even on the partisan scale and a toss-up in November.

So suddenly, Carlos Curbelo is worried about Zika, and he now knows that blaming the Democrats while the Republicans control both the House and Senate isn't going to fly with voters in southwest Miami-Dade County, the southern tip of Florida, and the Keys where Zika (and its effect on pregnant women and tourism) is starting to become a problem.

The House isn't going to reconvene until after Labor Day, and they have 4 weeks to get a Zika funding bill passed, otherwise I'm betting strongly that Carlos Cubelo will be kicked to, well, the curb, and rightfully so.

We'll see.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

"So," people ask me. "Zandar, you live in Kentucky. Trump will probably win here by 10-12 points.  Clinton can't possibly win, so why aren't you voting for Jill Stein and the Green party?"

Well, let me think about it...

Jill Stein VP Ajamu Baraka says he stands by calling Barack Obama an "Uncle Tom president."

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) August 18, 2016

I'm going to go with "no."

The Coming Av-Hill-Lanche, Con't

At this point, even the relatively careful Sabato's Crystal Ball political forecast maintains a Hillary Clinton win in November, the question now being what her margin of victory will be.

What about the overall picture? As our regular readers know, we’ve been the Rock of Gibraltar when it comes to a Clinton victory. Our first electoral map, issued at the end of March, showed Clinton at 347 EVs to 191 EVs for Trump, and all subsequent maps have maintained those totals — until now. After looking carefully at Nebraska’s 2nd District — Nebraska being, along with Maine, a state that awards one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district — we’ve decided that NE-2 is leaning toward Clinton. It isn’t much of a lean, and it’s possible that if Trump can tighten up the contest, this one will wobble back to the Republicans. But for the moment, adding NE-2 to the Democrats makes Clinton’s total 348 EVs and Trump’s total 190 EVs. As you’ll recall, Obama carried this district in 2008 but lost it in 2012, so it’s on the margins — yet it also ranks 49th out of 435 congressional districts for percentage of non-Hispanic whites with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Moreover, not only is Clinton investing ad money in Omaha, which also bleeds into the western parts of swing state Iowa, she is also spending actual campaign time in the city, a sign that her campaign believes it can win this extra electoral vote. And did we mention Warren Buffett, a huge Hillary fan, dominates the economic landscape there?

We’ve heard from many of you asking why we haven’t switched Arizona and Georgia to Clinton. The answer is simple: There’s not enough evidence yet to justify doing so. The polling averages are basically tied in both, so we’ll keep watching. Probably these states would be the next on our map to change color if a blue tide is in the Nov. 8 forecast. On the other hand, if Trump manages a modest recovery, Arizona and Georgia would remain in his column.

By the way, we’re lowering Kansas and South Carolina from Safe Republican to Likely Republican after recent closer-than-expected surveys surfaced. In the former, the latest statewide poll from SurveyUSA had Trump ahead by just five points, 44%-39%, and notably it showed Clinton ahead 45%-35% in the Kansas City region. Echoing that finding, an internal survey for Rep. Kevin Yoder (R, KS-3) showed Clinton up 44%-38% over Trump in a district that is mostly in the Kansas City area. In addition, KS-3 was a 54%-44% Mitt Romney district in 2012, further confirming our views of NE-2, which voted for Romney by 53%-46%. Meanwhile, a Public Policy Polling survey found Trump up only 41%-39% in South Carolina, and it is a state with a high Democratic floor (but a low ceiling) because of a large black population and the Palmetto State’s racially polarized voting. We certainly don’t expect either Kansas or South Carolina to vote Democratic. Still, we have noticed that many deep red states may be preparing to produce lower-than-usual pluralities for Trump. It won’t matter in the Electoral College, of course, but it will be reflected in the national popular vote total.

Sabato's map is pretty much exactly what my map would look like if I made a forecast for November today, with the exception of Missouri moving into only Likely territory for Trump, and sliding the upper Midwest Great Lake states from Likely Clinton to Safe (or at least Minnesota.)

Trump again is heading for a beatdown, this is the Obama 2008 drubbing of McCain minus Missouri and Indiana, and both are definitely in play for Clinton.  But how cool would that be if Clinton picked up Arizona and Georgia as well?  That's the direction we're heading right now.

We'll see.  Word at this hour is that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort is now out.

StupidiNews!

• The Red Cross says this month's flooding in Louisiana is the worst US natural disaster since Superstorm Sandy four years ago, the death toll has now risen to 13.
• A federal judge has blocked ride-sharing giant Uber's attempt to settle a class action suit, saying the proposed $84 million was not adequate for the 385,000 drivers suing the company.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel says there is no reason for the EU to lift economic sanctions against Russia as Moscow has failed to meet its commitments to peace.
• Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan says that US interest rates will need to begin to rise soon if not with a "degree of rapidity" to stave off inflation.
• After a lawsuit and buyout, website Gawker.com will cease operations at the end of next week, however the group's other websites will continue.