Last Call For Blinded By The Light

Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night...

Emerging victorious from a campaign in which he called climate change a hoax, promised to reinvigorate coal mining and vowed to overturn major international agreements and domestic regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, President-elect Donald Trump’s next target in his political denial of human-driven global warming might be NASA’s $2-billion annual budget for Earth science.

Trump himself has been relatively mum about his plans for NASA. But in an op–ed published weeks before the election, two Trump space policy advisors—the former congressman Robert Walker and the economist Peter Navarro—wrote that the agency is too focused on “politically correct environmental monitoring” of climate change. Under a Trump administration, they wrote, NASA would prioritize “deep-space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies,” such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“Budgets would have to be realigned to handle that transfer,” Walker tells Scientific American. “We would also anticipate that any new [Earth science] programs would be funded by those agencies.” With a budget about a quarter of NASA’s, NOAA spends the bulk of its funds on weather forecasting and environmental monitoring. It contracts with NASA to use the space agency’s Earth-observing satellites, and relies on NASA’s help in building and launching satellites of its own. The NSF has a budget roughly three times smaller than NASA’s, and has essentially no involvement in building, launching or operating satellites. In recent years Republican lawmakers have sought budget cuts to climate change–related Earth science programs at all three agencies.

Now set to hold majorities in both the House and Senate, Republicans appear likely to support forthcoming Trump administration proposals to pare back NASA’s Earth science budget, which grew by some 50 percent under the Obama administration. That boost, which gave Earth science the lion’s share of NASA’s science funding, has sustained a growing fleet of satellites that collect data demonstrating climate change’s reality: rising surface temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions, retreating glaciers and ice sheets, and shifting patterns of rainfall and vegetation growth, to name a few.

“Earth science’s preferred growth under Obama—the fact that it has grown over all of NASA’s other science—has created a big political target on its back and validated, in a sense, Republican interpretations of its partisan nature,” says Casey Dreier, director of space policy for The Planetary Society. “And this is taking place in a new political dynamic of strong, near-universal condemnation and skepticism of climate change by the Republican Party, without a Democratic president and key members of Congress that used to push back. That’s a bad double whammy for Earth science.”

If we pretend that we can't see climate change happening, then it's not happening, right?

We Don't Need No Education, Con't

If there were ever a president who would turn American public schools into for-profit "charter school" mills bilking taxpayers for billions, it would be the man behind Trump University's $25 million settlement for fraud. Now imagine the criteria for kind of person he'd select as his Education Secretary, and at the top of your list would be former Michigan GOP party chair and "charter school" advocate Betsy DeVos.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to use federal funds to encourage states to make school choice available to all poor students, including through vouchers that allow families to take public funding to private schools.

That’s exactly what DeVos has zealously worked to make happen on a state-by-state basis for decades. In 2000, she helped get a ballot measure before Michigan voters that would have enshrined a right to vouchers in the state’s Constitution. After the measure failed, she and her husband formed a political action committee to support pro-voucher candidates nationally. Less than a decade later, the group counted a 121-60 win-loss record.

One recipient of its support: former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who created the voucher program that Trump’s vice president-elect, Mike Pence, later expanded. Indeed, DeVos’s vision puts her more in line with Pence, who has supported private school vouchers for both low- and middle-income families, than with Trump, whose plan extends only to poor families.

Ahh, but it gets worse.  It always does with Trump.

DeVos and her husband played a role in getting Michigan’s charter school law passed in 1993, and ever since have worked to protect charters from additional regulation. When Michigan lawmakers this year were considering a measure that would have added oversight for charter schools in Detroit, members of the DeVos family poured $1.45 million into legislators’ campaign coffers — an average of $25,000 a day for seven weeks. Oversight was not included in the final legislation.

The DeVos influence is one reason that Michigan’s charter sector is among the least regulated in the country. Roughly 80 percent of charters in Michigan are run by private companies, far more than in any other state. And state authorities have done little up to now to ensure that charter schools are effectively serving students, eliciting concern from current federal authorities.

“There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters,” current U.S. Secretary of Education John King told Chalkbeat about Michigan last month.

So if you wanted to bring the Trump University model to America's public schools, you'd pick this woman to lead the way.

Needless to say, guess who Trump wants for the job?

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday said he intends to appoint West Michigan GOP mega donor and philanthropist Betsy DeVos to be his education secretary, putting an ardent supporter of school choice in charge of the nation’s education policy.

DeVos, 58, is seen as a national leader in the school choice movement, which she has called an attempt to “empower” parents to find good schools for their children, whether they be traditional public schools in other neighborhoods, charter schools, virtual schools or private institutions.

“Betsy DeVos is a brilliant and passionate education advocate,” Trump said Wednesday in a statement. “Under her leadership, we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families.”

And keep in mind DeVos has precisely zero experience as an educator whatsoever.  But she has a lot of money, and she's good at the whole charter school scam.  And yes, I've had my differences with Arne Duncan over the years, but he never, ever wanted to do to America's public schools what DeVos wants to do: raze them to the ground and turn them over to corporate America.

Betsy's husband is Dick DeVos, and if you're not familiar with him, you're familiar with the company he's the heir to: Amway.  Dick and Betsy were instrumental in using Amway's billions to elect Rick Snyder (after Dick lost his bid for governor ten years ago) and in helping Snyder dismantle Michigan's labor unions.

THE DEVOSES sit alongside the Kochs, the Bradleys, and the Coorses as founding families of the modern conservative movement. Since 1970, DeVos family members have invested at least $200 million in a host of right-wing causes—think tanks, media outlets, political committees, evangelical outfits, and a string of advocacy groups. They have helped fund nearly every prominent Republican running for national office and underwritten a laundry list of conservative campaigns on issues ranging from charter schools and vouchers to anti-gay-marriage and anti-tax ballot measures. "There's not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the last 50 years who hasn't known the DeVoses," says Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.

Nowhere has the family made its presence felt as it has in Michigan, where it has given more than $44 million to the state party, GOP legislative committees, and Republican candidates since 1997. "It's been a generational commitment," Anuzis notes. "I can't start to even think of who would've filled the void without the DeVoses there."

The family fortune flows from 87-year-old Richard DeVos Sr. The son of poor Dutch immigrants, he cofounded the multilevel-marketing giant Amway with Jay Van Andel, a high school pal, in 1959. Five decades later, the company now sells $11 billion a year worth of cosmetics, vitamin supplements, kitchenware, air fresheners, and other household products. Amway has earned DeVos Sr. at least $6 billion; in 1991, he expanded his empire by buying the NBA's Orlando Magic. The Koch brothers can usually expect Richard and his wife, Helen, to attend their biannual donor meetings. He is a lifelong Christian conservative and crusader for free markets and small government, values he passed down to his four children.

Today, his eldest son, Dick, is the face of the DeVos political dynasty. Like his father, Dick sees organized labor as an enemy of freedom and union leaders as violent thugs who have "an almost pathological obsession with power." But while DeVos Sr. simply inveighed against unions, Dick took the fight to them directly, orchestrating a major defeat for the unions in the cradle of the modern labor movement. 

And if you think Dick and Besty DeVos are bad...well, you should meet Betsy's younger brother.

So now Betsy DeVos, and in turn her husband Dick DeVos, are now soon to be in charge of America's education system. Hope you don't have any school-age kids coming though public education anytime soon.

Make America Grift Again.
 

Not Getting Along At All This Thanksgiving

Charles M. Blow writes the definitive rage against the dying of the light as the Trump era draws near, and as his employer, the NY Times, meets with the President-elect to try to get back into his good graces.  If the Grey Lady did somehow manage to bow and scrape enough to please Der Orangefuhrer, this column pretty much set that bridge aflame, and rightfully so.

After a campaign of bashing The Times relentlessly, in the face of the actual journalists, he tempered his whining with flattery.

At one point he said:

“I just appreciate the meeting and I have great respect for The New York Times. Tremendous respect. It’s very special. Always has been very special.”

He ended the meeting by saying:

“I will say, The Times is, it’s a great, great American jewel. A world jewel. And I hope we can all get along well.”

I will say proudly and happily that I was not present at this meeting. The very idea of sitting across the table from a demagogue who preyed on racial, ethnic and religious hostilities and treating him with decorum and social grace fills me with disgust, to the point of overflowing. Let me tell you here where I stand on your “I hope we can all get along” plea: Never.
You are an aberration and abomination who is willing to do and say anything — no matter whom it aligns you with and whom it hurts — to satisfy your ambitions.

I don’t believe you care much at all about this country or your party or the American people. I believe that the only thing you care about is self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. Your strongest allegiance is to your own cupidity.

I also believe that much of your campaign was an act of psychological projection, as we are now learning that many of the things you slammed Clinton for are things of which you may actually be guilty.

You slammed Clinton for destroying emails, then Newsweek reported last month that your companies “destroyed emails in defiance of court orders.” You slammed Clinton and the Clinton Foundation for paid speeches and conflicts of interest, then it turned out that, as BuzzFeed reported, the Trump Foundation received a $150,000 donation in exchange for your giving a 2015 speech made by video to a conference in Ukraine. You slammed Clinton about conflicts of interest while she was secretary of state, and now your possible conflicts of interest are popping up like mushrooms in a marsh.

You are a fraud and a charlatan. Yes, you will be president, but you will not get any breaks just because one branch of your forked tongue is silver.

I am not easily duped by dopes.

I have not only an ethical and professional duty to call out how obscene your very existence is at the top of American government; I have a moral obligation to do so.

I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, but rather to speak up for truth and honor and inclusion. This isn’t just about you, but also about the moral compass of those who see you for who and what you are, and know the darkness you herald is only held at bay by the lights of truth.

It’s not that I don’t believe that people can change and grow. They can. But real growth comes from the accepting of responsibility and repenting of culpability. Expedient reversal isn’t growth; it’s gross.

So let me say this on Thanksgiving: I’m thankful to have this platform because as long as there are ink and pixels, you will be the focus of my withering gaze.

I'm thinking Mr. Blow will soon find himself robbed of both ink and pixels very soon by his current employer, but this column will stand for some time.  I find myself agreeing with the piece completely.

Have a happy Thanksgiving and remember when it comes to Trump: "Let me tell you here where I stand on your “I hope we can all get along” plea: Never."

Last Call For My Neighbor Vladimir

Now that Vlad The Dudesplainer has his man in Washington, he's feeling pretty free and clear to make his moves around Europe and dare NATO to try anything.  This week, he's moved short ranged missile launchers into Kaliningrad, that lovely little Russian chunk of land on the Baltic between Lithuania and Poland.

NATO has accused Russia of "aggressive military posturing" following reports that it has deployed anti-ship missiles in its westernmost Baltic region.

Russia's Interfax news agency said on Monday that Bastion missile-launchers had been sent to Kaliningrad.

In a statement to the Associated Press, NATO said the move "does not help to lower tensions or restore predictability to our relations".

The Kremlin has accused NATO of stoking tensions by expanding eastwards.

Kaliningrad is a Russian exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.

In October, Russia sent nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, a move Poland described as of the "highest concern".

Russia said the deployment was part of military exercises and had happened before.

So what, you're thinking, standard Vlad move, right?  Well...

The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad represents an important military outpost between Poland and Lithuania with its coastline on the Baltic Sea.

The accumulation of radars and air defence systems, as well as coastal anti-shipping missiles, all form part of Moscow's developing "anti-access and area denial strategy", which in essence seeks to push NATO forces away from Russia and to make it very difficult to reinforce NATO members in the Baltic region in the event of a crisis.

The fact that Russia can cut off the Baltic is bad enough.  It gets worse.

However, in a separate statement on Monday, the RIA news agency quoted Russian defence committee chairman Viktor Ozerov as saying Iskanders and S-400 surface-to-air missiles were deployed in Kaliningrad to counter a planned US missile defence shield in eastern Europe.

The Bastion system fires Oniks cruise missiles, which have a range of up to 280 miles (450km). Russia has already used them in the Syrian civil war where it is supporting President Bashar al-Assad.

By the way for those of you at home, places within 280 miles or so of Kaliningrad?  Most of Poland, southeastern Sweden, and the bonus round, northeastern Germany.  You know, Berlin.

Have a nice Turkey Day, courtesy of our good friend Vlad!

Merry Trumpmas? Bah Trumpbug!

Over the weekend I talked about Republicans in Congress eagerly awaiting the opportunity to reverse an Obama Labor Department rule and take overtime pay away from salaried workers who make less than $47,000 a year, something that would affect four million working Americans and their families.

Weeks before the 115th Congress even begins, House Republicans are laying the groundwork for a major push to repeal President Barack Obama’s most recent regulations, using the Congressional Review Act. The 1996 law allows the House to reverse regulations enacted within the previous 60 legislative days — and the Senate to pass a repeal by simple majority instead of the upper chamber’s typical 60-vote threshold.

While Obama is still president, the Republican controlled-Congress has no chance of repealing his regulations. But once Trump is inaugurated, that all changes.

Another boon for the right: The 1996 law is written such that the 60-legislative-day clock resets at the beginning of each Congress for all rules enacted in the 60 legislative days prior to the final day of congressional adjournment. That will give Congress months longer to tear up regulations issued late this year.

These working-class folks are mostly pink-collar office workers and lower "management" in retail and restaurants, busting their asses 50-60 hours a week and getting the same pay with no overtime every week (and even more on Black Friday week like this week.)  They were slated to start getting this overtime pay just in time for Christmas on December 1.

But Nevada GOP AG Adam Laxalt (a "rising GOP star" and Trump supporter in the Silver State) has come through with a gigantic lump of coal for millions this holiday season: a federal injunction blocking these overtime rules from taking affect at all.

In a blow to the Obama administration's labor-law plans, a federal court has blocked the start of a rule that would have made an estimated 4 million more American workers eligible for overtime pay heading into the holiday season.

As a result of Tuesday's ruling, overtime changes set to take effect Dec. 1 are now unlikely be in play before vast power shifts to a Donald Trump administration, which has spoken out against Obama-backed government regulation and generally aligns with the business groups that stridently opposed the overtime rule.

The U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas granted the nationwide preliminary injunction, saying the Department of Labor's rule exceeds the authority the agency was delegated by Congress.

"Businesses and state and local governments across the country can breathe a sigh of relief now that this rule has been halted," said Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who led the coalition of 21 states and governors fighting the rule and has been a frequent critic of what he characterized as Obama administration overreach. "Today's preliminary injunction reinforces the importance of the rule of law and constitutional government."

The regulation sought to shrink the so-called "white collar exemption" that allows employers to skip overtime pay for salaried administrative or professional workers who make more than about $23,660 per year. Critics say it's wrong that some retail and restaurant chains pay low-level managers as little as $25,000 a year and no overtime — even if they work 60 hours a week.

So there you have it.  Odds are now very good that these rules will be blocked until they can be reversed by congressional Republicans and eventually dismantled by the Trump Administration, meaning we'll continue to have millions of workers working 60-hour weeks with no overtime.

Make America Great Again, right?

Time To Audit The Vote

It's time to start seriously taking a much closer look at the vote counts in the Rust Belt swing states and to start asking some hard questions.

Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

I know the effort to recount Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan seems like Alex Jones-level conspiracy theories at this point, but if Alex Halderman and other computer science experts are involved in this analysis, it's time for this to be considered plausible enough to audit.

The revelation this month that a cyberattack on the DNC is the handiwork of Russian state security personnel has set off alarm bells across the country: Some officials have suggested that 2016 could see more serious efforts to interfere directly with the American election. The DNC hack, in a way, has compelled the public to ask the precise question the Princeton group hoped they’d have asked earlier, back when they were turning voting machines into arcade games: If motivated programmers could pull a stunt like this, couldn't they tinker with the results in November through the machines we use to vote?

This week, the notion has been transformed from an implausible plotline in a Philip K. Dick novel into a deadly serious threat, outlined in detail by a raft of government security officials. “This isn’t a crazy hypothetical anymore,” says Dan Wallach, one of the Felten-Appel alums and now a computer science professor at Rice. “Once you bring nation states’ cyber activity into the game?” He snorts with pity. “These machines, they barely work in a friendlyenvironment.”

The powers that be seem duly convinced. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently conceded the “longer-term investments we need to make in the cybersecurity of our election process.” A statement by 31 security luminaries at the Aspen Institute issued a public statement: “Our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups.” Declared Wired: “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets.”

For the Princeton group, it’s precisely the alarm it has been trying to sound for most of the new millennium. “Look, we could see 15 years ago that this would be perfectly possible,” Appel tells me, speaking in subdued, clipped tones. “It’s well within the capabilities of a country as sophisticated as Russia.” He pauses for a moment, as if to consider this. “Actually, it’s well within the capabilities of much less well-funded and sophisticated attackers.”

And again, I know you're thinking that not only is this Ohio 2004 "the election was stolen!" nonsense all over again when legal voter suppression by Republicans was a far more likely answer then and a far more likely answer now to these questions, but there's also the factor of  "this will be used against us in the future by Republicans."

I remind you that questioning the integrity of the voting process is already being used by Republicans against us.  Maybe, just maybe, it's time to fight back.

StupidiNews!

• President-elect Donald Trump is considering more cabinet picks, floating SC GOP Gov. Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador, Dr. Ben Carson at HUD, and Democrat Harold Ford Jr at Education.
• Democrat Nancy Pelosi made her case to remain House minority leader, outlining a series of opposition challenges to the Trump administration's plans for the social safety net.  
• China says it is eager to play a role in forming an Asia-Pacific trade pact without the US as the GOP looks to immediately scrap the TPP trade deal in January.
• As the world turns increasingly to electric vehicles, the International Energy Agency is now predicting that global gasoline demand has all but hit its peak.
• President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to several yesterday, including two women pioneers in computer science: Rear Adm. Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton.

Last Call For We Don't Need No Education

I'm still kind of mad at Nate Silver, but his evidence that the percentage of a given county's residents with a 4-year college degree having a direct correlation to who the county voted for president is pretty overwhelming.

I took a list of all 981 U.S. counties 1 with 50,000 or more people 2 and sorted it by the share of the population 3 that had completed at least a four-year college degree. Hillary Clinton improved on President Obama’s 2012 performance in 48 of the country’s 50 most-well-educated counties. And on average, she improved on Obama’s margin of victory in these countries by almost 9 percentage points, even though Obama had done pretty well in them to begin with.

.Although they all have highly educated populations, these counties are otherwise reasonably diverse. The list includes major cities, like San Francisco, and counties that host college towns, like Washtenaw, Michigan, where the University of Michigan is located. It also includes some upper-middle-class, professional counties such as Johnson County, Kansas, which is in the western suburbs of Kansas City. It includes counties in states where Clinton did poorly: She improved over Obama in Delaware County, Ohio, for example — a traditionally Republican stronghold outside Columbus — despite her numbers crashing in Ohio overall. It includes extremely white counties like Chittenden County, Vermont (90 percent non-Hispanic white), and more diverse ones like Fulton County, Georgia, where African-Americans form the plurality of the population. If a county had high education levels, Clinton was almost certain to improve there regardless of the area’s other characteristics.

Then Nate took the 50 least educated large counties.

These results are every bit as striking: Clinton lost ground relative to Obama in 47 of the 50 counties — she did an average of 11 percentage points worse, in fact. These are really the places that won Donald Trump the presidency, especially given that a fair number of them are in swing states such as Ohio and North Carolina. He improved on Mitt Romney’s margin by more than 30 points (!) in Ashtabula County, Ohio, for example, an industrial countyalong Lake Erie that hadn’t voted Republican since 1984.

And this is also a reasonably diverse list of counties. While some of them are poor, a few others — such as Bullitt County, Kentucky, and Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana — have average incomes. There’s also some racial diversity on the list: Starr County, Texas, is 96 percent Hispanic, for example, and Clinton underperformed Obama there (although she still won it by a large margin). Edgecombe County, North Carolina, is 57 percent black and saw a shift toward Trump.

How do we know that education levels drove changes in support — as opposed to income levels, for example? It’s tricky because there’s a fairly strong correlation between income and education.4 Nonetheless, with the whole country to pick from, we can find some places where education levels are high but incomes are average or below average. If education is the key driver of changes in the electorate, we’d expect Clinton to hold steady or gain in these counties. If income matters more, we might see her numbers decline.

As it happens, I grew up in one of these places: Ingham County, Michigan, which is home to Michigan State University and the state capital of Lansing, along with a lot of auto manufacturing jobs (though fewer than there used to be). The university and government jobs attract an educated workforce, but there aren’t a lot of rich people in Ingham County. How did Clinton do there? Just fine. She won it by 28 percentage points, the same as Obama did four years ago, despite her overall decline in Michigan.

And in most places that fit this description, Clinton improved on Obama’s performance. I identified 22 counties5 where at least 35 percent of the population has bachelor’s degrees but the median household income is less than $50,0006 and at least 50 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white (we’ll look at what happened with majority-minority counties in a moment, so hang tight). Clinton improved on Obama’s performance in 18 of the 22 counties, by an average of about 4 percentage points.

So yeah, it's pretty clear at this point that Donald Trump's play to a combination of fear, ignorance, and white identity politics (and a need for "beneficent" white identity politics to help less educated, poorer non-white areas) was the key to his victory.

And he did it masterfully.

Trump on Trump

Donald Trump went to visit the NY Times today.  Reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted what the President-elect said:

Trump on alt-right supporters: "It's not a group I want to energize. And if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why."

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 22, 2016

How does that even work? How can be be this oblivious to the very reason he won?
But here's the big one.

Trump on his businesses/conflict q's: "The law's totally on my side, the president can't have a conflict of interest."

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 22, 2016

Another President said something remarkably similar 50 years ago.



We're in a lot of trouble, guys. But you knew that.

How To Steal An Election, Con't

Well, I mentioned Sunday that NC GOP Gov. Pat McCrory was trailing his Democratic opponent, AG Roy Cooper, in his re-election race, and that McCrory refuses to concede the race. I also mentioned that it looked like McCrory might try to stall or pull some other chicanery so that the Republican-dominated NC General Assembly would then declare McCrory the winner.

As of today this definitely looks like the plan, and Republicans in NC are definitely moving forward with it and then some.  But first, any good heist needs the setup:

N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore said Monday that the legislature could revisit voter ID requirements and other election laws in the wake of complaints filed with help from Gov. Pat McCrory’s campaign.

During a news conference announcing House Republican leaders for next year’s legislative session, Moore was asked about the complaints filed amid a tight governor’s race – making claims that dead people and convicted felons voted in this year’s election.

“The fact that there are a number of protests related to the election at least make it an issue that it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” Moore told reporters.

The speaker said GOP legislators still support the voter ID law that was struck down by a federal court this year.

“We believe firmly that the voter ID law that we passed should have passed constitutional muster in every way, and certainly we’ll continue to work on that because we believe voter integrity is very important,” he said.

Did you catch that?

The NC GOP are now heavily implying the idea that, because part of the state's effort to disenfranchise black voters was struck down by the courts, that McCrory's loss can be attributed to lack of "voter integrity". 

Pay close attention to that setup, because the heist is now in the works. Mark Jospeh Stern at Slate explains:

This chicanery will be easier to pull off than you might expect. Thus far, McCrory has questioned votes in more than half of North Carolina’s counties. One attorney monitoring the proceedings called these challenges “silly, small in number, poorly researched and often defamatory,” which is undeniable: Republican-controlled county election boards have forcefully rejected McCrory’s challenges, concluding that there is simply no proof of widespread fraud or malfeasance as McCrory claims. Frustrated by these setbacks, McCrory petitioned the Republican-controlled State Board of Elections to take over the review process. The board refused, but it agreed to meet on Tuesday to set guidelines for how county boards should address complaints.

Despite the utter lack of evidence to support allegations of fraud, McCrory’s team has launched a misinformation campaign to cast a pall of suspicion over the results. His campaign spokesman asked, “Why is Roy Cooper fighting to count the votes of dead people and felons?” McCrory’s close ally and current state budget director, Andrew T. Heath, also tweeted that Durham County has 231,000 residents over the age of 18 but 232,000 registered voters, implying fraud. (In reality, Durham’s 2015 voting-age population was about 235,600, and the county has only 193,659 active registered voters; its Republican-controlled election board already unanimously rejected a complaint alleging malfeasance.) Now McCrory’s lawyers are targeting black American voter outreach groups for purportedly violating minor procedural rules while helping voters fill out absentee ballots. The governor has falsely accused these groupsof conducting a “massive voter fraud scheme.”

McCrory can, and probably will, still ask for a statewide recount. But he must know that a recount will not close such a sizable gap. His real goal appears to be to delegitimize the results to such an extent that the state legislature—which holds a Republican supermajority—can step in and select him as the winner. North Carolina state law states that when “a contest arises out of the general election,” and that contest pertains “to the conduct or results of the election,” the legislature “shall determine which candidate received the highest number of votes” and “declare that candidate to be elected.” By alleging fraud, mishandling of ballots, and irregular vote-counting, McCrory is laying the groundwork for the legislature to proclaim that a “contest” has arisen as to “the conduct or results of the election.” At that point, it can step in, assert that McCrory received “the highest number” of legitimate votes, and “declare [him] to be elected.”

The best part? Under the law, the legislature’s decision is “not reviewable” by the courts. Republican legislators can simply step in, overturn the decision of the voters, and grant McCrory another term. The courts have no authority even to review the legality of their actions.

So McCrory is trying to imply Cooper stole the election with the help of those people, and clearly the NC General Assembly is buying this argument, so much so that it's already blaming the federal court that struck down NC's unconstitutional "omnibus voter bill" before the election.  This setup is important because it's going to be what McCrory uses as justification for stealing this election, full stop.

And he's expecting a friendly Trump administration to refuse to take any real federal action.  After all, the NC GOP's voter suppression laws, and similar laws in Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania  were the major reason why Trump won the state and the election.

This is a huge deal and I'm definitely keeping an eye on it.

StupidiNews!

• A 6.9 magnitude quake off Japan's east coast late Monday triggered tsunami warnings as officials are closely monitoring the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
• President-elect Donald Trump reiterated in an interview that he plans to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal on "day one" of his presidency.
• The crackdown on Kurds by Turkey's government continues as Ankara has issued an arrest warrant for the head of the Syrian Kurdish opposition party, a key US-backed rebel leader.
• Steven Mnuchin, the presumptive pick for Treasury Secretary, could face a brutal nomination hearing as Democrats attack him as one of the chief architects of the 2007 mortgage crisis.
• Canada has announced plans to require all the country's coal power plants to capture and store all carbon emissions or face being phased out by 2030.

Last Call For Trumpsgiving, Trumpmas, And A Trumpy New Year

House Republicans are acting like kids in a candy store these days with you know, total Republican dominance of the country.  Actually, they're acting more like "kids in a candy store with a flamethrower making sure the candy for other kids besides themselves gets burned to ashes."  So if you voted for Republicans and were expecting them to give a damn about you and your family being a working American and such, well, here's your latest Thanksgiving turkey.

Weeks before the 115th Congress even begins, House Republicans are laying the groundwork for a major push to repeal President Barack Obama’s most recent regulations, using the Congressional Review Act. The 1996 law allows the House to reverse regulations enacted within the previous 60 legislative days — and the Senate to pass a repeal by simple majority instead of the upper chamber’s typical 60-vote threshold.

While Obama is still president, the Republican controlled-Congress has no chance of repealing his regulations. But once Trump is inaugurated, that all changes.

Another boon for the right: The 1996 law is written such that the 60-legislative-day clock resets at the beginning of each Congress for all rules enacted in the 60 legislative days prior to the final day of congressional adjournment. That will give Congress months longer to tear up regulations issued late this year.

That’s why leaders are already seeking to leave town early in December, essentially stopping the clock and enabling themselves to repeal as many 2016 rules and regulations as possible. Many believe the chamber will be gone no later than Dec. 9.

House Republicans are currently in the process of making lists of regulations that fall within their time frame and could potentially be repealed early next year. One of the major ones they’re eyeing is Obama’s overtime rule that requires companies to pay time-and-a-half to employees who make under roughly $47,000.

The rule is set to go into effect Dec. 1 and will be a top priority for Republicans to reverse, multiple sources said.

Oh, so you were one of the millions of hard-working Americans slated to finally start getting overtime pay when your boss makes you work 60 hours a week?  Too bad, you voted Republican.  That's going away and you're back to being screwed out of pay.

But hey, you'll get it for a couple of weeks, right?  Merry Christmas!

The Siege Of Standing Rock

I haven't really gone into too much detail about the ongoing battle at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota over the Dakota Access oil pipeline because of the election, but this is a major civil rights battle that is happening right now in America that has been going on for weeks.

Tensions over the Dakota Access oil pipeline flared again Sunday when North Dakota law enforcement used water cannons to disperse a group of about 400 protesters trying to move past a barricaded bridge toward construction sites for the controversial project.

As temperatures in Cannon Ball, N.D., dropped into the 20s, police in riot gear sprayed anti-pipeline activists with a hose mounted on top of an armored vehicle and formed a line to prevent them from advancing up the road, according to the Bismarck Tribune. Protesters also reported being pelted with rubber bullets, tear gas and concussion grenades during the standoff, which lasted until late Sunday night.

A grainy Facebook Live video from the scene shows throngs of people gathered around the Backwater Bridge on Highway 1806, with flood lights shining down on the grass and road below, and a haze of smoke and water vapor rising near police vehicles.

The clashes began around 6 p.m., when protesters attempted to remove burned out trucks that had been blocking the bridge since authorities and activists faced off there in late October. Police have since set up wire and concrete barriers on the bridge, which is about a mile south of where the pipeline developer plans to drill.

Protesters, who call themselves “water protectors,” have argued that the barricade prevents emergency services from reaching the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and a nearby camp they have used as a staging ground for demonstrations.

Authorities responded after protesters moved one of the trucks blocking the roadway. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department said that by 8:30 p.m. an estimated 400 people had arrived to try to “breach” the bridge and had set dozens of fires in the area. The department called the situation an “ongoing riot,” saying protesters were “very aggressive” and had attempted to “flank and attack the law enforcement line.” At least one person was arrested, the department said.

One of the protest organizers, Dallas Goldtooth, said protesters started small fires in the area to help warm people who had been sprayed with water in the freezing cold. He told the Tribune that some activists tried to remove the burned out trucks to expose the heavily-armed authorities behind them.

“Folks have a right to be on a public road,” Goldtooth said. “It’s absurd that people who’ve been trying to take down the barricade now have their lives at risk.”

Another organizer, Tara Houska, told the Tribune that more than 200 people had been hit with tear gas, pepper spray or water from the hose.

“They’re using everything and anything,” she said. “This has been weeks and weeks of those vehicles on the road for no apparent reason, and it’s a huge public safety risk. It’s putting enormous pressure on the Standing Rock Sioux community and people who live and work in the area.”

The water protectors of Standing Rock have been blocking pipeline construction for weeks now in order to save the reservation's water supply from the oil companies.  I talk about Black Lives Matter a lot, but it's very easy to forget there are many marginalized groups in America and tribal groups are definitely fighting for basic human rights in this country on a daily basis.  They are shot and killed and beaten by law enforcement as well.

Imagine if Flint's water crisis was made worse by dropping a pipeline through the middle of town and bulldozing houses and buildings around it while still doing nothing about the water supply, and you're starting to get the picture of what's going on in Standing Rock.

This is something President Obama needs to intervene in.

It's Always Those People Who Are At Fault

Understand that if the Democratic party actually takes the advice of Columbia professor Mark Lilla here, they are done and the party of Trump will rule for a generation.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life. 

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

No.

The very "identity groups" that Lilla is denigrating here are the voters that turned out for Hillary Clinton by the largest margin.  Abandon them at your own peril, Democrats.  And while Democrats are busy eating their own and people like Lilla are complaining about the state of education in America, Republicans are busy doing things like this.

Despite concern from LGBTQ activists, a Texas state senator's office says a bill addressing parents' right to full disclosure of school information would not force schools to "out" students who identify as sexual minorities, her chief of staff said.

Sen. Konni Burton, R-Fort Worth, filed Senate Bill 242 on Thursday for the 2017 Texas Legislative session that begins Jan. 10 in Austin.

The two-page bill states that a parent is entitled to all of a school district's written records about their child's "general physical, psychological or emotional well-being (except information related to child abuse). An attempt by a school employee to conceal or encourage a child to withhold information is grounds for discipline, the bill states.

Equality Texas, a nonprofit organization that works to secure equal rights for sexual minorities through legislation and education, on Friday issued a statement opposing Burton's bill.

"Until kids are not kicked out of their house for being gay or transgender, and until kids are not being beaten by parents for being gay or transgender, we owe it to kids to protect them," said the statement from Steven M. Rudman, Equality Texas board chairman. "We believe Sen. Burton's legislation would essentially destroy protected communications between a student and an educator...."

Some also worry that the bill would also put lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) Texas youth at risk of being placed in so-called "reparative therapy," which is based upon the premise that homosexuality is a mental health problem, according to the progressive website TheNewCivilRightsMovement.com.

"That is an unfortunate interpretation," said Elliott Griffin, the senator's chief of staff, on Friday.

Nothing in the bill should be construed to mean that a child could be forced into reparative therapy, he said. "I have no idea why they would draw that conclusion."

And let's remember the next vice-president is a big fan of "reparative therapy" and thinks all LGBTQ folks need to be "fixed".   Making common cause with the Trump administration and the people who voted them into power will come at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society.  And I refuse to do it.

StupidiNews!

• In a papal announcement on Monday, Pope Francis has granted all Catholic priests the power to forgive abortion.
• A police officer in San Antonio was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop just outside the city's main police headquarters, police are still hunting the suspect.
• Iraqi military forces are close to severing the last supply lines to the ISIS stronghold of Mosul as militias gather to retake the city.
• President-elect Trump's "repatriation" corporate tax holiday plan will most likely benefit the investor class and not job creation as he has claimed in the past.
• President Obama says once again that he has no plans to pardon Edward Snowden, despite the NSA leaker's raising of "legitimate concerns" in US intelligence operations.