Last Call For Mitch, Interrupted

Everything you need to know about why Democrats should get rid of the filibuster once they get control of the Senate comes in the form of Mitch McConnell taking to the NY Times op-ed section to scold them not to.

A Democratic assault on the legislative filibuster would make the nomination fights look like child’s play. That’s because systematically filibustering nominees was not an old tradition but a modern phenomenon, pioneered in 2003 by Democrats who opposed President George W. Bush. When Republicans followed suit and held up a handful of Obama nominees the same way, Democrats could not stomach their own medicine and began a “nuclear” exchange that Republicans had to end.

The back-and-forth was regrettable, but the silver lining is that the failed experiment Democrats started in 2003 is now over. The Senate has taken a step back toward its centuries-old norms on nominations: limited debate and a simple majority threshold.

On legislation, however, the Senate’s treasured tradition is not efficiency but deliberation. One of the body’s central purposes is making new laws earn broader support than what is required for a bare majority in the House. The legislative filibuster does not appear in the Constitution’s text, but it is central to the order the Constitution sets forth. It echoes James Madison’s explanation in Federalist 62 that the Senate is designed not to rubber-stamp House bills but to act as an “additional impediment” and “complicated check” on “improper acts of legislation.” It embodies Thomas Jefferson’s principle that “great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

The legislative filibuster is directly downstream from our founding tradition. If that tradition frustrates the whims of those on the far left, it is their half-baked proposals and not the centuries-old wisdom that need retooling.

Yes, the Senate’s design makes it difficult for one party to enact sweeping legislation on its own. Yes, the filibuster makes policy less likely to seesaw wildly with every election. These are features, not bugs. Our country doesn’t need a second House of Representatives with fewer members and longer terms. America needs the Senate to be the Senate.

I recognize it may seem odd that a Senate majority leader opposes a proposal to increase his own power. Certainly it is curious that liberals are choosing this moment, when Americans have elected Republican majorities three consecutive times and counting, to attack the minority’s powers.

But my Republican colleagues and I have not and will not vandalize this core tradition for short-term gain. We recognize what everyone should recognize — there are no permanent victories in politics. No Republican has any trouble imagining the laundry list of socialist policies that 51 Senate Democrats would happily inflict on Middle America in a filibuster-free Senate.

Now Mitch isn't writing this for his base, he's writing this as an open threat to Democratic voters to not elect Democrats.  For all of his posturing and scolding, the only real thing that matters is control of the Senate with 51 Senators (or 50 plus the VP).  The "historical mores" of the Senate have only resulted in years of useless gridlock, and a Republican Senate bound and determined not to pass legislation.

The best thing we could do is get rid of Mitch McConnell.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

The Justice Department under William Barr is going to take years to fix because the entire place is poisoned by Trumpified US attorneys like the one whose district includes Philadelphia, William McSwain.

U.S. Attorney William McSwain quickly blamed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for the August 14 shooting of six police officers who were trying to serve a warrant. In a statement released less than 24 hours after the standoff ended in North Philadelphia, McSwain, the U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said the shooting was “precipitated by a stunning disrespect for law enforcement” that was “championed” by Krasner.

“The [district attorney’s office] has no interest in engaging with Bill McSwain’s inappropriate attempts to run for political office from his taxpayer-funded perch in Donald Trump’s DOJ,” Krasner spokesperson Jane Roh told The Appeal.

Seems like Trumpies will Trump, but there's always more to the story.

McSwain failed to mention, however, that alleged shooter Maurice Hill’s interactions with law enforcement predated Krasner taking office. Nor did McSwain acknowledge that the 36-year-old Hill, who on Saturday was charged by Krasner’s office with attempted murder and multiple counts of aggravated assault related to the incident, has been a federal informant for years, according to documents obtained by The Appeal.

In June 2008, Hill entered a guilty plea the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was sentenced in the case in 2010. In an April 2010 sentencing memorandum filed with the court, Hill’s attorney Wayne Maynard stated that federal prosecutors filed a motion for a downward departure from Hill’s guideline sentence because he provided substantial assistance to the federal government. “He has testified before the Grand Jury on two occasions, was willing to testify at trial, and provided information about a shooter that led to an arrest,” Maynard wrote. “He has cooperated with the Government and provided information that has and will likely continue to imperil his safety and that of his family.”

Maynard argued that Hill should receive a lower-than-average sentence because of his cooperation and that a federal prosecutor made a similar argument for such a sentence. The federal prosecutor’s sentencing memorandum was sealed by the court, so the specifics of the downward departure are unknown.

In April 2010, Hill was sentenced to 55 months in federal prison followed by three years on supervised release. That year, the average sentence for a person convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm was more than 75 months in prison, according to statistics published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

According to the agency, roughly one-quarter of all people sentenced in federal court received a sentence below the standard guideline minimum, the majority of whom received sentencing relief for providing substantial assistance to the federal government.

Prosecutors often file substantial-assistance motions in these cases; upon such a motion, which states that a defendant has provided substantial assistance in an investigation or prosecution of another person who has committed an offense, the court may depart from the sentencing guidelines. However, because much of Hill’s federal court record is sealed, it is unknown whether such a motion was filed in his case.

So of course, McSwain blamed Philly DA Larry Krasner for something that happened before Krasner took office, and it wasn't even Krasner who put Hill back on the streets.

It was the Feds.

Orange Snowflakes In Greenland

Donald Trump got his feelings hurt when Denmark's Prime Minister told him Greenland wasn't for sale, and now we have a full-blown international incident on our hands with yet another European ally.

President Trump on Wednesday lashed out at Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, saying the leader of the U.S. ally had made “nasty” comments about his interest in having the United States purchase Greenland.

Trump announced Tuesday night that he was calling off a planned two-day state visit to Copenhagen early next month over Frederiksen’s refusal to entertain the sale of Greenland, a self-governing country that is part of the kingdom of Denmark.

Frederiksen told reporters Wednesday she was surprised by Trump’s change in plans and also lamented the missed opportunity to celebrate the historical alliance between Denmark and the United States, saying preparations for the visit had been “well underway.”

Frederiksen called the idea of the sale of Greenland “absurd” over the weekend after news broke of Trump’s interest — a characterization that apparently offended him.

“I thought it was not a nice statement, the way she blew me off,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “She shouldn’t treat the United States that way. . . . She said ‘absurd.’ That’s not the right word to use.”

Trump’s comment came during a rambling, 35-minute back-and-forth with reporters outside the White House, where he reversed his position on some issues facing his administration while also reiterating comments that have already sparked several rounds of controversy this week.

Trump's put a year's worth of chaos into one week, and it's only Thursday morning.

The president defended his trade war with China despite worries that his tariffs have become a drag on the economy while chastising his predecessors for not taking a tougher line with Beijing.

“Somebody had to do it,” he said before looking skyward and proclaiming: “I am the chosen one.”

He said he still wants to end birthright citizenship through an executive order — an idea that was dismissed by most legal experts as unconstitutional when he floated it late last year — while also disputing reports that he is backing away from a plan to expand background checks following recent mass shootings. 

Trump denied he is considering a payroll tax cut to head off a recession, arguing that there is no need to do so even after he confirmed it was under consideration the previous day.

He intensified his criticism of Jewish voters who support Democrats, calling them “very disloyal to Israel.”

And Trump continued to serve as the loudest cheerleader for his own record, while dismissing any criticism of his actions or rhetoric.

“I was put here by people to do a great job, and that’s what I’m doing,” he said. “And nobody’s done a job like I’ve done.”

It's exhausting, all of it.

StupidiNews!

• California police have arrested a 37-year-old hotel cook who was allegedly planning to kill co-workers and guests, police found multiple rifles and tactical gear at the suspect's home.
• Over 73,000 forest fires have been recorded in Brazil in the first eight months of 2019 as President Jair Bolsonaro is under fire for increased deforestation of the Amazon rain forest.
• Washington state Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee has pulled out of the 2020 presidential contest, Inslee's climate change-centered campaign struggled to break out of the bottom of the pack of 20+ Dems.
• Italy's government faces collapse as PM Giuseppe Conte has resigned, leaving a caretaker government headed by President Sergio Materella as major political talks are underway.
• Dutch scientists are getting closer to a universal blood test that can flag major factors in premature death in people under 60, the tests so far are about 83% accurate.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is officially throwing out the Flores settlement rules on detaining migrants, asylum-seekers, and undocumented who cross the border and now says anyone who does enter the country without documentation can be held indefinitely.

The Trump administration unveiled a regulation on Wednesday that would allow it to detain indefinitely migrant families who cross the border illegally, replacing a decades-old court agreement that imposed a limit on how long the government could hold migrant children in custody and specified the level of care they must receive.

The White House has for more than a year pressed the Department of Homeland Security to replace the agreement, known as the Flores settlement, a shift that the administration says is crucial to halt immigration across the southwestern border.

The new regulation, which requires approval from a federal judge before it can go into effect and was expected to be immediately challenged in court, would establish standards for conditions in detention centers and specifically abolish a 20-day limit on detaining families in immigration jails, a cap that has prompted President Trump to repeatedly complain about the “catch and release” of families from Central America and elsewhere into the United States.

“This rule allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress,” Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, said in a statement. He called it a “critical rule” that would allow the government to detain families and maintain the “integrity of the immigration system.”

The administration proposed the rule last fall, allowing the public to comment on the potential regulation. It is scheduled to be published this week in the Federal Register and would take effect 60 days later, though administration officials concede that the expected court challenge will probably delay it.

Under the new rule, the administration would be free to send families who are caught crossing the border illegally to a family residential center to be held for as long as it takes for their immigration cases to be decided. Officials said families cases could be resolved within three months, though many could drag on much longer.
Trump administration officials — who briefed reporters on Tuesday night on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans — said that many of the families would be detained until they were either released after being awarded asylum or they were deported to their home countries. Some families might be awarded parole to leave the facilities while the courts decide their fate.

The 20-day limit has been in place since 2015, a legal outgrowth of a 1997 court-ordered consent decree after a federal class-action lawsuit alleged physical and emotional harm done to immigrant children held for extended periods of time in the detention facilities.

Previous administrations tried to change the rules for detaining children in efforts to reduce surges of migrants crossing the border. Mr. Trump’s homeland security officials have repeatedly said that limiting the detentions of entire migrant families has driven the surge of Central American families who crossed the border this year.

The officials said on Tuesday that enacting the new regulation would send a powerful message that bringing children to the United States was not “a passport” to being released from detention.

They predicted that the rule would cause a significant decrease in the number of families trying to cross into the United States illegally, reducing the need for more family residential centers.

Withdrawing from the consent decree has also been a personal objective for Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy. Delays in finishing the new regulation had prompted Mr. Miller to lash out at senior homeland security officials, who were ousted from the department.

This is all according to plan.  Stephen Miller and his ghoul squad know full well that with the Trump regime doing everything they can to make immigration courts as awful as possible, under these new rules families will be detained in cages for as long as necessary to deport them, all while private prison companies get paid handsomely to house them like animals in the pound.

The results will be overcrowded and filthy concentration camps, broadcast to the world to let everyone know what awaits them under America's new management.

Meanwhile, ICE will continue raids to find undocumented bodies to fill these facilities and keep the deportation machinery packed until Congress relents and gives Trump the power he wants for mass deportations, and Trump made that clear this afternoon.

President Trump said he’s looking into ending birthright citizenship for the children of non-citizens.

Speaking outside the White House Wednesday, Trump told reportershe plans to do away with the constitutional right, which he called “frankly ridiculous,” through an executive order. This isn’t the first time he’s made that claim: In 2018, he told Axios he had plans to issue an executive order preventing automatic citizenship for the children of non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, but nothing came of it.

“We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land. You walk over the border, have a baby — congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen.”

It’s unclear whether an executive order is currently in the works, but it’s likely that any attempts to end birthright citizenship would be challenged in the courts, since the 14th Amendment to the Constitution grants the right to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

Trump has repeatedly railed against so-called “anchor babies,” a derogatory term for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. The president has also claimed that migrants come to the U.S. specifically so they can give birth to natural-born citizens. In the 2018 Axios interview, Trump said he had discussed ending birthright citizenship with his legal team.

More likely, Trump will seize that power anyway for mass revocations of citizenship for "undesirables" leading to huge ICE roundups, and indefinite detentions.  All he needs is the Roberts Court to sign off.

We call that "ethnic cleansing".

This is his 2020 reelection strategy.

Reality Has A Well-Known Bias

The right wing loudmouths are furious over the report from former Republican Sen. Jon Kyl on Facebook's "anti-conservative bias" and now everyone is involved in a healthy outing of goalpost-moving.

"Freedom of expression undergirds the First Amendment," Kyl writes in his conclusion, as well as being considered a basic human right by the United Nations. But for all the complaints identified by participants in the research, the report does not actually identify any specific or consistent bias.

"Facebook's policies and their application have the potential to restrict free expression," Kyl notes. "Given the platform's popularity and ubiquity, this is a danger that must be taken seriously." The platform has made some baby steps toward transparency that help, he concludes, but "[t]here is still significant work to be done to satisfy the concerns we heard from conservatives."

"While we err on the side of free speech, there are critical exceptions: we don't allow content that might encourage offline harm or is intended to intimidate, exclude, or silence people," Facebook communications VP Nick Clegg wrote in a company blog post. "And we work to slow and reduce the spread of content like debunked hoaxes and clickbait by downranking it in News Feed. We know we need to listen more as we work to strike the right balance with these policies."

As Facebook is going to learn at its own peril. once you give in to the bullies, there's no stopping them from demanding more and more from you.

Facebook might have hoped having a staunch conservative oversee the audit and write the report would mitigate criticism by Republicans. It did not. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in a statement that the report wasn't a genuine audit. Instead, he called it "a smokescreen disguised as a solution."

"Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third-party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content-moderation protocols," Hawley added. "Then Facebook should release the results to the public."

The Media Research Center, a conservative organization, criticized the report, saying it "stunningly fails to admit fault or wrongdoing," and that any changes made by Facebook to date toward addressing the complaints levied by conservatives are "empty and insulting."

So now Facebook is going to have to reveal its family secrets to a "trusted" third-party, one that of course Donald Trump's coming executive order will pick for them and control. 

The practical upshot is of course that unfortunately, the Trump regime will need to have this independent agency control Facebook's policies, along with that of all other social media companies in order to ensure the First Amendment rights of citizens.

Once again, the only real question is how much the Roberts Court will let Trump get away with before the 2020 elections.

Trump Goes Straight To The Loyalty Test

Donald Trump compounded his racist, Islamophobic attacks on Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib on Tuesday with a gigantic helping of anti-Semitic vitriol, saying that Jewish voters who support Democrats are "disloyal" or worse.

President Trump on Tuesday said that any Jewish people who vote for Democrats are showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” prompting an outcry from critics who said the president’s remarks were promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes. 

Trump made the comment in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office ahead of a meeting with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis. 

Trump began by lashing out at Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), questioning the sincerity of her tears at a news conference where she talked about her decision not to travel to Israel to see her elderly grandmother, who lives in the occupied West Bank. 

“Yesterday, I noticed for the first time, Tlaib with the tears,” Trump said. “All of the sudden, she starts with tears, tears. . . . I don’t buy it for a second, because I’ve seen her in a very vicious mood at campaign rallies, my campaign rallies, before she was a congresswoman. I said, ‘Who is that?’ And I saw a woman that was violent and vicious and out of control.” 

He then went on to attack Democrats more generally over the views of Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.). Both women have long been fierce critics of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. They support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a global protest of Israel. 

“Where has the Democratic Party gone?” Trump asked. “Where have they gone, where they’re defending these two people over the state of Israel? And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”

Needless to say, the condemnations were swift and forceful.

Jewish Democrats rushed to condemn Trump’s statement. Halie Soifer, executive director of Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement, “This is yet another example of Donald Trump continuing to weaponize and politicize anti-Semitism.” The president’s “appalling” statement reveals that “his professed support for Israel is based on personal political calculation, not principled commitment,” the Democratic Majority for Israel said on Twitter. Aaron Keyak, former National Jewish Democratic Council head, told JI, “Just because President Trump is deeply unpopular in our community is no reason to slander us with echoes of some of the most insidious attacks against our people.” 

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) defended the president. “It shows a great deal of disloyalty to oneself to defend a party that protects/emboldens people that hate you for your religion,” the RJC tweeted.

According to Pew Research Center, 79% of Jewish voters supported Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections.

“Actual LOL,” Ambassador Daniel Shapiro tells JI. “There are lots of uncertainties in American politics. How the Jewish vote will break in the next presidential election is not one of them. Faced with a Democratic candidate who reflects their values and supports a strong, secure, Jewish, democratic Israel and a two-state solution with Palestinians versus Donald Trump’s cruel, divisive politics… and his approach that threatens to help lead Israel into becoming a binational state, you can mark 75 percent as the floor for the Jewish vote for Democrats in 2020. Eighty percent is not out of the question.” 

Ann Lewis, who served as White House director of communications for President Bill Clinton and as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, said in an email to JI that Trump “has now attacked the more than 70 percent of American Jews who dare to disagree with him politically by using one of the most dangerous, deadly accusations Jews have faced over the years.” 

“False charges of disloyalty over the centuries have led to Jews being murdered, jailed and tortured,” Lewis explained. “This is the kind of cruel, careless rhetoric that inflames anti-Jewish passions and leads to violence.”

Matt Brooks, RJC’s executive director, tells JI: “Of course the president was not trafficking in dual loyalty and antisemitism. The reality is that what the president gave voice to is a question that I get all the time in all of my speeches, in large part from folks who aren’t Jewish and want to understand how people in the Jewish community — given the issues that are important to them — can support the policies of individuals like Omar and Tlaib. You know, it’s a question that has a lot of people scratching their heads.”

The American Jewish Committee condemned the president’s comments. AJC CEO David Harris said the president’s comments are “shockingly divisive and unbecoming of the occupant of the highest elected office. American Jews – like all Americans – have a range of political views and policy priorities. His assessment of their knowledge or ‘loyalty,’ based on their party preference, is inappropriate, unwelcome, and downright dangerous.” 

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted, “It’s unclear who POTUS is claiming Jews would be ‘disloyal’ to, but charges of disloyalty have long been used to attack Jews. As we’ve said before, it’s possible to engage in the democratic process without these claims. It’s long overdue to stop using Jews as a political football.”

No matter how you feel about Omar and Tlaib, or the fact that they are black Muslim women who were elected to Congress as proud Democrats, Donald Trump's screaming, blatant anti-Semitism is now America's problem, and it's one we have to fix quickly.

Sadly, it'll take the rest of my lifetime to repair the damage Trump has already wrought.  The reason why is simple, watching Jewish Republicans try to defend Trump rather than themselves is both sad and depressing.

There's historical precedent for that and it always ends badly.

Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

As I informed you all on Sunday, the NY Times has made a valuable and powerful contribution to the discussion of race in America that is ongoing with the 1619 Project.  It's taken me most of the last two days to digest the multiple articles, and the screaming rage from the right over even having that conversation on anything other than 100% their terms has driven them into paroxysms of thunderous verbal flatulence, as Slate's Ashley Feinberg notes.

Conservative pundits were not happy to see this. Right-wing intellectual heavyweights such as Newt Gingrich or right-wing intellectual junior middleweights such as Erick Erickson spent the past few days obsessively tweeting or yelling at you from your TV screens to make sure America knew that the New York Times was trying to—well, that part was not entirely clear.

For white conservatives, accepting that the United States wouldn’t exist without slavery would mean acknowledging that the Founders were not the creators of an infallible civic religion, which sets the limits on all modern claims for justice. It would mean that liberty was, in practice, as much a matter of exclusion as inclusion, and that success and prosperity owe more to centuries of exploitation than to God’s blessing of an exceptional people.

But their political project depends on not even considering those possibilities. And so their response was equal parts furious and vague, a barrage of arguments that discussing this country’s history is the last thing this country needs: the Times was being divisive, or it was being nihilistic, or it was implementing a secret scheme to make Americans vote against Trump by claiming that racism was an ongoing problem.

Mostly, they wanted to express that they were very personally angry. The fact that they took a wide-ranging examination of slavery’s lasting ills as an attack on themselves was a fairly obvious confession.

And that's where we are right now, the anti-intellectual modern Know-Nothings bleat about how America will be made great again if we can just get those people to stop talking about how maybe a country that did everything it could to keep black America down might be an ongoing, systemic issue while convincing themselves that they've already done enough.

I see this on social media, too.  Very "clever" (and 99.98% of the time, white) people simply respond with how being black in America is better than being black anywhere else on Earth, and I laugh and say "Would you be black for even a day in this country?"

It's amazing.

Down And Out In Elkhart, Again

Remember Elkhart, Indiana?  I've talked about the RV Capital of the World before, where many of the nation's recreational vehicles are manufactured.  President Obama went there to kick off his stimulus package and the people of Indiana rewarded him with "economic anxiety".

Mr. Obama, whose four trips here during 2008 and 2009 tracked the area’s decline, is expected to return for the first time in coming weeks, both to showcase its recovery and to warn against going back to Republican economic policies. Yet where is Mr. Neufeldt leaning in this presidential election year? He may keep a photograph of himself and Mr. Obama on a desk at the medical office he cleans nightly, but he is considering Donald J. Trump. 

“I like the way he just won’t take nothing off of nobody,” Mr. Neufeldt said, though days later he allowed: “He scares me sometimes.” 

Billboards proclaim, “Hiring: Welders. Up to $23/hour,” but for all the progress, many people here — like Americans elsewhere — harbor unshakable anxiety about stagnant wages, their economic future and the erosion of the middle class generally. 

Antigovernment resentments over past bank bailouts linger, stoked by candidates in both parties (though taxpayers got their money back, with dividends). And social issues such as abortion, gun rights, same-sex marriage, the Affordable Care Act and immigration loom larger than any other for some voters. 

The enduring wounds of the Great Recession, together with discouraging economic trends that long predated it, have fueled anger on the left but especially on the right, thanks to Mr. Trump, the maverick Republican front-runner. Mr. Obama is not getting the recognition historically accorded a president who presides over economic revival, but then again, neither are divided Republicans seen as offering a positive alternative.

Obama's policies got Elkhart's unemployment from over 20% in 2009 to under 5% in 2016.  The RV business came roaring back. But Elkhart Indiana picked Trump, along with enough of the country to put him in power, because "economic anxiety".  But last summer, things started to get dicey thanks to Trump's stupid tariffs.

Shipments of motor homes were down 18.7 percent in June compared with a year ago, and shipments of smaller trailers and campers were down 10.5 percent, according to the RV Industry Association. Motor home shipments were down 6.5 percent in July, but overall shipments were up 10 percent compared with the same month last year. Some companies have cut back to four-day workweeks. Amid strong job gains nationally, hints of rising wages and solid overall economic growth, Elkhart’s health is decidedly ambiguous. 

“I think it’s a yellow light,” said Richard Curtin, a University of Michigan economist who is a consultant to the R.V. industry. “Depending on how things evolve in six months, it could be a red light, getting to the end of the expansion.”

Well guess what Trump's tariffs have done to the place three years later?

Shipments of recreational vehicles to dealers have fallen about 20% so far this year, after a 4.1% drop last year, according to data from the RV Industry Association. Multiyear drops in shipments have preceded the last three recessions. “The RV industry is better at calling recessions than economists are,” said Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University, in Muncie, Ind. Mr. Hicks says softening consumer demand for RVs coupled with rising vehicle prices due to tariffs suggests the economy is either in a recession or soon headed for one.

Yep.  You wanted Trump, Elkhart, and boy howdy, did you get Trump.

RVs can range in price from about $12,000 for a folding camping trailer to $212,000 for a high-end motor home, according to average retail prices collected by the RV Industry Association. The prices have been sensitive to the U.S. tariffs imposed on some Chinese goods. The industry estimates that as many as 523 items could be hit by the tariffs, everything from the toilet-seat covers that go into RV bathrooms and cow hides for leather furniture to the aluminum or steel used throughout the vehicles. 

Divya Brown, the president of Houston.-based TAXA Outdoors, a small RV manufacturer, said her company bought most of its parts from Elkhart. Her suppliers are raising their prices to account for the hit they are taking from imported goods such as aluminum and steel. Ms. Brown said the company saw a 22% jump in the cost of steel and a 9% jump in the cost of aluminum.

It was bad for Elkhart last year.  This yeah it's a bloodbath.  The yellow light is now flashing red and the signal poles are on fire.  In the last seven days we've seen an inverted yield curve and now Elkhart's economy is starting to crumble.

Do you think Donald Trump is going to get us out of this coming shitstorm?

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Trump regime: The gloom and doom talk on the economy is a plot to harm Dear Leader!

Also Trump regime: So, since the economy needs stimulus, how about a payroll tax cut?

Several senior White House officials have begun discussing whether to push for a temporary payroll tax cut as a way to arrest an economic slowdown, three people familiar with the discussions said, revealing growing concerns about the economy among President Trump’s top economic aides.

The talks are still in their early stages and have included a range of other tax breaks. The officials also have not decided whether to formally push Congress to approve any of these measures, these people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to disclose internal discussions. But the White House increasingly is discussing ideas to boost a slowing economy, they said.

Even though deliberations about the payroll tax cut were held Monday, the White House released a statement disputing that the idea was actively under “consideration.”

“As (National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow) said yesterday, more tax cuts for the American people are certainly on the table, but cutting payroll taxes is not something under consideration at this time,” the statement said.

The statement and the internal discussions over the payroll tax cut are part of a rapidly evolving effort by the White House to both exude confidence about the economy’s strength while simultaneously hunting for ways to bolster business and consumer confidence. Business spending already has pulled back, in part because of fears about the trade war, but consumer spending has remained robust. If ordinary Americans begin to tighten their belts later this year, the economy could suffer new strain.

Millions of Americans pay a “payroll tax” on their earnings, a 6.2 percent levy that is used to finance Social Security programs. The payroll tax was last cut in 2011 and 2012 during the Obama administration to 4.2 percent, as a way to encourage more consumer spending during the recent economic downturn. But the cut was allowed to reset back up to 6.2 percent in 2013.

Workers pay payroll taxes on income up to $132,900, so cutting the tax has remained a popular idea for many lawmakers, especially Democrats, seeking to deliver savings for middle-income earners and not the wealthiest Americans. But payroll tax cuts can also add dramatically to the deficit and – depending on how they are designed – pull billions of dollars away from Social Security.

The issues are two as I see it, first the "talks have included a range of other tax breaks" at the top there, and the fact that is designed badly, payroll tax cuts can harm Social Security.  Republicans tried to claim President Obama was doing just that in 2012 before they caved for several extensions, but in 2013 when the payroll tax cut expired, the GOP slammed him hard and rode that towards a 2014 wipeout of House Democrats.

My worry is that any payroll tax cut will be a mess that the Democrats will have to fix.  Again.

StupidiNews!

• A new congressionally-mandated report on the Pentagon's defense strategy finds the US military is "in danger of being overwhelmed" if forced to fight a major foe like Russia or China on the ground.
• Tensions between India and Pakistan continue to head for a boiling point as Pakistani PM Imran Khan called on the world to notice India's "Fascist, racist government."
• US Attorney General William Barr is removing the acting head of the Bureau of Prisons in the wake of the suicide of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in his cell last week.
• UK officials in the Johnson government are "deeply concerned" over reports that British diplomatic staff have gone missing abroad during a trip to China.
• The FCC report on commercial internet provider CenturyLink's massive 37-hour outage in December that affected several 911 systems across the nation finds no recommendation of punishment.

Last Call For The Other, Other Operation

Looks like China is trying to use Twitter to create an AstroTurf movement against the Hong Kong protesters, and Twitter is not only acknowledging it, but actually doing something about it.

We are disclosing a significant state-backed information operation focused on the situation in Hong Kong, specifically the protest movement and their calls for political change.
What we are disclosing
This disclosure consists of 936 accounts originating from within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Overall, these accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground. Based on our intensive investigations, we have reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation. Specifically, we identified large clusters of accounts behaving in a coordinated manner to amplify messages related to the Hong Kong protests.

As Twitter is blocked in PRC, many of these accounts accessed Twitter using VPNs. However, some accounts accessed Twitter from specific unblocked IP addresses originating in mainland China. The accounts we are sharing today represent the most active portions of this campaign; a larger, spammy network of approximately 200,000 accounts — many created following our initial suspensions — were proactively suspended before they were substantially active on the service.

All the accounts have been suspended for a range of violations of our platform manipulation policies, which we define as:
Spam
Coordinated activity
Fake accounts
Attributed activity
Ban evasion

So what is Twitter doing?

Covert, manipulative behaviors have no place on our service — they violate the fundamental principles on which our company is built. As we have said before, it is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease. These deceptive strategies have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed. They adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge. For our part, we are committed to understanding and combating how bad-faith actors use our services.

Today we are adding archives containing complete Tweet and user information for the 936 accounts we’ve disclosed to our archive of information operations — the largest of its kind in the industry.

We will continue to be vigilant, learning from this network and proactively enforcing our policies to serve the public conversation. We hope that by being transparent and open we will empower further learning and public understanding of these nefarious tactics.

They've also made all the information available on the Chinese fake accounts available on the link at the top of the story.

A far cry from the Russian manipulation, which Twitter did its best to hide.  Maybe it's because as Twitter says, the service is openly banned in China, so it's not like they are risking the loss of ad revenue and users, or risking the wrath of Donald Trump.

On Deep Background

We've been down this road before. 

An overwhelming majority of Americans of all political stripes are open to universal background checks for firearms ownership and a national database. Suburban women are no different.

A new poll conducted by a premier Republican polling firm shows that about 3 in 4 suburban women favor stricter gun laws. The Republican Main Street Partnership, which supports moderate Republicans and has endorsed “red flag” bills under consideration in the House, commissioned a Public Opinion Strategies survey of 1,000 registered voters across five suburban House districts: Colorado’s Sixth, Kansas’s Third, North Carolina’s Ninth, Pennsylvania’s First and Virginia’s 10th. The group shared with me the topline results among women in these suburban areas:  

• 72 percent said they think gun laws should be stricter, compared to four percent who said they should be less strict and 23 percent who said they should be kept as they are now.
• 55 percent said they think stricter gun laws would help prevent gun violence.
• 90 percent support requiring universal background checks for gun purchases at gun shows or other private sales, which would require all gun owners to file with a national firearms registry.
• 88 percent said they would support requiring a 48-hour waiting period between the purchase of a firearm and when the buyer can take possession of that gun.
• 84 percent back a national red flag law that would permit law enforcement to temporarily retain firearms from a person who may present a danger to others or themselves.
• 76 percent said they would ban the purchase and use of semi-automatic assault-style weapons like the AK-47 and the AR-15.
• And 72 percent would support banning the sale and possession of high-capacity or extended ammunition magazines, which allow guns to shoot more than 10 bullets before needing to be reloaded.

The female respondents were read six issues and asked which they want their lawmaker to focus on the most. Working to prevent gun violence was No. 1, selected by 30 percent of suburban women. Health care was No. 2, with 24 percent, followed by addressing illegal immigration (14 percent) as the No. 3 priority. Further down the list were improving the economy, balancing the budget, improving the country’s infrastructure and strengthening national security.

All of those five districts are swing districts, including NC-9 of stolen absentee ballot fame, with a special election there next month, and it's a Republican poll, so if anything the numbers are shaded in favor of the NRA.

Having said that, all of these initiatives have zero chance of passage.

Following his now well-established pattern after mass shootings, Trump continues to back away from his initial support for "strong background checks." When the bodies are still being buried – whether after Las Vegas, Parkland, Fla., or El Paso – the president proclaims that he will take meaningful action to address the epidemic of gun violence. But as public attention wanes, and he faces pushback from the National Rifle Association, Trump returns to saying the problem that needs to be addressed is actually mental health.

“It's the people that pull the trigger, not the gun that pulls the trigger,” Trump said last night on the tarmac in New Jersey, as he prepared to fly back to Washington after 10 days at the golf club he owns there. “We have a very, very big mental health problem, and Congress is working on various things and I will be looking at it. … They have bipartisan committees working on background checks and various other things. And we’ll see. I don't want people to forget that this is a mental health problem. I don't want them to forget that because it is. It’s a mental health problem."

There have always been lots of violent people in the world, but they did not always have such easy access to weapons of war and massive magazines. Mass shootings did not used to happen with such regularity, and they did not used to be so deadly.

Asked last night if he’ll support universal background checks, Trump was curt and noncommittal. “I'm not saying anything,” he replied. “I'm saying Congress is going to be reporting back to me with ideas. And they'll come in from Democrats and Republicans. And I'll look at it very strongly. But just remember, we already have a lot of background checks, okay? Thank you.”

Besides, Mitch McConnell will never allow legislation to even get a floor vote.

Until we start seeing people on the evening news interviews saying "I voted for this candidate because of their support for new gun safety regulations and background checks" or better yet, "I voted against this incumbent because they've had years to do something about background checks and didn't lift a finger" then no, nothing will happen.

Meanwhile, I expect we'll visit the issue of background checks and assault weapons at least one or two more times between now and November 2020, and the same exact articles will be written and the poll results won't change, and Mitch will still do nothing.

And the American people will re-elect 95% of the incumbents who did nothing.

A Bunch Of Block(ade) Heads

Donald Trump's latest idiotic foreign policy idea is a total naval blockade of Venezuela, which would be not only immensely impractical, but an act of open war. Axios's Jon Swan:

President Trump has suggested to national security officials that the U.S. should station Navy ships along the Venezuelan coastline to prevent goods from coming in and out of the country, according to 5 current and former officials who have either directly heard the president discuss the idea or have been briefed on Trump's private comments.

Driving the news: Trump has been raising the idea of a naval blockade periodically for at least a year and a half, and as recently as several weeks ago, these officials said. They added that to their knowledge the Pentagon hasn't taken this extreme idea seriously, in part because senior officials believe it's impractical, has no legal basis and would suck resources from a Navy that is already stretched to counter China and Iran.

Trump has publicly alluded to a naval blockade of Venezuela. Earlier this month he answered "Yes, I am" when a reporter asked whether he was mulling such a move. But he hasn't elaborated on the idea publicly.

In private, Trump has expressed himself more vividly, these current and former officials say. 

"He literally just said we should get the ships out there and do a naval embargo," said one source who's heard the president’s comments. "Prevent anything going in." 

"I'm assuming he's thinking of the Cuban missile crisis," the source added. "But Cuba is an island and Venezuela is a massive coastline. And Cuba we knew what we were trying to prevent from getting in. But here what are we talking about? It would need massive, massive amounts of resources; probably more than the U.S. Navy can provide."

Hawkish GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, has a different perspective about the value of a show of military force. "I've been saying for months that when the Venezuelan military sees an American military presence gathering force, this thing ends pretty quickly," he told me.

"This thing" being the government of Nicolas Maduro, of course.  The US Navy wants nothing to do with this stupidity, but they're already being portrayed as not sufficiently patriotic to Dear Leader Trump and giving the Navy a major boost in Pentagon spending in swing states in order to get them on board with the war effort is seen as a worthwhile endeavor by right-wing goofballs like Hugh Hewitt.

When the Air Force decided in 2017 not to base F-35A fighter aircraft at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan, it missed an easy way to achieve some equity in the distribution of defense-industry dollars in the states. Trump could direct the Pentagon to reverse that decision.

The Navy’s plans for a new “large unmanned surface vessel” calls for a ship which could be built at a Great Lakes facility; near Detroit makes sense, if only out of fairness to a state that has been largely ignored in the Trump military rebuild. Given the likely long-term need for many of these ships in the future, a new facility could be planted and grown along with the program. It pains this Buckeye to say so, but somewhere along the Michigan coast next door to Ohio would be equitable. 

A focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin need not be limited to the Defense Department. Recently, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) pushed successfully for the planned relocation of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colo., in a brilliant move to bring bureaucrats closer to the citizens they regulate and whom they are supposed to serve. Sending large parts of the Environmental Protection Agency to Flint, Mich., or nearby locations would drive home the same message.

Trump has the chance to drain the swamp while making government agencies much more attuned to the people in flyover country. But he must act soon.

Yet, it is really the Navy’s utter failure to deliver even a bare-bones plan to realize the president’s promise of a 355-ship Navy that ought to rankle the commander in chief. A new chief of naval operations will arrive soon. The president ought to have waiting on his desk copies of the speeches in which he promised, and then promised again, a 355-ship Navy, along with the slogan famously used by Winston Churchill scrawled with the black Sharpie that Trump likes to use: “Action this day!”

The pressure on the US Navy to make a blockade work is on...and the result will be yet another option to get us into a war at Trump's convenience.

StupidiNews!

• Newly-examined DNA evidence has potentially cracked a 36-year-old sexual assault case in Florida, the suspect is currently serving time for bank robbery in West Virginia.
• Hundreds of thousands of protesters clogged the streets of Hong Kong Sunday for a massive pro-democracy rally as China continues to decry the "terrorist-like" tactics of demonstrators.
• Islamic State is claiming responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed 63 at a wedding reception in Kabul over the weekend as Taliban and US forces continue to negotiate a US withdrawal.
• Former South Carolina GOP Rep. Mark Sanford says he's pondering a primary challenge to Donald Trump, saying Trump "does not deserve" a second term.
• A new US Department of Energy survey finds that wind power is now cheaper to produce than natural gas, but only due to a renewable energy tax credit that the Trump regime is ending.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

This time America got lucky and a white supremacist terrorist was stopped before he could shoot up an Ohio synagogue.

An Ohio man has been arrested for making threats toward a local Jewish community center in New Middletown.

James Reardon Jr., 20, has been charged with telecommunications harassment and aggravated menacing and is being held in the Mahoning County Jail on $250,000 bond with a court hearing planned for Monday morning.

On Friday, the FBI Violent Crimes Task Force raided Reardon’s house and seized a cache of weapons and ammunition, including dozens of round of ammo, multiple semi-automatic weapons, a gas mask and bulletproof armor.

"Grateful for the work of the FBI, local law enforcement and our community partners in the Youngstown Jewish community. We will continue to employ all our resources to stop the spread of white nationalism and violent extremism," the Anti-Defamation League in Cleveland tweeted.

Police initially became aware of Reardon on July 11 when he posted a video on Instagram of a man shooting a semi-automatic rifle with sirens and screams in the background. He tagged the Jewish Community Center of Youngstown in the post.

"That kicked off an intense investigation, a very rapidly evolving investigation, because of the way the world is," New Middletown Police Chief Vince D’Egidio told Youngstown ABC affiliate WYTV.

"Because of the way the world is", as if we somehow didn't have a direct line to draw from the man in the White House and the anti-Semitic hate he surrounds himself with and uses on a regular basis to repeated potential mass slaughter of American Jews.

But sure, let's just pretend Donald Trump has nothing to do with it.

The Evil Behind Deportation Nation

The Washington Post takes a look at the Trump Regime's rogues gallery of racists, grifters, enablers, parasites, and yes men that run our country, and the worst of the lot by far is the Minister of White Supremacy himself, Trump's immigration adviser Stephen Miller.

Effusive in praising his boss, Miller said he experienced a “jolt of electricity to my soul” when he saw Trump announce his presidential run, “as though everything that I felt at the deepest levels of my heart were for now being expressed by a candidate for our nation’s highest office before a watching world.”

With sections of the West Wing under summer renovation, Miller has been working out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, setting up in the Secretary of War suite, a spacious, elegant command post appointed with oil paintings, fine leather furniture and a small forest’s worth of hardwood.

Barely a decade removed from college, Miller is at the seat of power. His authority has grown in recent months as he engineered a leadership purge at the Department of Homeland Security, removing or reassigning the head of every immigration-related agency in a span of just seven weeks.

And his long-sought policy goals are reaching fruition. On Monday, Miller secured tighter immigration rules that can disqualify green-card applicants if they are poor or deemed likely to use public assistance, cutting off a pathway to U.S. citizenship for those immigrants who could become a burden on taxpayers, or “public charges.”

Miller’s horizon extends beyond one or even two presidential terms. He views the public charge rule as vital to his goal of reducing immigration, and he has told colleagues it will have “socially transformative effects” on American society.
“Immigration is an issue that affects all others,” Miller said, speaking in structured paragraphs. “Immigration affects our health-care system. Immigration affects our education system. Immigration affects our public safety, it affects our national security, it affects our economy and our financial system. It touches upon everything, but the goal is to create an immigration system that enhances the vibrancy, the unity, the togetherness and the strength of our society.”

This account of Miller’s role in the White House and his relationship to Trump is based on interviews with Miller and 22 current and former administration officials, nearly all of whom have worked directly with him. His colleagues speak of him with a mix of admiration, fear and derision, impressed by his single-minded determination and loyalty to the president, despite an awkward and sometimes off-putting style. Some of the same co-workers who deplore his political machinations say he can be charming and likable when he’s not angling toward an outcome.

Miller often launches into pedantic arguments with others in the White House, citing lengthy, arcane statistics that he mentally stores like munitions. He reads “every economic analysis, every think tank paper, every Wall Street Journal editorial on immigration,” said another colleague.

Obsessed with terminology, Miller tells others in the West Wing that how issues are talked about — and what terms the media and legislators use — is often as important or more important than anything else.

The words and phrases that Miller uses are verbatim white supremacist dogma.  And his attention to detail means he is knowingly using this framing and phraseology in order to advance his twisted cause and to signal to fellow travelers that this is now White House policy.

Remember, Miller doesn't want to stop undocumented from entering the country.  He wants to end legal immigration, and he wants to reverse America's demographic changes by deporting tens of millions of "undesirables" out of the country.

He's flat out evil.

Sunday Long Read: 400 Years Of Slavery

The N Y Times, along with several writers and historians, have put together the 1619 Project, a look at how America started as a slave nation and how it has struggled with that ever since, as we enter our fifth century as a nation and as a people that still has yet to fully come to terms or even to define them.

In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.

But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us. 

This collection of essays is mandatory reading, or should be, for every American.  We'd understand the country and ourselves much more if we did.

Return Of The Blue Wave, Con't

Perpetually DEEPLY CONCERNED ABOUT DONALD TRUMP Maine Sen. Susan Collins should now be deeply concerned about keeping her job, as Cook Political Report has shifted her 2020 reelection race to true toss-up status.

Collins won her last reelection bid in 2014 by more than 30 points but is expected to face a much tighter race this time around, with the leader of the state's House of Representatives, Sara Gideon (D), announcing she would challenge the four-term senator.

A press release Friday from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) claimed that the incumbent senator's support had cratered in the state following her confirmation vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year, a controversial vote that Democrats argue pushed her outside the label of "moderate."

"This is the latest in a string of bad news for the vulnerable incumbent, who has continued to lose support among Mainers and seen her net approval drop by a 'stunning' amount since President Trump took office," the DSCC said in a press release, quoting a Morning Consult analysis.

The senator defended her vote to confirm Kavanaugh last month in an interview with The New York Times, telling the newspaper she did not regret her vote "in the least."

Gideon, meanwhile, hammered Collins for the vote in her campaign announcement earlier this year.

“At one point, maybe Sen. Collins was different, but she doesn’t seem that way anymore: taking over a million dollars from drug companies and the insurance industry and voting to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court,” Gideon said.

No current Republican senator has paid more in the polls than Collins.  Like the article says, she won in 2014 by 30 points, running against her was unthinkably quixotic even a few years ago.

Now she's in serious trouble, along with Republican incumbents Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona.

If Democratic Sen. Doug Jones can keep his seat in Alabama, Democrats can pick up at least three seats.  They'll need to pick up more to send Mitch McConnell to the showers, but two open GOP seats, one in Tennessee and one in Kansas are in play, and support for North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis isn't very deep.

It'll take some lifting, but then again, I figure Trump wrecking the economy will have an effect.

Vacationless Nation

America, you're getting screwed out of your time off, and it's costing us tens of billions of dollars.

Workers in the United States left a record number of vacation days on the table last year, equating to billions in lost benefits, according to research from the U.S. Travel Association, Oxford Economics and Ipsos. 

A total of 768 million days went unused in 2018, a 9% increase from 2017. Of those, 236 million were completely forfeited, which comes out to $65.5 billion in lost benefits.

Fifty-five percent of workers reported that they did not use all of their vacation days. If American workers used their time off to travel, the study says, the economic opportunity amounts to $151.5 billion in additional travel spending and would create 2 million American jobs. 

One of the main culprits for the increase in unused vacation days is that the number of earned days off is increasing faster than workers are using them. Workers did not use an average of 27.7% of their earned days off in 2018, up from 25.9% in 2017. 

Although there was a large increase in unused vacation days, on average, American workers took more days off in 2018: 17.4, up from 17.2 off in 2017. However, that is a significant drop from the 20.3 average vacation days used from 1978 to 2000.

But of course in Trump's America, you do what you are told, worker.

The choice for thousands of union workers at Royal Dutch Shell’s petrochemical plant in Beaver County was to either spend Tuesday standing in a giant hall waiting for President Donald Trump to speak, or to take the day off with no pay.
“Your attendance is not mandatory,” read the rules that Shell sent to union leaders a day ahead of the visit to the $6 billion construction site. But only those that showed up at 7 a.m., scanned their cards, and prepared to stand for hours — through lunch but without lunch — would be paid.

“NO SCAN, NO PAY,” the rules said.

Those that decided to sit out the event would have an excused absence, the company said, and would not qualify for overtime pay on Friday. The company has a 56-hour workweek with 16 hours of overtime. That means those workers who attended Mr. Trump’s speech and showed up for work on Friday meeting the overtime threshold are being paid at a rate of time and a half, while those that didn’t go to hear the president are being paid the regular rate, despite the fact that both groups did not do work on the site on Tuesday.

This is just what Shell wanted to do and we went along with it,” said Ken Broadbent, business manager for Steamfitters local 449.

The local has 2,400 workers on the site and Mr. Broadbent said he would not “bad rap about it one way or another.”

“We’re glad to have the jobs. We’re glad to have the project built,” he said. “The president is the president whether we like him or dislike him. We respect him for the title.”

We all serve at the pleasure of Dear Leader Trump now, and our corporate masters will see to it that we do.

Now get back to work.