Last Call For What Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism Problem?

Hey look, it's yet another right-wing white guy calling for armed revolution and overthrow of the US government, but of course nobody cares.

On Saturday the president of a Texas open-carry group called for like-minded followers to join him in marching on Washington to “arrest the bankers, crooked politicians and restore liberty here in our country” at gunpoint. 

Saying that voting “is not working,” Kory Watkins, president of the Open Carry Tarrant County, wrote on his Facebook page: “Have you ever thought we might just need to organize a very large group of our own people. Like 200 from each state so we can march armed to DC take over the city, arrest the bankers, crooked politicians and restore liberty here in our country? I’m not scared. I mean really…..voting and waiting is not working!” 

Watkins recently made the news when he posted on Facebook that he was involved in a car crash with a drunk driver as he returned from protesting at a DUI safety checkpoint set up by Arlington police. 

Watkins had reportedly been warning motorists about the checkpoint while shouting “You criminals!” at officers as they stopped drivers.

Would your reaction dismissing this jackass as a harmless crank be the same if he were black, and demanding armed marchers on Washington DC to arrest politicians for failing on police killings of unarmed black men and women because "voting and waiting is not working"?  Somehow I think it would be national news.  Or at least, constantly news on FOX.

The New Conversion Rate

Alternet's Adam Lee has a theory about why Republicans want to destroy the safety net for America's poor and let church charities deal with them instead: putting millions of Americans under a new theocratic state is exactly what they want.

Cutting government charity on the scale that Republican Congresses propose would be Armageddon," according to local charities and food banks. But I think there's an explanation that runs deeper than indifference. I suspect many religious conservatives are well aware that what they propose would mean throwing millions of people into destitution. In fact, they may be counting on it. 

Under the law, churches have wide latitude to discriminate and to put conditions on whom they'll hire and whom they'll serve, far more than any private business. In exchange for ladling out soup, they can make people sit through a sermon; they can impose an ideological loyalty test; they can refuse to serve people they think might be gay; they can discriminate for any reason or for no reason at all. (The one thing that churches can't legally do is tell their members how to vote - at least, they can't do this if they want to retain their tax exemption - but they're fighting hard to repeal even that trivial restriction, with right-wing pastors all around the country repeatedly flouting the law and daring the IRS to punish them.) 

While most evangelical churches proclaim that they want people to convert voluntarily, their actions show otherwise. When given the chance to coerce their audience, they'll do so gleefully, as we've seen in prison ministries all over the country where inmates are given special rewards and privileges in exchange for their cooperation with religious indoctrination. 

What they want, in short, is a captive audience. If government charity were to be cut off, the churches wouldn't be able to come close to supplying the wants of everyone, and so they'd have strong incentive to impose stringent conditions on the people they did help. Only the most faithful, the most compliant, the most submissive would be able to get through the door. 

And that's precisely the state of affairs that the religious right yearns for. What they want is to build a theocracy from the ground up, where the poor and the needy are abjectly dependent on a church that can yank away the necessities of life if it judges them insufficiently compliant, and so the masses will have no choice but to be corralled and steered. Even today, we can see this conservative vision put into practice, and witness the terrible consequences that result when it blocks the government from helping the needy. Consider Mississippi, which is both the most religious and has the most churches per capita of any U.S. state. If rosy visions like Ernst's were true, Mississippi would be the best place in the country to live. But in reality, it's the poorest and (by life expectancy) sickest state.

If you thought right wing Christians were furious with poor people getting tax money and having to jump through hoops to show they're really needy, wait until they have to go through the church to get basic needs met.  Millions of ready souls to be cared for, and the church can set whatever rules they want in exchange for help, including listening to whom they should vote for.

Which is exactly what the GOP wants.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Over at National Journal, Sam Baker and Sophie Novak ask:

If the Supreme Court Breaks Obamacare, Will Republicans Fix It?

Republicans want the Supreme Court to blow a major hole in Obamacare next year, but they are still debating whether they would help repair it—and what they should ask for in return. 

There's a very real chance the high court will invalidate Obamacare's insurance subsidies in most of the country, which would be devastating for the health care law. It would become almost entirely unworkable in most states, and the cost of coverage would skyrocket. 

That loss for the Affordable Care Act might seem like a clear-cut political win for the GOP, but the reality would be far messier. The law would still require people to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, leaving people on the hook for a product that—sans subsidies—they could not afford. And as many of those people live in Republican-run states or 2016 battlegrounds, they'll be asking for a solution. 

That would leave Republicans with a difficult choice: Do they continue to push for an all-out repeal of the law—creating a standoff with Democrats who will dig in in the hopes of legislation undoing the Supreme Court's decision—or do they seek a deal that alleviates the law's burden on those who've lost their subsidies? Such a deal would likely include pullbacks of major parts of the law, but it would also require Republicans to give up on a full "root-and-branch" repeal.

Let's be honest here. A SCOTUS decision that wrecks Obamacare here will absolutely, positively be a 100% clear-cut political win for the GOP.

After SCOTUS destroys federal exchange subsidies, Republicans will then demand Obamacare be fully repealed and doing so will become the major campaign issue of 2016, because Democrats are pathetic, whining losers.

States with federal-run exchanges include Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, the states that will pretty much decide 2016's White House winner.  And Republicans in those states know damn well they can run ads saying OBAMACARE WILL COST YOU THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS A MONTH NOW and they won't have to lift a finger to fix a damn thing, and most likely they'll win easily.

Since when do voters punish Republicans for wrecking the country when they can blame Obama and win?

What's the downside?

StupidiNews!

• Pakistani Taliban gunmen have attacked a military school and left 120 dead, mostly children, and at least 100 more wounded.
• In an 8-1 ruling the US Supreme Court has found that police can pull a suspect over for the wrong reason, as long as they have a reasonable suspicion and understanding of the law.
• A manhunt in the Philadelphia suburb of Pennsburg continues for Iraq war veteran Bradley William Stone, who is suspected of killing six people, including his ex-wife and her family.
• Crude oil prices have now fallen under $60 as OPEC nations continue to produce in order to maintain market share against US shale oil.
• Dutch privacy regulators say Google has violated a 2012 law and could face up to 15 million euros in fines.

Last Call For Waging A Wage War

NY Times Upshot reporter Neil Irwin crunches the numbers on the labor market and finds a major problem that's going to have to get fixed sooner or later: employment is roaring up, but wages are down.

On the surface, it doesn’t make any sense. The jobless rate doesn’t even count millions of people who have left the labor force entirely in recent years and might be coaxed back in. So any employer with a job opening should have no problem hiring. If anything, the ratio of openings to hiring should be lower than it was in the mid-2000s, not higher. 

Here’s a theory to try to make sense of the disconnect: During the recession, employers got spoiled. When unemployment was near 10 percent, talented workers were lined up outside their door. The workers they did have were terrified of losing their jobs. If you put out word that you had an opening, you could fill the job almost instantly. That’s why the ratio of job openings to hires fell so low in 2009. 

As the economy has gotten better the last five years, employers have had more and more job openings, but have been sorely reluctant to accept that it’s not 2009 anymore in terms of what workers they can hire and at what wage.

This is most evident in the rush to get more H-1B visas for tech workers.  We've been told for a decade now that America isn't producing enough engineers and programmers, and the reality is that employers don't want to pay American ones at a fair market wage,  They want cheaper imported labor.  In effect, this is playing out all over the country.  Employers naturally want to hire as cheaply as possible, but the days of "I'll take that job for nothing just so I'm employed again" are over.

There are some early hints that this day is coming soon. In the National Federation of Independent Business survey of members released Tuesday, 22 percent of small businesses reported increasing compensation versus 2 percent that said they reduced pay. Their outlook for pay increases in the coming months rose. The November jobs numbers released last week showed a 0.4 percent rise in average hourly wages for private sector workers. 

All this is fragmentary evidence, and after years of stagnant wages, we’ll need a lot more solid proof that something has changed before proclaiming a wage boom has arrived. But in this standoff between businesses that want high-skilled workers for minimal pay and workers who want to see raises, one side has to give.

And it's going to be employers.  How much, we'll see, but I wouldn't be surprised to see wage numbers start going up soon.  There are now too many unfilled jobs.

Women Are All Nasty Liars Anyway, Right Guys?

Ol' Instagoober lets us know that ladies, the only problem on college campuses is your constant lying about being raped so you can get attention or something.  And we certainly don't need new laws to stop something that doesn't exist, right?

For months we've been told that there's a burgeoning "epidemic" of rape on college campuses, that the system for dealing with campus rape is "broken" and that we need new federal legislation (of course!) to deal with this disaster. Before the Rolling Stonestory imploded, Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., were citing the Virginia gang rape as evidence of the problem, but now that the story has been exposed as bogus, they're telling us that, regardless of that isolated incident, there's still a huge campus rape problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. 

And that's the real college rape hoax. Because the truth is that there's no epidemic outbreak of college rape. In fact, rape on college campuses is — like rape everywhere else in America — plummeting in frequency. And that 1-in-5 college rape number you keep hearing in the press? It's thoroughly bogus, too. (Even the authors of that studysay that "We don't think one in five is a nationally representative statistic," because it sampled only two schools.) 

Sen, Gillibrand also says that "women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus." 

The truth — and, since she's a politician, maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise — is exactly the opposite. According to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of rape and sexual assault is lower for college students (at 6.1 per 1,000) than for non-students (7.6 per 1,000). (Note: not 1 in 5). What's more, between 1997 and 2013, rape against women dropped by about 50%, in keeping with a more general drop in violent crime nationally.

So keep in mind reported sexual assaults are down.  The ones that aren't reported, well.  I can't imagine why efforts to drag a woman who tries to report sexual assault through the mud, calling her a liar, and trying to destroy her utterly would lower the rate of reported sexual assaults.  There's no epidemic because it's not being reported, and it's not being reported because those who do are treated worse by America than those who actually assault women on college campuses, ergo, there's no epidemic because the numbers "don't fit the left's narrative".

It's a neat little package of self-loathing we bundle our young women up in, isn't it?  If you report assault, you're worse than the person who assaulted you and you're assumed to be lying because of "the statistics" show assault on college campuses are down.  If you don't report it, well, then the assault statistics are down, so there's no problem.  College campuses are safer than ever!

So of course we don't need to do anything about it, except make those lying women shut up, right boys?  Al we have to do is make sure no woman feels confortable enough to ever report her assault and bammo, instant cure for sexual assault in America.

The statistics say so. Just ask Glenn Reynolds here.

Measuring Up In The Treasure State

If it seems that the new dress code for Montana's state legislature is a throwback to the days of Mad Men, it's because it's a throwback to the days of Mad Men.

Montana has never been known as a black-tie place. Governors wear cowboy boots and bolo ties, and people joke that a tuxedo is a pair of black jeans and a sport coat. But this winter, when lawmakers arrive at the State Capitol, they will have to abide by a new dress code: No more jeans. No casual Fridays. And female lawmakers “should be sensitive to skirt lengths and necklines.”

Republican leaders who approved the guidelines say they are simply trying to bring a businesslike formality to a State Legislature of ranchers, farmers and business owners that meets for only four months every other year. But the dress code has set off a torrent of online mockery, and is being pilloried by Democratic women as a sexist anachronism straight from the days of buggies and spittoons.

“The sergeant-at-arms could be standing there with a ruler, measuring hemlines and cleavage,” said Jenny Eck, a Democratic House member.

Ms. Eck said she was leaving a health care forum in Helena, the capital, on Monday when one of her Republican colleagues peered at her and told her that he was glad to see she was dressed appropriately.

“It just creates this ability to scrutinize women,” Ms. Eck said. “It makes it acceptable for someone who’s supposed to be my peer and my equal to look me up and down and comment on what I’m wearing. That doesn’t feel right.”

Yeah, commenting on a female colleague being "dressed appropriately" isn't creepy as hell or anything. Republicans sure like to re-live the "good old days" whenever possible, when women were "dressed appropriately" and stuff. 

 Why don't you find that cute new young page and swat her ass hello while you're at it, guys.

Jesus.

StupidiNews!

• Protests against police brutality found tens of thousands marching in cities across America over the weekend in support of the families of victims.
• Former Vice-President Dick Cheney insisted in an interview with NBC that former President George W. Bush knew about torture of terrorist detainees and insisted it was done for medical reasons.
• Australian police are treating a hostage situation in a Sydney cafe as a terrorist attack, believing the gunman may have ties to Islamist extremists.
• New York is expected to issue the state's first Vegas-style casino licenses this week, eventually putting gambling facilities in the Catskills, only 50 miles away from the Big Apple.
• Ride-share service Uber charged four times the regular fare rate in Sydney during Monday's hostage crisis, only to turn around and begin offering free rides after being mauled in social media.

Last Call For Uber Uber Alles

Ride share bad boy Uber is flipping the country's taxi services upside down, proving that when you combine the ambush tactics of the Tea Party right and the pitiless analysis of Silicon Valley's left, there's very few local and state legislatures and regulators you can't curbstomp.

On a Thursday in June, bureaucrats from Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles made their move against Uber Technologies. The fast-growing ride-for-hire company was told that its popular service was, in fact, illegal and that the firm needed to immediately cease all operations in the state.

Far from being intimidated, Uber was ready to fight back. The company immediately called on one of its most potent weapons: its ­ever-growing list of smartphone-wielding customers. A notice sent to Uber users in Virginia included the e-mail address and phone number of the ordinarily low-profile official in charge of the decision. The notice instructed the company’s supporters to demand that the DMV “stand up for you.”

Hundreds of them did and, by Sunday, Commissioner Richard Holcomb’s inbox was flooded. Holcomb did his best to respond — working through the weekend, even crafting e-mails to irate Uber customers as he lay in bed at home.

The poor guy never had a chance.

Then, seeking a longer-term fix, Uber lobbyists submitted a draft of a proposed temporary operating permit. State officials granted a revised version several weeks later, permitting Uber as well as Lyft, a smaller company, to continue normal operations for the time being.

In an era of government dysfunction, the Virginia example shows how San Francisco-based Uber has pioneered not just a new sort of taxi service but also a new way to change long-standing local ordinances.

Uber’s approach is brash and, so far, highly effective: It launches in local markets regardless of existing laws or regulations. It aims to build a large customer base as quickly as possible. When challenged, Uber rallies its users to pressure government officials, while unleashing its well-connected lobbyists to influence lawmakers.

Why bother with lobbyist organizations like ALEC when you can cut out the middleman, aggressively leverage the internet and your own customers, and crush any and all regulatory opposition?  Just roll through and take over before anyone can react. Yes, the article does point out that Uber has screwed up so far on more than a few occasions, and maybe people are starting to wise up to what's going on.

But until that happens, it's the Wild West, and Uber is winning.

Sunday Long Read: History Is Written By The Winners

I grew up in North Carolina and went to public school there, eventually graduating from the state's residential magnet high school for science and math.  It was one of the best learning experiences of my life, which is why it saddens me to see 20 years later that the Koch brothers just bought North Carolina's high school history and civics classes to teach Tea Party doctrine to students.

Public high school students in North Carolina will be taught from a lesson plans and worksheets prepared by a organization closely tied to the billionaire Koch brothers, if the state’s Department of Public Instruction gets its way. According to the Raleigh News and Observer, the Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute received a “$100,000, sole-source contract with [North Carolina] to help develop materials for teachers to use in a course on founding principles that the state requires students to take.”

The N&O also notes that the organization receives funding directly from David Koch and from two Koch family foundations, although, if anything, this description understates the Institute’s ties to the conservative billionaires. Two of the Institutes four board members are employed by Koch entities — one is a senior vice president at Koch Industries and another is director of higher education programs at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation — and many of the Institute’s other top leaders also appear likely to push a political agenda in line with the Koch brothers’ anti-government views. Board member Todd Zywicki, is a George Mason law professor and a leading opponent of Wall Street reforms such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Institute’s president, David J. Bobb, founded two centers at Hillsdale College, a conservative institution of higher education that proclaims its opposition to “the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity.’”

At every turn the lesson plan is that America was formed by armed resistance to centralized, federal government and remains plagued to this day by high taxes and Washington DC interference.  The lesson plan also includes a call to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, instead allowing state legislatures to choose Senators to "avoid the corruption of federal elections" and holds the Commerce Clause as the source of many woes the country suffers from.

It's pretty subtle and nasty stuff, and worth a read.  Especially for those of you with kids in high school, understand that this lesson plan is coming to dozens of red states pushed by state legislatures controlled by Republican corporate interests.

Got to get them hating the federal government while they're young, you know.

Cruz Uncontrolled Con't

So Sen. Ted Cruz's plan to force the Senate to stay through the weekend and vote on every single nomination the Dems wanted in order to pass this year's spending bill to stop a shutdown was a disaster.

For Ted Cruz.

Democrats called his bluff.

While Republican senators were fuming at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) for holding up a $1.1 trillion spending bill aimed at preventing a government shutdown, Democrats saw a silver lining: the move by Cruz and Lee gave Democrats an opening to move a number of President Barack Obama's nominees for federal judgeships and the executive branch.

What happened was that when Cruz and Lee scuttled a deal between Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that would have allowed lawmakers to leave Washington D.C. for the weekend and come back Monday they gave Democrats a chance to advance Obama's presidential appointees by having to stay in D.C. to deal with the spending bill.

The extra time over the weekend gave Reid the opportunity to, through the Senate's executive session, file cloture on the nominations and move them sooner than they would have under the deal Reid and McConnell had planned on and that Cruz and Lee blocked. Under the original deal Reid would have had to schedule votes on the nominees later in the upcoming week, when Democrats may not have wanted to stick around to vote.

"It allows us to speed up the time when we could get going on these noms, rather than waiting until next week," a top Senate Democratic aide told TPM on Saturday evening. "It gets harder to get them all done when you’re running up on the end of the Congress."

Cruz dragged out the clock in protest, lost his anti-immigration poison pill vote on the CR/Omnibus bill anyway, and bought the Democrats extra time to bring up all the nominations that the Republicans blocked for the last two years for a straight up or down vote on Monday.

And in the end, Ted Cruz loses again.  Get used to that headline, America.

Bill De Blasio, Persona Non Grata

New York City's Finest apparently don't think Hizzoner Mayor Bill de Blasio should be welcome anymore after siding with people who think the NYPD shouldn't be chokeholding people to death.

Cops are warning Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Melissa ​Mark-​Viverito to stay away from their funerals should they be ​killed in the line of duty.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association distributed a flier to members, blaring: “DON’T LET THEM INSULT YOUR SACRIFICE!” Cops were encouraged to sign and submit the “Don’t Insult My Sacrifice” waiver to ban the cop-bashing pols from their funerals.

“I, as a New York City police officer, request that Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito refrain from attending my funeral services in the event that I am killed in the line of duty,” the waiver states.

“Due to Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice.”

Officers can download the form on the PBA’s Web site and drop off a signed copy to their PBA delegates.

The mayor traditionally attends funerals for fallen officers.

Not anymore, it seems.

Cruz Uncontrolled

The whole "not shutting the government down" plan the House worked out on Thursday has run into the reality of Grandstanding Sen. Ted Cruz, and no plan survives contact with the Enemy, as they say.

Sen. Ted Cruz, the firebrand conservative freshman from Texas, has blown up the Senate leadership’s plans to have a peaceful weekend by forcing round-the-clock votes on President Obama’s nominees and the $1.1 trillion omnibus.

Cruz took to the floor late Friday to castigate congressional leaders for trying to pass the 1,600-page spending bill after only a few hours of debate and questioned the resolve of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to fight Obama’s executive order protecting five million illegal immigrants from deportation. 

“Even though millions of voters rose up just one month ago to protest how President Obama and the Senate Democrats were running Washington, business as usual is continuing inside the marble halls of the United State Congress,” Cruz said in a fiery floor speech.

Because of objections from Cruz and his ally Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the Senate will begin slogging through procedural votes on nominees starting at noon Saturday and vote to end a filibuster of the omnibus spending package at 1 a.m. Sunday morning.

“It appears that we’re going to have to have a series of votes all day tomorrow starting as soon as we get here and perhaps into the morning,” Reid said shortly before temporarily adjourning the chamber Friday night.

A senior Senate Democratic aide said the Senate may hold up to 40 procedural votes on nominees this weekend due to what he called the “extreme pettiness on the part of Republicans.”

So we're all just playing Ted Cruz's game now.  Get used to that for the next two years, America.  It's what you voted for when you sat home in November.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Four are wounded, 3 hospitalized as police search for a gunman who opened fire near a high school in Portland, Oregon.
• US Attorney General Eric Holder says that the Justice Department will not compel NY Times reporter James Risen to reveal his source on a failed CIA plot to undermine Iran's nuclear program.
• The "CR/Omnibus" spending bill that passed the House yesterday must now pass the Senate before midnight Sunday to avoid a government shutdown.
• Meanwhile, the House passed unanimously tougher sanctions on Russia over the continuing Ukraine crisis, but the bill gives President Obama some leeway on action.
• British officials are blaming an air traffic control center software failure for dozens of cancelled flights on Friday.

Last Call For Back-Scratching 101

The Village is a small world after all as the Sony Pictures hack/leak is the gift that keeps on giving.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd promised to show Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal’s husband Bernard Weinraub — a former Times reporter — a version of a column featuring Pascal before publication. 

The end result was a column that painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication. It also scored Pascal points back at the studio, with Sony’s then-communications chief calling the column “impressive.” 

The exchanges were uncovered in a trove of Pascal’s emails released as part of a massive hack on Sony carried out by the group known as “Guardians of Peace.” 

The column, published after the Academy Awards earlier this year, lamented how “Oscar voters and industry top brass are still overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged.”

Of course.  It's ironic that the column found Hollywood to be an overly chummy boys club (which it is) while of course Dowd and Pascal using a close friendship to get the glowing column about Pascal written in the first place.

Can't be burned down fast enough.