Last Call For One Hell Of A Blowback Story

It's Judicial Watch, so take it with an entire salt mine's worth of salt, but the gist is that the Pentagon worked with Al-Qaeda remnants in Syria in order to topple Bashar al-Assad and when that went tits up, the result was those groups became ISIS, a Pentagon report predicted the whole mess, and Obama did it anyway.

The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies.

Noting that “the Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”

The 7-page DIA document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic State in Iraq,’ (ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’ “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media.”

The formerly secret Pentagon report notes that the “rise of the insurgency in Syria” has increasingly taken a “sectarian direction,” attracting diverse support from Sunni “religious and tribal powers” across the region.

In a section titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the DIA report predicts that while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate “into proxy war.”

Well, at least one DIA analyst knew what they were talking about.

In a strikingly prescient prediction, the Pentagon document explicitly forecasts the probable declaration of “an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

Nevertheless, “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts” by Syrian “opposition forces” fighting to “control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to Western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar)”: 

“… there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

The secret Pentagon document thus provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS, had three years ago welcomed the emergence of an extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion.”

The establishment of such a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria, the DIA document asserts, is “exactly” what the “supporting powers to the [Syrian] opposition want.” Earlier on, the document repeatedly describes those “supporting powers” as “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey.”

This is all pretty depressing if true. This is a hell of a news dump for Memorial Day weekend, but it's still worth analyzing. The notion that we worked for regime change -- again -- and it failed disastrously is definitely going to be the next president's major problem in the Middle East.

I'm going to need more evidence on this before I start assigning blame, but I don't have a good feeling about it.

Driving Miss Crazy

MoDo The Red is horrified that her Uber passenger score is not 5 stars, and she's upset, you guys.

Even in the land of movie stars, you could feel like a movie star when your Uber chauffeur rolled up. Standing in front of the Sunset Tower Hotel, I tapped my Uber app and saw five little cars swarming around my location. But, suddenly, they scattered in the opposite direction. I stood in the driveway, perplexed. Finally, a car pulled up, and the driver waved me in.

“Do you know why no one wanted to pick you up?” he asked. “Because you have a low rating.”

(Uber drivers see your rating once they accept the request and then can cancel.)

I was shocked. Blinded by the wondrous handiness of Uber, I had missed the fact that while I got to rate them, they got to rate me back.

Revealing that I had only 4.2 stars, my driver continued to school me. “You don’t always come out right away,” he said, sternly, adding that I would have to work hard to be more appealing if I wanted to get drivers to pick me up.

Uber began to feel less like a dependable employee and more like an irritated boyfriend.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that constantly treating her Uber driver like The Help and often making the driver wait for her is the reason why MoDo has a less than stellar rating, but don't tell her that.  These Uber drivers are working here, and they get paid by the fare.  Making them wait means they can take fewer fares in the same time period.  It's wasting their time and their money, and she had no idea.

Also, is there anyone that Maureen Dowd doesn't treat like an irritated boyfriend?  Uber drivers, other reporters, President Obama, etc.?

The woman has issues.  Big ones.

Sunday Long Read: The Race To Stop Racism

This week's Sunday Long Read is from NY Magazine's Lisa Miller, reporting on Fieldston Lower School, a Bronx private school that began an experiment to deal with race and racism in America head on, starting in the third grade.

In recent years, under the direction of its principal, George Burns, Lower has come to look a lot less like the white, mostly Jewish Riverdale neighborhood that encircles the school and more like the Bronx in general. Just fewer than half the kids at Lower are white. Twenty percent are black or Latino, and another 20 percent multi­racial. The remainder are Asian or won’t say, making Lower one of the most racially diverse private elementary schools in New York. This has been a big change (when Burns took the job 16 years ago, about 20 percent of the students were kids of color), but as this parent body sees it, it’s all to the good. Lower has always been a progressive place, and in 2015, many are happy to see it as a kind of racial utopia, too.

Now the school was promising to do even more in the name of racial equity, offering a pioneering new curriculum designed to give its youngest students the tools they’d need to navigate their own futures — and to bolster Fieldston’s sense of itself as a standard-bearer in progressive education. The program, which was also put in place this school year at Ethical Culture, Fieldston’s other elementary school, would boost self-esteem and a sense of belonging among minority kids while combating the racism, subtle or otherwise, that can permeate historically white environments. It would foster interracial empathy by encouraging children to recognize differences without disrespect while teaching kids strategies, and the language, for navigating racial conflict. Efforts like this had been popping up around the country over the past decade in progressive private schools and public schools wrestling in more direct ways with the tangle of race and achievement. Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has developed an anti-bias curriculum that 16,000 teachers have downloaded since it became available in September. The Anti-Defamation League does training for kids and teachers in schools — 200 a year in Connecticut alone. And Welcoming Schools, connected with the Human Rights Campaign, helps train the staffs of elementary schools for this kind of learning, traveling last year to Boulder, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Arkansas. In Gallup, New Mexico, a fifth-grade class planned and staged a community arts crawl showcasing the theme “Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action.” In Greenville, Alabama, fourth-graders made picture books answering the question “How have people fought for what is right at different times in history?” and then read them aloud to the school’s second-graders.

But Fieldston’s program would be bolder, more radical: It would be mandatory rather than voluntary, and built into the school day itself; it would compel participation from children of all races who would at first be separated into racial “affinity groups”; and it would start in the third grade, with 8-year-olds, an age when many of the kids have only an inchoate sense of what “racial identity” means. It would be a boundary-pushing experiment, in other words, in a place that seemed exceptionally hospitable to progressive experimentation — but also, undeniably, a privileged and racially anomalous bubble. Fieldston’s unusual identity gave it a better shot than most schools, perhaps, at making this work; and if it did work, its administrators thought, the impact might reach far beyond its cloister.

To all these ends, the third- , fourth- , and fifth-graders at Lower were to be divided once a week for five weeks into small groups according to their race. In 45-minute sessions, children would talk about what it was like to be a member of that race; they would discuss what they had in common with each other and how they were different, how other people perceived them, rightly or wrongly, based on appearance. Disinhibited by the company of racially different peers, the children would, the school hoped, feel free to raise questions and make observations that in mixed company might be considered impolite. The bigger goal was to initiate a cultural upheaval, one that would finally give students of color a sense of equal owner­ship in the community. Once the smaller race groups had broken up, the children would gather in a mixed-race setting to share, and discuss, the insights they had gained. Then — after all this — their regularly scheduled school day would continue: math, English, social studies, science, gym.

The kids seem to respond pretty well to the program.  The parents...well...they're the ones that were taught the most valuable lessons. It's a good read.

Last Call For Sons Of The South

Politico notes that the deep red South isn't doing so well with the 2016 Clown Car Cavalcade.

It’s the heartland of the modern Republican Party, the most reliably red region in presidential elections. But as the 2016 GOP campaign for the White House gets underway, the South finds itself yet again without a native son in a leading role.

As party leaders gathered here for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, a traditional candidate cattle call that draws many of the party’s presidential hopefuls and attracted around 2,000 activists this year, there was no shortage of reminders about the South’s importance, both financially and electorally, to the party’s political fortunes.

Yet the three Republicans who lead the field are a governor from Wisconsin, Scott Walker, and Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush, two candidates rooted in the part of Florida that is most culturally distinct from the South — Miami.

The GOP primary is not without authentic sons of the South — South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, both born in small towns at the dawn of the civil rights era, proudly identify as such. There is also Bobby Jindal, the Baton Rouge-born Louisiana governor.

But all of them — including former Gov. Rick Perry, as a Texan not quite a Southerner but stylistically close enough to pass for one — find themselves trailing far behind in the polls, struggling to demonstrate their viability as 2016 prospects. Two other candidates with tenuous claims to the Southern candidate mantle — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Canada-born Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — are faring better but still have a ways to go in expanding their voter bases. Should they all fall short, it would mark the third consecutive presidential election that the Republican Party has picked a nominee who doesn’t hail from the South, even in its most expansive definition.

Few here at the SRLC said that it matters, as long as the candidate who captures the GOP nomination shares the same conservative values.

“I just think our people don’t care where they’re from as much as what they believe and how they lead,” said Chad Connelly, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman.

If that's not a good old-fashioned "Bless his heart" being directed at Jeb Bush, specifically, I dunno what is.

Pretending that it doesn't matter if they can't get a Good Ol Boy into the White House again? That's funny.  But let's face it, the party is bought and paid for by the Romney/McCain Country Club wing, and the Bubbas from the South are just there to be cannon fodder for the GOP and alway will be in the back of the bus.

I'm sure this will come up again in 2020, after they lose again.

StupidiNews Weekend Update

Couple of big stories developing this weekend:

Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of charges by a judge in the involuntary manslaughter charges against a black couple when officers fired 138 bullets into the car that killed Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.

A white Cleveland police officer who stood on a car and shot the vehicle's two unarmed black occupants after colleagues already riddled the car with bullets in 2012 was found not guilty Saturday in their deaths -- with a judge ruling his actions were constitutionally justified.

Cuyahoga County Judge John P. O'Donnell, who reached the verdicts after a several-week trial, declared Officer Michael Brelo not guilty of voluntary manslaughter and felonious assault in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams following a 20-minute car chase.

Brelo's actions -- jumping onto the stopped car and firing 15 shots into the vehicle after he and his colleagues fired more than 100 times -- were constitutionally justifiable because it wasn't yet clear that any perceived threat to the officers was over, O'Donnell ruled.

It looks like same-sex marriage will win and win big in Ireland as exit polls for Friday's referendum indicate the Yes vote leading.

Early results suggest the Republic of Ireland has voted to legalise same-sex marriage in a historic referendum.

More than 3.2m people were asked whether they wanted to amend the country's constitution to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry.

Government ministers have said they believe it will pass, while prominent "no" campaigners have conceded defeat.

Counting started at 09:00 BST on Saturday morning. An "unusually high" turnout has been reported.

A final result is expected late afternoon on Saturday.

The Senate has blocked reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act, and rejected a bill that would continue the bulk collection of metadata on US citizens.

Unable to end a struggle over how to deal with government surveillance programs, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell scheduled a last-minute session to consider retaining the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic phone records.

McConnell, R-Ky., warned against allowing the controversial NSA program and other key surveillance activities under the USA Patriot Act to expire at midnight May 31. He said he would call the Senate into session that day, a Sunday, and seek action before the deadline.

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky’s other senator and a Republican presidential candidate, called the Senate’s failure to allow an extension of the surveillance programs during a late-night session Friday into Saturday a victory for privacy rights.

“We should never give up our rights for a false sense of security,” Paul said in a statement. “This is only the beginning — the first step of many. I will continue to do all I can until this illegal government spying program is put to an end, once and for all.”

By the time senators broke for the holiday, they had blocked a House-passed bill and several short-term extensions of the key provisions in the Patriot Act.

More on this as it develops.

The Kroog Versus The TPP

When you've lost Paul Krugman on an Obama administration policy as important as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, there's usually something wrong to the point of me reevaluating the policy. I'm at that point now.

I don’t know why the president has chosen to make the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership such a policy priority. Still, there is an argument to be made for such a deal, and some reasonable, well-intentioned people are supporting the initiative.

But other reasonable, well-intentioned people have serious questions about what’s going on. And I would have expected a good-faith effort to answer those questions. Unfortunately, that’s not at all what has been happening. Instead, the selling of the 12-nation Pacific Rim pact has the feel of a snow job. Officials have evaded the main concerns about the content of a potential deal; they’ve belittled and dismissed the critics; and they’ve made blithe assurances that turn out not to be true. 

The administration’s main analytical defense of the trade deal came earlier this month, in a report from the Council of Economic Advisers. Strangely, however, the report didn’t actually analyze the Pacific trade pact. Instead, it was a paean to the virtues of free trade, which was irrelevant to the question at hand. 

First of all, whatever you may say about the benefits of free trade, most of those benefits have already been realized. A series of past trade agreements, going back almost 70 years, has brought tariffs and other barriers to trade very low to the point where any effect they may have on U.S. trade is swamped by other factors, like changes in currency values. 

In any case, the Pacific trade deal isn’t really about trade. Some already low tariffs would come down, but the main thrust of the proposed deal involves strengthening intellectual property rights — things like drug patents and movie copyrights — and changing the way companies and countries settle disputes. And it’s by no means clear that either of those changes is good for America.

I have to admit, a month ago I would have said "I trust the President to get a good enough deal on this."  But a lot of people are now flat out saying that there's no good deal to be had here, unlike Iran or Cuba or Obamacare or a host of other real accomplishments President Obama has made.

If this is the least awful option, then that's what we need to hear, not that this is going to be a great thing.

I'm going to try to find more information on the TPP this weekend.

Last Call For The End Of The Center Right Country Myth

Gallup's latest poll of where Americans stand on the liberal/conservative question finds that for the first time in 16 years of the poll, the percentage of Americans calling themselves liberal now equals the percentage of Americans calling themselves conservative.

Thirty-one percent of Americans describe their views on social issues as generally liberal, matching the percentage who identify as social conservatives for the first time in Gallup records dating back to 1999. 

 

Gallup first asked Americans to describe their views on social issues in 1999, and has repeated the question at least annually since 2001. The broad trend has been toward a shrinking conservative advantage, although that was temporarily interrupted during the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency. Since then, the conservative advantage continued to diminish until it was wiped out this year.

Can we finally put to bed the idiotic "America is a center-right country" myth?  Because America has grown increasingly more liberal over the last 16 years, and we're seeing that today with the question of same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court, a black president now, and a woman the top candidate for the Dems in 2016.

Hopefully we can get things done more in the future.

The Kentucky Job Miracle(!)

Joe Sonka reminds us that in addition to bringing health insurance to 450,000 through the creation of Kynect here in Kentucky, Gov. Steve Beshear has presided over impressive job creation numbers to boot.

The Beshear administration announced this morning that Kentucky’s seasonally adjusted preliminary unemployment rate fell to 5.1 percent in March — a drop of over 2 percent in the past year and the lowest rate since the summer of 2001. 

The federal survey of 60,000 households shows that employment increased by 7,353 in March, while the number of unemployed decreased by 2,310. This marks the 23rd straight month in which the ranks of the unemployed has decreased in Kentucky, and the seventh consecutive month where employment has increased. 

The number of unemployed has fallen by more than 120,000 in Kentucky since the height of the Great Recession in 2009. While employment fell steadily in 2014, that number has jolted upward by over 35,000 in the last three months alone.

Kentucky's unemployed has fallen from 225,000 to 100,000, and while the labor force fell by 75,000, it has rebounded in 2015 and has clawed back nearly a third of that number.  All of this is a big deal as the campaign to succeed Beshear gets underway.

The question of whether Kentucky is facing dramatic job growth or job loss has been a major topic of discussion in this year’s gubernatorial campaign. Republican Hal Heiner began running a TV ad last month claiming Kentucky had lost 20,000 jobs over the last two years. His primary opponent James Comer went a step further, claiming Kentucky lost “nearly 50,000 jobs” over that same time period, though his campaign subsequently stopped stating that figure.

As Insider Louisville noted last month, while Heiner’s ad was correct if you only count the number of employed, it neglected to mention the full context of the falling number of unemployed and total labor force. Additionally — using Heiner’s preferred statistics for the “20,000 lost jobs” figure — if you update those figures for the last two years from this March, Kentucky has actually gained 7,671 jobs.

So Kentucky has a lower unemployment rate now than when Beshear took office, and there are fewer unemployed Kentuckians now too. The recovery is real in the Bluegrass State.  Both Matt Bevin and Jim Comer will destroy that recovery if elected, guaranteed.

Jack Conway needs to win in November, period.

Last Call For Detroit Rock (Bottom Housing) City

White people are moving back to, of all cities, Detroit.  The city that became synonymous with "white flight" is now the new hot urban center for white Millennials and Gen Xers, while black families are moving out to the suburbs.

Simple math convinced music producer Mike Seger to move from adjacent Oakland County into a rented two-story house on Detroit's east side that also houses his Get Fresh Studio. Seger, 27, pays $750 per month in rent, and said he wouldn't have been able to find anything comparable in the suburbs for that price. The average monthly rental rate of a three-bedroom single-family home in Detroit is about $800, as opposed to $1,100 to $1,400 in the suburbs, according to RentRange.com, which collects rental market information. 

"A young person can move here with $10,000 and start up a small flex space for artists or artists' studios," Seger said. "It's the uprising of the youth being able to have the opportunities to make a future for themselves." 

Eugene Gualtieri, a 41-year-old lab technician at the Detroit Medical Center, took advantage of an incentive program. Live Midtown, offered by his employer and several others in the Midtown neighborhood, allowed him to take out a $20,000 home loan that he won't have to repay if he stays in his condo for five years. The program is aimed at getting workers to live closer to their jobs, which can benefit employers and employees. 

"The condo is eight minutes from work ... super close, nice neighborhood and really reasonably priced," Gualtieri said. "Like any part of any city, I'm sure there are good parts and bad parts. You just make sure you don't end up in the areas you are not supposed to be in." 

Live Downtown is a similar incentive program offered by employers located in downtown Detroit, which is home to General Motors, Quicken Loans and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Three professional sports teams and stadiums, three casinos, restaurants and bars are entertainment anchors.

That's one side of Detroit.  But for the people already living in mostly black neighborhoods, the talk of incentives and urban renewal is still just that, words.

Blacks appear to be weary of waiting for Detroit to turn things around and have been migrating to nearby suburbs in search of comfort, better schools and lower crime. 

The city's black population was nearly 776,000 in 1990. By 2013 it had dipped to an estimated 554,000. 

Elizabeth St. Clair, 27, and her family may count themselves among black former Detroiters. 

St. Clair and her boyfriend are searching for rental homes in Detroit and several inner-ring suburbs. She has two school-aged children. 

She acknowledges things are getting better — pointing out Detroit's current campaign to tear down vacant houses and eradicate blight. But the high cost of car insurance, underperforming schools and the condition of many neighborhoods are obstacles. 

"As I see a resurgence of Detroit, I really want to stay here," St. Clair said. "I feel there are two Detroits. There's a Detroit where you are able to go downtown and enjoy, and then in our neighborhoods there's not much change."

So the hip downtown entertainment district is getting a facelift, and attracting white people.  But the black folks that already live in Detroit aren't seeing any improvement at all, and they're leaving.

If this seems like this is all being done on purpose, and for a specific reason, you're not alone.

StupidiNews!

• Voters in Ireland take to the polls today to determine whether or not to change the country's constitution to allow same-sex marriage, in what is expected to be a close vote.
• Washington DC police have arrested 34-year-old Daron Dylon Wint in connection with the death of construction company owner Savvas Savopoulos and three others, found after a suspicious arson.
• A Maryland grand jury has returned indictments against all six police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray last month, with arraignment set for July 2.
• Puerto Rico's House has passed a bill raising the island's sales tax from 7% to 11.5% in an effort to balance the US protectorate's nearly $10 billion budget shortfall.
• House Republicans are cutting National Science Foundation research funding by as much as 50%, and barring all federal agencies from using DoE research on fossil fuels to set regulations.

Black, White And Grayson Areas

National Journal conservative pundit Josh Kraushaar is convinced that Alan Grayson will cost the Dems taking back the Senate the way Republican Todd Akin did for the GOP in 2010: by opening his mouth one too many times and becoming a national sound bite punch line.

The list of Grayson's greatest hits is long—and contains equal-opportunity vitriol against Republicans, Democrats, and reporters alike. He reportedly called Murphy a "piece of shit" when recently meeting with DSCC Chairman Jon Tester. In the run-up to a 2010 landslide loss against GOP Rep. Daniel Webster, he aired an ad labeling his opponent as "Taliban Dan" and, without basis, accused him of wanting to outlaw divorce for abused women. Grayson called a Federal Reserve adviser a "K Street whore" and told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that Dick Cheney has blood "dripping from his teeth" when talking. He threatened a conservative constituent with five years of prison time for launching a website titled mycongressmanisnuts.com. Most recently, he asked Tampa Bay Times political reporter Adam Smith whether he was some kind of "shitting robot" when confronted with questions surrounding his offshore investments. 

Grayson also is enmeshed in an ugly divorce battle with his wife of 24 years, who has accused him of domestic abuse. He's vigorously denied the allegations, and has accused her ofengaging in bigamy and being a "gold digger."

"On a professional level, before he went to Congress he was a wealthy trial lawyer looking for fights to make a living. That's what he had to do. In 2010 [when he lost his first reelection], Alan Grayson proved to me that when the going got tough, he completely lost control," said Florida-based Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who led President Obama's campaigns in the state. "My gut says Grayson's looking for a fight. This is a guy whose entire career has been based on looking for a bully to hit. If he says he's probably going to run for the Senate, he's probably going to run for the Senate."
The tricky calculus for the DSCC, which endorsed Murphy early in a bid to dissuade Grayson from running, is that Grayson is so unpredictable that it's hard to plot a strategy designed to limit his destructiveness. Most Senate candidates wouldn't want to give up a cushy lifetime Congressional job to make a long-shot bid at higher office. But Grayson is independently wealthy—the 17th-richest member of Congress, with assets of around $25 million—and derives his prestige through provocation. 

Democrats normally have many tools to marginalize a weak candidate, but few of the traditional rules apply to Grayson. He's unlikely to be swayed by promises of subcommittee chairmanships or increased funding in his Orlando-area district. Attacking him as unelectable will only raise his profile further, and amp up the already-explosive rhetoric between the two sides. Schale argued that the DSCC's move endorsing Murphy to unify the party against Grayson is likely to backfire, and raise the odds he jumps in the race. 

Making the strategy even more complicated is that Murphy is vulnerable to a challenge on his left. Representing a swing district that voted for Mitt Romney, Murphy has voting record that is one of the most conservative in his caucus. He boasts an 86 percent lifetime vote score with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a better tally than many House Republicans. He's still unknown to most Florida Democrats, given that he represents only a small slice of the expansive state. In fact, Quinnipiac's April survey found Grayson somewhat better-known than Murphy, and despite the controversies, holding a net positive favorability rating.

Kraushaar's obvious concern trolling aside, Alan Grayson vs Patrick Murphy really is the perfect microcosm of the "more Democrats versus better Democrats" debate.  Murphy is a safe candidate, but absolutely a Southern Blue Dog, where a loss of Blue Dogs in the South and retirements in the Mountain West cost Dems the Senate big time last year.

Having said that, anything that would piss Josh Kraushaar off is usually a good idea worth doing, and Alan Grayson running for Senate would certainly qualify.  There's no question that Patrick Murphy represents the corporate wing of the Dems, but then again, Kirsten Gillibrand was notoriously conservative in her upstate New York House district before becoming a very liberal Senator, so it's not like Murphy can't start leaning more to the left in a statewide race.

We'll see.  My gut says that betting on Grayson is risky, but would pay out big time if successful.

The Hollywood Fifteen

In a huge, huge move, the Los Angeles city council voted to raise the city's minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The increase — which the Los Angeles City Council passed in a 14-1 vote — comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages, and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wage by referendum.

The impact is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, more than 40 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour.

“The effects here will be the biggest by far,” said Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was commissioned by city leaders here to conduct several studies on the potential effects of a minimum-wage increase. “The proposal will bring wages up in a way we haven’t seen since the 1960s. There’s a sense spreading that this is the new norm, especially in areas that have high costs of housing.”

Tuesday’s vote could set off a wave of minimum wage increases across Southern California, and the groups pressing for the increases say the new pay scales would change the way of life for the region’s vast low-wage work force.

Indeed, much of the debate here has centered on the potential regional impact. Many of the low-wage workers who form the backbone of Southern California’s economy live in the suburban cities of Los Angeles. Proponents of the wage increase say they expect that several nearby cities, including Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Pasadena, would follow Los Angeles’ lead and pass ordinances for higher wages in the coming months.

LA joins Seattle and San Francisco with $15 an hour, and Chicago's $13 an hour, and similar proposals are on the docket for NYC, DC, and Kansas City.  By my ballpark figures, this means as many as 2 million or so workers are going to get a raise, and that's massive.

However, keep in mind that the movement for $15 a hour also involves unionized employees, and that's going to be a far tougher component to sell around the country.

Still, it's a start, and a much needed one.

StupidiNews!

• ISIS forces have captured the Syrian city of Palmyra, containing ancient ruins of arches and temples that are thousands of years old.
• Dave Letterman got an all-star sendoff as he aired his final Late Night show Wednesday, with stars ranging from Bill Murray to Chris Rock to President Obama.
• The US is concerned that China is provoking tensions by reclaiming land around reefs in the South China Sea, 90% of which China claims over its Asian coastal neighbors.
• Drugstore chain CVS Health is looking to acquire nursing-home pharmacy Omnicare in a deal that would make the company one of the nation's largest players in Medicare Part D.
• European Union appear to be wanting to scrap existing net neutrality rules entirely in order to get a larger deal from carriers on mobile roaming charges in Europe.

Last Call For Maximum Godwin

What happens when Daily Caller founder and bowtie enthusiast Tucker Carlson gets together with America's favorite conspiracy theorist, Infowars radio host Alex Jones? Obama the eugenics loving Nazi, that's what!

During a bizarre appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Obama administration is engaging in "Nazi stuff" by using ethnic politics, and wants to confiscate all the country's firearms and put people "in jail for even having them." 

Jones, America's leading conspiracy theorist, believes the government perpetrated mass catastrophes like the September 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the Boston Marathon bombing, and several mass shootings. Jones has recently been pushing the conspiracy theory that a military training exercise, Jade Helm, is an attempt to create martial law in the United States (it isn't). Jones is an ally of Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul and helped launch his political career. 

Fox News executive vice president Bill Shine has dismissed Jones, saying he "wishes he had a platform on Fox News ... That's not going to happen, so he should stick with trying to locate the black helicopters." Some of Carlson's colleagues have dismissed Jones as a "nut job radio guy" who owns a "radical far-right Web site." 

Despite Fox's disapproval of Jones, Carlson appeared on his May 19 program to commiserate about the downfall of America under President Obama. (Carlson has previously appeared on the program.)

Carlson, who is also the founder and editor in chief of The Daily Caller, claimed during the appearance that progressives use ethnic politics and identity politics to divert attention from their "policy failures." He said the strategy is "really dangerous," comparing it to countries where there is a violent ethnic divide. He said of the Obama administration: "They categorize people by race in a way that, you know, you can't even imagine -- 30 years ago you would have said, 'Wait a second, that's like Nazi stuff.'"

Of course we go from zero to genocide in under 60 seconds here, which is a painful reminder that is there is anything that unites the lunatic fringe of the left with the most odious operatives of the right, it's comparing President Obama to Hitler.

It's amazing stuff.  These guys are insane, but they're both laughing all the way to the bank.

Grifters Are Indeed Going To Grift

320 million Americans or so, and yes, some of them are horrible, horrible people.

A Tennessee man and his family used much of the $187 million it collected for cancer patients to buy themselves cars, gym memberships and take luxury cruise vacations, pay for college tuition and employ family members with six-figure salaries, federal officials alleged Tuesday in one of the largest charity fraud cases ever, involving all 50 states. 

The joint action by the Federal Trade Commission and the states says James T. Reynolds Sr., his ex-wife and son raised the money through their various charities: The Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and its affiliated Cancer Support Services; The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona; and the Children's Cancer Fund of America in Powell, Tennessee. 

The charities hired telemarketers to collect $20 donations from people across the country, telling consumers that they provided financial aid and other support to cancer patients, including pain medication, transportation to chemotherapy visits and hospice care. 

But little money made it to cancer patients, as the groups "operated as personal fiefdoms characterized by rampant nepotism, flagrant conflicts of interest, and excessive insider compensation" with none of the controls used by bona fide charities, the FTC said Tuesday. 

Anyone who donated money to these groups shouldn't expect a refund anytime soon. While litigation against Reynolds Sr. and the Cancer Fund of America is ongoing, the settlement agreements with Reynolds' son, ex-wife and a long-time associate of the family — Kyle Effler — notes that much of the money has already been spent. The agreement bans the three from fundraising and shuttered their organizations. 

"The money is mostly gone," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. Rich declined to say whether a separate criminal investigation might be underway, noting only that the regulatory agency doesn't have that authority.

$187 million bucks worth of fraud.  Why, those are almost Bank of America numbers if you add a couple of zeroes or so.

Seriously, you scammed people for cancer patients, twenty bucks at a time, and made that much off of it. Amazing stuff, frankly. And of course, the money's all but gone.  Oh well.

Perhaps we should cut the FTC's budget.  I'm sure that would solve the problem, right Republicans?