Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

CNN's Ashley Fantz asks:

Can the Klan rebrand?

Because as white supremacists like Frazier Glenn Miller are shooting people and shouting "Heil Hitler" the real problem in 2014 with the Aryan movement is lack of marketing.

From a sheer marketing perspective, the lack of central leadership poses more problems for the KKK if it's serious about revamping its image. Just look at the Catholic Church, Ries said.

"The KKK doesn't have a Pope. Look at what that guy has done. You have to have a leader like that to make people believe a change has happened," she said.

Without a clear leader, marketing experts said, crafting and conveying a spin-friendly message is impossible.

That was evident the minute members of the "new" Klan denounced the shootings. Soon after Ancona spoke to reporters, other self-described "real" Klansmen began attacking him online for not adhering to authentic Klan doctrine.

"This movement is a hodgepodge of little groups that, as often as they attack their enemies, attack one another," said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups.

He estimates there are about 8,000 KKK members nationwide.

"To call these guys disorganized," he said, "doesn't quite do it."

There's no chance that the Klan could rebrand and these are all dangerous, hate-filled lunatics, but somebody felt the need to write 5,000 words to give us the "both sides" of this "argument" in 2014.  How nice.

Your Sunday Long Read

This depressing, saddening and altogether heartbreaking ProPublica article by Nikole Hannah-Jones on school re-segregation in America should definitely spur some action.  It's evidence that the Bush-era civil rights division of the Justice Department, which started releasing school districts from busing orders almost immediately and for 8 years, has done so much damage to the public education system in this country that as we approach the 60th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, one has to wonder if the decision even matters anymore in places like Tuscaloosa.

The reason for the decline of Central’s homecoming parade is no secret. In 2000, another federal judge released Tuscaloosa City Schools from the court-ordered desegregation mandate that had governed it for a single generation. Central had successfully achieved integration, the district had argued—it could be trusted to manage that success going forward.

Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa’s schools have seemed to move backwards in time. The citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. Central retains the name of the old powerhouse, but nothing more. A struggling school serving the city’s poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black. D’Leisha, an honors student since middle school, has only marginal college prospects. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools.

Tuscaloosa’s schools today are not as starkly segregated as they were in 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared an end to separate and unequal education in America. No all-white schools exist anymore—the city’s white students generally attend schools with significant numbers of black students. But while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.

Tuscaloosa’s school resegregation—among the most extensive in the country—is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, and angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics and a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city’s black elites. And it was blessed by a U.S. Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed.

We now live in the era of "apartheid schools" where less than 1% of the student body is white, students are well below the national average in poverty.  White flight combined with the elimination of busing enforcement to create entire neighborhoods left behind: crushingly poor, gerrymandered to a person, and nearly all black.  They were designed that way to save the white kids who still had a chance.

Tuscaloosa’s residential population stagnated during the ’90s, and the school situation took on special urgency in 1993: Tuscaloosa was vying for the Mercedes-Benz plant where Melissa Dent now works, which officials hoped would draw people to the city. Just a few years earlier, Tuscaloosa had lost out on a bid for a Saturn plant. In an interview early this year, Johnnie Aycock, who at the time headed the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama, suggested the schools had scared Saturn away. “We learned that lesson. We learned that lesson completely.”

Publicly, the city’s movers and shakers said the lack of neighborhood schools made the district unattractive and that schools languished in disrepair because the district had to await court approval for every little decision. Behind closed doors, they argued that if they did not create some schools where white students made up the majority—or near it—they’d lose the white parents still remaining.

Districts under desegregation orders aren’t supposed to take actions that increase racial separation. And so the city’s leadership decided the desegregation order needed to go, and they believed the time was ripe for a court to agree.

The rest of course is history.

In 1993, Tuscaloosa’s school board fired a test shot. It filed papers in federal court seeking to build a new elementary school called Rock Quarry, deep in a nearly all-white part of town separated from the rest of the city by the Black Warrior River. If a judge accepted the school, that might signal a willingness to end the order altogether.

“You could see what the city and the school district were doing. They were going to have a racially and economically segregated school system,” said Janell Byrd, one of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys who represented the plaintiffs at the time.

The case landed in the courtroom of Judge Sharon Blackburn, a recent George H. W. Bush appointee who had gone to college in Tuscaloosa. In 1995, Blackburn held a five-day hearing to decide the question of Rock Quarry. School officials promised that the new school’s student body, though whiter than the district’s overall school population, would be half black.

Today that number is 9% black in Rock Quarry.  As with many larger cities in America, white parents have pulled their kids out to suburban county districts or private schools and designed the districts along racial lines.  In order to get the car plant, the black kids in Tuscaloosa had to be put out of sight and out of mind.  It worked too well.  And now what little hope and resources left for schools are being finished off by conservatives who argue that trying to educate these kids is a waste of taxpayer money. 

We've written off the education of black Millennials, and it's only going to get worse.

Russian Reset, Redux

Peter Baker at the NY Times gives us the account of the state of the Obama-Putin relationship and discovers at this point, there is none.

Even as the crisis in Ukraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.

Just as the United States resolved in the aftermath of World War II to counter the Soviet Union and its global ambitions, Mr. Obama is focused on isolating President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah state.

Mr. Obama has concluded that even if there is a resolution to the current standoff over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, he will never have a constructive relationship with Mr. Putin, aides said. As a result, Mr. Obama will spend his final two and a half years in office trying to minimize the disruption Mr. Putin can cause, preserve whatever marginal cooperation can be saved and otherwise ignore the master of the Kremlin in favor of other foreign policy areas where progress remains possible.

No, this isn't good news.  "Minimizing the disruption" Putin can cause in a 20th century containment strategy is a massive step backwards.  Putin however seems to have not given President Obama much of a choice.

The manifestation of this thinking can be seen in Mr. Obama’s pending choice for the next ambassador to Moscow. While not officially final, the White House is preparing to nominate John F. Tefft, a career diplomat who previously served as ambassador to Ukraine, Georgia and Lithuania.

When the search began months ago, administration officials were leery of sending Mr. Tefft because of concern that his experience in former Soviet republics that have flouted Moscow’s influence would irritate Russia. Now, officials said, there is no reluctance to offend the Kremlin.

So yes, Russia is now our enemy and we're basically back to the Cold War.  We're to the point where we're now actively working to damage Russia's financial interests and political ones.  That's got to be something of a shock to the Millennials, who have always known Russia as our ally and frenemy at best.  Hell, it's a shock to us younger Gen X folks.  I was in middle school when the Berlin Wall fell, Germany reunited, and we had to get used to calling the Soviets "Russians" again.  For most of my life, the Russians have been "the guys we won over".

How things change.

Last Call For Repeal-O-Rama

Paul Krugman on the 8 million Obamacare signups:

How did enrollment manage to surge so impressively despite the initial debacle of healthcare.gov? Obviously they fixed the website; but the broader issue, as Sarah Kliff rightly points out, is that being uninsured is truly terrible. Uninsured Americans really, really wanted coverage, and they weren’t ready to give up.

Kliff doesn’t make this point too explicitly, but this diagnosis has another crucial implication: the benefits of Obamacare, for all its imperfections, are immense. Millions of people who lived extremely anxious lives now have far more security than before. Compared with those benefits, the complaints of some already insured people that they have less choice of doctors than before, or that they’re no longer allowed to retain minimalist plans, look like whining. (And of course not one of the more serious-sounding stories about soaring premiums and all that has held up under scrutiny.)

And speaking of whining, the GOP response seems to be to make every possible insinuation to the effect that the numbers are somehow fraudulent. I actually don’t think there’s a game plan here; their whole position was premised on the inevitable collapse of health reform, and they have no plan B.

The Republican position on Obamacare is this:

1. The law is failing and that the numbers and the good news are all lies that will be exposed when the law falls apart before the elections.
2. Best case for the GOP, millions have lost their insurance and all of them have seen their plans replaced with far more expensive Obamacare plans that they can't afford.  Worst case is only diehard Democratic voters have benefited from the law.
3. The insurance companies will soon have no choice but to pass massive premium increases along to all their customers right before the November elections.
4. This will create a critical mass of people who will demand repeal and usher in a new near-permanent era of GOP control as Obama limps out of office in 2016 or is somehow forced to resign.
5. Republicans take total control of the country at the federal and state level in 2016, reducing the Democrats to a regional New England/West Coast party, and remake America.

By "Republican position" I of course mean "magical thinking-powered delusion."  What people will demand is that the GOP get out of the way and allow improvements to the law.  The insurance giants, medical device industry, big pharma, hospital chains, and doctors' groups will lobby hard for this, as will business groups and the tech industry (benefiting from electronic medical records.)  The law will be expanded and improved upon.

You'll see Republicans jump on board, or be replaced by Republicans who will.

Home Home On Deranged

At the NY Times, Timothy Egan deftly handles the Cliven Bundy situation and explains it for what it is:  the government gave Bundy more than 20 years to make good, and they finally tried doing something about it.

Imagine a vendor on the National Mall, selling burgers and dogs, who hasn’t paid his rent in 20 years. He refuses to recognize his landlord, the National Park Service, as a legitimate authority. Every court has ruled against him, and fines have piled up. What’s more, the effluents from his food cart are having a detrimental effect on the spring grass in the capital.

Would an armed posse come to his defense, aiming their guns at the park police? Would the lawbreaker get prime airtime on Fox News, breathless updates in the Drudge Report, a sympathetic ear from Tea Party Republicans? No, of course not.

So what’s the difference between the fictional loser and Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada who owes the government about $1 million and has been grazing his cattle on public land for more than 20 years? Near as I can tell, one wears a cowboy hat. Easterners, especially clueless ones in politics and the press, have always had a soft spot for a defiant white dude in a Stetson.

This phony event has brought out the worst of the gun-waving far right, and the national politicians who are barely one degree of separation from them. Hundreds of heavily armed, camouflaged supporters of the scofflaw turned out Saturday in Nevada, training their rifles on public employees who were trying to do their job. The outsiders looked like snipers ready to shoot the police. If you changed that picture to Black Panthers surrounding a lawful eviction in the inner city, do you think right-wing media would be there cheering the outlaws?

And as I've said before, if Bundy wasn't white, if he was Latino or black, the same people defending him would be the first to demand that the government take everything he had and then put him in prison.

Or worse, they'd put a bullet in him themselves.

The Bundy situation in Nevada is one of the most amazing examples of privilege in this country.   If you are white and stand up to government law enforcement, you are a patriot.  If you are not white, you are a criminal, a cop killer, or worse.

America.

The Re-Education Of Chris Hayes

After getting rolled by Koch Industries operative Jennifer Stefano on his show last month, I'm glad to see Chris Hayes finally do a segment on the Perpetual Right Wing Outrage Machine as he connected the dots from the Bundy Ranch standoff to the GOP party's incessant need for greater and greater quantities of red meat in order to be fed.  Thursday's open:




It's a good segment, and it means that Hayes is at least aware that conservatives are not his friends, and they are not looking for meaningful debate.  They are looking for outrage to stoke the resentment of the base, always.  That goes for Hayes, Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, and the other young guns on the left:  you will never be more than the "Juice Box Mafia" to the right, so stop treating them like they're your pals.

Sadly, Chris's learning curve is a flatline as when Friday came around and he decided to interview Nevada State Assemblywoman (and complete Tea Party nutjob) Michele Fiore, he was bullied, badgered, and steamrolled again.



Fiore was rude, awful, and disrespectful.  Chris flopped around like the punching bag he is.  Fiore referred to undocumented immigrants as "terrorists", called the attempt by BLM to get Cliven Bundy to obey the law "suspicious" and cut Hayes off several times, eventually justifying the militia threats of violence by saying "Don’t come here with guns and expect the American people not to fire back."

 His response later Friday evening?

My exchange w/ @VoteFiore over cows and their ultimate fate might be one of my favorite ever on @allinwithchris http://t.co/sIXfKnjr74
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) April 19, 2014

The woman makes Michele Bachmann look like Steven Hawking, and Chris Hayes thought the interview was "one of his favorite ever".  It was embarrassing and stupid and Chris Hayes walked into the jet intake again.

Jesus wept.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• A magnitude 7.2 earthquake shook Mexico's southern Pacific coast near Acapulco, causing damage as far away as Mexico City.
• Condemning a brutal Friday attack on a UN base in South Sudan that killed 58, the UN Security Council said the incident may be considered a war crime.
• At least 12 are confirmed dead in the worst single incident in Mount Everest's history as an avalanche swept through a summit route at the start of the mountain's climbing season.
• The Obama administration will delay whether to expand the Keystone XL pipeline through Nebraska in a move that could put a final decision on hold until after the November elections.
• A Virginia court has denied climate skeptics access to emails of climate scientist Michael Mann while he was at the University of Virginia.

Last Call For The Snowjob, Con't.

In response to yesterday's embarrassing dance as Putin's puppet, Edward Snowden apparently took to the Guardian's op-ed section and wrote a rather interesting defense of his actions giving the motive that he was trying to hold Putin as accountable as he wants President Obama to be. 

On Thursday, I questioned Russia's involvement in mass surveillance on live television. I asked Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, a question that cannot credibly be answered in the negative by any leader who runs a modern, intrusive surveillance program: "Does [your country] intercept, analyse or store millions of individuals' communications?"

I went on to challenge whether, even if such a mass surveillance program were effective and technically legal, it could ever be morally justified.

The question was intended to mirror the now infamous exchange in US Senate intelligence committee hearings between senator Ron Wyden and the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, about whether the NSA collected records on millions of Americans, and to invite either an important concession or a clear evasion. (See a side-by-side comparison of Wyden's question and mine here.)

Clapper's lie – to the Senate and to the public – was a major motivating force behind my decision to go public, and a historic example of the importance of official accountability.

In his response, Putin denied the first part of the question and dodged on the latter. There are serious inconsistencies in his denial – and we'll get to them soon – but it was not the president's suspiciously narrow answer that was criticised by many pundits. It was that I had chosen to ask a question at all.

I was surprised that people who witnessed me risk my life to expose the surveillance practices of my own country could not believe that I might also criticise the surveillance policies of Russia, a country to which I have sworn no allegiance, without ulterior motive. I regret that my question could be misinterpreted, and that it enabled many to ignore the substance of the question – and Putin's evasive response – in order to speculate, wildly and incorrectly, about my motives for asking it.

It's those last two paragraphs that really, really ring alarm bells for me.  This comes across as incredibly condescending and arrogant, as if anyone in the class of Snowden's critics even have the right to question his motives.  Given what Snowden is trying to accomplish, the irony of that is breathtaking.   He basically says "I'm sorry you misunderstood me" which is no apology at all, and then dismisses his critics as speculating wildly and incorrectly about him.

He then goes on to point out that yes, Russia is very much a surveillance state, and that he was trying to get Putin into a "gotcha" moment.

The first is true.  I don't believe the second.   That's pretty naive.  But how then do we explain this column?

If Snowden didn't pen this, he's being used as a pawn by his allies as well as Putin, in which case he's severely damaged his own argument not once but twice in the last two days.  If Snowden did pen this, he's an arrogant prick who believes he's beyond criticism, and who severely damaged his own argument not once but twice in the last two days.

Now having said all this and insofar as there are two separate arguments here, that is A) “What role should the NSA play in America and how can we enforce that the NSA remains in that role when they are a covert organization with next to zero transparency” and B) “Did Edward Snowden really have no other choice but to break the law in order to expose the NSA’s practices”, Snowden remains the sideshow compared to the NSA's awful practices.

My problem is the people who say “A justified B, and therefore Snowden is a hero” and then when Snowden does something like this, immediately respond with “Snowden is not the argument.”

I agree Snowden himself and his conduct are a much much much smaller issue than the NSA repeatedly not telling the truth and doing whatever the hell they feel like, because NSA LOL.

But there are people that not only want it both ways, they conflate the two arguments to begin with, and that’s making any realistic discussion on A) very difficult.

And now we have Snowden himself making that discussion more difficult with his own actions.  Snowden's credibility is damaged.

But maybe that's the whole point, says Putin, laughing in the background.

No, President Obama Is Not Deporter-In-Chief

No matter how much the Freakonomics crew at Vox like to think so, the fact is no, President Obama is not "deporting more immigrants than any president in history".  It's complete nonsense, as Sean Davis at The Federalist explains:

Vox writer Dara Lind didn’t just torture the data. Oh no. This was no simple waterboarding operation. The offending data was not forced to give a bogus confession. Nope. Lind straight up had the traitorous data disappeared.

In order to make her point that Obama was far more willing to deport illegal immigrants than his predecessor, she was forced to ignore and exclude 80 percent of all deportations under Bush. That’s right. How laughably wrong is Vox’s claim, which was obviously meant to make Obama look tough in order to make it easier to pass some type of immigration amnesty? Lind had to exclude 8.3 million deportations under Bush in order to con her readers into believing that the current president is totes the toughest ever on illegal immigration.

Now granted, The Federalist is dudebro central and very much is anti-Obama, with the theory that Vox is trying to make Obama look tough on immigration in order to pass "amnesty".  But the funny part is Reuters comes to the same conclusion about President Obama's deportation record, quoting a NY Times piece on the data.

Deportations through U.S. immigration courts have fallen 43 percent in the past five years as the federal government brought fewer cases before those courts, according to Justice Department data analyzed by the New York Times on Wednesday.

The figures come as President Barack Obama and House of Representatives Republicans clashed openly over immigration- reform legislation that remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

More than 11 million people are believed to be in the United States illegally. Many are children brought by their parents across the border from Mexico.

Obama, who has made immigration reform a priority, has drawn fire from advocacy groups and been called "deporter in chief" for presiding over an administration that has deported some 2 million people. But his administration brought 26 percent fewer cases in immigration courts in 2013 than in 2009, the New York Times reported.

Judges ordered deportations in some 105,000 of those cases in 2013, which is just part of total annual deportations. The lower numbers, however, contributed to an overall drop in removals in 2013, which saw nearly 370,000 deportations, a 10 percent decrease from 2012, the newspaper reported.

The Department of Homeland Security, which handles immigration prosecutions, opened 187,678 deportation cases in 2013, nearly 50,000 fewer than in 2011, the newspaper said. In addition, the courts increasingly are deciding against deportation and allowing immigrants to remain in the U.S., the Times said.

Funny how that works out.  It's like the President really is deporting fewer people than Bush because he understands how broken Republicans keep making our immigration system.

Putin's Latest Snowden Job

Hey look, Dudebro Defector has gone from heroic figure of the information age to Putin propaganda tool!

NSA leaker Edward Snowden put a direct question to Vladimir Putin during a live televised question-and-answer session Thursday, asking Russia's president about Moscow's use of mass surveillance on its citizens. 

Speaking via a video link, Snowden asked: "I've seen little public discussion of Russia's own involvement in the policies of mass surveillance, so I'd like to ask you: Does Russia intercept, store or analyze, in any way, the communications of millions of individuals?" 

Putin replied by stating Russia did not carry out mass surveillance on its population, and that its intelligence operations were strictly regulated by court orders. 

"Mr Snowden, you are a former agent, a spy, I used to work for the intelligence service, we are going to talk one professional language," Putin said, according to translation by state-run broadcaster Russia Today. 

"Our intelligence efforts are strictly regulated by our law so...you have to get a court permission to stalk that particular person. 

"We don't have as much money as they have in the States and we don't have these technical devices that they have in the States. Our special services, thank God, are strictly controlled by society and the law and regulated by the law."

To recap, Obama and America, evil fascist capitalist pigs who spy on everyone so you can't trust a single word he says.  Putin and Russia, so much better than America as beacons of human rights who love freedom and are 100% totally credible, because Snowden!  (Please ignore our invasion of Ukraine.)

Please, tell me again how awesome Russia's human rights record is. I wonder if Edward is uncomfortable with Putin's hand up his ass like that.

Speak, puppet.  Speak.  Eli Lake at the Daily Beast rips into Snowden:

Snowden and his defenders have repeatedly said the former NSA contractor does not control the master files of intelligence documents he originally took from the U.S. intelligence community even if he wanted to hand them over to Russian intelligence. Thus far no U.S. official has provided any public evidence to suggest that Snowden was a paid foreign agent when he took those documents.

But on Thursday Snowden looked to some like he was participating in a Soviet-style propaganda play. “Whatever else Snowden might think he has been doing, surely he must understand he was just used as a prop by the president of the Russian federation,” said Michael Hayden, a former NSA and CIA director under the George W. Bush administration who has been one of his former agency’s most ardent public defenders. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has also been critical of Snowden and the journalism his leaks have helped produce said, “It speaks volumes that Snowden lends his name to Putin’s propaganda efforts.”

Galeotti says he found the display of Snowden’s question for Putin on eavesdropping to be depressing. “I believed he was an honest man who made some stupid choices,” says Galeotti. “But in this case he was doing what was in his handler’s interests.”

“We have to think of two Snowdens,” Galeotti tells The Daily Beast. “There was the original whistleblower who thought he was doing something good for the world. Now there is the Snowden—to put it crassly—who is bought and paid for entirely by the Russians. The Russians are not altruistic, if they are protecting him they are doing so because there are things he can do to repay them.”

In the immortal words of Trent Reznor, "Bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve."

StupidiNews!

• Chelsea Clinton announced that she is pregnant with the baby due later in 2014, the first grandchild for President and Hillary Clinton.
• County commissioners in Orange County, Texas are under fire for unanimously voting to name April as "Confederate History and Heritage Month".
• The death toll in Wednesday's ferry accident in South Korea has risen to 25 and hundreds still remain missing and unaccounted for.
• President Obama announced that the number of people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act has risen to 8 million in the law's first year.
• One Star Trek fan's efforts to restore Captain Picard's chair from The Next Generation has become an effort to create a sci-fi museum in Hollywood.

Last Call For A One-Sided Battle

So Tuesday's "Anti-terrorist" operation in Eastern Ukraine didn't exactly go so well, and as a result, the Russian predictions of civil war and a breakup of the country seem pretty damn prescient, rather than propaganda.

Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” against anti-government rebels has proved a spectacular debacle. Soldiers refused to move in on rebel-held positions. The rebels captured six APCs, drove the soldiers into Slovyansk flying the Russian flag, and sent them back on dingy buses, dejected, disarmed, and defeated. Self-appointed “self-defense” commanders who couldn’t even agree on which one of them was in charge disarmed and defeated Ukraine’s army.

On the eve of talks in Geneva between Ukraine, Russia, the U.S., and the European Union on the country’s crisis, Kiev seems to have proven many of the points the Kremlin and its propaganda machine have rammed home for weeks. Eastern Ukraine is in chaos, and Kiev’s central government has no power over large parts of it. Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov acts deaf to protesters’ demands, and frightens them with force. Moscow’s calls for a federalized Ukraine with special status for the Russian-speaking southeast, which Kiev and its Western backers decried as tantamount to breakup only weeks ago, now seem inevitable.

Kiev's government has no power outside Kiev itself, and that was proven this week.

Asked what they wanted, nearly all the protesters made identical demands mirroring those voiced on Russian television for weeks about a federalized Ukraine. That, many commentators say, suggests Moscow’s goal may be to destabilize Kiev’s government, which it says is illegitimate, and disrupt presidential elections set for May 25 to help bring a more favorable candidate to power. In any event, the protesters appeared to have succeeded in bypassing Kiev’s ban on Russian state television, which it shut off last month. Many of them would not talk to BuzzFeed without assurances this reporter was not secretly working for oligarch and presidential favorite Petro Poroshenko’s Channel 5, which is seen as having supported protests in Kiev against Yanukovych last winter.

Even some of the soldiers seemed affronted by Kiev’s mixed messages and failure to address the concerns of eastern provinces. “Some people say one thing, others another – it just leads to clashing heads with locals. I don’t know whom to believe anymore,” Dima, 27, a reservist, said. “The only thing we are scared of is armed conflict with the locals. We are not scared of the Russian army,” he added.

So given a choice between Russia and Kiev, a lot of folks in eastern Ukraine are choosing Russia.  There's next to nothing that the West can do, so we'll see how all this shakes out.  But the practical upshot is Ukraine will not be the same country anymore.

Tuesday I was worried about a shooting war.  Now it seems that the government of Kiev is so incompetent and hated that nobody wants to take a bullet for them.

Oh Susana, Now Don't You Cry For Thee

Andy Kroll at Mother Jones posts an article revealing that New Mexico GOP Gov. Susana Martinez is petty, vindictive, ignorant, and thin-skinned to almost Palinesque levels.  (I know, shocking, right?)

Despite numerous requests, the governor and her aides declined to comment for this piece. But previously unreleased audio recordings, text messages, and emails obtained by Mother Jones reveal a side of Martinez the public has rarely, if ever, seen. In private, Martinez can be nasty, juvenile, and vindictive. She appears ignorant about basic policy issues and has surrounded herself with a clique of advisers who are prone to a foxhole mentality.

Martinez doesn't look like any of the governors who came before her, and members of her inner circle sometimes feel that she has been subject to unfair attacks. Jay McCleskey, her closest aide, once sent a text message complaining about an opponent's negative mailing: "They're trying to keep the brown girl down!!!"

Still, interviews with former Martinez aides, state lawmakers, Democratic and Republican officials, fundraisers, and donors show a governor whose prosecutorial style and vindictiveness have estranged her from leaders in her own party and from the Democratic lawmakers she must work with to get anything done. Martinez and her staff, they say, have isolated themselves in her fourth-floor office inside the modest state capitol known as the Roundhouse. As one major Republican donor in New Mexico puts it, "They've got this Sherman's march to the sea mentality, burning everything in sight until they get to the finish."

Martinez's office wastes no time proving the core of the piece to be true.

Hours after it was published, Martinez circulated a fundraising email decrying the "D.C. Liberal media."

"We’ve come a long way since the days of Bill Richardson, but now liberals in Washington want to undo the progress we’ve made," Martinez said in the email. "In the absolute height of desperation, one of the most radically liberal publications in the country is now peddling false, personal attacks against me, using stolen audiotapes from our debate prep sessions four years ago.

"Their 'smoking gun'? I referred to Diane Denish using the B-word four years ago in a private conversation with close advisers," she continued. "I admit it — I've had to fund the cuss jar a few times in my life."

Can't make this stuff up, folks.  How dare the liberal media use my exact words verbatim!  Meanwhile...

Martinez's crew saw enemies everywhere. A former staffer recalls the campaign on multiple occasions sending the license plate numbers of cars believed to be used by opposition trackers to an investigator in Martinez's DA office who had access to law enforcement databases. In one instance, a campaign aide took a photo of a license plate on a car with an anti-Martinez bumper sticker and emailed it to the investigator. "Cool I will see who it belongs to!!" the investigator replied.

Nope, not vindictive, petty, or thin-skinned at all.

Back To Barack Bashing

And Sen. Mary Landrieu has learned precisely nothing from the awesome collapse of Blanche Lincoln four years ago as she rolls out a new ad attacking President Obama on oil and gas drilling.

A new ad by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) features TV clips of her going after the Obama administration's oil and gas policies, spliced with footage of Louisianans who appear to be energy workers in the state. The ad is running statewide with a buy of $250,000 this week, a Landrieu campaign source told TPM.

"The administration's policies are simply wrong when it comes to oil and gas production in this nation," she says in one clip. In another, she says there are 300,000 oil and gas workers in Louisiana, and "you can't just beat up on them." Landrieu chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

So when Republican Bill Cassidy wins by 15 points in November, recall what Mary was doing to her fellow Democrats.   Because the energy industry has been so good for the Louisiana coast.

StupidiNews!

• A federal judge has overturned North Dakota's "Heartbeat" abortion law, which would have been the strictest in the nation in banning abortions as early as after six weeks.
• The former city administrator of Bell, California will face 12 years in prison and will have to pay $8.8 million in restitution after pleading guilty to 69 criminal counts.
• Syrian opposition forces are accusing the al-Asaad regime of once again using chemical weapons, posting footage of four alleged victims on the internet.
• China's ban on genetically modified grain from the US could cost farmers as much as $6.3 billion in losses over the next 15 months.
• A new "thermal fuel" to store solar energy and release it as heat without degrading could revolutionize energy storage, making solar power much more reliable.