Sunday Afternoon Long Read

Today's long read comes from San Francisco Magazine, a story about how even in arguably the most liberal large city in America, there's problems with wage theft for service workers.  The good news is that these workers banded together and fought back to the tune of $4 million.

Even after Zhen Li leads a rousing chant—“Workers organize, everybody wins!”—no one else wants to step up to the microphone. Tiny and bespectacled, her hair in a jet-black bob, Li has the look of a Chinatown matron, one of those tenacious hagglers who elbows her way through the crowds on Stockton Street to purchase jade-green gai lan and silvery carp. Wearing jeans, sturdy black shoes, and a puffy striped jacket, she exhorts her fellow proletariats to join her up front and holds out the mic to a nearby woman. The woman tries to beg off, pleading, “I’m sick—my throat hurts,” but cheers draw her to her feet, and she sheepishly echoes Li’s rallying cry.

On this rainy evening in early December at the Chinese Cultural Center, Li and dozens of workers—mostly women, mostly middle-aged and older— are celebrating with greasy takeout, cake, a slideshow, and speeches. While some are clearly shy about speaking in public, they are no longer scared. They’ve already achieved the impossible: Their solidarity has won them an astonishing sum—$4 million—from a powerful employer that had systematically undercut their wages, pocketed their tips, and forced them to work under brutal conditions. And it wasn’t just any business that Li and her comrades had taken on: It was Yank Sing, San Francisco’s most lucrative and popular purveyor of dim sum, those small plates of har gow, siu mai, and other doll-size delicacies that the restaurant serves to more than 1,200 customers a day (and that’s a slow day).

The journey to restitution for Li and her coworkers began two years ago, when Li discovered that she wasn’t alone in feeling abused and underpaid. Her official work hours were 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., but often, she says, her bosses forced her to stay, unpaid, an hour or two longer to prepare food and take care of her station. Unbeknownst to Li, a few coworkers had been meeting with the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA)—a scrappy and strategic advocacy group that’s been organizing low-income laborers for decades—in an effort to bring change to Yank Sing. One of her coworkers approached her, saying, “We need your help.” When Li discussed the idea with her husband, he tried to stop her from joining the nascent campaign. “What if you don’t win? What if you lose your job?” he asked. “Your employer is so wealthy, so powerful.”

Despite his resistance, Li persisted. “I was pretty scared. It was just a few of us going to meetings,” she tells me, speaking in Cantonese through a translator. “But with all the support and encouragement, I started to have more courage.” Before long, she would prove her mettle, becoming one of the insurgent group’s most stalwart leaders.

While you read Zhen Li's story, think about how the vast majority of America views organized labor in 2015: as an economic disease that must be eradicated, and that poor working conditions, low wages, and wage theft are 100% the fault of the people who choose to work these service jobs.  If you wanted a better job, a better life, you would be a good enough person to earn a better job.  The fact you're working for minimum wage in a kitchen, the argument goes, is proof you are unskilled, lazy, stupid, uneducated, and most of all, undeserving of dignity.

Organized labor upsets this natural balance of the Invisible Hand of the Free Market.  It gives these "undeserving" people hope that they matter, that they are worth something more than the wage they get per hour where in America your sole measure of worth is your paycheck.  These people, the story goes, get more than they deserve by stealing from the rest of us when they form those evil unions.  Most of all they force our most precious resource, Business Owners, to spend money on greedy union workers when they could be hiring more of us for cheaper wages instead.  Unions cost jobs, you see.

Never mind that the mythical American middle class doesn't get paid enough these days to be able to afford to buy products we make or sell, and business owners are sitting on billions in profits in cash used to prop up share prices through stock repurchase plans and trillions in offshore profits that never get taxed in the US.

Funny how businesses are making the greatest profits in American history, but somehow can't afford to pay taxes or raise wages.

Surely that's the fault of kitchen workers in San Francisco.

Sunday Right-Wing Conspiracy

The Assrocket comes in with this completely ridiculous theory:

Scott wrote here about Harry Reid’s announcement that he will not run for re-election, a decision which, Reid was quick to say, was not the result of his “elastic exercise band” accident. In January, I wrote OK, So What Really Happened to Harry Reid? I noted the injuries that Reid suffered on New Year’s Day, in Las Vegas: multiple broken bones around his right eye, damage to the right eye, severe facial bruising, broken ribs, and a concussion. Was all of this really the result of losing his balance because an elastic exercise band broke? That seems unlikely, to say the least.

Oh it gets more hysterical.

When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.

Wait for it....

A friend of mine was in Las Vegas a week or two ago. He talked to a number of people there about Reid’s accident, and didn’t find anyone who believed the elastic exercise band story. The common assumption was that the incident resulted, in some fashion, from Reid’s relationship with organized crime. The principal rumor my friend heard was that Reid had promised to obtain some benefit for a group of mobsters. He met with them on New Year’s Day, and broke the bad news that he hadn’t been able to deliver what he promised. When the mobsters complained, Reid (according to the rumor) made a comment that they considered disrespectful, and one of them beat him up.

Says a lot about Assrocket's "friends" doesn't it.  Then again, they don't believe in evolution or climate change or basic macroeconomics, so of course "Harry Reid was really beaten into retirement by mobsters."

Is that what really happened? I have no idea, but it is a more likely story than the elastic exercise band yarn.

What happened to Reid is not just a matter of curiosity. Everyone knows that the Reid family has gotten rich, even though Reid has spent his entire career as a public employee. It is known that a considerable part of his fortune came from being cut in on sweetheart Las Vegas land deals that included at least one person associated with organized crime as a principal. Was the Senate Majority Leader in the pocket of the Mafia? That seems like a question worth exploring, and yet, to my knowledge, not a single investigative reporter has chosen to look into the matter, even with the obvious clue of Reid’s face in front of them.

The deliberate blindness of Democratic Party reporters hasn’t stopped people from speculating about what really happened to Harry Reid, but so far, at least, it has prevented the story from exploding into a major scandal.

"Everyone knows" Harry Reid is "involved with mobsters" and yet nobody has reported on it especially nobody on the right.

Weird how that works. It's almost like Assrocket has no actual evidence and is full of shit as usual.

Last Call For Indiana Pence And The Backlash Of Doom

Things aren't going too well for the Hoosier State since GOP Gov. Mike Pence signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act State Permission To Discriminate Act last week, and the backlash has been fierce.  Companies ranging from gaming convention Gen Con to clomputing firm Salesforce to Apple CEO Tim Cook have blasted the law and have even threatened to pull out millions of dollars of investments in the state.

What the law doesn't have is a whole lot of defenders, as Indianapolis Star columnist Tim Evans notes.

Oddly and conspicuously missing has been a strong counter-show of public support by the law's backers, including evangelical Christians.

Polling shows Americans are divided nearly evenly on the issue of gay marriage — even down to whether wedding-related businesses should be forced to serve same-sex couples in the face of a strongly held religious objection — but you wouldn't know the split was so close based on the noise swirling around Indiana in the last few days.

The ceremony where Gov. Mike Pence's signed the bill into law Thursday was deliberately low-key and private. The event was closed to the media and, even though the governor's office issued a photograph of Pence surrounded by a clutch of backers — many in religious garb — the governor's staff refused to provide their names.

So what's the deal?

An excellent question.  The law was sold as a necessary bulwark to protect Indiana Christians from secular assault, but there aren't tons of people celebrating the law in the streets.  So why not?

Is it that backers don't want to appear to be gloating in the wake of a major victory in the cultural war?

Or is it something deeper, reflecting a changing attitude about the broader issue of discussing religion in public — a shift that has left many who hold deep religious beliefs leery, maybe even afraid, to speak out for fear of being marginalized, labeled as fanatics or targeted for retribution?

The answer, according to the few backers who responded to questions from The Star, appears to be a mix of the two. But it also is true that some religious groups have not backed the new law.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) sent a letter to Pence this week threatening to cancel its 2017 convention in Indy if he signed the measure into law.

"Our perspective is that hate and bigotry wrapped in religious freedom is still hate and bigotry," Todd Adams, the associate general minister and vice president of the Indianapolis-based denomination, told The Indianapolis Star.

Now that's interesting.  A Christian church that doesn't find the law to be very Christ-like.  Maybe that's the difference here in 2015.

Of course, there are those who are happily using the law for its intended purpose.

An Indiana business owner went on a local radio station and said that he had discriminated against gay or lesbian couples even before Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed a law on Thursday protecting business owners who decide to discriminate for “religious liberty” reasons. He then defended the practice and suggested he would do it again.

The business owner, who would not give his name or the name of his business, said he had told some LGBT “people” that equipment was broken in his restaurant and he couldn’t serve them even though it wasn’t and other people were already eating at the tables. “So, yes, I have discriminated,” he told RadioNOW 100.9 hosts. The hosts were surprised the owner said he was okay with discriminating.

“Well, I feel okay with it because it’s my place of business, I pay the rent, I’ve built it with all my money and my doing. It’s my place; I can do whatever I want with it, “he said. “They can have their lifestyle and do their own thing in their own place or with people that want to be with them.”

And the law expressly prohibits any legal penalties to be levied against this fine, upstanding pillar of the community for his ignorance, because that's exactly what the law was meant to do.

And everyone knows it.

The Big Bug Out In Aden

With Yemeni President Hadi gone and even despite Saudi-led coalition airstrikes, it looks like there's very little to stop Houthi rebels in Yemen from capturing the port city of Aden and removing the last vestiges of the US-backed government. Foreign diplomats and UN staffers are taking advantage of the Saudis offering an exit by naval route.

Saudi Arabia's navy evacuated dozens of diplomats from Yemen and the United Nations pulled out international staff on Saturday after a third night of Saudi-led air strikes trying to stem advances by Iranian-allied Houthi fighters.

Residents reported heavy clashes between the Houthis and mainly Sunni tribal fighters in the south of the country, while the Saudi-led air campaign sought to stall a fresh offensive by the Shi'ite Muslim group on Aden from the east.

Riyadh's intervention, a surprise move from a conservative monarchy better known for flexing its muscle in oil markets than through military might, is planned to last a month but could extend for five or six, a Gulf diplomatic source said.

He said satellite imagery had shown that the Houthis had repositioned long-range Scud missiles in the north, close to the Saudi border and aimed at Saudi territory. A Yemeni official said Iran was providing parts for the missiles.

Dozens of diplomats were shipped out of Aden to the Red Sea port of Jeddah, Saudi television said, escaping the city where President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi had taken refuge until Thursday, when he left for Egypt to shore up Arab support for his crumbling authority.

Again, the Saudis are involved because the notion of a failed state now fallen to the point of being a base for Shi'a terrorists (not to mention the remnants of Sunni AQ Yemen) is something of a security problem on their southern doorstep.

Hadi running for Egypt shows you just how bad the situation is here, and oh yes, Iraq to Saudi Arabia's north is still very much a problem, with Islamic State running around from Basrah all the way over to Homs in Syria.

The Middle East is in pretty bad shape right now, and nothing I've seen makes me think anything's going to improve after a six month air strike campaign in Yemen.

Bank On Their Hatred Of Warren

OK, if Wall Street is having this much of a hissy fit over Sen. Elizabeth Warren, then she's doing something right.

Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, sources familiar with the discussions said.

Representatives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party's tone toward Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said this week.

Bank officials said the idea of withholding donations was not discussed at a meeting of the four banks in Washington but it has been raised in one-on-one conversations between representatives of some of them. However, there was no agreement on coordinating any action, and each bank is making its own decision, they said.

The amount of money at stake, a maximum of $15,000 per bank, means the gesture is symbolic rather than material

Moreover, banks' hostility toward Warren, who is not a presidential candidate, will not have a direct impact on the presumed Democratic front runner in the White House race, Hillary Clinton. That's because their fund-raising groups focus on congressional races rather than the presidential election

Still, political strategists say Clinton could struggle to raise money among Wall Street financiers who worry that Democrats are becoming less business friendly.

The tensions are a sign that the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis - the bank bailouts and the fights over financial reforms to rein in Wall Street - are still a factor in the 2016 elections.

Frankly, that's the best news I've heard about Senate Dems in quite some time.  I'm sure banks will still give to the Dems, but if they are publicly declaring Warren, Brown, and maybe even Hillary as their enemies, then it will only help the Dems in 2016.

Good work, banks!

Last Call For A Bluff, Broken And Busted

We've talked about Indiana's "religious freedom" bill allowing people to not face penalties for discrimination against LGBTQ folks based solely on belief, so when similar legislation came up in front of the Georgia House of Representatives this week, one Republican bravely stood up and killed it with truth.

As in Indiana, proponents of Georgia’s bill have tried to argue that it has nothing to do with discrimination. Rep. Mike Jacobs, an LGBT-friendly Republican, decided to test this theory by introducing an amendment that would not allow claims of religious liberty to be used to circumvent state and local nondiscrimination protections. Supporters of the bill, like Rep. Barry Fleming (R), countered that the amendment “will gut the bill.” Nevertheless, the House Judiciary Committee approved the amendment with a 9-8 vote, three Republicans joining the Democrats in supporting it. 

Fleming moved to table the amended bill, a motion that passed with 16 votes, making it unlikely the bill will proceed before the legislative session ends. With an exception for nondiscrimination protections, the “religious liberty” bill is dead. 

Before the vote, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Josh McKoon (R), joined the hearing to similarly argue against making an exception for nondiscrimination protections. He claimed that the bill’s religious liberty protections would no longer be “uniform” across the state, adding, “That amendment would completely undercut the purpose of the bill.” Rep. Roger Bruce (D) pressed McKoon: “That tells me that the purpose of the bill is to discriminate.” Without further explanation, he countered, “It couldn’t be further from the truth, no sir.”

Well played, Mr. Jacobs. Well played indeed.

Black Guy Time Machine

Time travel may be fun in movies, novels, and games, but in reality it just doesn't happen.  One African-American physicist however is at least giving it the ol' college try.

When he received his doctorate in 1973, [Ron] Mallett was one of only 79 black Ph.D. physicists among about 20,000 in the U.S., he says. While he detects more tolerance in the profession now, the discrimination — the idea that a black man can’t be this smart — has not disappeared. 

Mallett says he kept his work on time travel secret for years partly because colleagues would conclude he was a crackpot unfit for tenure. If he worked openly and with others, he also worried white physicists would get all the credit. 

“I’m afraid that’s how it would work,” Mallett says. 

He built his first time machine in the basement of the Altoona, Pennsylvania, home where his mother moved him and three younger siblings from the Bronx after their father’s death plunged the family into poverty. He was 11 and had just read “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells. The odds and ends he slapped together didn’t work. He knew he would need the science. 

He was miserable much of the time growing up, depressed and isolated. He was an average student. Electronics, English and math were the exceptions.

Mallet says he owes everything to his father, and he wants to give his theoretical equations a chance to be put into practice, maybe to see him again.  There's a lot more to this story than just temporal physics, and hell, I'm hoping that maybe, just maybe, he's got this figured out.

The Honey Badger Hangs Up His Gloves

Senate minority leader Harry Reid will not run for re-election in 2016 as yet another big Senate retirement will set off a scramble for both his seat and for leadership among the Dems.

Senator Harry Reid, the tough tactician who has led Senate Democrats since 2005, will not seek re-election next year, bringing an end to a three-decade congressional career that culminated with his push of President Obama’s ambitious agenda against fierce Republican resistance. 

Mr. Reid, 75, who suffered serious eye and facial injuries in a Jan. 1 exercise accident at his Las Vegas home, said he had been contemplating retiring from the Senate for months. He said his decision was not attributable either to the accident or to his demotion to minority leader after Democrats lost the majority in November’s midterm elections. 

“I understand this place,” Mr. Reid said. “I have quite a bit of power as minority leader.”
He has already confounded the new Republican majority this year by holding Democrats united against a proposal to gut the Obama administration’s immigration policies as well as a human-trafficking measure Democrats objected to over an anti-abortion provision. 

“I want to be able to go out at the top of my game,” said Mr. Reid, who used a sports metaphor about athletes who try to hang on too long. “I don’t want to be a 42-year-old trying to become a designated hitter.”

Reid certainly has done a hell of a job trolling Republicans all these years.  The Dems could do a lot worse.  The article ends with this:

Mr. Reid said he had seen one important change for the better in the Senate: an influx of female senators. 

“This place is so much better because of women,” he said. “Men and women are different, and they have changed the dynamic of the Senate.”

Amen to that, Honey Badger.  Maybe with both President Obama and now Harry Reid unburdened by re-election, some interesting last minute things can get done.

StupidiNews!

• NYC officials are calling yesterday's explosion that collapsed an East Village building and injured 19 "gas-related" as utilities inspectors had been on site an hour prior to the blast.
• The Deputy Chief of Fresno, California's Police Department has been arrested on drug conspiracy charges after a federal probe found distribution networks for heroin, oxycodone and pot.
• The GOP-led Senate has passed a budget that cuts more than $5 trillion in domestic programs over 10 years while increasing funding for the Pentagon.
• Turkey's parliament has passed a controversial raft of security laws that expand police authority and online surveillance of citizens.
• Cloud computing firm Salesforce is the latest company to object to Indiana's "religious freedom" law, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company will no longer invest in projects in the state.

Crash Course In The French Alps

Well, this week's Germanwings Airbus A320 crash in the French Alps just took a very depressing turn.

The chief Marseille prosecutor handling the investigation of the crash of a Germanwings jetliner said on Thursday that evidence from the cockpit voice recorder indicated that the co-pilot had deliberately locked the captain out of the cockpit and steered the plane into its fatal descent. 

“At this moment, in light of investigation, the interpretation we can give at this time is that the co-pilot through voluntary abstention refused to open the door of the cockpit to the commander, and activated the button that commands the loss of altitude,” the prosecutor, Brice Robin, said. 

He said it appeared that the intention of the co-pilot, identified as Andreas Lubitz, had been “to destroy the aircraft.” He said that the voice recorder showed that the co-pilot had been breathing until before the moment of impact, suggesting that he was conscious and deliberate in bringing the plane down and killing 144 passengers and five other crew members in the French Alps on Tuesday.

Why Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot, crashed the plane on purpose we may never know, and why he chose to take 149 lives with him is still a mystery.

The inquiry shows that the crash was intentional, Mr. Robin said, and he was considering changing his investigation from involuntary manslaughter to voluntary manslaughter. 

He said there was no indication that it was a terrorist attack, and added that Mr. Lubitz was not known to law enforcement officials. After the news conference, the German interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, told reporters in Berlin that security officials had checked their records after Tuesday’s crash and found no indication that anyone on board had links to terrorism. 

An investigation into the background of Mr. Lubitz, who was 28 years old and came from the German town of Montabaur, is underway. 

Asked if Mr. Lubitz had tried to commit suicide, the French prosecutor said, “I haven’t used the word suicide,” adding that it was “a legitimate question to ask.”

There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle that are still missing, and we may never find all of them, but hopefully officials in France can reconstruct what happened, and we can start asking why a co-pilot would be in the seat alone and able to lock the pilot out of the cockpit.

But Remember, Pro-Life

So it turns out trying to firebomb a Planned Parenthood clinic is actually something that's against the law in Texas. Wonder how long that little oversight will take to get rectified.

The Austin American-Statesman reported that an anti-abortion group was holding a prayer vigil outside the Planned Parenthood clinic Monday night when someone drove by and threw a flaming bottle out of their car window. 

Ruth Allwein with the Texas Alliance for Life told officers that she stomped out the bottle and pulled out the wick. The liquid in the bottle turned out to be Gumout gas treatment, which is flammable. It reportedly burned an area of grass about the size of small pizza before it was put out. 

Although the vehicle’s license plate had been obscured with cardboard, activists provided police with enough information to arrest 52-year-old Melanie Marie Toney.
At first, Toney denied that she had thrown the bottle. But she later admitted that she threw it and that it “might” have been smoldering. 

Toney was charged with felony aggravated assault, and was being held in lieu of $25,000 bond. 

An arrest affidavit said that Toney’s motive was not completely clear. But anti-abortion protesters told police that they felt like they had been targeted. 

“We are just very sad this happened and we are thankful no one was hurt,” Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas President Ken Lambrecht told KVUE. “The health and safety of anyone coming in or near Planned Parenthood Health Center is of the utmost importance to us.” 

The South Austin Planned Parenthood has surveillance cameras, security guards and high fences in place to protect patients and staff.

And of course the anti-choicers protesting against the clinic felt like they of course had to be the victims, and not the clinic itself.

Sure.  Because it's not like America has a history of the "pro-life" movement bombing abortion clinics or anything.

Jesus wept.

StupidiNews!

• A coalition of Arab forces led by Saudi Arabia has launched airstrikes on Yemen, as Yemeni President Hadi appears to have fled leaving Houthi rebels in control most of the country.
• An Arizona bill preventing women from buying health insurance that offers coverage for abortion on the state's federal insurance exchange is headed for Gov. Doug Dicey's desk.
• Former Taliban prisoner of war Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has formally been charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, charges that could result in life in prison.
• The fastest growing US city in 2014 was retirement community The Villages in Florida, with 5.4% growth last year, almost double that of any other metro area in the US.
• After 14 years Steven Spielberg is finally getting back behind the camera to direct the film adaptation of Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One.

Last Call For Coats For Senate

The latest Senate retirement headed into 2016 is Indiana Republican Dan Coats, setting off a Hoosier state shuffle for his seat.

"Today I am announcing that I will not seek re-election to the United States Senate," Coats said in a statement. "This was not an easy decision. While I believe I am well-positioned to run a successful campaign for another six-year term, I have concluded that the time has come to pass this demanding job to the next generation of leaders.

Coats's decision to retire may set off a Republican scramble for the open seat. While the GOP would seem to have the early edge, it is now another state they must defend in a presidential year where they're almost entirely playing defense to protect their new Senate majority.

Potential Republican candidates include Reps. Todd Young and Susan Brooks, both of whom have long been viewed as having statewide ambitions, as well as Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard and Reps. Todd Rokita, Jackie Walorski and Marlin Stutzman.
An aide to Rep. Luke Messer told The Hill he wouldn't seek the Senate seat.

Coats's chief of staff, Eric Holcomb, is also taking a look at the race and is seen as a top candidate by by Indiana observers. He is close to kingmaker and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), has been traveling the state extensively building connections with the GOP grassroots. 

“Eric has taken a leave of absence from Senator Coats’ office as he considers a run for the open U.S. Senate seat in 2016. He’s grateful for the immediate outpouring of support from every corner of Indiana and will make a decision soon,” Pete Seat, a spokesperson for Eric Holcomb, said in a statement.

Well that's the GOP side, plenty of people salivating over that prize.  But Indiana's other senator is Democrat Joe Donnelly who won because Republican Richard Mourdock was a tea party nutcase that Indiana didn't want to touch..  Could the Dems take both seats in a similar way?

That would mean finding another Blue Dog in Indiana with the cash to run for Senate.  And you know who that means.

Their best recruit would likely be former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who chose to retire rather than facing a tough race in 2010 and still has close to $10 million in the bank for a potential return to politics. Bayh has ruled out a run for governor but hasn't closed the door on a Senate run. 

National Democrats immediately expressed optimism over the newly open seat, pointing back to their 2012 victory.

“Indiana's Senate race is now one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, and Democrats are ready to put together a strong campaign just like we did in 2012. We're confident that we will find a great candidate who will put Indiana first and win this seat in 2016," Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Jon Tester (Mont.) said in a statement.

If Bayh doesn't run, former Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.) and Hammond Mayor Tom McDermott (D) are potential candidates on the Democratic side.

Oh hooray Evan F'ckin Bayh might be back!  I'm sooooooo haaaaaaaappy.

Cut Until You Can't Bleed Anymore

The House GOP budget proposal is not only lunacy, but dangerous.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have crunched the numbers and found that Republicans want a budget that cuts more than $3 trillion from programs for working and middle class over ten years, and the biggest victim would be health care:

• More than $2.9 trillion in health care reductions for low- and moderate-income people. The plan would convert Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program into a single block grant with drastically reduced funding levels. It also would repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including health reform’s subsidies to make coverage affordable for people with low or modest incomes and its Medicaid expansion. To date, the ACA coverage expansions have extended coverage to 16.4 million previously uninsured people and strengthened coverage for millions of others.
• $125 billion in cuts to SNAP (formerly food stamps). The House plan block-grants SNAP starting in 2021 and cuts SNAP funds by $125 billion, or more than a third, over 2021 to 2025. States would be left to decide whose benefits to reduce or terminate, but cuts of this magnitude would end food assistance for millions of low-income families, cut benefits for millions of such households, or do some combination of the two, according to a new CBPP analysis.[3]
• $159 billion[4] in cuts to tax credits for low- and modest-income working families. The House Budget Committee plan would allow critical provisions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to expire at the end of 2017, which would increase the number of people in poverty by an estimated 1.8 million, including 1.0 million children — and deepen poverty for another 14.6 million people, including 6.7 million children, in 2018. The House plan would also allow the American Opportunity Tax Credit to expire at the end of 2017, which would cause millions of low- and moderate-income families to lose some or all of the tax credits they receive to help offset college costs.[5]
• Roughly $300 billion in cuts in other mandatory (i.e. entitlement) programs serving low-income Americans, much of which is unspecified. Aside from the cuts in SNAP and refundable tax credits discussed above, the House plan cuts more than $550 billion from mandatory programs just in the education and income security categories of the budget. The Budget Committee provided few specifics here, but we conservatively estimate that about $300 billion would come from low-income programs in these areas. The Budget Committee made clear that the plan eliminates the mandatory portion of funding for Pell Grants, which help students from families with modest incomes afford college. The reduced Pell Grant funding would necessitate cuts in the program. Despite the fact that Pell Grants already cover a much lower share of college costs than they used to, the Budget Committee said its plan would freeze the maximum grant level for ten years, even as tuition and room and board costs continued to rise. Other mandatory programs in these areas that would also be candidates for significant cuts under this vague part of the plan include child nutrition programs, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the elderly and disabled poor, and possibly the underlying refundable portion of the EITC and the underlying low-income (or refundable) component of the Child Tax Credit (CTC). In calculating the size of the cuts in programs targeted on people of modest means, we assumed that low-income program (other than SNAP) would bear their proportionate share of the remaining $550 billion in cuts in mandatory programs that the budget plan makes in the education and income security categories.
• About $160 billion, and maybe more, in cuts to low-income non-defense discretionary programs. On top of the significant cuts already enacted as a result of the BCA’s discretionary caps and sequestration, the House Budget Committee cuts non-defense discretionary programs about $970 billion[6] below their post-sequestration levels. About two-thirds of these cuts are located in portions of the budget that have little or no low-income programs, such as scientific research, natural resources, and transportation infrastructure. But the rest are essentially unspecified or occur in areas where low-income programs reside. Here, too, we make the conservative assumption that low-income programs would bear a proportionate share of the cuts, which is how we derive our estimate of $160 billion in reductions.

The Senate GOP version cuts slightly less from health care (only $2.5 trillion in cuts!) but would keep intact pretty much everything else as far as cuts.  These are brutal cuts too, and where would the $3 trillion in savings go?

Guess.

Here's a hint: if you have to guess, you most likely won't see a dime of it.

Every Breath You Take (I'll Be Blocking You)

The GOP House is responding to President Obama's EPA regulations on coal plant emissions with Kentucky Rep Ed Whitfield (R-Bituminous) introducing legislation to stop the regulations from ever taking effect.

Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky unveiled a draft bill that would allow governors to veto compliance with the federal rule if the governor determines it would cause significant rate increases for electricity or harm reliability in the state. 

The bill also would delay the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rule until all court challenges are completed. 

Whitfield, chairman of the energy and power subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce panel, said the EPA’s proposed rule to limit carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants is riddled with problems and faces an uphill battle in the courts. 

Whitfield and other Republicans cited testimony from an unlikely ally, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, an Obama mentor who has said the proposed EPA rule is unconstitutional. 

“Burning the Constitution should not become part of our national energy policy,” Tribe told Whitfield’s subcommittee last week. 

Tribe said the EPA was attempting what he called “an unconstitutional trifecta: usurping the prerogatives of the states, Congress and the federal courts — all at once.” 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also cited Tribe’s comments in a letter urging the nation’s 50 governors to defy Obama’s rules for power plants by refusing to submit compliance plans to Washington. 

“Some have suggested recently that failing to comply with the EPA’s requirements would be to disregard the law,” McConnell wrote in a letter to all 50 governors. “But the fact is, it is the EPA that is failing to comply with the law.”

Larry Tribe selling out to the GOP aside, Whitfield's bill most likely won't even make it past the Senate.  But Mitch the Turtle openly calling for states to break federal regulations and refuse to submit emissions reduction plans is cute.  That of course means the EPA will do it for them, and I'm betting they'll be a lat more harsh about it.

That is of course if the regulations aren't tied up in the courts until the Obama administration ends, which is a distinct possibility.  After that, who knows?

We should probably do something as voters to make sure we have a continuation of these EPA policies if we want clean air and to do something about climate change, or at least try to do something.

Or at least the rest of you should.  Kentucky will never comply until forced to by the Feds.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/03/24/3764976_ky-congressman-targets-climate.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy