StupidiNews!

• Nigerian Army officials say another 160 women have been rescued from Boko Haram captivity in the Sambisa forest region of the country.
• Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders confirms he will enter the 2016 presidential race as a Democrat, and that he's running to win.
• Relatively peaceful protests against police violence took place in Baltimore, New York City, Denver, and other US cities yesterday over the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore police custody.
• Greece and the EU are targeting this weekend for a preliminary bailout deal to keep Greece in the eurozone with talks for a final deal set for a meeting of EU finance ministers on May11th.
• Streaming service Hulu has reportedly paid $700,000 an episode for exclusive rights to stream all nine seasons of Seinfeld starting in June.

Last Call For Pissed Christie

Guess which US governor has the lowest approval ratings in the country right now?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), a potential presidential candidate in 2016, on Monday placed blame on the media for his low approval ratings. 

During an interview with NJ101.5 radio's "Ask the Governor," Christie dismissed the hit he has taken in the polls since the Bridgegate scandal broke.

"If you're going to have relentlessly negative coverage from the media, it's going to affect your poll numbers," Christie said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Christie's approval ratings sunk to the lowest of any governor this year in an April Quinnipiac poll. Fifty-six percent of New Jersey voters said they disapproved of the job Christie is doing, while just 38 percent said they approved.

It's telling that Christie's usually reliable "blame the media for covering what I'm doing" plan is no longer working.  He's not even considered a serious 2016 candidate anymore, a long fall from where he was in 2014.  Bridgegate has finished the man, and at this point he's fighting not to become the next punchline of a GOP governor.

I'm betting he doesn't cross that bridge, because he may not be Governor for much longer.

David Wildstein, a former ally of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who ordered intentional traffic jams near the George Washington Bridge, is scheduled to plead guilty to criminal charges on Thursday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. 

Wildstein is set to appear in federal court in Newark, where grand jurors have heard testimony in secret for months about gridlock over four mornings in Fort Lee, New Jersey, according to the person, who requested anonymity because the matter isn’t public. He would plead guilty to a charging document known as a criminal information, the person said. It was unclear what the specific charges would be. 

Wildstein lawyer Alan Zegas and Fishman spokesman Matthew Reilly didn’t immediately return e-mails and calls seeking comment on the scheduled plea. Zegas has said “evidence exists” that Christie knew of the traffic jams at the time.

Now, it's possible Wildstein is falling on his sword to take the blame for Christie, in which case, he might recover from this. But if this is a plea bargain for Wildstein to take a lesser charge in exchange for evidence against Christie, his 2016 run is done.

We'll see.

Never Bet Against The American People Being Dumb

Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza is shocked -- SHOCKED! -- to discover that Pew Research's annual reminder showing that Americans are a majority of low-information meatheads when it comes to politics is still showing Americans are low-information meatheads.

The Pew Research Center spent the last month collecting data on responses to its 12-question news quiz. And the results are, um, humbling for those of us who spend every day writing, talking and thinking about politics. 

The overriding message? People don't know so much about current affairs with political tinge. Here are two examples. 

1. The Senate 

Presented with four options about the current partisan makeup of the Senate, roughly half (52 percent) got the answer right. (It's option number 4 above. Duh.) 

Pretty good, right? Not so much. Consider that a straight-up guess would give you a 25 percent success rate since Pew provided four options for people to choose from. Given that, you'd (or maybe I'd) expect a lot more people to get it right. What did the 48 percent who got it wrong choose? One in five people (21 percent) said that Republicans controlled 61 seats while one in ten thought Democrats held the Senate majority (option #3). Six percent said the Senate was tied 50-50. 

2. Elizabeth Warren



Again, roughly half (51 percent) of those who participated in the news quiz knew that Warren was the woman pictured on the lower left above. Ok, so, yes, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin (top right) does look a little bit like Warren. But, Nancy Pelosi (bottom right but you already knew that) looks nothing like Warren. And, even if you have no idea who Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) is (top left), she still looks NOTHING like Warren.

Your average American got 8 out of 12 right (you can take the quiz here) with older Americans doing slightly better than Millennials.  But after a midterm where only a third of voters bothered to even show up, why is Cillizza in any way shocked at these numbers?  Americans have tuned out politics for the last several years, and the "both sides do it" and "view from nowhere" style of political reporting that carefully assigns blame and fault to all politicians rather than the ones who are actually responsible has achieved the desired effect of making Americans completely apathetic about political issues.

Cillizza wants to know why so many Americans are ignorant about basic politics?

They probably read The Fix.

National Fiduciary League

You may have heard that the NFL is voluntarily giving up its sweet, sweet tax-exempt status.  Why is it doing so?  There has to be a monster of a catch.  Travis Waldron explains:

Under tax law, the NFL and other professional sports leagues have been able to organize as 501(c)(6) non-profit trade organizations. The NFL has done so since 1942, largely without much fanfare or scrutiny. But in recent years, especially as NFL revenues have ballooned to nearly $10 billion annually, the league’s tax-exempt status has come under scrutiny from sports fans, tax groups, and lawmakers from both parties. It is now, Goodell said in the letter, “a distraction” that isn’t worth keeping. 

NFL types might be fond of throwing the “distraction” label on things that don’t deserve it, but in this instance, Goodell is probably right. Relinquishing the tax exemption will almost certainly have little, if any, cost for the league or benefit to taxpayers, since the NFL operates as a pass-through entity. That is, the majority of the money the league takes in is either made by or passed on to teams and taxed at that level, where 31 of the 32 franchises are organized as private, tax-paying businesses (the publicly-owned Green Bay Packers are a nonprofit). 

Because of that, the cost of the exemption to taxpayers (or the benefit to the NFL) is relatively small. According to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who featured tax-exempt status for sports leagues in his annual “Waste Book,” those exemptions cost taxpayers as much as $91 million a year. But the NFL is only a part of that, and Citizens for Tax Justice has estimated that the exemption saves the league just $10 million annually, roughly the same calculation the Joint Committee on Taxation made when it estimated that revoking the exemption would increase federal revenues by $109 million over a decade.

But those benefits may not exist at all. Major League Baseball gave up its tax exemption in 2007 and has maintained that doing so had no effect on its finances. The NFL, according to some experts, may have to pay a small amount of taxes based on some revenue it takes in and the structure of a stadium loan program it used to run. But even accounting for that, other experts have in the past guessed that the league might be able to find more than enough write-offs in the tax code to offset what it could have to pay.

So yes, the bottom line is that our corporate tax code is so generous to businesses as large as NFL franchises that it actually may benefit the NFL in the long run.

And the best part is they can keep hustling cities and local governments for fat tax exemptions and stadium sweetheart deals that will keep them making huge profits at the expense of crumbling cities.

Nice work if you can get it.

StupidiNews!

• In a major policy speech in New York today, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton will call for mandatory police body cameras nationwide.
• Saudi Arabia's King Salman has named his interior minister as heir to the throne and removed the King's youngest brother Moqren as heir and foreign minister in a government shakeup.
• Police and National Guard troops enforced a 10 PM curfew in Baltimore last night, breaking up a protest with pepper spray and rubber bullets.
• Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker is holding up a Republican budget proposal because the $5 trillion in spending cuts over ten years being called for isn't enough.
• A Russian resupply ship headed for the International Space Station has "suffered a critical malfunction" but astronauts have enough supplies aboard for now.

Stand With Rand On Quicksand, Con't

Another week, another audience, and Sen. Rand Paul has changed his position yet again on the use of drones in military and combat use, this time when cornered by FOX News. Dave Weigel:

"I do think that there is a valuable use for drones and as much as I’m seen as an opponent of drones, in military and warfare, they do have some value,” Paul said. “I think this is a difficult situation. You have hostages being held; some of them are American. You have people holding hostages; some of them are American. I’ve been an opponent of using drones about people not in combat. However if you are holding hostages, you kind of are involved in combat. So I look at it the way it is in the United States. If there's a kidnapping in New York, the police don't have to have a warrant to go in." 

Of course, as Weigel notes, this is the totally opposite position as to where Paul has been on the question of drones.

Had Paul never spoken out about drones before, this would have been a newsless answer, comparable to what other Republican candidates and politicians had been saying. But Paul has a long, dramatic record of pronouncements about drones. He's said that a drone that flew over his home would meet the business end of a shotgun. He's demanded stronger justifications from the Obama administration before it targets any American citizens. That talk has won him praise from the left and the libertarian right. 

Yet on Fox, Paul declined the chance to criticize the administration. "You really don't get due process or anything like that if you are in a war zone," said Paul. "I tend not to want to blame the president for the loss of life here. I think he was trying to do the right thing." 

Paul's comments perplexed Glenn Greenwald, the journalist and co-founder of The Intercept who has written extensively about drone warfare. "I don't get his strategy: he's never going to attract GOP hawks, so why dilute what makes him interesting/unique?" asked Greenwald on Twitter. "If his big maverick view is now reduced to 'no drone killings of Americans on US soil,' it's hardly interesting."

You tell me, Double G.  You're the one who's been backing the guy for the last year.  But hey, he's got all kinds of rubes to fool running for President, right?

Oh, and on his other big issue, criminal justice reform? You'd think Rand Paul would be eager to weigh in on Baltimore and continue his "outreach" to black and Hispanic voters. He did that too.

Presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) weighed in on the turmoil in Baltimore on Tuesday, standing with police and blaming the violence on a lack of morals in America. 

"I came through the train on Baltimore (sic) last night, I'm glad the train didn't stop," he said, laughing, during an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. 

Railing against what he repeatedly called "thuggery and thievery" in the streets of Baltimore, Paul told Ingraham that talking about "root causes" was not appropriate in the middle of a riot. 

"The police have to do what they have to do, and I am very sympathetic to the plight of the police in this," he said.

Nice.  "Lack of morals".

Hoocuddanode, Climate Change Edition

Greg Sargent notes that now that Senate Democrats have all but agreed with the GOP that the Senate and not President Obama should have the final say over negotiations with Iran, Senate Republicans are insisting that the Senate have the same final veto power over any international climate change treaties as well.

Hoocuddanode, right?

Who says the new GOP Congress isn’t interested in getting anything done? The Wall Street Journal reports that Senate Republicans are hard at work hatching a new strategy to accomplish a key piece of their agenda: Undermining President Obama’s chances of reaching an international deal in which major countries agree to curb climate emissions, by sowing doubts about his ability to deliver on our end of the bargain. 

Republicans are already fighting in court to block Obama’s proposed new EPA rules curbing emissions from existing power plans, which is central to U.S. efforts to reach a global climate deal in talks later this year. They argue that the rules are unconstitutional and amount to more executive overreach. The Journal reports that the idea is to send a message that Obama cannot unilaterally negotiate a climate deal, and the model is Tom Cotton’s recent letter to Iran.

Gosh, it's almost like this was the point all along: to set a precedent for every international treaty going forward that the Senate should get the final say.

Whenever there's a Democrat in the White House, anyway.

Sen. James Inhofe said Mr. Obama’s unilateral pursuit of the climate accord exceeds the scope of president’s power. Mr. Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, plans to hold a hearing this summer focused on the Senate’s advice-and-consent process and its possible application in international climate negotiations. 

Additionally, Mr. Inhofe said the Iran letter, which was penned by Sen. Tom Cotton, could be a useful model to send a message about the climate agreement. 

“The Tom Cotton letter was an educational effort,” Mr. Inhofe said in an interview. Other countries think “if the president of the United States says something, it’s just automatic…His letter was over there saying, ‘the president says he can do this; he can’t do this.’ ”

Some 43 other presidencies were allowed to.  Apparently, when the president is Barack Obama, then the President no longer speaks for the United States of America in international affairs.

Imagine that.  And once again, Senate Democrats have helped by backstabbing the president.

StupidiNews!

• Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has instituted a week-long curfew as protests at the funeral of Freddie Gray, killed in police custody, turned violent last night.
• The Supreme Court on Monday tossed a 6th Circuit Court decision on Obamacare requirements for contraception coverage, reviving objections by Catholic groups that they should be exempt.
• Nepali PM Sushil Koirala says that the death toll from Saturday's devastating earthquake could top 10,000 as information continues to trickle in from remote areas of the country.
• Chinese auto parts maker BYD has secured a contract to make as many as 200 electric transit buses for the city of Long Beach, California.
• Chipotle becomes the first major US restaurant chain to eliminate GMOs, saying customers deserve real ingredients in their foods.

Last Call For A Brave New World

SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston previews tomorrow's Supreme Court oral arguments on same-sex marriage and the Constitutional issues before the justices.

Assuming that the Supreme Court moved forward to a decision on the constitutional controversy, it probably must choose between two contrasting interpretations of what right is at stake. It would be harder for gays and lesbians to win — though not entirely beyond their reach — if one of those versions were accepted by the Justices. 

Gay and lesbian couples insist that they are not asking the Court to declare, for the first time ever, that gays and lesbians have a right to marry — that is, a new and very specific right to marry the person of one’s choice, when that person is of the same sex. 

Rather, they contend that there is an existing right to marry, well established in every state, and they simply want equal access to it. It is their exclusion from a right now open to opposite-sex couples that they argue denies them legal equality and due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

There are two variations of that claim. 

One is that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids denial of equal legal rights based upon a constitutionally forbidden category. In this situation, that category is sexual orientation or, as it is sometimes called, gender identity. 

The other is that the Supreme Court has declared that marriage is a fundamental right under the Constitution, and that the right may not arbitrarily be denied to a couple that — except for their same-sex characteristic — would be eligible to enter it. 

And the argument against same-sex marriage:

Many lawyers for states, in defense of their bans, have made a contrasting argument. They contend that gays and lesbians are, in fact, asking the Court to create a brand-new constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex. 

The Court, of course, very seldom establishes a previously non-existent constitutional right. It can extend an existing right to new groups — for example, give women legal equality — but it does so by finding that the underlying constitutional concept has simply evolved. The recognition of a new right is simply an interpretative alteration, not a new creation, done from scratch. 

Even less often, lawyers for the states have contended, does the Supreme Court recognize a new “fundamental right.” To exist at that most important level, there must be a history behind the right, something that is so evidently a part of constitutional understanding that it is only natural to formally acknowledge it. 

In the same-sex marriage cases, then, gay and lesbian couples would confront a major obstacle to winning their case if they had to persuade the Court to create a new right of gay marriage, as such, and, especially, if they had to make the case that such a right is fundamental in the constitutional sense. 

So the outcome is actually fairly simple if the plaintiffs are victorious:

If the couples win on the first point, then equality would be mandated nationwide, and recognition would seem to lose its separate significance. It is possible that the Court, if it were to examine the recognition issue wholly apart from its obvious link to marriage access, might find it fairly easy to assure equality in recognition. That, in effect, is what it required the federal government to do when, in the Windsor decision, it opened federal marital benefits to already married same-sex couples as a matter of constitutional equality. 

Much of the written briefing in the four cases seems to proceed on the assumption that the two rights being claimed are not distinct, but closely intetwined. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine how the Court might rule in favor of one but not the other.

So the bottom line is that the pro side believes the federal right to marry already exists and is being expanded by the Fourteenth Amendment.  The con side believes the right does not exist, because it is a state issue, and that a federal mandate cannot be created wholesale by the courts (and therefore must fall to the states).

Again, as Denniston says, it seems very difficult to say there's no federal mandate to recognize same-sex marriage nationally without, well, recognizing same-sex marriage nationally.  The clues are there that indicate that there are at least five justices willing to say there is (and possibly six, if you think the Chief Justice wants his fingerprints on this legacy.)

We'll have more data to pore over tomorrow.

Ferguson: Economic Violence 101

Charles Warren details in The Atlantic how Ferguson, Missouri spent years using its police as a taxation force, harassing the (mostly black) citizenry to raise money to run the local government despite Ferguson being the home of a $24 billion Fortune 500 corporation.

Take a walk along West Florissant Avenue, in Ferguson, Missouri. Head south of the burned-out Quik Trip and the famous McDonalds, south of the intersection with Chambers, south almost to the city limit, to the corner of Ferguson Avenue and West Florissant. There, last August, Emerson Electric announced third-quarter sales of $6.3 billion. Just over half a mile to the northeast, four days later, Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. The 12 shots fired by Officer Wilson were probably audible in the company lunchroom. 

Outwardly, at least, the City of Ferguson would appear to occupy an enviable position. It is home to a Fortune 500 firm. It has successfully revitalized a commercial corridor through its downtown. It hosts an office park filled with corporate tenants. Its coffers should be overflowing with tax dollars. 

Instead, the cash-starved municipality relies on its cops and its courts to extract millions in fines and fees from its poorest residents, issuing thousands of citations each year. Those tickets plug a financial hole created by the ways in which the city, the county, and the state have chosen to apportion the costs of public services. A century or more of public-policy choices protect the wallets of largely white business and property owners and pass the bills along to disproportionately black renters and local residents. It's easy to see the drama of a fatal police shooting, but harder to understand the complexities of municipal finances that created many thousands of hostile encounters, one of which turned fatal.

The familiar convention of the true-crime story turns out to be utterly inadequate for describing the social, economic, and legal subjection of black people in Ferguson, or anywhere in America. Understanding this requires looking beyond the 90-second drama to the 90 years of entrenched white supremacy and black disadvantage that preceded it.

The key to Ferguson's plight is nothing less than decades of a regressive "race to the bottom" taxation system designed exclusively to benefit white property owners and businesses at the expense of black tenants and renters.

Like most of the rest of St. Louis Country, mid-century Ferguson was defended by exclusionary zoning codes and whites-only collusion in the real estate market. In the 1960s Ferguson was known as a “sun-down” community: African Americans, mostly from neighboring Kinloch, came in to work in the houses of wealthy whites in Ferguson during the day, but were expected to be out of town by the time the sun set. To this day, the adjacent cities are joined by only two through streets, the Ferguson city line runs down a neutral zone lined on either side with mirror-image three-way intersections. If you have been to St. Louis, you likely landed in Kinloch. Over the last three decades, the vast majority of that city’s black residents have been displaced to accommodate the expansion of Lambert-St. Louis Airport. Over the same period of time, a small number of African American homeowners and a much larger number of African American renters have gradually replaced whites in Ferguson. Ferguson, which was almost entirely white in 1970, today has a black majority. 

In 1981, a federal judge in Missouri declared that the “severe” residential segregation of the St. Louis metropolitan area had produced a constitutionally impermissible degree of segregation in the region’s schools. The court tasked the East-West Gateway Government Council and the Missouri Housing Development Commission with developing a plan to desegregate the metropolitan area, but they simply ignored the ruling. At the turn of the 21st century, almost one-half of St. Louis County’s 90-odd municipalities had black populations under 5 percent.

And that brings us to Emerson Electric.

For tax purposes, Emerson’s Ferguson campus is appraised according to its “fair market value.” That means a $50 million dollar solar-powered data center is only worth what another firm would be willing to pay for it. “Our location in Ferguson affects the fair market value of the entire campus,” Polzin explained. By this reasoning, the condition of West Florissant Avenue explains the low valuation of the company’s headquarters. 

In fact, the opposite is true: The rock-bottom assessment value of the Ferguson campus helps ensure that West Florissant Avenue remains in its current condition, year after year. It severely limits the tax money Emerson contributes to the Ferguson-Florissant district’s struggling schools (Michael Brown graduated from nearby Normandy High School, a nearly 100 percent African American school that has been operating without state accreditation for the last two years), and to the government of St. Louis County more generally. On the 25 parcels Emerson owns all around St. Louis County, it pays the county $1.3m in property taxes. Ferguson itself receives far less. Even after a 2013 property tax increase (from $0.65 to the state-maximum $1 per $100 of assessed value), Ferguson received an estimated $68,000 in property taxes from the corporate headquarters that occupies 152 acres of its tax base—not even enough to pay the municipal judge and his clerk to hand out the fines and sign the arrest warrants. 

St. Louis County doesn’t just assess Emerson a low market value. It then divides that number in three—so its final property value, for tax purposes, ends up being one third of its already low appraised value. In some states, Ferguson would be able to offset this write-down by raising its own percentage tax rate. Voters would even be able to decide which services needed the most help and raise property taxes for specific reasons. But Missouri sets a limit for such levies: $1 per $100 of property. As Joseph Pulitzer wrote of St. Louis during the first Gilded Age, “millions and millions of property in this city escape all taxation."

A $24 billion company generates just $68,000 in taxes for the city in which it resides.  One percent of assessed value.  Put the $50 billion data center in a place like Ferguson and it becomes nearly worthless to tax.

America is broken.

 

Warren, No Peace, Brown, Won't Back Down

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown continue to go directly after President Obama over fast track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and they let fly again over the weekend calling on the president to immediately declassify all terms being negotiated for the deal.

Obama equated that argument to the “death panels” floated during the ObamaCare debate, as a claim so far-fetched as not to be taken seriously, adding that members of Congress have been frequently briefed on the talks.

“Someone coming up with a slogan like ‘death panels’ doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said Thursday. “The same thing is true on this. Look at the facts, don’t just throw a bunch of stuff out there.”

In response to those claims, Warren and Brown told Obama to release the text of the negotiations to the public. While members of Congress can review documents, it is illegal to release them to the public or discuss specifics.

And if, as Obama says, the trade deal is his best effort to carve out good terms for the working class, they argued there is no reason not to let the public review it before it is finalized.

“The American people should be allowed to see for themselves whether it’s a good deal for them,” they wrote.

“Characterizing the assessments of labor unions, journalists, members of Congress and others who disagree with your approach to transparency on trade issues as ‘dishonest’ is both untrue and unlikely to serve the best interests of the American people,” they added.

Brown at least has re-election to try an win in 2016 in Ohio. But Warren is safe and in a safe seat. Going this hard after President Obama didn't exactly work in 2014, so I'm wondering what Warren's game is. Cover for Hillary? Playing the foil to help the President? I'm not sure.

But the argument that negotiation terms need to be disclosed while the negotiations are still ongoing is ridiculous. That is Warren and Brown scoring cheap points, and they know it. If you're going to argue that the deal is bad, but can't tell us as to why, then have a seat.

StupidiNews!

• The death toll in this weekend's earthquake in central Nepal has risen to more than 3,700 as the capital of Kathmandu reels amid destruction of ancient temples and buildings.
• The US Supreme Court will hear hours of arguments Tuesday on the legality of state same-sex marriage bans and recognizing marriages from other states with a decision expected in June.
• Hundreds of poultry workers exposed to the H5N2 strain of bird flu have been offered preventative antiviral medicine in case the flu mutates and a human is infected by the disease.
• Dozens remain trapped on Mt. Everest base camps as this weekend's earthquake in Nepal triggered a massive avalanche on the world's highest mountain, killing 19 so far.
• Google faces an age discrimination suit from a 64-year-old engineer as the company deals with having a median employee age of 29, well below the national average.

Last Call For Memento Mori

People seem to thing Hillary Clinton is doomed by the "revelations" in the book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer.  And some Republicans remember that the Clintons are if anything, survivors who are hard to put down.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson cautioned members of his party Sunday against overconfidence when it comes to Schweizer's blockbuster claims.

“Republicans need to be careful not to overstate the case,” Hutchinson said on Meet the Press. “There’s no evidence of quid pro quo."

Schweizer made the political talk show rounds arguing just the opposite on Sunday, likening the donations made Clinton Foundation during the time that Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state to insider trading.

Hutchinson countered that all the Schweizer's book really shows is "evidence of mistakes" made by Clinton Foundation. Furthermore, Hutchinson said that, ultimately, those mistakes would not end up swaying a majority of votes. “It doesn’t impact her base or the Republican base,” Hutchinson said of the allegations. “It impacts the voters in the middle.”

There are few voters "in the middle" when it comes to Hillary Clinton.  She's been in the national political spotlight for nearly 25 years now, and the notion that there are still enough people in 2016 who are mulling over Hillary Clinton versus the GOP is laughable. People have already formed their opinions about her, and those opinions have been held for years.

That this hit job of a book is going to change an election 18 months from now is silly.  But it shows how terrified Republicans are of losing to yet another Clinton for the White House. The Clintons have a lot of old friends in the business.

Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer appeared on This Week and faced a very skeptical George Stephanopoulos, who argued that his accusations that Hillary Clinton exchanged favorable treatment from the U.S. State Department for multimillion dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation were unsubstantiated.

The most significant of the allegations center on a Russian company that was approved by the State Department to purchase a Canadian uranium company, giving Russia a sizable stake in the world’s uranium market, after a $2.3 million donation to the Clinton Foundation. But Stephanopoulos pointed out that the State Department was one of nine agencies that signed off on the deal, and that “there’s no evidence at all that Hillary Clinton got directly involved at all in this decision.” (A smiliar argument was made by Clinton surrogate Lanny Davis over on Fox News Sunday.)

“There were nine different agencies who approved it,” Stephanopoulos said. “Doesn’t that suggest that that was because there was no national security concern, not because of some nefarious influence by Hillary Clinton?”

“We don’t have direct evidence,” Schweizer said. “But it warrants further investigation because, again, this is part of the broader pattern. You either have to come to the conclusion that these are all coincidences, or something else is afoot.”

And by dragging out this nothingburger early in the fight, the Clintons now have the ability to defuse this long before it becomes a problem.

The White House Correspondents (Were) Dinner

President Obama ate everyone's lunch at the WHCD last night, saving the best dishes of revenge for last with comedian and actor Keegan-Michael Key (of Comedy Central's Key and Peele) joining him at the podium as Luther the Anger Translator, and boy did he ever serve those dishes cold.




I honestly don't think I've ever seen President Obama this lethally funny. He decimated the Village, the GOP, Senate Democrats, Hillary Clinton, and just about everyone else who took a swipe at him over the last 12 months, and it was glorious. 

Unfettered, doesn't need to run again President Obama just keeps getting better and better, folks.

Sunday Long Read: Does Anyone Here Speak Jive?

It's time for a bit of lighter fare this week for your Sunday Long Read.  It's the 35th anniversary of one of my favorite movie comedies of all time, the classic Abrahams/Zucker Brothers riot, Airplane! The AV Club has an oral history of the movie from its creators and stars, and it's just hysterical to see how this film was put together.  The guy that saved the film? Disney head Michael Eisner, wh was at Paramount Pictures at the time with Jeffrey Katzenberg.

J. Zucker: It was a major struggle to get Airplane! greenlit. There was a little bit of interest here and there, but nobody was biting. And then we made Kentucky Fried Movie. As soon as the check cleared for that, we stopped doing the live show and we got a little bungalow up in Santa Monica and wrote Airplane! And then we took it out and shopped it, at which point we got turned down by all the studios until we finally got to Paramount.

Abrahams: We were sort of credible after Kentucky Fried Movie, but we attached ourselves as directors, so that was a dealbreaker in most places. But we shopped iteverywhere. Somebody told me that they’d read a copy of the screenplay. I said, “Oh, yeah? Where’d you find it?” And they said, “I found it on a bus.” [Laughs.] I think that’s probably actually a true story, because there were copies all over the place.

D. Zucker: It was really only one person who saved us and got Airplane! made, and that was Michael Eisner at Paramount.

J. Zucker: Well, Eisner and [Jeffrey] Katzenberg.

D. Zucker: Eisner and Katzenberg, yeah. Eisner heard about the script, called Katzenberg, and asked him to call these guys who did this Airplane! script, whatever it is, and have them in the office on Monday. And that’s how we ended up at Paramount.

J. Zucker: Eisner was having dinner with a woman named Susan Baerwald, who at the time was a reader for United Artists, and they were friends. And he asked her, “So what have you read that you liked?” And she said, “Well, there’s this one script that United Artists passed on, but I thought it was really, really funny.” And she told them a little bit about it, and I think Eisner just thought, “A comedy on an airplane? That’s a good idea!” So they immediately had it tracked down, and then we got a call from Katzenberg, saying, “Come on in, we want to hear about this.”

Abrahams: Even when Paramount were expressing interest and were willing to take a shot on us as directors, at the same time there was a company called Avco Embassy—I think Bob Rehme ran it back then—and they were equally interested and actually offered us a little more money for it. So one weekend, David and Jerry and I kind of decided we’d take off in order to make the decision whether we were going to go with Avco and Paramount, and we just anguished over it.

We spent a lot of time weighing pros and cons of both the companies. In fact, at one point, we said, “We’re definitely going with Avco.” It just seemed like the better decision. So we called up Jeffrey Katzenberg to tell him, and I don’t think the conversation was five minutes. But at the end of the conversation, we were at Paramount. He was really good. [Laughs.] And, of course, we’re forever grateful that he changed our minds.

The whole thing is nearly as amusing as the movie itself.  It's a good read should you be on a flight this weekend.

Or...maybe not, come to think of it.