Return Of The Podcast

Hey guys, got a surprise for ya.

Podcast Versus The Stupid is back for the 2016 election season!

Check Out Politics Progressive Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

Give a listen to this week's episode, and be on the lookout for more...

Feeling The Pressure

You think DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is aware of how bad voting against the President's Iran deal would look, considering she's already in a position where she should lose her job for incompetence?  Today she's out in favor of the deal in an opinion piece in the Miami Herald:

In July, I committed to an exhaustive review process to carefully examine the facts and consider the intangible elements of this agreement, basing my decisions exclusively on what I believed would be most likely to prevent Iran from achieving its nuclear-weapons goals.

I have subsequently come to the conclusion that the agreement promotes the national-security interests of the United States and our allies and merits my vote of support.

I do not come to this decision lightly. I have probed the details of this agreement page by page, word by word, and had personal meetings with President Obama, Vice President Biden and Treasury Secretary Lew. I heard directly from Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and had numerous highly classified briefings. I also spoke or met with independent economists, nuclear experts, military and intelligence experts in Israel and the United States, and ambassadors from our allies that are parties to the agreement as well as Israel’s ambassador.

Finally, before I finished my lengthy review, I held a series of meetings with my constituents so I could hear their concerns directly. I am proud to represent such an engaged constituency on the issues that matter, and I am proud of the time, energy and thoughtfulness the hundreds of individuals I met with or spoke to put into their review, whether for or against.

Vice President Biden saw these attributes on display firsthand when he led a roundtable discussion last week in my district, in an effort to answer questions and dispel myths for both me and some of my constituents.

This agreement is not perfect. But I join many in the belief that with complex, multilateral, nuclear non-proliferation negotiations with inherent geopolitical implications for the entire world, there is no such thing as a “perfect” deal.

I am somewhat pleasantly surprised at her decision, and her reasoning is what we've heard from other Democratic lawmakers supporting the bill.  It doesn't change the fact she presided over the disastrous 2010 and 2014 cycles and lost more than 80 House seats and nearly 20 Senate seats total in those two elections, and she still needs to be replaced.

But she did the right thing here, for once.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article34233213.html#storylink=cpy

Sunday Long Read: More Tales Of Two Cincys

CityBeat Cincinnati takes a look at the Queen City's race and inequality problem and finds that there are no easy answers, and a whole hell of a lot of hard questions.

Cincinnati’s economic and geographic segregation hasn’t gone unnoticed. A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network found that Cincinnati is the eighth most-segregated city in America. A study of major U.S. cities by social science journal New Geography published in January ranked Cincinnati 50 out of 52 cities when it came to the economic prospects of black residents. 

A CityBeat analysis of 2010 Census neighborhood and census tract-level demographic data shows the disturbing extent of the economic isolation in Cincinnati’s black neighborhoods. And that isolation seems to be getting worse. 

Of the city’s 10 neighborhoods with the lowest median household incomes, nine are more than 70-percent black. Six of those neighborhoods with considerable populations — The Villages at Roll Hill, Winton Hills, West End, Millvale, South Cumminsville and Avondale — are more than 90-percent black. 

Each of these neighborhoods has a median household income around half, or less, than the city’s median of about $34,000 a year. In these places, life expectancies are five to 10 years lower than the city as a whole. 

At least one of these neighborhoods, Over-the-Rhine, is undergoing a kind of revitalization, and its triumphs and travails are well-covered by the media. But the others are neglected, rarely considered places. 

One Cincinnati neighborhood, English Woods, today consists almost entirely of a single housing tower looming over vast, empty, fenced-off fields that once contained the rest of the housing project. It is home to about 400 people, 90 percent of them black. Its median household income is just $8,474 a year. 

Together, these lowest-income and predominantly black neighborhoods account for more than 36,000 people, a quarter of the city’s black population. 

The history behind why black neighborhoods in Cincinnati are not the kind of things you read in history class.  Redlining, white flight, urban renewal and gentrification have all come at the expense of the city's poorer, black neighborhoods.  It's still going on today and in fact things have gotten worse.

Black Cincinnati has never recovered from the financial devastation in 2008.  It was left behind, yet again.  The systemic issues in this country have blown a hole in the side of the boat, and the rising tide only serves to drown millions in poverty.

Still A Champion

Remember Bengals player Devon Still, who the Cincinnati NFL team rallied around for his daughter Leah, who was diagnosed with cancer? Still played several games with the Bengals last season, and has in fact not made the team this year after the pre-season cut.

But the team will pick up the tab for Leah's insurance for the next five years.

Devon Still has been released by the Cincinnati Bengals, the teamannounced Saturday.

Still played 12 games for the Bengals last season. He recorded 19 total tackles.

In 2014, the Bengals kept Still on the team's practice squad to help him financially with his daughter Leah's cancer diagnosis. He eventually joined the 53-man roster.

In March of this year, Still announced his daughter Leah's cancer was in remission. As of July, Leah's cancer is still in remission.

Because Still was on the Bengals’ roster last year, he and his daughter will have five years of NFL health insurance, even if Still is not on an NFL roster, reportsThe Cincinnati Enquirer's Paul Dehner.

Some good news out the Bengals camp this year, even if the team itself is probably destined for another first-round playoff exit.

Waging War On The Poor

The NY Times editorial board takes on the $15 minimum wage on this Labor Day weekend, and does a pretty good job of dismantling the Republican objections to it.

States should decide: Mrs. Fiorina has said that setting a minimum wage should be “a state decision, not a federal decision,” because of differences in the cost of living around the country. Many Republicans who want to leave the federal minimum where it is, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Scott Walker, make basically the same argument.

Experience shows that state minimums are inadequate without a robust federal minimum. Today, 21 states do not impose minimums higher than $7.25, which was already too low when it was mandated by Congress in 2007. None of the other 29 states have minimums high enough to cover local expenses for an individual worker. In New York, including New York City, the minimum will top out at $9 at the end of this year, even though it takes an hourly wage of $12.75 for one person to cover living costs in the state.

If there were no federal minimum, states would be free to perpetuate poverty level wages. Under the law in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, there is no state minimum wage; in Georgia and Wyoming, the state minimums are $5.15 an hour.

The market should decide: Jeb Bush has said that ideally each state’s minimum wage would be decided by the “private sector.” Mr. Walker and Senator Rand Paul have said much the same thing; Mr. Paul could have been speaking for the pack when he said the “minimum wage is only harmful when it’s above the market wage.”

Markets do reliably establish the prices of goods and services when businesses have to compete. When businesses compete for workers, for example, wages rise because employees gain a modicum of bargaining power. The law has long recognized, however, that low-wage workers seldom have bargaining power. An adequate federal minimum wage effectively substitutes for that lack.

Businesses will be hurt: Donald Trump has said a higher minimum wage would make it impossible for American companies to compete with low-paying foreign rivals. That stance is baffling given his stated aim to “make America great again,” because broad prosperity requires rising wages, not a race to the bottom with countries whose economies are built on low pay.

Robots will replace workers: Senator Marco Rubio has been trotting out this scare tactic at every opportunity: “I don’t want to deny someone $10.10. I’m worried about the people whose wages are going to go down to zero because you’ve made them more expensive than a machine.”

But keeping worker pay low to discourage capital investment is a recipe for a faltering economy and ignores history, in which new technology has bothreplaced and created jobs.

Here's the greater argument as to why every single Republican take on the minimum wage is complete hogwash: All of them at some point include the absolute falsehood that businesses will invest profits in worker wages. You have only to look at our current economy, with wages having stagnated for 40 years, productivity up dramatically, and and record corporate profits to see that unless federal law is there to set a floor, businesses will pay workers as little as possible whenever possible in order to "maximize shareholder value".

American businesses have been doing everything they can to reduce wages.

Poll Position Update

Well now, things have come a long way for The Donald, haven't they.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump leads Democrat Hillary Clinton head-to-head, according to a new poll released Friday.

The poll by SurveyUSA finds that matched up directly, Trump garners 45 percent to Clinton’s 40 percent.

In other head-to-head matchups, Trump beats out Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by 44 percent to 40 percent; Vice President Joe Biden by 44 percent to 42 percent; and former Vice President Al Gore by 44 percent to 41 percent.

The poll also found that 30 percent of respondents believe Trump will eventually be the Republican nominee, leading the field.

Kind of interesting to see this, as it proves that Trump motivates the GOP base, unlike depressing it like, say, Rick Perry or Jeb Bush.

It's also just one poll, but Republicans are certainly ready to vote for him, and Democrats are still at the "meh, whatever" stage.

We'll see.

Last Call For Rowan County Calculus

Lexington Herald-Leader political columnist Sam Youngman weighs in on the situation in Rowan County and how it will affect Kentucky's gubernatorial election in two months.

The longer Davis sits in a Carter County jail cell, the worse it is for Conway. Bevin is enjoying daily opportunities to motivate his base and present a clear, if at times misleading, message. 

Keep in mind that there are two other county clerks refusing to issue marriage licenses, and really it's anybody's guess how Davis eventually gets out of jail or what she will do when that happens. 

Regardless, this is not a story that will end in the next few days. 

Time is running out before Election Day, and the longer the saga endures, the harder it will be for Conway to get voters to focus on state issues — jobs, education, pensions — and his opponent's flaws. 

The bottom line is that we don't know how this will impact the fall elections. 

It could be the first ripple in the water that becomes a wave that wipes out the entire Democratic slate. Or it could marginalize Bevin and make Conway look more palatable to the broader electorate. 

It has been a quiet race so far, and the general consensus is that very few Kentuckians have been paying attention. 

But given the attention this episode is generating, it seems like a safe bet that voters will be tuned in from here on out.

Youngman's take is pretty much in line with my own opinions here.  It's is a safe bet to say that yes, as long as this election remains about "Barack Obama persecuting the good white Christian people" of Rowan County, Matt Bevin is going to be the commonwealth's next governor by double digits.

On the other hand, Bevin really, really, really tends to overplay his hand and he clearly doesn't know when to shut up while being ahead.

But if Huckabee, Paul, etc. show up and make constant news, it's only going to be helping Matt Bevin.

That means Jack Conway had better work damn hard to get this election back to being about what Matt Bevin will destroy if he's allowed to win, and fast.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/09/04/4020284_sam-youngman-unpacking-the-political.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&rh=1#storylink=cpy

A Bad Judgment Call In Kansas

I've been talking for months about how Kansas Republicans have effectively decimated the state, cutting taxes to the point where the state can no longer fund itself, under the nightmare tenure of Gov. Sam Brownback.  But now the state is rapidly going from permanent Laffer Curve punchline to third-world banana republic status with blinding speed.

On Wednesday night, a district judge in Kansas struck down a 2014 law that stripped the state Supreme Court of some of its administrative powers. The ruling has set off a bizarre constitutional power struggle between the Republican-controlled legislature and the state Supreme Court. At stake is whether the Kansas court system will lose its funding and shut down. 

Last year, the Kansas legislature passed a law that took away the top court's authority to appoint chief judges to the state's 31 judicial districts—a policy change Democrats believe was retribution for an ongoing dispute over school funding between the Supreme Court and the legislature. (Mother Jones reported on the standoff this spring.) When the legislature passed a two-year budget for the court system earlier this year, it inserted a clause stipulating that if a court ever struck down the 2014 administrative powers law, funding for the entire court system would be "null and void." Last night, that's what the judge did. 

The Republican legislature has threatened to destroy the state's court system unless the GOP can strip the power the judiciary has to appoint judges and give that power to lawmakers instead.  The judiciary called the legislature's bluff.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt warned that last night's decision “could effectively and immediately shut off all funding for the judicial branch.” That would lead to chaos. As Pedro Irigonegaray, an attorney for the Kansas judge who brought the legal challenge against the administrative law, put it, “Without funding, our state courts would close, criminal cases would not be prosecuted, civil matters would be put on hold, real estate could not be bought or sold, adoptions could not be completed."  

Both parties in the case have agreed to ask that Wednesday's ruling remain on hold until it can be appealed to the state Supreme Court, so that there is a functioning court to hear the appeal. On Thursday, a judge granted the stay. Meanwhile, lawyers involved in the case and advocates for judicial independence are preparing a legal challenge to the clause of the judicial budget that withholds court funding. Sometime in the next few months, the state Supreme Court is likely to rule on whether the legislature has the right to strip the Supreme Court of its administrative authority, and whether it can make funding for the courts contingent on the outcome of a court case. 

“We have never seen a law like this before," Randolph Sherman, a lawyer involved in fighting the administrative law, said in a statement, referring to the self-destruct mechanism in the judicial budget. "[I]t is imperative that we stop it before it throws the state into a constitutional crisis.”

So depending on the outcome, Kansas may or may not have courts.  Amazing.

Imagine if a Republican Congress and Republican president passed a law that said the President could no longer appoint federal court or Supreme Court judges, and that instead they would be appointed by the Speaker of the House and approved by the Senate, and that the law also said that if the Supreme Court struck the law down, that Congress would automatically end all funding for the federal court system.

That's the kind of thing you find in a dictatorship, not a representative, Constitutional democracy. But here we are.

The most broken state in the Union continues to stay broken.

Under A Snow, Hill

Guy who exposed bunch of classified information to the world and fled the country to hang out with Putin:  Hey, Hillary Clinton is a dirty leaker!

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Thursday that 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is likely aware her personal email server exposed sensitive national intelligence.

Snowden added that lesser employees would have lost their jobs for copying Clinton’s actions during her tenure as secretary of State. 

“This is a problem because anyone who has the clearances that the secretary of State has, or the director of any top level agency has, knows how classified information should be handled,” he said, according to excerpts of an Al Jazeera interview airing Friday. 

“If an ordinary worker at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency … were sending details about the security of the embassies, which is alleged to be in her email, meetings with private government officials, foreign government officials and the statements that were made to them in confidence over unclassified email systems, they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution for it,” he added.

Or they would, you know, fly to Moscow with even more info and get Glenn Greenwald's merry team of assholes to cover for you.

Coming from Snowden, that's frigging hysterical.

StupidiNews!

• Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis remains in jail on contempt charges for refusing to issue marriage licenses, her deputies are expected to issue them starting today.
• Vice President Joe Biden says the decision to run for president in 2016 depends on his "emotional energy to run" after the recent death of his son Beau Biden.
• Former Clinton State Department aide Bryan Pagliano says he will plead the Fifth rather than testify to Republicans over Clinton's private e-mail server.
• The number of people grilling out this Labor Day weekend is on the decline as record beef prices and fewer barbecue grills mean a decline in cooking outside.
• Two North Carolina teenagers face child pornography charges after consensual "sexting" for nude pictures on their own phones.

Last Call For The Iowa Border Wars

Trump is the unalloyed rage of the GOP, and his supporters are nothing more than a mob.  Even in a state like Iowa.

Round them up, nearly half of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers say. 

Forty-seven percent say it's a good idea to gather up an estimated 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally and send them to their home country. 

Among Donald Trump supporters, nearly three-fourths (73 percent) say so. 

But among all the other Iowans who support the other 16 candidates, just 40 percent say rounding up immigrants here illegally is a good approach. A plurality, 45 percent, say it is a bad idea. 

"That's what they do when they find Americans that are illegal in their country — they either send them back or throw them in jail," said poll respondent Walter Allsup, a 58-year-old retired musician from Keokuk. "We're crazy to let people come in and do anything they want like that." 

Allsup added: "Race has nothing to do with it. I'm totally blind. I can't tell what color they are anyway. ... I don't care if they're from Liechtenstein."

It's not racism, just going into where people and families live in the middle of the night and rounding them up like cattle to ship them off.  There's nothing wrong with that if you're a Republican, and especially if you back The Donald, apparently.

But still Iowans, your neighbors think this is a good idea, at least a healthy chunk of the Republican ones do.  After all, angry folks have to blame somebody, and "illegal immigrants" are always a fun choice.

So who will they want to round up after that, you have to wonder.

The problem is that there are other Republicans running for offices other than President in 2016. Republicans are trying to hold on in the Senate and it's looking worse and worse for their chances because of Trump.

Lichtenstein was not available for comment.

Insane In The Methane

A potentially huge natural gas field discovered off the coast of Egypt could shift the calculus of power in the Middle East in a very bad way.

Italian energy group Eni says it has found one of the world's largest natural gas fields off Egypt's coast.

The company said the area was 1,450m (4,757 feet) beneath the surface and covered 100 sq km (39 sq miles).

It could hold as much as 30 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 5.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent, Eni said.

The company says that the Zohr field "could become one of the world's largest natural-gas finds" and help meet Egypt's gas needs for decades.

"This historic discovery will be able to transform the energy scenario of Egypt," said Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Eni.

Eni, which has full concession rights to the area, is the biggest foreign energy firm in Africa.

This is going to make the Egyptian military government a lot of money, and will help the Italians too.  US energy companies are cut out of the loop here, but so are the Russians, the other major gas player in Europe.  They'll get their money by other means, I'm sure.

How that's leveraged by General Sisi and his government, we'll see.  But somehow I don't see this as a major boon for your average Egyptian.  It's only a question of how much of a cut our good "ally" in Cairo takes. And considering Egypt is the kind of place where journalists are convicted for exposing corruption, I don't have a very good feeling about this at all.

Now Sisi and his friends will have the money to hold power indefinitely, and I'm sure they'll buy all the toys they want from the biggest arms dealers in the world, America and Russia.

Awesome.

We Have To Want To Follow The Law

With Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis facing a federal judge today for her refusal to issue marriage licenses despite June's Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage across the land, Kentucky Republicans, led by State Senate President Robert Stivers, are demanding that they get a say in the matter too.

The Republican president of the Kentucky state Senate has asked a federal judge to withhold his ruling ordering a county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. 

Republican Senate President Robert Stivers says U.S. District Judge David Bunning needs to give the state legislature time to pass a law that would exempt Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis from having to issue marriage licenses. The state legislature is not in session and won't be until January. Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear has refused to call for a special session, arguing it would waste taxpayer money for an issue that only affects one clerk. 

"The Supreme Court ruling has completely obliterated the definition of marriage and the process for obtaining a marriage license in Kentucky," Stivers said in a news release. "The General Assembly will be compelled to amend many sections of Kentucky law, not just for the issuance of marriage licenses, to comply with the recent Supreme Court decision." 

Stivers says nearly all of Kentucky's laws governing marriage are invalid following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in June that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. For example, Kentucky's state law requires a couple seeking a marriage license to apply for one in the county "in which the female resides" or at another county so long as the woman applies for it. 

"(The Supreme Court decision) clearly contemplates marriages that do not involve a female, as well as marriages that involve two females," Stivers' attorney wrote to the court. "It is unclear at this juncture what the proper venue for the issuance of a license for same sex marriages is after (the Supreme Court's decision.)

Mike Huckabee was saying something similar, that same-sex marriage licenses remain invalid until the states choose to "enable" them.  That's complete hogwash, what Stivers is saying is that no marriages in Kentucky are legal right now until the state legislature amends the laws to comply with the Supreme Court.

It's idiotic, but that's where we are right now in this mess.

[UPDATE]: At the hearing today, the judge jailed Davis, saying that he didn't believe fines would compel her to obey the Supreme Court's ruling.  Sen. Rand Paul is very unhappy with this.

"I think it’s absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties," the GOP presidential candidate and outspoken advocate of states' rights told CNN on Thursday, shortly after Davis' fate was decided by a U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning. 

"This is really the problem when from on high we decide to get involved on a federal level with something that has always been a local issue," Paul said.

Weird.  Guess Paul is now against federal abortion restriction then, huh.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/09/02/4016199_news-briefs-from-around-kentucky.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• Thousands of refugees remain in Budapest's main rail station today, hoping to be allowed to travel into Western Europe, but international trains remain suspended out of Hungary.
• Marijuana legalization could be on the 2016 ballot in Massachusetts, but will first go in front of lawmakers next spring if advocates can get 64,000 signatures.
• Chinese President Xi Jinping has announced that Beijing will cut 300,000 troops from the Chinese military, a move most Western observers say is prelude to modernization.
• Guatamalan President Otto Perez has offered his resignation in the wake of imminent arrest for a major bribery scandal, ahead of elections this weekend.
• Traffic crowdsourcing app PhantomAlert is suing rival Waze for copyright infringement, accusing the now billion-dollar Google-owned app company of stealing its database.

Last Call For Instant Lynch Mob

You need to stoke the fires of racism?  FOX News delivers.

Over the weekend, a gunman shot and killed a sheriff's deputy in Harris County, Texas, in an apparent ambush. It's still not clear what the shooter's motive was, but it was the work of a man with multiple marks on his criminal record for which he served several short stints in jail. 

Despite any solid leads and facts about the motives in the shooting of 10-year deputy veteran Darren Goforth, some conservative media outlets and local law enforcement officials have already settled on the real culprit: Black Lives Matter. 

"We've heard black lives matter, all lives matter," Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman said at a press conference following the shooting. "Well, cops' lives matter, too. So how about we drop the qualifier and just say lives matter?" 

Fox News's Elisabeth Hasselbeck later wondered aloud on air why Black Lives Matter isn't considered a "hate group." Bill O'Reilly was more blunt, concluding the movement was indeed a "hate group."

Indeed, Bill-O vowed on his show to "take Black Lives Matter down."

Now white supremacist assholes in Texas are taking up FOX News on the offer.

“It’s going to end, and it’s going to end with that,” said Nathan Ener in a Facebook video. “That’s not going to happen anymore. That’s the end of it. Y’all have pushed us to the limit, and we ain’t going to take it anymore. There’s stuff that us citizens can do, and we’re fixing to do them — starting now.” 

He said alleged gunman Shannon Miles, who was found incompetent to stand trial in an unrelated 2012 assault case, was not to blame for the deputy’s slaying. 

“The one that killed him was these Black Panthers and all these black thugs that comes to your town and marches and hollers ‘oink-oink, bang-bang,’ and all that retarded sh*t, you know, they’re the ones that’s responsible for it,” Ener said. 

Fox News dubbed Black Lives Matter a “murder movement” in an on-screen graphic Monday during a segment with Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who accused President Barack Obama of launching a “war on police,” and other conservative media outlets have accused black activists of promoting violence against enforcement. 

“Starting now we holding these people responsible,” Ener warned. “Like I said, it stops now. Don’t ever let a Black Panther or any black group come to your town and march in that town and get done and be able to get in their vehicle and leave. That’s over with.”

So how long before yet more black lives are lost to the lynch mob?  Unfortunately, I'm thinking that the next tragedy will happen soon.

Ener held the slingshot draped over his hands like a noose and issued threats against “thugs” like the New Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter “bullshit,” saying they “better run” because he and his associates were watching videos to identify, locate and target activists for violence. 

“There won’t be another killing in Texas,” he warned. “There might be a killing, but it won’t be what you think.” 

He picked up a shotgun and cocked it. 

“The last fricking thing some of you sons of b*tches will ever hear is that noise when we’re out there, when we come in your goddamn house,” Ener warned. “Don’t ever threaten another cop in Texas, don’t ever threaten another white person. You black bastards, you goddamn Panthers and sh*t, try to come to another town and try to march — see what happens to you.”

Big words from a small man, to be sure.  But following up on that threat, well...I'm very fearful that those words will become action.

Unless you think Nathan Ener is the only white guy in Texas who thinks like this.