StupidiNews!

• The Russian embassy in Syria was attacked by mortar fire during a pro-Russian demonstration as the US has airdropped tons of ammo to rebel groups in Hasakah province.
• A year after ending showing nudity on its website, Playboy magazine will no longer publish nudes in print because the internet has made it "passe".
• Iran's parliament has ratified the nuclear deal worked out with the United States and other nations, despite the protests of Iranian hardliners.
• Brewery giants AB InBev and SABMiller have finally settled on a merger offer worth $106 billion, the deal would give the combined company a third of the global beer market.
• The National Association Of Broadcasters are the latest group to weigh in to get the FCC to stop the merger between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable.

Last Call For Last Year's Model

A couple of notes of Republicans and Obamacare to report today, first, Jeb! is introducing Jebcare! or something:

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Tuesday will lay out proposals to repeal President Barack Obama’s healthcare law and replace it with a system that provides a tax credit for the purchase of health plans and shifts power to the states.

Bush will detail his plan at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester to start a three-day campaign swing through the state, which holds the first-in-the-nation primary election on Feb. 9 on the road to the November 2016 election.

This sounds familiar!

Key components of Bush’s plan would be a tax credit for the purchase of affordable, portable health plans that protect Americans from catastrophic medical events and an increase in contribution limits and uses for Health Savings Accounts to help with out-of-pocket costs.

Bush would replace the controversial Cadillac tax in Obamacare with a cap on the “employer tax exclusion,” the tax-free status of health benefits provided by employers, as a way to lower insurance premiums.

The “Cadillac Tax,” to take effect in 2018, is a 40 percent tax on the most expensive employer-sponsored health coverage.

He would allow employers to use financial incentives to encourage wellness programs, and enable small businesses to make tax-free contributions to their workers’ individual plans.

Bush would overhaul the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory system and set up a review of regulatory barriers to health innovation.

Oh good, tax credits.  Because the people who would lose their health insurance due to being thrown off expanded Medicare, the loss of exchanges, and can't afford health savings accounts would in fact totally get health care from this plan.   It's also the same plan that Marco Rubio has, because it's the same plan the Republican have had for over a year now, and they can't get the votes to pass it even when they control Congress.

And speaking of Marco Rubio, looks like our old friend Avik Roy has joined Team Marco after bailing on the now failed Team Perry. It's kind of awkward though...

Roy, a conservative health care policy wonk who initially backed former Texas Gov. Rick Perry's ill-fated campaign, on Monday announced that he'll be advising Rubio on policy, saying in a tweet, "No candidate expresses — and embodies — the American dream better."

Roy's past words about Rubio's policy haven't been as glowing.

One target has been the freshman senator's criticism of Obamacare's use of "bailouts" for insurers — shorthand for a complicated mechanism meant to provide cash to insurers who cover sicker, costlier patients than they expected to as a result of the health care law. Just this month, Rubio took credit for putting constraints on the program, which he derided as a "crony capitalist bailout program."

Roy, whose Forbes blog regularly features substantive takedowns of Obamacare and also the thin Republican proposals to replace it, has rejected that characterization of the Obamacare provision. He notes the mechanism was meant to coax risk-averse companies to offer new insurance plans to people getting covered under the health care law.

“It’s not an insurance company bailout if it’s the government that’s messing up the health insurance market, right?" Roy wondered in an appearance on CNBC last year. "The insurers are just trying to do their job.”

Oops.  Of course, that risk-pool provision was criminally underfunded by Republicans in last year's budget, and it cost Kentucky 50,000 insured just this month.

In other words, Republicans sabotaged Obamacare again.  Now they plan to finish the job in 2017.

The Man Gets No Respect

President Obama's interview with 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft was, as usual, the Village media trying to score points by yelling.

President Barack Obama's interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" was anything but smooth.

During an interview that primarily covered Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East, correspondent Steve Kroft was combative with Obama, repeatedly asking questions about his strategy on Syria and ISIS and the administration's response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent military maneuvers. 

Kroft interrupted the President multiple times to challenge his answers, which seemed to genuinely perturb Obama. 

One of the more interesting exchanges occurred when Kroft told Obama that Putin "seems to be challenging [Obama's] leadership." 

Obama tried to make the case that Putin's actions come from a source of weakness, rather than strength. Kroft quickly disagreed.  

"He's challenging your leadership, Mr. President. He's challenging your leadership," Kroft repeated. 

Obama cut him off to give his definition of leadership. 

"My definition of leadership would be leading on climate change, an international accord that potentially we'll get in Paris," Obama said. "My definition of leadership is mobilizing the entire world community to make sure that Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon." 

Perhaps the most contentious part of the interview was an exchange regarding the program in Syria to train and equip 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels. The Obama administration officially abandoned the program last week after months of setbacks. By the end, according to a top US general, only "four or five" US-trained rebels were amid the fight in Syria.

Kroft called the program an "embarrassment".

President Obama acquitted himself well, but it was pretty clear that Kroft was going after him pretty hard, and this wasn't going to be a friendly exchange at all.

View More: 60 Minutes News|Live News|More News Videos

Judge for yourself above.

Champions Of The Obvious

Now that GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy let the cat out of the bag that the Benghazi investigation was nothing more than millions of dollars spent to try to destroy Hillary Clinton's 2016 run, Republicans are jumping ship and lawyering up.

A former investigator for the Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi plans to file a complaint in federal court next month alleging that he was fired unlawfully in part because his superiors opposed his efforts to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission in the Libyan city rather than focus primarily on the role of the State Department and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The former investigator, Bradley F. Podliska, a major in the Air Force Reserve who is on active duty in Germany, also claims that the committee’s majority staff retaliated against him for taking leave for several weeks to go on active duty. If true, the retaliation would violate the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994, which Major Podliska plans to invoke in his complaint, according to a draft that was made available to The New York Times.

Oops.

Major Podliska, a lifelong Republican, holds a doctorate in political science from Texas A & M University and spent more than 15 years working at a federal defense agency, as an intelligence analyst for much of that time.

In September 2014, he began working for the Benghazi committee, on which his role was to investigate the way that various federal agencies in Washington responded to the attack, in which four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, were killed.

But two things changed in March, Major Podliska said. First, after revelations that Mrs. Clinton relied exclusively on a private email server for her State Department correspondence, the committee became preoccupied with the State Department’s role in the controversy surrounding the Benghazi attack and less interested in a comprehensive investigation.

Second, Major Podliska informed his superiors around the same time that he would need to perform 39 days of active duty for the Air Force in Germany in a handful of intervals, beginning with the middle of that month. (The length of the leave later rose slightly.)

According to Major Podliska’s complaint, another senior staff member, Dana Chipman, who had served as the Army’s judge advocate general, questioned whether he “really needs to go to Germany.”

Major Podliska said in an interview that he believed other staffers were skeptical of his obligations as a reservist and annoyed that he would take time off just as the committee had received its biggest break since being formed in May 2014 — the Clinton email revelations.

So they fired him and destroyed his career because he wanted to get to the truth.  Republicans were never interested in the truth, they were interested in years of taxpayer-funded witch hunts to go after Hillary.

Surprise!  Republicans, when given power, immediately use that power to target their political enemies.  And no, both parties are not the same.

StupidiNews!

• Turkey is blaming two ISIS suicide bombers for a deadly attack on Ankara's main train station over the weekend that killed 97 and wounded more than 250.
• Georgia officials are planning to place a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr on top of Stone Mountain Park, currently home to a monument to heroes of the Confederacy.
• California will officially ban the school mascot name "Redskins", but Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed legislation that would ban naming buildings after Confederate figures.
• The campaign to keep the UK in the EU begins this week as PM David Cameron wants to put membership in the bloc to a referendum in 2017.
• China's internet content laws have quietly caused Apple to disable its Apple News app when US users are traveling there.

Last Call For Water Babies

The GOP has gotten their nationwide block of EPA clean water rules, and who knows how many will be sickened or die as a result?  Republicans certainly don't care.  And of course, it was the Sixth Circuit court right here in Cincinnati that did it.

A federal court ruled Friday that President Obama’s regulation to protect small waterways from pollution cannot be enforced nationwide.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Cincinnati-based Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit delivered a stinging defeat to Obama’s most ambitious effort to keep streams and wetlands clean, saying it looks likely that the rule, dubbed Waters of the United States, is illegal.“We conclude that petitioners have demonstrated a substantial possibility of success on the merits of their claims,” the judges wrote in their decision, explaining that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new guidelines for determining whether water is subject to federal control — based mostly on the water’s distance and connection to larger water bodies — is “at odds” with a key Supreme Court ruling.

The judges said they have yet to decide whether they have jurisdiction to review the regulation, but a stay would make it easier to determine that.

“A stay allows for a more deliberate determination whether this exercise of executive power, enabled by Congress and explicated by the Supreme Court, is proper under the dictates of federal law,” the court said.

“A stay temporarily silences the whirlwind of confusion that springs from uncertainty about the requirements of the new Rule and whether they will survive legal testing. A stay honors the policy of cooperative federalism that informs the Clean Water Act and must attend the shared responsibility for safeguarding the nation’s waters.”

The decision expands a stay that a North Dakota judge imposed in August, the day before the rule took effect, and that only applied to 13 states.
The EPA said it will respect the court’s decision, but it believes the rule is legal and necessary.

“The agencies respect the court’s decision to allow for more deliberate consideration of the issues in the case and we look forward to litigating the merits of the Clean Water Rule,” EPA spokeswoman Melissa Harrison said.

So hooray, the freedom to pollute streams and ponds and wells is yours, America!  Don't mind the fracking chemicals in your well water or the industrial runoff in your rivers or the hog lagoon waste in your backyard, that's not the EPA's jurisdiction, turns out.

Oh well.  Hey, did I mention that courts, including the Sixth Circuit, have seen appointments blocked by the GOP as payback against Obama?  Makes it rather easy to make sure that Bush-era judges continue to run our federal courts.  Obama will have the fewest federal judges appointed to the courts in decades, even with two terms.

Can't imagine why.  I'm sure corporate America will take care of your water for you, America.

For a price.

Podcast Versus The Stupid

This week's episode is "It's A Rough Job But Nobody Wants To Do It":

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

GOP House majority leader Kevin McCarthy has bailed on Orange Julius's old job as Speaker and the race is truly up for grabs as House Republicans devolve into Lord of the Flies, and President Obama gets a less than warm welcome from Gunmerica as he visits Oregon to speak to the families of the victims of last week's deadly shooting in Roseburg. Plus, an update on Springfield's city council nonsense.

Listen here or Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sunday Long Read: The Pantheon Walks Among Us

Of the hundreds of millions of dollars funding White House candidates in both parties right now, half of that total comes from just 158 families, and 138 of those families are funding the GOP.

They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, according to a New York Times investigation. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

These donors’ fortunes reflect the shifting composition of the country’s economic elite. Relatively few work in the traditional ranks of corporate America, or hail from dynasties of inherited wealth. Most built their own businesses, parlaying talent and an appetite for risk into huge wealth: They founded hedge funds in New York, bought up undervalued oil leases in Texas, made blockbusters in Hollywood. More than a dozen of the elite donors were born outside the United States, immigrating from countries like Cuba, the old Soviet Union, Pakistan, India and Israel.

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlements. While such measures would help protect their own wealth, the donors describe their embrace of them more broadly, as the surest means of promoting economic growth and preserving a system that would allow others to prosper, too.

“It’s a lot of families around the country who are self-made who feel like over-regulation puts these burdens on smaller companies,” said Doug Deason, a Dallas investor whose family put $5 million behind Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and now, after Mr. Perry’s exit, is being courted by many of the remaining candidates. “They’ve done well. They want to see other people do well.” 

By a seven to one margin they are backing the GOP with hundreds of millions, making sure the Republicans stay in power whenever and however they can.  They've already bought Congress.  If they get the White House back, it's over.  The kind of people who have five million to throw away on Rick Perry as President are not your friends, folks.  They want their country back from the Obama voters, and they have the might to take it.

In marshaling their financial resources chiefly behind Republican candidates, the donors are also serving as a kind of financial check on demographic forces that have been nudging the electorate toward support for the Democratic Party and its economic policies. Two-thirds of Americans support higher taxes on those earning $1 million or more a year, according to a June New York Times/CBS News poll, while six in 10 favor more government intervention to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly seven in 10 favor preserving Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are.

Republican candidates have struggled to improve their standing with Hispanic voters, women and African-Americans. But as the campaign unfolds, Republicans are far outpacing Democrats in exploiting the world of “super PACs,” which, unlike candidates’ own campaigns, can raise unlimited sums from any donor, and which have so far amassed the bulk of the money in the election.

The 158 families each contributed $250,000 or more in the campaign through June 30, according to the most recent available Federal Election Commission filings and other data, while an additional 200 families gave more than $100,000. Together, the two groups contributed well over half the money in the presidential election -- the vast majority of it supporting Republicans.

“The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want,” said Ruy Teixeira, a political and demographic expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

These are the gods and goddesses who own the most powerful economy on the planet.  And they are one election away from owning it all.

The People Next Door

The major problem with disruptive 21st century internet technology that brings information to an from our fingertips at will is that it's still being used by 19th century jackass douchebags.

Nextdoor.com, a website that bills itself as the "private social network for neighborhoods," offers a free web platform on which members can blast a wide variety of messages to people who live in their immediate neighborhood. A San Francisco-based company founded in 2010, Nextdoor's user-friendly site has exploded in popularity over the last two years in Oakland. As of this fall, a total of 176 Oakland neighborhoods have Nextdoor groups — and 20 percent of all households in the city use the site, according to the company. 

On Nextdoor, people give away free furniture or fruit from their backyards. Users reunite lost dogs with their owners. Members organize community meetings and share tips about babysitters and plumbers. But under the "Crime and Safety" section of the site, the tone is much less neighborly. There, residents frequently post unsubstantiated "suspicious activity" warnings that result in calls to the police on Black citizens who have done nothing wrong. In recent months, people from across the city have shared with me Nextdoor posts labeling Black people as suspects simply for walking down the street, driving a car, or knocking on a door. Users have suggested that Black salesmen and mail carriers may be burglars. One Nextdoor member posted a photo of a young Black boy who failed to pick up dog poop and suggested that his neighbors call the police on him.

And in the end, even in California, even in the Bay Area, when you can anonymously tip the cops that a scary looking brown person is on your street, people just jump on the damn opportunity, don't they?

White residents have also used Nextdoor to complain and organize calls to police about Black residents being too noisy in public parks and bars — raising concerns that the site amplifies the harmful impacts of gentrification. On Nextdoor and other online neighborhood groups — including Facebook pages and Yahoo and Google listservs — residents have called Black and Latino men suspicious for being near bus stops, standing in "shadows," making U-turns, and hanging around outside coffee shops. Residents frequently warn each other to be on the look out for suspects with little more description than "Black" and "wearing a hoodie." 

"These posts cast such a wide net on our young Black men," said Shikira Porter, an Upper Dimond resident, who is Black. "You start seeing this over and over again, and you understand quickly that, oh, it's the Black body that they're afraid of." 

In some Nextdoor groups, when people ask their neighbors to think twice before labeling someone suspicious, other users attack them for playing the "race card" and being the "political correctness police." Some groups have even actively silenced and banned the few vocal voices of color speaking up on the websites, according to records that I reviewed. 

This sometimes toxic virtual environment has real-world impacts. Residents encourage each other to call police, share tips on how to reach law enforcement, and sometimes even alert cops and security guards about suspicious activity they've only read secondhand from other commenters. I spoke to longtime Oaklanders who say the profiling is getting worse, noting that they have recently had neighbors question them on their block or in their own driveway — suspicious of whether they might be up to no good. People of color described stories of white residents running away from them, screaming at them to leave a shared garden space, and calling police on young children in their own home. In some areas, the profiling is further exacerbated by the growing presence of private patrol officers whom residents have hired to guard the streets.

So yes, if you somehow think people of color are somehow safer from harassment or racism or prejudice online in cyberspace, you're sorely mistaken.  It just ends up being another place where being black or brown is a major liability...and in some instances, fatal.

Last Call For Bitter Home Alabama, Con't.

The issue with voter suppression in Alabama is just the endgame for GOP rule in Southern states.  The real goal is to crush the poor and simply get rid of them, and Alabama is well on its way to doing just that after decades of Republican rule.

What hurts in rural areas generally is all the more painful in the Black Belt, a broad band across southern Alabama named for its rich soil. The Black Belt counties, nearly all of them majority African-American, are scattered with dying towns, few job opportunities and bad health.

Still, they were again hit by the funding cuts: three of the five state parks slated to close are here.

Officials with the Bentley administration, who had warned of potentially deeper cuts, blame the legislature for not finding more revenue. But in Alabama, the poor tend to get squeezed when it comes to cutting services and raising revenue alike.

Corporate tax breaks are generous and the timber and farming interests that own so much Black Belt land enjoy substantial property tax discounts. At the same time, households earning far below the poverty level are required to pay income tax, while the local and state sales tax burden is among the highest in the United States, and Alabama, unlike nearly every other state, imposes its full sales tax on groceries. With such volatile funding on the state level and so little tax revenue locally, Black Belt schools are chronically underfunded.

“Whenever there are funding cuts it may give a cold to most of the schools, but it gives us pneumonia,” said Daniel Boyd, the superintendent of Lowndes County’s public school system, which has been short of textbooks since 2008.

And so the schools struggle, people move out, the tax base dwindles and more services are cut. This time around, it is the driver’s licenses.

“It’s going to be a problem,” said Carolyn Shields, who was discussing the cutbacks with her sister Caritha in front of Caritha’s mobile home in the tiny community of Geiger.

With people from several counties now having to go to Tuscaloosa, the lines will likely be longer, they said, meaning a whole day off work — maybe two, if the wait is especially long. More young people will probably just drive without licenses, as plenty around here already do, they said.

The sisters said they were not sure about the effect one way or another on voting. For them, the main consideration was whether places like this could remain at all.

“Before long,” Ms. Shields said, “there won’t be nothing here.”

The prospect of cutting government to the bone and then amputating it is nothing new, certainly.  But it's the poor, the black, the brown, that suffer the most, suffer first, and suffer the longest. And Republicans don't care.  Take everything from them including the right to vote and you win. Wall the place off and let the losers perish.

And the game continues like it has for centuries.

And He's Ore-Gone

I'm old enough to remember when US presidents were not greeted with guns.

Gun-toting protesters gathered on Friday morning to await President Obama's arrival in Roseburg, Ore., where he planned to meet with the families of victims of last week's mass shooting at Umpqua Community College.

But local residents planned to protest Obama's visit, saying he rushed to "politicize" the tragedy by pushing a gun control agenda. 

"My family, my friends, everybody down here is not happy about him coming," Michelle Finn, a Umpqua alumna and Roseburg native, told the Oregonian. "He already says he's going to politicize this — he's already going to push his agenda." 

A Facebook event page for a protest dubbed "Defend Roseburg - Deny barack 0bama" [sic], had garnered more than 8,000 RVSPs by Friday. In its lengthy event description, organizers suggested attendees carry a handgun as opposed to a rifle, but reiterated "you have the right to carry what you wish." 

"Polarizing as usual, Mr 0bama [sic] has insisted on politicizing the event as a conduit for increased executive orders on gun control via means of his pen, and his phone," the description continued.

Now, the notion of publicly saying that you're going to go protest a presidential visit to your town with your rifles and pistols by your side and threatening to run him out of town is pretty common.

Can't imagine what changed from the previous 43 presidents.

Hillary's Poll Position

Here's some crosstabs from the latest Quinnipiac poll matchup between Hillary Clinton and various GOP candidates, in this case, Ben Carson.

Clinton loses pretty badly to Carson, but the reason why is she loses the white vote badly.  Among white women it's 54-40% Carson, but among white men it's 60-29%.

Even Obama got more of the white vote than this in 2012.

Hillary's numbers among white voters are terrible, but she doesn't break 30% against any of the Republicans among white men period, not against Carson, Bush, Fiorina or Trump.

Keep an eye on that number should Joe Biden get in the game.

The Voting Wrongs Act

Don't expect Jeb to sign any voting rights legislation if he's elected, like most Republicans who threw up their hands in 2008 and said "OK, we've elected a black president, what more do you people want" Bush sees the VRA as an antiquated, irrelevant relic.

The 1965 law, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, has dramatically reduced racial discrimination in voting. But for the past two years, its impact has been less clear. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the heart of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision laid out a formula to determine which states had a history of voting discrimination that would subject them to extra scrutiny every time they sought to change voting laws. At the time, nine states were affected by the clause. Unless Congress writes a new formula that would pass muster with the Supreme Court, the effect of the law remains muted. 

To Bush, singling out states for their historic racism is no longer relevant. "If it's to reauthorize it to continue to provide regulations on top of states as though we are living in 1960—'cause those were basically when many of those rules were put in place—I don't believe that we should do that," he said. "There has been dramatic improvement in access to voting. I mean, exponentially better improvement. And I don't think there is a role for the federal government to play in most places, could be some, but in most places where they did have a constructive role in the '60s. So I don't support reauthorizing it as is."

Of course not, because bruised southern white feelings are more important than the right to vote, Supreme Court even said so!

The scary, more serious part is this notion that the federal government doesn't have a role to play in guaranteeing that voter suppression is going on when southern states like Alabama are imposing voter ID laws and then closing drivers license offices in heavily black counties first.

This is exactly the kind of nonsense the Voting Rights Act was supposed to stop, but because it's been gutted, Alabama will most likely be able to get away with it and disenfranchise thousands of black voters in the process.

But that's the point: a Republican president won't enforce the Voting Rights Act at all.

Last Call For Bevin Blowing It

It's looking more and more like Matt Bevin is going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the Kentucky governor's race as the backbiting from the Kentucky GOP is already beginning.

Some prominent Northern Kentucky Republicans have told the Enquirer they support Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jack Conway. 

The bitterness among many Republicans against the tea party, which has challenged many in leadership recent years, might catch up to Republican candidate Matt Bevin, often seen as an outsider candidate who has heavy tea party support. 

In particular, Bevin's nasty primary challenge of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014 has left a sour taste in the mouths of some Republicans. They believe the lack of support for Bevin in his own party could allow Conway to win, despite Conway having to deal with President Barack Obama's unpopularity in the state. 

"I think the chickens are coming home to roost," said Alexandria Republican Mike Combs, who has given $250 to Conway's campaign. "They made it such a personal attack in so many ways." 

Bevin made so many enemies trying to beat Mitch McConnell last year that when he needs Republicans here in the NKY to turn out to support him, he's coming up empty handed.

The tension between traditional Republicans and the tea party wing that includes Bevin, who won the gubernatorial nomination largely by carrying Northern Kentucky, came to the surface in the keynote speech at last month's Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce annual dinner. 

Incoming chamber chairman Dave Heidrich didn't directly name vocal conservative voters and groups such as the tea party in his speech. But he called out businesses to help current elected officials get things done. 

"The business community must gather around our elected officials and provide support. They need to know they can take a bold position and not be immediately defeated by a small vocal minority in the next primary," said Heidrich, a registered Republican who has held a fundraiser for Conway this year. 

In his speech, Heidrich specifically doubled down on the chamber's commitment to getting a new bridge next to the Brent Spence Bridge, a plan that tea party supports oppose because the plan currently relies on tolls. The crowd of more than 500 at the dinner loudly applauded Heidrich. 

Conway's campaign website lists a group of 24 leading Republicans, known as Republicans for Conway. Two locals on the list are Campbell County real estate broker Ken Perry and lawyer Michael Plummer. 

Could less than complete GOP support keep Bevin from winning? 

Bevin and Conway remain close in the polls, with the last Bluegrass Poll at the end of September by the Louisville Courier-Journal showing Conway leading Bevin 42 percent to 37 percent. The poll showed tepid support among their bases for both candidates, with 16 percent of registered Democrats saying they'd vote for Bevin and 15 percent of registered Republicans saying they'd vote for Conway. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

And that's true, with Conway up by five and Bevin finding burnt bridges around every corner, Conway just might pull this off.

The Fool On The Hill(ary)

Daily Beast columnist Ben Domenech rips into Hillary Clinton's reversal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and wonders out loud if she thinks undecided Democratic primary voters like myself are as stupid as she thinks we are.

For years, Hillary Clinton has championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as one of her signal achievements in her time as secretary of state. 

She called it the “gold standard in trade agreements” in 2012. She listed it in her book as one of her key accomplishments. But now, four weeks before the final TPP text is released, she has announced a change of heart. “As of today,” she told Judy Woodruff, “I am not in favor of what I have learned about it.” 

Clinton’s flip-flop would be laughable if it weren’t exactly what the American people expect of her—and a trap for Republicans blind to her game. 

From the perspective that assumes Clinton operates according to principles and ideology, the shift is potentially damaging. Vox, for example, headlines its coverage: “Hillary Clinton’s flip-flop on the TPP makes no sense.” 

And it doesn’t, for someone who is a consistent, principled, ideologically driven politician. 

But this move makes total sense if you understand that Clinton is none of these things. She is changing her mind on this, as she has on so many other things, based on nothing more than political pressure from her left and analysis of political trend lines. The media loves to talk about how GOP primaries pull Republicans so far to the right they can’t win a general election, but that’s what’s happening in real time to Clinton, who is locked in a bidding war with a Vermont socialist over the progressive base.

Clinton has always been a perfect barometer of where her party is. She is a follower, not a leader. She has correctly perceived that the Democratic base is now a dominated by a coalition of economic know-nothings and culture-war leftists who are less interested in “progressive” policy than in freezing the status quo in place. 

As an expression of throwback reflexes on trade and growth, it amounts to Trumpism in a pantsuit. And it’s something more: It’s evidence that a second Clinton presidency can only be won on the ashes of the legacy and vision of the first—a triangulating presidency during which entitlements were reformed significantly and free trade expanded. 

Yet I wonder if all the campaign operatives right and left now saying, “Oh, Hillary’s flip-flopping, she’s contradicting what’s in her book—this could damage her,” have been paying attention to anything the voters have learned about Hillary Clinton in the intervening years. Of course it won’t damage her to flip-flop. She has been for all the things before she was against them.

I really can't find fault in Domenech's logic here.  Clinton has been a finger-in-the-wind triangulator like her husband for decades now, and it hasn't hurt her so far.  This demure "As of today" move leaves the door wide open for her to change her position again as she "learns more about" the TPP and everyone knows it.

Of course, the problem is the alternative to Clinton right now is Bernie Sanders, and both of them are more than happy to run away from President Obama and his policies.  Right now I'm wishing Joe Biden would get into the race if only to have at least one Democrat actually run on the fact that President Obama did a pretty damned good job considering the hand he was dealt by both the Republicans and the Democrats in Congress.

That would be nice.