Roll Over Beethoven And Everyone Else

Legendary Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer, Blues Hall of Famer, and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner Chuck Berry has passed at the age of 90.

He performed in 1979 for President Jimmy Carter at the White House, landed at No. 6 on Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” and trademarked his stage showmanship with his famous “duck walk.”

John Lennon once said, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’” He paved the way for such music legends as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Band, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, AC/DC, Sex Pistols and Jerry Lee Lewis, among many others.

Muddy Waters, Berry’s idol and musical influence, gave him some constructive backstage advice: contact Leonard Chess. Chicago-based Chess Records, primarily a blues label run by Polish brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, had a series of transplanted blues artists on its roster, including Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker.

The Chess brothers signed Berry in 1955 and produced and released his first single, “Maybellene,” an adaption of the Bob Wills song “Ida Red.” It sold more than a million copies, reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts and hit No. 5 on the Pop charts, allowing Berry to build crossover appeal beyond the R&B audience.

Chuck Berry defined rock for decades, and the biggest names in the industry know exactly who they owe their success to.

Keith Richards of the Stones, a big fan, said, “Chuck Berry always was the epitome of rhythm and blues playing, rock ’n’ roll playing. It was beautiful and effortless, and his timing was perfection. He is rhythm supreme. He plays that lovely double-string stuff, which I got down a long time ago but I’m still getting the hang of. Later I realized why he played that way — because of the sheer physical size of the guy. I mean, he makes one of those big Gibsons look like a ukulele!”

His 1972 album The London Chuck Berry Sessions, featuring a who’s who of British rock royalty went gold within a month, selling more than 500,000 copies. It featured both studio and live recordings with such songs as “Let’s Boogie,” “I Love You,” “Johnny B. Goode” and “My Ding a Ling,” a late-period hit written and first recorded by Dave Bartholomew. The novelty song about his private part became his only No. 1 pop hit on both the Billboard and U.K. pop charts.

Berry fought a number of legal situations that arose in his life. He was arrested in high school for stealing a car and robbing convenience stores. He received his GED in prison and was released at age 21. He was imprisoned under the Mann Act in the early 1960s for having sexual intercourse with a minor and in 1979 for tax evasion. He continued to make music behind bars, writing “Thirty Days,” “Nadine” and “No Particular Place to Go.”

Expressing his disagreement with the charges, “Thirty Days” included the lyrics, “If I don’t get no satisfaction from the judge/I’m gonna take it to the FBI and voice my grudge/If they don’t give me no consolation/I’m gonna take it to the United Nations/I’m gonna see that you be back home in 30 days.”

Bands like the Stones, Beach Boys (basing “Surfing U.S.A.” on his “Sweet Little Sixteen”) and Beatles covered his songs, allowing him to remain relevant to the music world, and he signed with Mercury Records in the mid-1960s. He released five albums on the label and toured on the success of his earlier hits. He quickly built a bad reputation during his live shows by hiring spur-of-the-moment backup bands, somehow thinking they’d know each lick of his music.

Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller occasionally performed live with Berry. Springsteen and the E Street Band backed Berry during his performance of “Johnny B. Goode” and “Rock and Roll Music” at his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Director Taylor Hackford captured Berry’s 60th birthday in the 1986 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, where he famously clashed with his protégé Richards. Those who appeared in the film included Diddley, Lennon, Lewis and Little Richard, all of whom revealed personal stories and relationships with him. Berry performed concerts that same year with a number of artists including Linda Ronstadt, Etta James, Julian Lennon, Robert Cray and Johnson, his original mentor.

I think it's time to track down Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll and give it another viewing.  He was legendary 30 years ago, and the legend only grew since.

Sunday Long Read: True (Base) Detective

Oxford American's Nick Tabor gives us this week's Sunday Long Read, a detective tale about a grisly double murder in Oak Grove, Tennessee, just outside Army base Fort Campbell.  It's about the town madam who made a lot of money and paid to keep it that way, a bad cop whom everyone knew was guilty, and the military-industrial complex and a base with 30,000 soldiers that crushed a town and its 3,000 people for decades.

In the early 1990s, New Life Fitness & Massage kept its lights on twenty hours a day, closing at five every morning and reopening at nine. Everyone in Oak Grove knew it was a brothel. Fort Campbell, one of the nation’s largest Army posts, sits on top of the Kentucky-Tennessee border, and New Life stood right outside its northern gates next to Interstate 24. Many of its clients were Screaming Eagles: paratroopers from the famous 101st Airborne Division. Most of the others were truckers off the highway and locals of all stripes; some say judges and other dignitaries would come up from Nashville, an hour down the highway, to be ushered in and out covertly.

At twenty-six, the owner, Tammy Papler, was shrewd beyond her years. She had picked the location for the ready-made customer base in Fort Campbell, and for the pool of potential workers: soldiers’ wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends, as well as women who had recently been discharged, most of them far from their families and without safety nets. She wore her hair in a fluffy blond permanent and took the pseudonym Mercedes. Some of her employees feared her temper.

Oak Grove, Kentucky, wasn’t a city in any meaningful sense, but rather just a commercial strip hedged by trailer parks and clapboard housing. Its population was around three thousand, though this number fluctuated depending on deployments. While Fort Campbell’s officers could afford the more elegant digs on the other side of the post in Clarksville, Tennessee, Oak Grove was a haven for young enlistees, and it drew seedy businesses like mosquitos to a bog. The main stretch of highway was lined with liquor stores, pawnshops, and adult businesses: Fantasee Lingerie, Donna’s Den, Mona’s Go-Go, Classic Touch, and Cherry Video, the last of which Papler also owned. The brothel operated in the back of a small brick building that it shared with a Chinese restaurant.

The business cycle at New Life, as with Oak Grove’s small economy, rose and fell with military paydays. During the slow periods, the women would order takeout and watch the O.J. trial. There were moments of levity, and escapades. Once, two strangers came in off the interstate and plied a couple of workers with mounds of cocaine and hundred-dollar bills for an all-night party, but the men made such a mess in the Jacuzzi room that the workers had to spend their tips to have the carpet cleaned before Papler arrived in the morning.

For Ed Carter, a burly twenty-four-year-old police officer, the city was something of a playground. Carter grew up near Hopkinsville, the county seat, on a farm, where his father worked for an influential white family (the Carters were black) and his mother cleaned houses and churches for extra money. After dropping out of community college, Carter was recruited into the Police Explorers, an apprenticeship program for youths who want to work in law enforcement. He graduated into the midnight shift, responding to domestic fights of young military couples and scuffles at Oak Grove’s strip club.

With minimal training, he spent his first months on the job scrambling to learn the local geography and police procedures. But he didn’t need any instruction to push people around. (Once, Carter responded on a call about a fighting couple and he flung the husband out of their trailer.) He began to walk with a swagger. One of the badge’s perks, he found, was that wearing a uniform made it easy to pick up women—especially with so many men away on deployments. In 1992, he married a woman he’d met on the job, but this didn’t get in the way of his tomcatting.

As a bad cop, Carter was largely a product of his environment. The Oak Grove Police Department had only six officers and was known throughout Christian County for its corruption. Buddy Elliott, the police chief, was the older brother of the mayor, Jack, and together the Elliott brothers owned a major share of the local real estate. They used the police force as an arm of their business enterprises and sometimes as a revenue generator. For instance, in 1993, after some of the New Life massage parlor’s workers were charged with prostitution, Buddy Elliott came to Papler and asked whether she’d “get with the program.” She gave him $600 cash, and when the case reached a grand jury, the charges were dropped.

Over the year that followed, the cops got increasingly cozy at New Life, and some even hung out in the lobby when they were off duty. “They felt like they owned the place, they really did,” one of the workers remembers. “You never knew if they were just stopping by to say hi, or if they were wanting something.” Papler says she came up with a special procedure when an officer wanted sex: he didn’t pay, but his name was recorded at the bottom of the client register, so she could compensate the worker later herself. The Oak Grove government didn’t have much tax revenue, so when the patrol cars needed new lights, the cops imposed on Papler to foot the bill.

Carter spent more time at the brothel than any of his colleagues. He began a steady affair with the manager, and since his police salary was so meager, he compelled Papler to put him on the payroll as a “janitor.” She later said in court proceedings that the payments were really for “protection” or “hush money”—not for mopping the floors. And she was afraid that if she stopped, he’d get the place shut down. For all her friendliness with cops, Papler faced regular threats of closure. For backup, she had an emergency dispatcher keeping guard; whenever there was talk of another prostitution raid, the brothel would get a call—“a storm is coming” or “time to get the umbrellas out”—so her workers could get dressed.

Then, in the summer of 1994, Papler says, she cut Carter off. His payments cost her too much and they had a falling-out. She remembers telling him not to come back, but short of changing the locks, she couldn’t keep him out; he had a key. A few weeks later, in the early hours of September 20, two of her workers were alone at New Life. At 3:35 A.M., two colleagues found them in a back room of the brothel, naked, lying in puddles of blood, both shot through the head and stabbed in the neck. The investigators suspected Carter right away, but they didn’t have enough evidence to convict him. To many, it appeared that the Oak Grove Police Department had a hand in covering up the double murder. Within months, the New Life massage parlor shut down. Carter fled town and many of the locals close to the event eventually left, too, including Papler. The sheriff’s office handed over the investigation to the state, but for more than fifteen years no one was arrested. By the time I moved to the area, the case had almost evaporated into a grisly local legend.

This is Nick Tabor's story, chasing a legendary cold case in a town that definitely didn't want it re-opened.  Pull up a chair, this is a good one.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

In the Trump era, overt racism is again not only totally acceptable, but actually expected in red state American cities like Indianapolis.

The day should have been one of glory and celebration for five fourth-graders.

The Pleasant Run Elementary students had just won a robotics challenge at Plainfield High School, and the students — new to bot competition this year — were one step closer to the Vex IQ State Championship.

The team is made up of 9- and 10-year-olds. Two are African American and three are Latino.

As the group, called the Pleasant Run PantherBots, and their parents left the challenge last month in Plainfield, Ind., competing students from other Indianapolis-area schools and their parents were waiting for them in the parking lot.

“Go back to Mexico!” two or three kids screamed at their brown-skin peers and their parents, according to some who were there.

This verbal attack had spilled over from the gymnasium. While the children were competing, one or two parents disparaged the Pleasant Run kids with racist comments — and loud enough for the Pleasant Run families to hear.

And yes, I mean in 2017 in red states, racism is expected.

“They were pointing at us and saying that ‘Oh my God, they are champions of the city all because they are Mexican. They are Mexican, and they are ruining our country,’ ” said Diocelina Herrera, the mother of PantherBot Angel Herrera-Sanchez.

These are minority students from the east side of the city, poor kids from a Title I school.

“For the most part, the robotics world is kind of a white world,” said Lisa Hopper, the team’s coach and a Pleasant Run second-grade teacher. “They’re just not used to seeing a team like our kids.

"And they see us and they think we’re not going to be competition. Then we’re in first place the whole day, and they can’t take it,” she said.

The racism was always there, just under the surface.  People told themselves "Well, we have a black president though, haven't we gotten past this?"

The answer of course is now it is no longer hidden.  The poor kids from the school where we wall off black and brown kids, they're not supposed to win, let alone be there. They're not supposed to compete, hell they're not supposed to be allowed to compete.  They couldn't have won fair and square.  It has to be that they're cheating, or getting special treatment somehow.

But now the government is there to strike fear into these kids.  They see people who look like them get shot, get rounded up by ICE, go to prison, get deported, go to the morgue, get put in the ground.

There's nobody on their side, and they know it.  On top of everything else that you have to go through as a kid in America these days, now they have all this on top of it. 

Even when they win, they lose.  I know what it feels like.  Believe me.

Not in Trump's America.

Intense International Incidents

This week the Trumpies managed to piss off the Brits and embarrass the Germans, and that was just the list of our major allies that we offended.  First, Mouth of Sauron Sean Spicer made London's spies so angry that they actually spoke up about it.

Out of the gate, Spicer stated that the president still stands by his allegation of wiretapping, even after both the House and Senate have pronounced it false, then proceeded to initiate verbal fights with journalists, which media outlets have fairly termed wild and angry. Next, Spicer rehashed the increasingly threadbare accusations of the right-wing media, backing up the White House’s claim against President Obama, making no impression on the gathered journalists.

Things went from bad to worse when Spicer cited one especially ridiculous far-right claim verbatim:

On Fox News on March 14th, Judge Andrew Napolitano made the following statement: “Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice. He used GCHQ—what is that? It’s the initials for the British Intelligence Spying Agency. So simply, by having two people saying to them, ‘the President needs transcripts of conversations involved in candidate Trump’s conversations involving President-elect Trump,’ he was able to get it and there’s no American fingerprints on this.”

As I explained a couple days ago, Napolitano has zero background in intelligence and has no idea what he’s talking about. His accusation against Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, London’s NSA equivalent, was patently absurd, as well as malicious, demonstrating that neither Napolitano nor Fox News have the slightest notion how intelligence works in the real world.

Yet here the White House was publicly endorsing this crackpot theory—and blaming perhaps our closest ally for breaking American laws at the behest of Barack Obama. Our domestic crisis thereby became an international one, for no reason other than the administration has gone global in its efforts to deflect blame from its own stupidity and dishonesty.

This is no small matter. NSA and GCHQ enjoy the most special of special relationships, serving since the Second World War as the cornerstone of the Anglosphere Five Eyes signals intelligence alliance (the others are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) which defeated Hitler and won the Cold War. This constitutes the most successful espionage alliance in history, and just how close NSA and GCHQ are would be difficult to overstate.

Affectionately calling each other “the cousins,” they interchange personnel and, in the event of disaster—for instance a crippling terrorist attack on agency headquarters—NSA would hand most of its functions over to GCHQ, so that Five Eyes would keep running. It’s long been a source of consternation at Langley that NSA appears to get along better with GCHQ than with CIA. I once witnessed this issue come up in a top-secret meeting with senior officials, in which a CIA boss took an NSA counterpart to task when it became apparent that a piece of highly sensitive intelligence had been shared with “the cousins” before Langley was informed. The NSA senior official’s terse reply silenced the room: “That’s because we trust them.”

Publicly attacking the NSA-GCHQ relationship was therefore a consummately bad idea, particularly by a White House that has already gone so far out of its way to anger and alienate our own spies, and the British reply was one for the record books. Late yesterday, GCHQ issued a remarkable statement:

Recent allegations made by media commentator judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.
American spy services are famously tight-lipped in their public utterances, falling back on “we can neither confirm nor deny” with a regularity that frustrates journalists. And our spooks are positively loquacious compared to British partners, who seldom say anything on the record to the media. Calling out Fox News and the White House in this manner has no precedent, and indicates just how angry British officials are with the Trump administration. For Prime Minister Teresa May, whose efforts to build bridges with the new president have been deeply unpopular at home, this had to be galling.

If angering the entire British spy apparatus didn't win the prize for worst American diplomatic gaffe in decades, then insulting German Chancellor Angela Merkel to her face certainly did, only to have her quickly make Trump look like the uneducated buffoon he really is.

TO APPRECIATE how shocking President Donald Trump is to modern German sensibilities, consider the “America First!” slogan that so cheers his supporters. Then ponder how Germans—and indeed voters across Europe—would react if an avowed law-and-order nationalist were to seek the office of Bundeskanzler with the slogan: “Germany First!” Several issues divided Mr Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel at their first meeting in the White House on March 17th. At an often awkward press conference in the East Room, the two leaders politely disagreed on everything from immigration to free trade and the value of seeking multinational agreements. Their comportment could hardly have been more different. Mrs Merkel was every inch the cool, reserved physicist-by-training, at moments giving her American host the icy stare of a Mother Superior told a dirty joke. Mr Trump was dyspeptic, defensive and visibly irritated by press questions about his latest controversial tweets.

But the real dividing line between the two involved the nature of political leadership. Mr Trump, being Mr Trump, presented himself as a tribune of the people, heeding and acting on public demands to end “unfair” treatment of America. He catalogued some of those resentments. He said it is time for members of the NATO alliance to pay their “dues”—countries “must pay what they owe”, he grumbled—though as members of NATO, governments do not technically “owe” anything but have merely made political commitments to spend the equivalent of 2% of GDP on defence. He cited public demands for tighter controls on immigration in the name of “national security,” adding that: “immigration is a privilege, not a right.” He condemned previous free trade deals and spoke of the need for American workers to come first from now on.

Mrs Merkel’s response was subtle but brutal. She noted that free trade agreements have “not always been that popular” in Germany, and referred to protests in her own country relating to free trade pacts that the European Union has either signed with foreign partners or wants to sign. She recalled the specific fears raised by an EU pact with South Korea, and the predictions that the German car industry would suffer from increased competition and more open markets. Instead, she said, the pact with South Korea “brought more jobs” and both sides won. “I represent German interests,” she said at one point, just as the American president “stands up for American interests.” Listen carefully and Mrs Merkel was telling Mr Trump that she, like every leader in the world, has domestic politics to think about. Left unspoken was the point that it is easy, even dangerously easy, to let such distinct national interests provoke a clash. Her core message to Mr Trump was that real political leadership involves seeking a co-operative solution that leaves everyone ahead, and that international relations do not have to be zero-sum.

Mrs Merkel had no desire to pick an open fight. She has long experience with swaggering male leaders who like to throw their weight around, from President Vladimir Putin of Russia to the former French leader, Nicolas Sarkozy. The German press corps that covers the chancellor has long swapped tales of the dry, off-the-record jokes that she cracks at the expense of such men, often under the cover of self-deprecation. After one European summit in Brussels at which the hyper-active Mr Sarkozy had been more manic than usual, Mrs Merkel told her press corps: “I think I am the most boring person that he has ever met.”

The German leader also came prepared. She is an atypical “Playboy” reader. But that magazine’s interview with Donald Trump in 1990 is one clue studied by Team Merkel before their first meeting. In that preview of his “America First” views, nearly 30 years ago, Mr Trump accused allies of subsidising exports while free-riding on American security, growling: "I'd throw a tax on every Mercedes-Benz rolling into this country.” The president remains an unlikely Merkel ally. He scorns detail, has praised Britain’s decision to leave the EU, obsesses over trade balances (Germany ran a $53bn trade surplus with America last year), and has called her decision to admit more than a million refugees into Germany “catastrophic”. He has appalled the German government with his open admiration for the iron-fisted nationalism of Mr Putin, his hints that he might lift sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and his suggestions that NATO is obsolete.

At their press conference Mrs Merkel managed to persuade Mr Trump to state his “strong support” for NATO. She also heard the American leader praise Germany’s schemes for job training and retraining, and apprenticeships in industry. Earlier, she had introduced Mr Trump to bosses from firms like Siemens and BMW, who talked up their American factories and investments. That was smart. Apprenticeships are a big part of Germany’s global brand, and an impressed-sounding Mr Trump noted from the podium that his government is “in the process of rebuilding the American industrial base.”

At this point Trump is bleating on Twitter that this week was fine and that his meeting with Merkel was great.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Lock-up, Stockman, And Barrel

Long-time ZVTS readers (all three of you) will recognize the name Steve Stockman.  I've covered his rise in Texas Republican politics for a while now as a "Tea Party before there was a Tea Party" House Republican.  He loves his guns and he hates Obama, so much so that he threatened to shut down the government and even impeach the President if Democrats tried passing any gun safety legislation after Sandy Hook.

Last we had checked on him in June 2014, he had lost his Senate primary challenge to John Cornyn, was retiring from the House, and was facing possible campaign finance violations for accepting donations from staffers.

Well, it turns out that campaign finance case was a lot more serious than anyone thought at the time, and Stockman is now facing felony conspiracy charges.

Steve Stockman, who served two stints in the U.S. House of Representatives, spent part of Friday in federal court. 

Stockman, a Tea Party favorite who courted controversy thorough two congressional terms, was brought into court Thursday shackled and handcuffed. 

He is accused of conspiring to violate federal election laws during his last term in office. It's a felony that could send him to federal prison if he's convicted. 

As Stockman stood before the judge Thursday afternoon, prosecutors alleged that the former Congressman had conspired with two former employees to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to his personal use. 

According to the complaint, in 2011 Stockman set up a non-profit called Life Without Limits in Las Vegas. A single contributor donated $350,000 to the charity, which Stockman then allegedly funneled back to himself through donations made by his employees. 

Stockman said he understood the charge. Judge Stephen Smith set bail at $25,000.

How far this will go I have no idea, but it would be rather rich for the guy who wanted to jail Obama to end up in decidedly substandard federal housing for a while...and lose his right to vote as a convicted felon in Texas.

Lady Justice may be blind, but she has an awfully good sense of smell to know when someone stinks.

Escape From LA (County Courthouse)

Trump regime ICE agents squaring off with California's immigrant-friendly communities are literally taking the battle over arresting the undocumented to court.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been going to courthouses and arresting people in America illegally, sparking outrage from prosecutors and attorneys.

They worry such tactic will discourage undocumented immigrants from appearing in court to testify as witnesses for prosecutors.

Criminal defense lawyer Octavio Chaidez said his client is among those taken into custody by ICE agents, who arrested him at the Los Angeles Superior Court in Pasadena.

He said he had just finished a criminal court appearance with his client when four agents swooped in, confirmed his name and took his client away.

“It was very shocking because it occurred inside of a courthouse, and the reason for the detention had nothing to do with that proceeding,” recalled Chaidez, who would not say if his client has a criminal history.

Chaidez said he is among many attorneys and prosecutors who worry ICE arrests at courthouses will create enough fear of deportation among witnesses or victims of crimes to affect the outcomes of cases.

“They may refuse to contact the police. They may refuse to give testimony as a witness. They may refuse to show up in court, and that affects the entire system,” the attorney explained.

Again, the newly empowered ICE brownshirts are there to create an atmosphere of constant fear, fear of ICE agents around every corner, hiding in every public building or corner, waiting to arrest and deport people who have been living here in some cases for decades, working jobs, raising families and paying taxes.

Now they are the hunted.

The Bush era of "compassionate conservatism" is dead and buried.  Conservatism now is white nationalism, with the power of the government used to preserve the American ethno-state against demography at a frightening price.  These are people preparing for a war inside our own borders, folks, nudging forward the corrosion of legal, ethical, and social norms in order to take vicious, decisive action when the foundations finally crack.

That may be sooner rather than later.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump will meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House today after Trump took several potshots at the German leader earlier in the year over immigration.
• Stiff opposition among farm state Republicans is already building against proposed Trump budget cuts to the Department of Agriculture with farm industry groups crying foul as well.
• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says that Obama-era "strategic patience" with North Korea is now over and that "comprehensive" measures are being developed to deal with Pyongyang.
• Cape Town, South Africa is facing drought and a dwindling water supply that could see the city out of water in a matter of months, not years.
• New theories of gravity waves "pushing" as well as pulling run into trouble explaining large-scale universal phenomena.

Last Call For The Media Martyr

Don't look now, but national embarrassment and Mouth of Sauron Sean Spicer is apparently a rock star out in MAGA Country, fighting the good fight against the evil Lamestream Media or something.

In blue America, Trump’s spokesman stands accused of violating press freedoms and is the butt of jokes, lampooned on Saturday Night Live by comedian Melissa McCarthy. A woman accosted Spicer last week in a D.C.-area Apple store in a video that went viral. Rumors have swirled that the longtime Republican party operative might be replaced as press secretary and that Trump has been unhappy with his performance. 

But in Nashville, Spicer was a bona fide celebrity. As he tried to make his way to the press pen to talk to reporters before the rally, a mob formed around him, with supporters shaking his hand, telling him to keep up the good work, and posing for photos. A group of five women with pink "Women for Trump" signs pushed through the crowd for a photo. "We love you Sean!" they said. 

"You guys want to come to a briefing?" Spicer asked the crowd. 

To Trump’s base supporters, Spicer is a crusader against what they consider an unfair and dishonest media. Vincent Kirby, 19, said he watches Spicer’s briefings with White House reporters every day. He likes Spicer’s straight talk and cheers him on when he regards reporters as attempting to trip him up over technicalities. The attacks, the criticism, the mockery -- all of it only adds to Spicer’s appeal, Kirby said. 

"Some of the reporters’ questions, they are just trying to nitpick and sensationalize things -- it’s hard to take them serious," Kirby said before darting off to catch up to Spicer, who was trying to make his way through the crowd.

Gosh guys, isn't Trump's propaganda mouthpiece dreamy?

I really don't want to hear any more complaints about how the Obama administration was a cult of personality after reading this drivel, I really do not.

The King Of Wishful Stinking

As I said last week about virulently racist Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King, the problem isn't the 7-term Congressman, the problem is the people who keep re-electing him despite his obvious racism.  Des Moines journalist and WHO-TV political director Dave Price gives us this analysis of the people of King's district, IA-4, and why King will keep being sent to DC time and time again.

But there is more to King’s tells-it-like-it-is appeal. Northwestern Iowa is changing. Financially, the farm community has struggled over the past few years with commodity prices for corn and beans often falling below the cost of production. That’s helping to shrink the rural population, especially among younger people, who are increasingly looking to bigger cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids for better job opportunities. According to the U.S. Census, King’s home county of Crawford now has a population of about 17,000 people—about 4,000 fewer than it had in 1900. 

The area had been nearly all white for generations, but that, too, has been slowly changing as more Hispanic immigrants have arrived. In 2000, the county was about 93 percent white. That’s now dropped to 82 percent, with Hispanics accounting for nearly all of the change. Eager to make a living for themselves, many newcomers have been willing to take lower-paying jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and meat-packing. And not everyone is comfortable with the changing look of schools, grocery stores and churches in town. 

“There are some ‘Steve Kings’ out there,” says immigration attorney Jason Finch, who practices in Denison and nearby Storm Lake, two communities with rising immigrant populations. And he doesn’t mean it as a compliment. “I had a county attorney tell me it was his life’s mission to deport as many immigrants as he could.” 

Still, Finch reckons that anti-immigrant sentiment is held by a shrinking majority in the region, and where it exists, he says, it tends to be rooted more in ignorance than racism. “The younger generation handles it a lot better than the older generation does,” Finch says. 

Politically, much of King’s district is deeply conservative, with registered Republicans (nearly 200,000 of them) easily outnumbering registered Democrats (fewer than 125,000). That makes it hard for challengers to take on King, no matter how many controversial assertions he makes. 

In 2012, King was tested by a genuinely tough reelection fight. His opponent was Christie Vilsack, the spouse of a popular former Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, who would later become U.S. secretary of agriculture. King’s district had been redrawn, and was less Republican as a result. But King ended up getting a boost from Branstad, who had grown concerned with the dynamics of the race and personally sent staff to help the campaign. King won by 8 points. 

The next year, as Congress debated comprehensive immigration reform, King took a stand as one of the most conservative—and controversial—voices speaking out against illegal immigration. “For every one who’s a valedictorian,” he told Newsmax, referring to young undocumented immigrants crossing the border, “there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds. And they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’ve been hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Iowa Republicans cringed at the words, but no prominent leader strongly denounced King at the time. 

His margin of victory on election night in 2014? It was 23 points—far higher than his margin against Vilsack two years before, but just about par for the course for King. In fact, King has long crushed his competition. With the exception of 2012, he has won by at least 21 percentage points in each of his reelection bids; in 2010, the margin was 34 points.

In other words, King is in one of the safest districts in the country for the GOP, and even attempts to primary him go down in flames.

Nick Ryan understands why. Last year, Ryan, one of the state’s most well-known Republican operatives and donors, helped to orchestrate the first primary challenge King has faced since winning his seat in 2002. Ryan’s chosen candidate, State Senator Rick Bertrand, lost by 30 percentage points.

Steve King represents the people who keep voting for him.  They are no different from him, not enough to motivate them to vote for someone else.  Steve King's racism isn't the core problem.  The fact that his racism is perfectly acceptable to tens of thousands of Iowa voters every two years is. Until that changes, he'll keep his job.

Maybe Trump's proposed 30% cuts to the USDA will do it.  Who knows.  But we need to stop making excuses for the people who keep voting in racists and expecting them to stop being that way.

The Washington Chainsaw Massacre

The Trump regime plans to ask the GOP-controlled Congress for tens of billions in massive, draconian cuts to domestic programs across the board in order to pay for a huge Pentagon expansion and new border security measures as the White House releases its budget proposal today.

President Trump’s budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year would slash the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent and cut State Department spending by a similar amount in a brash upending of the government’s priorities, according to congressional staff members familiar with the plan.

The budget outline, to be unveiled on Thursday, is more of a broad political statement than a detailed plan for spending and taxation. But it represents Mr. Trump’s first real effort to translate his bold but vague campaign themes into the minutiae of governance. The president would funnel $54 billion in additional funding into defense programs, beef up immigration enforcement and significantly reduce the nondefense federal work force to further the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” in the words of Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.

Yet for all its headline-grabbing bold strokes — and the White House claims that it will reset the process of Washington policy making — major elements of the plan have already been declared dead on arrival by the Republican leadership in Congress, and much of the fiscal fine print will be filled in by Capitol Hill lawmakers and their aides over the next month.

House appropriations subcommittees began reviewing the plan late Wednesday. Among the cuts: drastic reductions in the 60-year-old State Department Food for Peace Program, which sends food to poor countries hit by war or natural disasters, and the elimination of the Department of Transportation’s Essential Air Service program, which subsidizes flights to rural airports.

The plan is a “skinny budget,” a pared-down first draft of the line-by-line appropriations request submitted by first-term administrations during their first few months. A broader budget will be released later in the spring that will include Mr. Trump’s proposals for taxation as well as the bulk of government spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs.

Mr. Trump’s version is likely to be even skinnier than usual, a result of the chaos, inexperience and staffing problems encountered by the Trump White House over the first two months.

Issues with coordination plagued Wednesday’s briefing sessions: Republican communications staff members, who usually coordinate their messaging, complained that they had been given no White House guidance on its details or how to sell the plan, which covers the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1.

In addition to the cuts at the E.P.A. and the State Department, Mr. Trump’s team is expected to propose a wide array of cuts to public education, to transportation programs like Amtrak and to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, including the complete elimination of the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, which funds popular programs like Meals on Wheels, housing assistance and other community assistance efforts.

House and Senate Republicans have already said that they're not going to take the fall for this, as the budget proposal is already considered DOA on Capitol Hill.  Having said that, the Trump Regime's recent executive order to restructure the entire executive branch means the White House has broad latitude to make these huge cuts effective in all but name by simply shifting priorities of what to actually do with the money.

The biggest winners and losers:



Note that the Department of Agriculture would take a massive cut under Trump, as well as state clean-up programs for the EPA, arts and science programs, energy research, and national parks.  It's a brutal austerity budget that would hurt red states as well as blue, and I can't imagine there are a whole lot of Republicans in Congress from Midwest or Mountain West states that are going to want to cut the USDA by 29%.

This is a cute document, but as with Trumpcare, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are going to run screaming from this mess.  If Republicans have to take votes on these kinds of cuts, even Democrats will be able to find winning messages in 2018.

StupidiNews!

• A second federal judge, this time in Maryland, has issued a nationwide block on the Trump regime's Muslim immigration ban.
• Former LA County Sheriff Lee Baca has been convicted on corruption charges for attempting to thwart a federal investigation into police abuses by the LA County Sherriff's Office.
• Early results from yesterday's Dutch vote finds PM Mark Rutte will hold on to his leadership as the party of far-right anti-Islam nationalist Geert Wilders suffered a major blow.
• Several Russian hackers and foreign agents have been charged by the Justice Department in the massive breach of half-a-billion Yahoo! mail accounts in 2014.
• The Trump regime will roll back Obama-era fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, automotive industry groups are celebrating the move.

Last Call For Block Busted Again

Once again a federal judge has blocked Trump's Muslim ban because hey...it's a Muslim ban, and in fact the Trump regime's propaganda folks were more than happy to call it as such, so much so that the judge actually cited Trump surrogates in his ruling.

The ruling -- which applies nationwide -- means that travelers from six Muslim-majority countries and refugees will be able to travel to the US. 

The Trump administration took over a month to rewrite the travel ban order after multiple federal courts blocked its implementation last month. Unlike the previous executive order, the new one removed Iraq from the list of banned countries, exempted those with green cards and visas, and removed a provision that arguably prioritizes certain religious minorities. 

US District Court Judge Derrick Watson concluded that the new executive order still failed to pass legal muster. 

"The illogic of the Government's contentions is palpable. The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed," Watson wrote. 

"Equally flawed is the notion that the Executive Order cannot be found to have targeted Islam because it applies to all individuals in the six referenced countries," Watson added. "It is undisputed, using the primary source upon which the Government itself relies, that these six countries have overwhelmingly Muslim populations that range from 90.7% to 99.8%." 

"It would therefore be no paradigmatic leap to conclude that targeting these countries likewise targets Islam," Watson added. "Certainly, it would be inappropriate to conclude, as the Government does, that it does not."

 The full ruling is brutal as hell, basically.

The more important point is that the judge basically said that the unconstitutional part of the original Trump executive order was not remedied at all by the "revised" order.  It's still intended to discriminate specifically against Muslims, period.

So yeah, it's blocked.  Trump is already screaming about "judicial overreach" again.  Too bad.

Terminal Trumpcare, Con't

GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan isn't taking the the fall for Trumpcare by himself.  On the contrary, he's going to bring the rest of the GOP along with him for the log flume ride on the River Styx.  Ryan spoke this morning on FOX Business:

House Speaker Paul Ryan is stressing that President Donald Trump had a hand in writing the beleaguered health care overhaul that Republican leaders hope to push through his chamber next week. 

The Wisconsin Republican says there is room for “improvements and refinements.” But he says its major components will stay “intact” because the measure’s House GOP authors wrote it with Trump and Senate Republicans. 

Ryan’s comments Wednesday come as GOP leaders struggle to dampen internal opposition to the measure. Party leaders hope Trump’s support will help them nail down votes.

And of course there's a reason everyone's running away screaming from Trumpcare on Capitol Hill: American voters absolutely hate it.

PPP's newest national poll finds that there is very little support for the American Health Care Act. Only 24% of voters support it, to 49% who are opposed. Even among Republican voters only 37% are in favor of the proposal to 22% who are against it, and 41% who aren't sure one way or another. Democrats (15/71) and independents (22/49) are more unified in their opposition to the bill than Republicans are in favor of it. 

The Affordable Care Act continues to post some of the best numbers it's ever seen, with 47% of voters in favor of it to 39% who are opposed. When voters are asked whether they'd have rather have the Affordable Care Act or the American Health Care Act in place, the Affordable Care Act wins by 20 points at 49/29. Just 32% of voters think the best path forward with the Affordable Care Act is to repeal it and start over, while 63% think it would be better to keep what works in it and fix what doesn't. 

When Jason Chaffetz said people might have to choose between an iPhone and having health insurance, he was actually speaking for a majority of the party base. 57% of Trump voters think that's a choice people should have to make, to only 29% who think it's not. But virtually no one would actually pick an iPhone over health care if that was the pick they were presented with- only 5% would go with the phone, to 85% who would choose health care.

Just 24%?  This is a minefield of landmines made of smaller, more dangerous landmines, and Trump's selling pogo sticks for profit. Even Republicans hate this thing, 37%? C'mon.  The GOP is going to get eviscerated in 2018 over this and they damn well know it.

So who's going to take the fall for Trumpcare?  Hopefully, all of the GOP, should it pass.  That's still possible, but I'm thinking Ryan doesn't have the votes. Even if he does, Mitch won't have them in the Senate, not for the House bill as is.

Then the fun really begins.

Taxation And Misrepresentation

So somebody dropped off two pages of Donald Trump's 2005 tax returns in reporter David Cay Johnston's mailbox last week, and yesterday he went on Rachel Maddow to talk about the story.

In 2005, Donald J. Trump married model Melanija Knavs, his third wife. That year, the real-estate mogul and newly minted TV star earned $153 million dollars, about $3 million a week. That’s far more than all but a tiny sliver of the U.S. population.

The newlyweds paid $36.6 million of that year’s take in federal income taxes, a rate of 24%, putting the Trumps in much the same tax league as any other two-earner professional couple making about $400,000 a year.

Or to put it another way, Donald Trump was paid that year like a member of the 0.001%, but he paid taxes like the 99%. And by at least one measure, he paid like the bottom 50%.

DCReport has obtained Donald Trump’s Form 1040 federal tax return for 2005. There’s no smoking gun there, no obvious evasion, but clearly some bending of the tax laws almost to the breaking point. The document offers a rare glimpse at how a super wealthy couple can manipulate and manage our complex tax laws to reduce their obligations far below rates paid by typical salaried professionals or even blue-collar wage earners.

The White House confirmed the authenticity of the tax returns. “Despite this substantial income figure and tax paid,” the White House said in a statement, “the dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda, while the President will focus on his, which includes tax reform that will benefit all Americans.”

Trump’s lawyers have said that any audit of the 2005 tax return is now closed. However, the president has made it clear, since he took office, that he has no intention of making public his tax returns.

When Maddow tweeted about the tax return story last evening to preview her show, the White House responded within minutes that Trump had paid $36.5 million in taxes on $153 million in income in 2005.

In other words, instead of a series of ranting tweets from Trump himself or a garbage statement from a confused spokesperson with no credibility, this notoriously sloppy and disorganized White House had a response prepared and ready.

They knew this story was coming.

The question is why this is so important to the Trump regime.

Now, the story itself is something of a letdown, as there's no smoking gun.  But we now know Trump certainly isn't a billionaire as he's claimed. We now know in 2005 most of his income wasn't recurring, but from the sale of distressed real estate holdings.  We now know that the Alternative Minimum Tax nailed Trump to the wall in 2005, otherwise he would have paid only around $5 million in taxes instead of $36.5 million, explaining why he's campaigned to eliminate the AMT entirely.

To make the mystery more interesting, the ranting Trump tweets came this morning, with Trump accusing the Pulitzer-winning Johnston of being a "nobody" and the tax returns of being fake...12 hours after his own White House staff confirmed them as true last night to reporters.

I'm not sure 100% what's going on here.  I have some theories: Trump released them himself and is trolling the media, Bannon did this to distract the country from Trumpcare, a Trump staffer caught wind and leaked them out of spite, Donald Jr. thinks he's a supervillain now and tested the waters, or somebody else has all the tax returns and is slow-dripping the feed.

All I know is we know more than we did yesterday about Trump's finances.

I'm betting we find out a lot more.

StupidiNews!

• A retired US Navy admiral is among 9 high-ranking officers indicted by a federal grand jury over bribery charges in the Navy's growing "Fat Leonard" defense contractor scandal.
• FBI Director James Comey is expected to confirm whether or not Donald Trump is being investigated by the agency for links to Russia, according to two US senators.
• US and coalition backed Iraqi forces are advancing on Mosul's Grand Mosque as government forces move to retake the city from Islamic State militants in heavy fighting.
• Dutch voters head to the polls today to choose a new government as Prime Minister Mark Rutte faces off against anti-Islam right-wing nationalist Geert Wilders.
• The city of Everett, Washington is the latest local government to file suit against the maker of opioid drug Oxycontin over the nation's opioid epidemic.