Last Call For Automation Nation

First Wendy's announced a pilot program already under way, now McDonald's is going to replace thousands of cashiers with automated kiosk terminals.

McDonald's shares hit an all-time high on Tuesday as Wall Street expects sales to increase from new digital ordering kiosks that will replace cashiers in 2,500 restaurants.

Cowen raised its rating on McDonald's shares to outperform from market perform because of the technology upgrades, which are slated for the fast-food chain's restaurants this year.

McDonald's shares rallied 26 percent this year through Monday compared to the S&P 500's 10 percent return.

Andrew Charles from Cowen cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017. The technology upgrades, part of what McDonald's calls "Experience of the Future," includes digital ordering kiosks that will be offered in 2,500 restaurants by the end of the year and table delivery.

"MCD is cultivating a digital platform through mobile ordering and Experience of the Future (EOTF), an in-store technological overhaul most conspicuous through kiosk ordering and table delivery," Charles wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. "Our analysis suggests efforts should bear fruit in 2018 with a combined 130 bps [basis points] contribution to U.S. comps [comparable sales]."

He raised his 2018 U.S. same store sales growth estimate for the fast-food chain to 3 percent from 2 percent.

The analyst raised his price target for McDonald's to $180 from $142, representing 17.5 percent upside from Monday's close. He also raised his 2018 earnings-per-share forecast to $6.87 from $6.71 versus the Wall Street consensus of $6.83.

"MCD has done a great job launching popular innovations within the context of simplifying the menu, while introducing more effective value initiatives that have recently begun to improve the brand's value perceptions," he wrote.

Of course Wall Street loves replacing several thousands of jobs with machines.  More profit!  Of course, if everyone automates, who's going to actually have money to pay for things?

Thirteen years ago, two prominent U.S. economists wrote that driverless cars couldn’t execute a left turn against oncoming traffic because too many factors were involved. Six years later, Google proved it could make fully autonomous cars, threatening the livelihoods of millions of truck and taxi drivers. Throughout much of the developed world, gainful employment is seen as almost a fundamental right. But what if, in the not-too-distant future, there won’t be enough jobs to go around? That’s what some economists think will happen as robots and artificial intelligence increasingly become capable of performing human tasks. Of course, past technological upheavals created more jobs than they destroyed. But some labor experts argue that this time could be different: Technology is replacing human brains as well as brawn.

When politicians talk about jobs, they tend to focus on iconic, goods-producing industries, such as mining, steel production and auto making, that have traditionally been the hardest hit by global competition and technological progress. Lately, though, the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. pales in comparison to the much larger losses in parts of the services sector.

Overall, services accounted for three-fourths of the job losses among more than 350 sectors of the private economy in the last year. That’s a big shift from previous decades, when goods-producing categories tended to suffer the most losses.

In the U.S., for example, department stores employ 25 times more workers than coal mining companies. And as customers increasingly purchased goods via the internet, average employment in the first four months of 2017 was down 26,800 from the same period a year earlier, against just 2,800 job losses in coal.

The effect on labor markets of free-trade agreements and increased immigration has already caused significant political upheaval, as the resurgence of populism in the U.S. and Europe demonstrates. But some economists believe that the world is on the cusp of much bigger change, on the scale of the revolution brought about by industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries. Researchers at the University of Oxford estimate that nearly half of all U.S. jobs may be at risk in the coming decades, with lower-paid occupations among the most vulnerable.

What jobs will today's kids actually have twenty years from now?  Odds are very good the answer will be "they won't have one."  Doctors, dentists, and CEOs will still be with America for decades, but any job that requires say, analysis, repetitive motion, or lots of math?  Kiss it goodbye.  Bookkeepers, actuaries, insurance underwriters, loan officers, and short-order cooks?  Not going to be a lot of those a couple decades from now.  If your job involves a computer and a phone, and you never meet face to face with anyone, I've got bad, bad news for you.

It's going to be a mess for the rest of my lifetime, and probably that of your kid's lifetime as well.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As I've been saying for a while, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump and Russia has three components: one, possible collusion with Russian hackers to damage our elections, two, long-time money laundering through Russian firms, and three, obstruction of justice in attempting to cover up one and two.

It's that second one, the money laundering, where we have the most evidence so far.  Tim O'Brien at Bloomberg covers this angle of the story, and it's very grim for Team Trump.

Trump has repeatedly labeled Comey's and Mueller's investigations "witch hunts," and his lawyers have said that the last decade of his tax returns (which the president has declined to release) would show that he had no income or loans from Russian sources. In May, Trump told NBC that he has no property or investments in Russia. "I am not involved in Russia," he said. 

But that doesn't address national security and other problems that might arise for the president if Russia is involved in Trump, either through potentially compromising U.S. business relationships or through funds that flowed into his wallet years ago. In that context, a troubling history of Trump's dealings with Russians exists outside of Russia: in a dormant real-estate development firm, the Bayrock Group, which once operated just two floors beneath the president's own office in Trump Tower. 

Bayrock partnered with the future president and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, on a series of real-estate deals between 2002 and about 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump Soho hotel and condominium in Manhattan. 

During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects in the U.S. to which the president once lent his name in exchange for handsome fees. Icelandic banks that dealt with Bayrock, for example, were easy marks for money launderers and foreign influence, according to interviews with government investigators, legislators, and others in Reykjavik, Brussels, Paris and London. Trump testified under oath in a 2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing there. 

"It's ridiculous that I wouldn't be investing in Russia," Trump said in that deposition. "Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment." 

One of Bayrock's principals was a career criminal named Felix Sater who had ties to Russian and American organized crime groups. Before linking up with the company and with Trump, he had worked as a mob informant for the U.S. government, fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges while boasting of his KGB and Kremlin contacts there, and had gone to prison for slashing apart another man’s face with a broken cocktail glass. 

In a series of interviews and a lawsuit, a former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, claims that he eventually departed from the firm because he became convinced that Bayrock was actually a front for money laundering. 

Kriss has sued Bayrock, alleging that in addition to laundering money, the Bayrock team also skimmed cash from the operation, dodged taxes and cheated him out of millions of dollars. Sater and others at Bayrock would not comment for this column; in court documents they have contested Kriss's charges and describe him, essentially, as a disgruntled employee trying to shake them down.

These are the guys Trump has worked with for years, and now he's pretending he never did.  What sort of leverage Bayrock -- and by logic, Russia -- now has on him, well, I hope Mueller gets to the bottom of all this and soon.  That Bayrock to Sater to Putin line is blood red, emphasis on blood.

Only fitting that Trump is caught up in all this.

The Senate GOP Trumpcare Bill Is Awful Too

As widely expected, the Senate Republican version of Trumpcare is also a raging dumpster fire that will kick tens of millions off their current insurance and wreck the market for tens of millions more. In several ways it may actually be worse than the House GOP version of the bill.

Senate leaders on Wednesday were putting the final touches on legislation that would reshape a big piece of the U.S. health-care system by dramatically rolling back Medicaid while easing the impact on Americans who stand to lose coverage under a new bill. 

A discussion draft circulating Wednesday afternoon among aides and lobbyists would roll back the Affordable Care Act’s taxes, phase down its Medicaid expansion, rejigger its subsidies, give states wider latitude in opting out of its regulations and eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood. 

The bill largely mirrors the House measure that narrowly passed last month but with some significant changes aimed at pleasing moderates. While the House legislation tied federal insurance subsidies to age, the Senate bill would link them to income, as the ACA does. The Senate proposal cuts off Medicaid expansion more gradually than the House bill,\ but would enact deeper long-term cuts to the health-care program for low-income Americans. It also removes language restricting federally subsidized health plans from covering abortions, which may have run afoul of complex budget rules. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) intends to present the draft to wary GOP senators at a meeting Thursday morning. McConnell has vowed to hold a vote before senators go home for the July 4 recess, but he is still seeking the 50 votes necessary to pass the major legislation under arcane budget rules. A handful of senators, from conservatives to moderates, are by no means persuaded that they can vote for the emerging measure.

Aides stress that the GOP plan is likely to undergo more changes to garner the 50 votes Republicans need to pass it. Moderate senators are concerned about cutting off coverage too quickly for those who gained it under the ACA, also known as Obamacare, while conservatives don’t want to leave big parts of the ACA in place.

So it wouldn't be as stridently anti-women as the House version, but it would make deeper cuts to Medicaid over a longer period of time, resulting in even more long-term damage.  At this point calling your local Senate office is a really smart idea, because if this passes, tens of millions of Americans are going to lose coverage outright, will be unable to get new coverage thanks to "pre-existing conditions" and millions more will be locked out by lifetime or annual limits on treatments on group plans.

In other words, we'll be back to the bad old days of the Bush era, only with Medicaid block grants and one in five Americans not having insurance.

And believe me, my two Senators will absolutely vote to take insurance from half a million here in Kentucky and won't lose a wink of sleep.  Your state may fare better, so make those phone calls.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump attacked Democrats at a campaign rally in Iowa yesterday, telling the crowd that Senate Democrats were standing between them and "a good heathcare plan".
• The FBI say it is treating the apparent stabbing attack by a Canadian man on an airport police officer in Flint, Michigan as an act of terrorism.
• A car bomb attack on a crowded bank branch in the Afghan city of Lashkar Gah has killed at least 20 people and injured more than 50.
• Tropical Storm Cindy has made landfall on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the storm could dramatically raise gasoline prices nationally by disrupting up to half of US refinery capacity.
• Senate Democrats are still hoping that the Justice Department will block a proposed mega-merger between AT&T and Time Warner as harmful to consumers.

Last Call For A De-Pressing Development, Con't

Buried in this NYT story on Trump regime mouthpiece Sean Spicer being horrible at his job is another nasty Dear Leader trial balloon: decreeing that the daily press briefing be limited to weekly state-run propaganda blurbs with pre-approved topics only.

The biggest shift Mr. Trump is discussing is a dramatic change to the briefing room schedule, including limiting briefings that he has described as a “spectacle” to once a week and asking reporters to submit written questions. Some of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers, including the Fox News host Sean Hannity, have urged him to curtail the freewheeling — and often embarrassing — barrage of questions. Mr. Trump has been particularly irked by CNN, and other allies such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have suggested banning the cable network.

“Donald Trump might as well get behind the podium himself, as the press coverage is the part of his presidency he cares the most deeply about,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. “You can’t be a credible press secretary when your boss makes you tell preposterous lies. You can’t be a credible press secretary when you don’t know what your boss thinks on key issues because he changes his mind depending on the last person he talked to.”

And even with Spicer being "promoted" out of the job, finding a replacement to read the weekly Trump regime press release is still pretty hard.  Trump doesn't want a press secretary, he wants a FOX News talking head.

Among the candidates: Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio host, about whom Trump advisers remain “iffy”; Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Fox News commentator who said publicly that Mr. Trump had called her in recent weeks (she said she didn’t want the job); and David Martosko, an editor for The Daily Mail who was briefly considered for the role during the transition and has been talked about for other roles now (White House aides said he was liked by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, but was never under serious consideration and put out a statement withdrawing his name).

So we're about one more major Trump-Russia leak from Tang the Conqueror reducing the White House to being, well, the Kremlin.

But maybe he'll pivot, right press flacks?

We'll Pass, Thanks

Looks like the Congressional Black Caucus has seen the light (or the darkness in this case) as the Trump regime has consistently rolled back civil rights and voting rights protections for African-Americans, and now the caucus isn't going to let Trump bait it into being used for feel-good photo ops anymore.

The Congressional Black Caucus is expected to reject an invitation to meet with President Donald Trump, according to four sources close to the group. 

The Trump administration, sources said, has done nothing to advance the CBC's priorities since the group's executive board first met with Trump in March. And members are worried the request for a caucus-wide meeting would amount to little more than a photo op that the president could use to bolster his standing among African-Americans.

“No one wants to be a co-star on the reality show,” said one senior Democratic aide. 

Lawmakers in the 49-member group each received an invitation last week from Omarosa Manigault, the-reality-TV-star-turned-White-House-aide who has pitched herself as an unofficial liaison to the CBC. 

“As requested by the president, we would like to schedule a follow-up meeting with the entire membership of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss issues pertinent to your members,” Manigault wrote in the invitation, obtained by POLITICO. 

But multiple CBC members said they were put off that she signed the invitation as “the Honorable Omarosa Manigault,” saying she hasn’t earned that title nor has she helped raise the profile of CBC issues within the White House as promised.

Considering how Trump treated HBCU presidents earlier this year by inviting them to meet with him and then turning around and proposing massive education budget cuts to colleges and universities, I don't blame the CBC one bit.  They should loudly oppose Trump's plans as a group and make sure that voters everywhere know exactly how much damage this regime is doing to black communities through the destruction of voting rights, civil service jobs, infrastructure scams, public housing and education cuts, Medicaid and Obamacare repeal, and stripping executive branch civil rights offices.

This is the first useful thing the CBC has done in year, frankly.  Bet you wish you had Obama back, huh?

Still Close, Still No Cigars

Democrats got awfully close last night in two special House elections, one in Georgia-06, the other in SC-05, but Republicans kept their seats in districts that voted for GOP incumbents by more than 20 points in November.  Democrats have gone 0-4 in these districts in special elections this year now, and that's prompting some to say that just running against the increasingly unpopular Trump is no longer an option.

To win in 2018, Democrats will have to find opportunities to do better, but it’s certainly an achievable goal. The fact that the district was competitive is a sign that the GOP majority is at risk; the question is simply what can Democrats do to put themselves over the top?

One thing they might want to try is developing a substantive policy agenda to run on. They came close this time, and they’ll just need to put forth an attractive package for voters in the 2018 midterms.

Ossoff, like so many losing Democratic candidates over the years, was brought down fundamentally by arguments grounded in identity politics.

Karen Handel didn’t argue that the Republican Party’s health care bill is a good idea (it’s very unpopular) or that tax cuts for millionaires should be the country’s top economic priority (another policy that polls dismally). Instead, her campaign and its allies buried Ossoff under a pile of what basically amounts to nonsense — stuff about Kathy Griffin, stuff about Samuel L. Jackson, stuff about his home being just over the district line, stuff about him having raised money from out of state — lumped together under the broad heading that he’s an “outsider.”

Much of this was unfair or ridiculous. And the stuff that wasn’t unfair — like the location of his home — is honestly pretty silly. None of this has anything to do with the lives of actual people living in the suburbs of Atlanta or anywhere else.

Ossoff’s team was aware, of course, that the district is not accustomed to voting for Democrats and that he was vulnerable to this kind of attack. They attempted to counter this move by positioning Ossoff as blandly as possible — just a kind of nice guy who doesn’t like Donald Trump — and dissociating him from any hard-edged ideas or themes. It’s a strategy that makes a certain amount of sense, but it also makes it hard to mobilize potential supporters. And by lowering the concrete stakes in the election, it also makes it easier for trivial and pseudo-issues to end up dominating in the end.

I hate to say that Yglesias has a point here, but he does.  Outrage will bring Republicans to the polls every time.  Democrats need more to bother to show up to vote.

Yes, there's no such thing as a safe seat for the GOP this year, but it still means that Democrats need more than "Trump sucks" to win in a lot of these districts where Republicans have a massive advantage due to gerrymandering.

Still, a district where the GOP won by 20 in November was only 6 now.  In a closer district Ossoff would have won.  And there are 70 or 80 closer districts out there for next year.

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Cindy is bearing down on the Gulf Coast this week and could bring as much as a foot of rain to parts of Texas and Louisiana by Friday.
• Senate GOP majority leader Mitch McConnell says Republicans will release a draft of their health care bill on Thursday after heavy pressure from Democrats and voters.
• Saudi King Salman has named his son Mohammed the kingdom's new crown prince, shuffling the line of succession as tensions between Saudi Arabia and Qatar remain extremely high.
• Rideshare giant Uber says that CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick has resigned under pressure from investors and board members after a number of high-profile scandals.
• The Supreme Court will not take up a ten-year old "Dancing Baby" copyright fair-use lawsuit, leaving the 9th Circuit's decision in place regarding takedown notices.

A De-Pressing Development

The Trump regime is now in the full paranoid style as Tang the Conqueror's approval ratings crash into the mid 30's and are still falling, and that means that like most proto-fascist autocracies, we're into the "information control by the state press" era.

Over the course of the Trump administration, the White House’s daily press briefings have been pared progressively further back; they are now shorter, less frequent, and routinely held off-camera.

The daily briefing is a venerable Washington tradition, though one that has often been a target of criticism. Media critic Jay Rosen has called for media outlets to “send the interns,” arguing that the briefing is a largely useless exercise in grandstanding. President Trump himself has publicly mused about canceling them, tweeting “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future "press briefings" and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”

But instead of canceling them entirely, the White House has appeared to embrace a different strategy: simply downgrading them bit by bit, from “briefings” to “gaggles,” and from on-camera to off-camera. Guidance for the briefings have begun to include a note that audio from them cannot be used. Additionally, though Trump has held short press conferences when foreign leaders visit, he has not held a full press conference since February.

The changes haven’t gone unnoticed, although reporters are still attending the gaggles. A clearly exasperated Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, said on Monday that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer had become “kind of useless.”

“It feels like we’re slowly but surely being dragged into what is a new normal in this country, where the president of the United States is allowed to insulate himself from answering hard questions,” Acosta said on CNN. “I don’t know why we covered that gaggle today, quite honestly Brooke, if they can’t give us the answers to the questions on camera or where we can record the audio. They’re basically pointless at this point.”

Asked for further comment, Acosta said in an email, “Unless we all take collective action, the stonewalling will continue.”

“If the WH is going to place unreasonable demands on our newsgathering, we should walk out,” he said.

What’s not clear is how much the White House would care if this happened. Reporters’ demands for access have not been a top priority for this administration, and though Trump is an avid media consumer and did a large number of interviews as a candidate and earlier in his term, he has begun to hold the press at arm’s length, skipping the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and doing fewer interviews lately.  

I respect Acosta's position and he is correct, but I hope that he also understands that the media boycotting these laughable kabuki events gives Trump the excuse to start declaring the "lamestream liberal media" as de facto enemies of the state, and that is precisely what Trump wants right now as the Mueller probe threatens to blow the whole sorry state of affairs open like a rotten melon dropped off of a rooftop.

The Trump regime is trying to couch this as Sean Spicer getting "promoted", but they definitely want to prove that if our media dares to make this political and not cover the daily "press briefings", well, then maybe America doesn't need an adversarial media...

Believe me when I say that step is coming sooner rather than later.  The nonsense about "going around the press to get the truth to the people" is propaganda of the the worst sort, an obvious manipulation, but in the kayfabe Trump era of convenient fictions, it's one that will go from perception to reality with frightening speed if allowed.

Last Call For Not Having The Energy For Climate Change

The Trump regime embarrasses America again, this time with Energy Secretary Rick Perry spouting climate denier nonsense as the official position of the Klep-Trump-cracy.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry told CNBC on Monday he does not believe carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are the main driver of climate change, joining the EPA administrator in casting doubt on the conclusion of some of the government's top scientists.

Asked whether CO2 emissions are primarily responsible for climate change, Perry told CNBC's "Squawk Box": "No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in."

"The fact is this shouldn't be a debate about, 'Is the climate changing, is man having an effect on it?' Yeah, we are. The question should be just how much, and what are the policy changes that we need to make to effect that?" he said.

In March, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told "Squawk Box" he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

Those statements contradict the public stance of the Environmental Protection Agency, at least until recently.

We're still "having the debate" so of course any action taken by our new government would be "rash" at this point, despite decades of data and literally dozens of other countries choosing to take action that we now refuse to.

The EPA's webpage on the causes of climate change used to state, "Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change." The EPA recently took down the web page containing that statement.

Perry and Pruitt's views are also at odds with the conclusion of NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Despite those conclusions, Perry said, "This idea that science is just absolutely settled and if you don't believe it's settled then somehow you're another neanderthal, that is so inappropriate from my perspective."

Being a skeptic about climate change issues is "quite all right," he said, suggesting that skepticism is a sign of a "wise, intellectually engaged person."

Gravity isn't "settled science" and neither is the earth being round, so questioning that makes me smart like Rick!  At least, that's how the logic goes.  If you don't believe in science, it still doesn't give a damn about you personally but it still goes about working anyway.

Vile Speech Must Be Allowed To Exist

In a sweeping 8-0 ruling that could potentially apply to a massive number of situations, the Supreme Court issued arguably the largest First Amendment ruling in years, that the government cannot restrict trademark or copyright protections of the law on vile speech. Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post:

That’s what the Supreme Court just held this morning, in Matal v. Tam. The court was unanimous on the result and some basic principles, though split 4-4 (Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wasn’t yet on the court when the case was argued) on some details. I’ll blog more on the case throughout the day, but here are the core pillars on which the justices agreed:

1. By denying registration to trademarks that allegedly disparage certain kinds of groups, the federal trademark law (the Lanham Act) discriminates based on viewpoint:

Our cases use the term “viewpoint” discrimination in a broad sense, and in that sense, the disparagement clause discriminates on the bases of “viewpoint.” To be sure, the clause evenhandedly prohibits disparagement of all groups. It applies equally to marks that damn Democrats and Republicans, capitalists and socialists, and those arrayed on both sides of every possible issue. It denies registration to any mark that is offensive to a substantial percentage of the members of any group. But in the sense relevant here, that is viewpoint discrimination: Giving offense is a viewpoint.

We have said time and again that “the public expression of ideas may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves offensive to some of their hearers.” Street v. New York, 394 U. S. 576, 592 (1969). See also Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397, 414 (1989) (“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable”) [more cases omitted] …

That’s from the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Stephen G. Breyer; but a concurring opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, agreed:

[The Government argues] that the law is viewpoint neutral because it applies in equal measure to any trademark that demeans or offends. This misses the point. A subject that is first defined by content and then regulated or censored by mandating only one sort of comment is not viewpoint neutral. To prohibit all sides from criticizing their opponents makes a law more viewpoint based, not less so. … The logic of the Government’s rule is that a law would be viewpoint neutral even if it provided that public officials could be praised but not condemned. The First Amendment’s viewpoint neutrality principle protects more than the right to identify with a particular side. It protects the right to create and present arguments for particular positions in particular ways, as the speaker chooses. By mandating positivity, the law here might silence dissent and distort the marketplace of ideas.

The Government next suggests that the statute is viewpoint neutral because the disparagement clause applies to trademarks regardless of the applicant’s personal views or reasons for using the mark. Instead, registration is denied based on the expected reaction of the applicant’s audience. In this way, the argument goes, it cannot be said that Government is acting with hostility toward a particular point of view. For example, the Government does not dispute that respondent seeks to use his mark in a positive way. Indeed, respondent endeavors to use The Slants to supplant a racial epithet, using new insights, musical talents, and wry humor to make it a badge of pride. Respondent’s application was denied not because the Government thought his object was to demean or offend but because the Government thought his trademark would have that effect on at least some Asian-Americans.

The Government may not insulate a law from charges of viewpoint discrimination by tying censorship to the reaction of the speaker’s audience. The Court has suggested that viewpoint discrimination occurs when the government intends to suppress a speaker’s beliefs … but viewpoint discrimination need not take that form in every instance. The danger of viewpoint discrimination is that the government is attempting to remove certain ideas or perspectives from a broader debate. That danger is all the greater if the ideas or perspectives are ones a particular audience might think offensive, at least at first hearing.

What this means is that as Eugene Volokh points out, the government cannot restrict trademark protections on something offensive, like the Washington Redskins.  The Washington NFL team has already declared victory and is immediately pressing the Supreme Court for relief from the Patent Office.

The 4-4 part of the ruling deals with the scope: Alito, Thomas, Roberts and of all people, Justice Breyer wanted very badly to say that the government could not weigh in on deeming commercial speech offensive at all, which would have been the largest SC ruling in decades.  It would have effectively reversed the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" precedent, rather that, the people themselves have to determine what commercial speech was unacceptable through the "discourse of regular democracy".

For now at least, the ruling is limited to what punitive actions the government can take through non-application of third-party patent protections.  In the future, well, we could have a Citizen's United-type ruling where commercial free speech is limited only by what corporate shareholders are willing to tolerate.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Syria...

As if things weren't already bad enough in the Middle East this month with the continuing blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the continued diplomatic reverberations from Trump's disastrous trip to Jerusalem that required more than a dozen political operatives from both parties more than a week to stabilize (because State Department? We outsourced that!) it appears now Tehran is causing major problems in Syria.

Iran's military announced on Sunday that it launched several missiles into Syria, targeting Islamic State fighters in retaliation for the attacks in Tehran on June 7. 

The missile strikes are the first reported ground-to-ground attack from Iran into Syria since the Arab country descended into a civil war in 2011. 

"In this operation, several ground-to-ground midrange missiles were fired from IRGC bases in Kermanshah Province and targeted Takfiri forces in the Deir Ezzor region in Eastern Syria," the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on its official news website, Sepah News. The IRGC uses the term Takfiri to describe ISIS. 

Tehran was rocked by two deadly attacks on June 7targeting Iran's Parliament building and a shrine dedicated to the republic's revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini. 

Six assailants killed at least 16 people in the twin attacks, which ISIS claimed. It was the first time that ISIS, a Sunni Muslim group fighting Iranian-backed militias in Syria, has claimed responsibility for an attack in Iran. 

The IRGC had vowed revenge for the attacks and accused Saudi Arabia of supporting ISIS in the operation. 

At this point we're on the edge of an impressively serious regional conflagration in the Middle East, and we barely have a functioning State Department, let alone a real diplomatic corps right now.  Trump is running around attempting to loot the US Treasury and while Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq have been various levels of awful for the last fifteen years, we're close to a full-out royal rumble.

Stay tuned.  Things are about to go from bad to much worse.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Two stories on, well, if you'll excuse the pun, the Russian front today.  The plan as of today for the Trump regime is whataboutism involving the Democrats, and deflection of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's growing list of inquiries.  First comes the most ridiculous of denials...

An attorney for President Donald Trump was adamant on Sunday that the president is not under investigation, despite the president’s tweets this week referring to one as a "witch hunt."

“Let me be clear here,” said Jay Sekulow, a member of the president’s legal team, on NBC's “Meet The Press.” “The president is not and has not been under investigation for obstruction."

On Friday morning, President Trump sent a tweet that seemed to confirm that he was under scrutiny, writing, “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.”

But Sekulow claimed the president wasn’t referring to an actual investigation in the message, but instead a news report about one.

“The tweet from the president was in response to the five anonymous sources purportedly leaking information to the Washington Post,” he said, referring to the Post’s report this week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election now also includes a look at whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice.

Sekulow claimed the president is not spending a lot of time composing the tweets, but defended them as a means of speaking directly to voters, saying "he's responding to what he's seeing in the media in a way in which he thinks is appropriate to talk to those people that put him in office."

"He's not afraid of the investigation — there is no investigation," Sekulow said, adding, "there is not an investigation of the President of the United States, period."

No penalty for Sekulow to lie on TV here, which he's obviously doing and has every reason to continue doing.  Meanwhile, Trump's allies in Congress have locked on to a new target now that their plans to go after former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice failed, and their attempt to discredit Mueller ran into Trump's ham-fisted attempts to float Mueller's firing, prompting calls even from the GOP that such an act would be obviously over the line.

Their new obsession is former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch, briefly mentioned by James Comey in his testimony earlier this month.

The move could allow Republicans to attempt to pivot away from the investigation into Russia's election meddling — which top GOP lawmakers have signaled belongs to the Intelligence Committee — and focus on Lynch, who has long been a target of Republicans.

Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican who is a member of both the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, said it “would be very helpful” for Lynch to testify before the Judiciary panel, which oversees the Justice Department.

“Frankly, a lot of what Hillary Clinton was exposed to by Director Comey’s misconduct and the way he handled that was apparently in response to his lack of confidence in the attorney general, and I think there is a lot we could learn from that,” Cornyn said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also wants to hear from Lynch and is pushing for the Judiciary Committee to “get more involved.”

“The accusations now that ... the current and former attorney general were political — that has nothing to do with Russia as much as it has to do with how the Department of Justice is being run,” he said. “I want to find out all about that.”

A spokesman for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee chairman, stressed that no decisions have been made and staffers needed to first “gather evidence."

But the spokesman said it was “likely” after Comey’s remarks before the intelligence panel that Lynch’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee “will become necessary at some point.”

Republicans are tying anything to get the story off Russia, but every time Trump tweets he shoots his own party in the foot.  I suspect that this will only continue as the Trump camp gets more and more desperate.

Sunday Long Read: Landing A Narc Out Punch

We talk about US wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Korea and Europe, but the most costly and devastating war in US history remains the War on Drugs over the last 50 years. It's important to note that much of the collateral damage from it has fallen on our border neighbor to the south, and the town of Allende, Mexico was one of those tragic casualties.

There’s no missing the signs that something unspeakable happened in Allende, a quiet ranching town of about 23,000, just a 40-minute drive from Eagle Pass, Texas. Entire blocks of some of the town’s busiest streets lie in ruins. Once garish mansions are now crumbling shells, with gaping holes in the walls, charred ceilings, cracked marble countertops and toppled columns. Strewn among the rubble are tattered, mud-covered remnants of lives torn apart: shoes, wedding invitations, medications, television sets, toys.

In March 2011 gunmen from the Zetas cartel, one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in the world, swept through Allende and nearby towns like a flash flood, demolishing homes and businesses and kidnapping and killing dozens, possibly hundreds, of men, women and children.

The destruction and disappearances went on in fits and starts for weeks. Only a few of the victims’ relatives — mostly those who didn’t live in Allende or had fled — dared to seek help. “I would like to make clear that Allende looks like a war zone,” reads one missing person report. “Most people who I questioned about my relatives responded that I shouldn’t go on looking for them because outsiders were not wanted, and were disappeared.”

But unlike most places in Mexico that have been ravaged by the drug war, what happened in Allende didn’t have its origins in Mexico. It began in the United States, when the Drug Enforcement Administration scored an unexpected coup. An agent persuaded a high-level Zetas operative to hand over the trackable cellphone identification numbers for two of the cartel’s most wanted kingpins, Miguel Ángel Treviño and his ​brother Omar.

Then the DEA took a gamble. It shared the intelligence with a Mexican federal police unit that has long had problems with leaks — even though its members had been trained and vetted by the DEA. Almost immediately, the Treviños learned they’d been betrayed. The brothers set out to exact vengeance against the presumed snitches, their families and anyone remotely connected to them.

Their savagery in Allende was particularly surprising because the Treviños not only did business there — moving tens of millions of dollars in drugs and guns through the area each month — they’d also made it their home.

For years after the massacre, Mexican authorities made only desultory efforts to investigate. They erected a monument in Allende to honor the victims without fully determining their fates or punishing those responsible. American authorities eventually helped Mexico capture the Treviños but never acknowledged the devastating cost. In Allende, people suffered mostly in silence, too afraid to talk publicly.

A year ago ProPublica and National Geographic set out to piece together what happened in this town in the state of Coahuila — to let those who bore the brunt of the attack, and those who played roles in triggering it, tell the story in their own words. They did so often at great personal risk. Voices like these have rarely been heard during the drug war: Local officials who abandoned their posts; families preyed upon by both the cartel and their own neighbors; cartel operatives who cooperated with the DEA and saw their friends and families slaughtered; the U.S. prosecutor who oversaw the case; and the DEA agent who led the investigation and who, like most people in this story, has family ties on both sides of the border.

When pressed about his role, the agent, Richard Martinez slumped in his chair, his eyes welling with tears. “How did I feel about the information being compromised? I’d rather not say, to be honest with you. I’d kind of like to leave it at that. I’d rather not say.”

Martinez's story is a hell of a tale, both a cautionary one and a rallying point for those opposed by the senseless ocean of blood that has been spilled over the decades in the name of "keeping our streets safe from drugs."

Give it a read.

Trials And Tribulations

Not one, not two, but three cases (well, a bad verdict, a mistrial, and a non-verdict) in the past 24 hours in three high-profile jury cases.  First, another murderous police officer is acquitted on the sole reason his victim, Philando Castle, was black, and therefore not deserving of human rights.

A jury found St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez not guilty Friday in the fatal shooting of Philando Castile, whose livestreamed death during a traffic stop stunned a nation.

Castile’s family called the decision proof of a dysfunctional criminal justice system, while prosecutors cautioned the public to respect the jury’s verdict “because that is the fundamental premise of the rule of law.”

“I am so disappointed in the state of Minnesota,” Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said at a news conference shortly after the verdict was read in court about 2:45 p.m. “My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the Twin Cities — the state of Minnesota with TC on it. My son loved this city and this city killed my son. And the murderer gets away.”

Hours later, at the tail end of a protest march through the streets of St. Paul, hundreds of people headed out on Interstate 94 at Dale, shutting down the freeway. Over the course of about an hour, the crowd thinned out and was moved to a ramp near Marion before State Patrol officers moved in after 12:30 a.m. Saturday and began making 18 arrests. Among those arrested were reporters Susan Du of City Pages and David Clarey of the Minnesota Daily, who were covering the protest.

The decision came on the last day of a three-week trial in a case that had been closely watched ever since Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, livestreamed the brutal aftermath on Facebook.

The jury of five women and seven men reached its verdict after about 30 hours of deliberations over five days. They appeared stalled Wednesday, and were called into the courtroom and asked to continue deliberations. Juror Dennis Ploussard said the jury was deadlocked 10 for acquittal, two for conviction until Friday afternoon.

It didn't matter that Castle's death was effectively broadcast to the nation, he was pulled over by a cop, the cop "felt his life was in danger" and Castle's life was ended.  That's all it takes to die as a criminal if you're black in America, the gut feeling of a cop and your life is forfeit without due process or recompense.  You die.  That's it.  The end.

If you're however a famous black celebrity who preyed on women for decades, you're fine.  Jurors were unable to come to a decision on the guilt of actor Bill Cosby.

The judge in the Bill Cosby trial declared a mistrial Saturday after the jury failed to reach a verdict in the case. The jurors -- five women and seven men -- were unable to come to a unanimous decision in a courtroom battle closely watched by the public as well as dozens of women who have accused Cosby of similar misconduct in the past. Cosby faced three charges of aggravated indecent assault.

Prosecutors announced they will retry the case.

Again, the Defense team was able to get a mistrial and rested their case after six minutes and it was enough to force a mistrial after six days.

That brings us to here in Cincy, where the trial of Sam DuBose's killer continues as Ray Tensing himself took the stand at the end of his retrial.

As Ray Tensing tried to open the car door, Sam DuBose pulled it shut with his left hand and restarted the car with his right.

Then came Tensing's decision to reach inside and try to remove the key from the ignition. His attorney called it a mistake. A prosecution witness said it was “tactically unsound.”

“He was so fast putting the car into drive," Tensing testified Friday. "He just mashed the accelerator to the floor.”

The former University of Cincinnati police officer said his left arm became “trapped,” pinned against the steering wheel by one of DuBose’s arms. He said he lost his balance and fell backwards as DuBose accelerated.

Tensing, who was 25 at the time, felt his body “moving with the car.”

“Instinctively, I reached for my gun,” he said. “I didn’t want to get sucked under his car and run over."

Tensing fired one shot to DuBose’s head, killing him instantly. The 1998 Honda Accord drove up the Mount Auburn street and crashed about 300 feet away through a guardrail into a utility pole.

Jurors heard Tensing explain the July 2015 incident, as he took the stand in his own defense and testified for more than two hours. He was the last witness called by his attorney, Stew Mathews.

Closing arguments in the retrial are set to begin Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court. Before jurors left for the day, Judge Leslie Ghiz told them to pack enough clothes for a two-night stay. The 12 jurors and four alternates will be sequestered if necessary during deliberations.

I have little to no hope for Tensing to be convicted.   Black people are simply vermin to be shot at the will of cops in America.  I'm only alive because my time hasn't come yet, I guess.