StupidiNews!

• At least 4 million are without power this morning as Hurricane Irma ripped up Florida's western coastline and continues into southern Georgia this morning as a Category 1 storm.
• North Dakota native Cara Mund became the first Miss America pageant winner from that state, crowned last night Mund said she disagreed with Donald Trump's stance on climate change.
• Norwegians go to the polls today to elect a government in a close race, PM Erna Solberg's Conservatives are looking for re-election against the opposition Labour Party. 
• North Korea is warning that the US will face the "greatest pain" as the UN Security Council votes on strict new oil import and asset freeze sanctions against Pyongyang on Monday.
• California lawmakers are banning autonomous drone delivery of marijuana ahead of the state legalizing recreational use of the drug on January 1.

Hillary Hangs It Up

Not that anyone really expected her to try again, and not that she would or would not have succeeded, but Hillary Clinton will not be running again for office she says.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Sunday that she will not pursue the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“I am done with being a candidate,” Clinton said on CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”

Clinton — who on Tuesday will release “What Happened,” her memoir of the 2016 campaign — does plan to stay involved in national politics, just not as an “active politician” who may launch a campaign.

“But I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country’s future is at stake,” she said in an interview with Jane Pauley.

Clinton also was critical of President Trump’s preparedness for the White House.

“We have a reality show that leads to the election of a president. He ends up in the Oval Office. He says, ‘Boy, it’s so much harder than I thought it would be. This is really tough. I had no idea,’” Clinton said. “Well, yeah, because it’s not a show. It’s real. It’s reality, for sure.”

 It's reality alright, and America will be extremely lucky to survive it as a democracy of any sort.

Still, we don't much tolerate presidential losers in America, at least since America gave that Nixon guy a second crack at the brass ring, and boy was that a mistake.  Fair or not, we don't really bother to give them the time of day, and Hillary officially saying she's out was necessary if only to (temporarily) stop the noise coming from the Village.

Probably not, though.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It's hard to overstate just how much social media network and search engine advertising helped the Russians plant their fake news stories, and nobody's more guilty of this than Facebook, the tool of choice for the discriminating Russian provatskiya agent.  Now that we know Russian front companies bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ads on Zuckerberg's toy, Congress has a few questions they want answered, and they have the means to get those answers.

The discovery that a Russian company bought election-related Facebook ads in last year’s presidential race opens new avenues for Justice Department and congressional investigators and likely will lead to subpoenas for confidential records of social media advertisers, former prosecutors say.

Facebook’s disclosure, which a key Senate Democrat called “the tip of the iceberg,” appears to show that Russians searching for ways to harm Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects broke criminal laws barring foreigners from attempting to influence U.S. elections.

The findings could ease investigators’ efforts to win Facebook’s voluntary release of records showing whether Russian intelligence agencies went even further to boost Donald Trump’s chances – by buying far more ads with much stealthier methods than the easily traceable $150,000 in purchases that the company divulged on Wednesday.

If Facebook, Twitter and other social media firms don’t cooperate, subpoenas could be in the offing.

The evidence of Russian ad buys on Facebook "is likely to be of great interest to all of the entities investigating Russian interference with last year’s election,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former assistant U.S. attorney who now heads the Columbia University law school’s Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity.

“To the extent that Facebook and other social media companies don’t voluntarily cooperate, I would expect subpoenas to be issued and other legal avenues to be pursued," she added -- though it’s uncertain whether the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees would oblige Democrats' push to compel cooperation.

Russia’s use of social media is a focus of investigations into the Kremlin’s massive, multi-pronged cyberattack by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the congressional intelligence committees.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that he has believed since the beginning of his panel’s investigation that Russians were using “the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything – the Facebooks, Googles and Twitters … to intervene in our elections.”

Addressing a major intelligence conference in Washington, Warner called “the tip of the iceberg” Facebook’s revelation that it had tracked thousands of the ads to a Russian company linked to a so-called, Kremlin-directed “troll farm” that spread Russian propaganda.

The sponsored Facebook ads pop up near the top of Facebook users’ private news feeds. Ads that are targeted to a certain subset of people are known as “dark posts,” because only the recipients see them. Many such ads are designed to automatically disappear once they’ve been viewed by Facebook customers.

U.S. intelligence agencies also say Russian operatives unleashed automated attacks using computer commands known as “bots” to circulate fake news about Clinton, often via phony Twitter accounts.

Warner said he wants Facebook representatives “to come back in” for further questioning by Senate investigators.

“I want to see Twitter back in” as well, he said. “I want to see others come back in.”

My biggest hope is that subpoenas derail Zuckerberg's political aspirations for good (or at least until after 2020).  The last thing Democrats need right now is one of the world's richest white guys promising he can run America like a start-up and on the ticket by dint of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules.

Sunday Long Read: White Paper

This week's Sunday Long Read is the inimitable Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Trump regime, who he correctly classifies as America's first white president, a president for white America, of whiteness, enabled and powered by its fear of non-whiteness, and dedicated to the supremacy of whiteness in the United States.

IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuckcasts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

And this is the key to understanding Trump, his supporters, and the people who voted for him.  It is not enough to reverse the Obama era, his legacy must be burned on the White House south lawn like a Klan cross warning, immolated along with the dream of anyone who isn't white. We must have that burned out of us, we must never raise our head high enough to glimpse the path to follow Barack Obama.  That must go up in flames, for that can never be allowed again.

That is what Trump sold for years, making the power of whiteness available to the least among the small empty towns, those in places without jobs or hope or much of a future.  Trump sold being white as the ultimate insider's card.

And it's a buyer's market.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Like any good investigator, Bob Mueller is conducting interviews with witnesses in order to obtain information, and the witnesses he wants to talk to regarding Trump and Russia are a half-dozen aides, all high-level Trump regime personnel, to get them to roll on the boss.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has alerted the White House that his team will probably seek to interview six top current and former advisers to President Trump who were witnesses to several episodes relevant to the investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the request.

Mueller’s interest in the aides, including trusted adviser Hope Hicks, former press secretary Sean Spicer and former chief of staff Reince Priebus, reflects how the probe that has dogged Trump’s presidency is starting to penetrate a closer circle of aides around the president.

Each of the six advisers was privy to important internal discussions that have drawn the interest of Mueller’s investigators, according to people familiar with the probe, including his decision in May to fire FBI Director James B. Comey. Also of interest is the White House’s initial inaction after warnings about then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s December discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

The advisers are also connected to internal documents that Mueller’s investigators have asked the White House to produce, according to people familiar with the special counsel’s inquiry.

Roughly four weeks ago, the special counsel’s team provided the White House with the names of the first group of current and former Trump advisers and aides whom investigators expect to question.

In addition to Priebus, Spicer and Hicks, Mueller has notified the White House he will probably seek to question White House counsel Don McGahn and one of his deputies, James Burnham. Mueller’s office has also told the White House that investigators may want to interview Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who works closely with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

White House officials are expecting that Mueller will seek additional interviews, possibly with family members, including Kushner, who is a West Wing senior adviser, according to the people familiar with Mueller’s inquiry.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is always a fun scenario to see acted out.  And if Spicer and Priebus don't roll over, Donny's family seems pretty vulnerable and self-centered to me, just like dad.

Hell, Mueller might end up with too much information, a pretty rare occurrence in a criminal investigation of a politician as dirty as Trump.  White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is the latest to lawyer up over Russia, and she won't be the last Trump aide to play this game of musical chairs to see who gets the immunity prize when Mueller kills the tunes.

Stay tuned, folks.

Last Call For Outfoxed Again

Dylan Matthews at Vox reminds us that despite Rachel Maddow and MSNBC enjoying a ratings spike in the Trump era, America is still very much FOX News country, and remains powerful enough by itself to determine American elections.

Fox News is, by far, America’s dominant TV news channel; in the second quarter of 2017, Fox posted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN. Given that Fox was founded by a longtime Republican Party operative and has almost exclusively hired conservative commentators, talk radio hosts, and the like to host its shows, it would stand to reason that its dominance on basic cable could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections.

A new study in the American Economic Review (the discipline’s flagship journal), with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds exactly that. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

They estimate that if Fox News hadn't existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

For context, that would've made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama's 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote.

"There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty" about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. "I personally don't think it's totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research." And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections.

Without FOX, America would be a far different place.  What's more, they are far more effective at moving Dems to the R column than anyone is at convincing Republicans to vote for the Democrats.

The effects of CNN and MSNBC on centrist voters are mostly negligible; MSNBC, in 2000 and 2004, modestly increased odds of voting Republican, before it turned left in time for 2008. But Fox News increases Republican voting odds for centrists, for Democratic viewers, and even, in 2004 and 2008, for Republicans already strongly inclined to vote that way. Watching three minutes more of Fox News per week in 2008 would have made the typical Democratic or centrist voter 1 percentage point likelier to vote Republican that year.

“Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," the authors find. While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizable minority aren't, and they're particularly suggestible to the channel's influence. In 2000, they estimate that 58 percent of Fox viewers who were initially Democrats changed to supporting the Republican candidate by the end of the election cycle; in 2004, the persuasion rate was 27 percent, and 28 percent in 2008. MSNBC, by contrast, only persuaded 8 percent of initial Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2008 cycle.

These are big effects, with major societal implications. The authors find that the Fox News effect translates into a 0.46 percentage point boost to the GOP vote share in the 2000 presidential race, a 3.59-point boost in 2004, and a 6.34-point boost in 2008; the boost increases as the channel's viewership grew. This effect alone is large enough, they argue, to explain all the polarization in the US public's political views from 2000 to 2008.

In other words, you can singlehandedly blame FOX for the Dubya years. Long before Trump or the Russians, the Republicans already had a substantial built-in advantage, and there may not be any way to stop it now short of another 2008 financial crisis magnitude disaster.

That's Great, It Starts With An Earthquake

Hurricanes on the east coast, flooding in the Gulf, massive wildfires in the west and just because, now we get a major earthquake off the southern coast of Mexico.

At least 16 people have died after the most powerful earthquake to hit Mexico in a century struck off the country's southern coast. 

During an interview with CNN affiliate Foro TV, Luis Felipe Puente, the country's national coordinator for emergency management, said 10 peopled died in Oaxaca state, four in Chiapas state and two in Tabasco state. 

The magnitude-8.1 quake, which was felt as far as Mexico City and Guatemala City, was registered off Mexico's southern coast just as heavy rains from Hurricane Katia lashed the east. The epicenter was in the Pacific Ocean, some 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) southeast of the capital and 74 miles (120 kilometers) from the Pacific coast. 

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said the quake was the strongest earthquake Mexico has experienced in 100 years. 

It hit just before midnight on Thursday, when many people would have been sleeping.

The planet will be fine long after we're gone, it'll adjust and keep being the third rock from the sun for several billion years.  Humans, well.  I'm thinking this particular trip around the sun that the earth might be reacting a bit to shed a few billion parasites.

Last Call For Checkmating The Credit Checkers

It was only a matter of time before hackers hit the Holy Grail of data jackpots: consumer credit agency Equifax was nailed by a breach that could have essentially exposed everyone with a credit record in the US.

Equifax, a provider of consumer credit reports, said it experienced a data breach affecting as many as 143 million US people after criminals exploited a vulnerability on its website. The US population is about 324 million people, so that's about 44 percent of its population.

The data exposed in the hack includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers. The hackers also accessed credit card numbers for 209,000 US consumers and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 US people. Limited personal information for an unknown number of Canadian and UK residents was also exposed. Equifax—which also provides credit monitoring services for people whose personal information is exposed—said the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July.

"Criminals exploited a US website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files," Equifax said in a statement late Thursday, without elaborating. That leaves open a wide range of possibilities, with injection bugs, faulty authentication mechanisms, and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities topping the list of the most widely exploited website flaws.

This isn't the first time a garden-variety website flaw has been exploited to obtain a massive amount of sensitive data. Associates of Albert Gonzalez, a convicted hacker who was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison, exploited a SQL-injection flaw that helped them obtain data for 130 million credit cards. On Wednesday, exploit code for a nine-year-old code-execution vulnerability in Apache Struts 2—a software framework used by many large financial service websites—went public, but there was no immediate indication that the Equifax site uses it.

You read that right. One hundred forty-three million credit records exposed.  Equifax is offering free credit monitoring to anyone affected, but that's pretty much everyone in the US with an Equifax credit file.

Which is, you know, anybody who ever had a credit card or loan application in the last 25 years.

Needless to say, you should consider your identity compromised and should take steps.

Until the next massive data breach, that is.  If you're wondering about consequences for Equifax's corporate leadership, well...let's just say they knew what was coming and acted in their own self-interest.

Three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach that may have compromised information on about 143 million U.S. consumers.

The credit-reporting service said late Thursday in a statement that it discovered the intrusion on July 29. Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 pre-scheduled trading plans.

In other words, they knew for over a month and didn't tell anyone, and sold shares before revealing the breach and the crash of Equifax stock.

Because corporate America.

Sure hope the credit records for these three aren't compromised, ya know?  That would be a shame.

Understanding Donald

Looks like Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress finally realized the best way to get Trump to do something is "couch it as revenge against those who wronged you" and voila!

President Trump and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) have agreed to pursue a deal that would permanently remove the requirement that Congress repeatedly raise the debt ceiling, three people familiar with the decision said.

Trump and Schumer discussed the idea Wednesday during an Oval Office meeting. The two, along with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), agreed to work together over the next several months to try to finalize a plan, which would need to be approved by Congress.

One of the people familiar described it as a “gentlemen’s agreement.”

The three people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the meeting.

Senate Democrats hope they will be able to finalize an arrangement with Trump by December.

On Thursday, Trump was asked by a reporter at the White House about abolishing the congressional process for raising the debt ceiling. He replied that "there are lots of good reasons to do that."

"It could be discussed," Trump said. "For many years, people have been talking about getting rid of [the] debt ceiling altogether."

He confirmed during the exchange with reporters at the White House that the issue was discussed during his meeting with congressional leaders on Wednesday.

Of course the corollary to this is "Trump will immediately screw you over on any deal you make with him" so of course this is going to fall apart well before December, but in the meantime Trump loses nothing to piss off Republicans who didn't get Trumpcare passed, because that's how America's government works now.

Whoever can babysit Tang the Conqueror and make him think everything is his brilliant idea to begin with wins.

Last Call For Making A Huge Massie Of Things

Local libertarian douchecanoe for Rep. Thomas Massie is taking a hell of a lot of heat for being one of the only three jagoffs in the House to vote against Harvey funding, and that frustration boiled over to Twitter today.

The Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce tweeted out an explicit opinion of U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie. 

The tweet was deleted shortly after it was posted Wednesday afternoon.

"Wow, what a piece of sh*t," the Northern Kentucky Chamber tweeted with a link to a River City News story about Massie, R-Garrison, voting against relief aid for Hurricane Harvey victims. 

Northern Kentucky Chamber President Brent Cooper apologized for the tweet and said he'd launch an investigation into how such a tweet could have come from the chamber Twitter account.

"It doesn't reflect the feeling of the chamber of commerce," Cooper said. "I apologize to Thomas Massie or anyone else who saw it."

NKY's Rep. Thomas Massie one of three 'no' votes on Harvey relief

Cooper said only two chamber staff members have access to the account, he and one other staff member.

"I know it didn't come from me," Cooper said.

The other staff member, whom Cooper wouldn't name, is traveling and didn't tweet it, he said. The chamber also contracts with a company to manage the social media account. Cooper wouldn't name the company. 

"I'm in the process of changing the security information to ensure it doesn't happen again," Cooper said.

The NKY Chamber's terrible Twitter security practices aside, whoever did tweet that was frankly right. It takes a special kind of garbage human being to vote against disaster funding when you know it's needed and Massie has all the empathy of a burning oil refinery.

I'm really hoping that this is the straw that sends Massie home, but NKY is dead solid Trump country, and you can spot the Republican here in 2018 40 points.

Ralph's Korean Barbecue

Over at the NY Post, columnist Ralph Peters calls for the genocide of a million North Koreans.

No really guys, this isn't hyperbole or me being snarky, this is actually a published columnist in a published newspaper calling for the deaths of North Koreans in a brutal preemptive military strike.

Better a million dead North Koreans than a thousand dead Americans. The fundamental reason our government exists is to protect our people and our territory. Everything else is a grace note. And the words we never should hear in regard to North Korea’s nuclear threats are “We should’ve done something.” 

Instead, we should do something. Pyongyang’s Sunday test of a hydrogen bomb of devastating power begs for decisive action. Must we wait until Americans die?
A pre-emptive strike against Kim Jong Un’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs would be a terrible thing, demanding a vast military effort (if done properly) and leaving broad destruction in its wake. But that terrible option increasingly appears to be the least bad option. The question is whether we’ll delay action until it’s too late to save American lives. 

When we’re threatened with nuclear destruction by North Korea, a military response is not unethical. Rather, inviting a North Korean attack by hesitating endlessly — then witnessing the slaughter of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of our citizens — would be unethical and immoral. 

We do not want war. That much could not be more obvious. But we cannot sacrifice American lives to shield the consciences of intellectual elites who, from protected positions of immense privilege, insist that all human life is precious, not just our “deplorable” American lives. 

If there is any real hope of a peaceful solution, of course that would be preferable. But we cannot rely on miracles or mirages. A generation of talks has done nothing but protect North Korea’s weapons programs. Sanctions haven’t restrained North Korea either, since China, Russia, India and other states undercut them.

Nor have our displays of force in the region done anything to deter a regime conditioned to our empty pageantry. 

North Korea doesn’t believe we will act. Because we never have acted. 

Those wildly misnamed Washington institutions labeled “think tanks” find themselves stumped: Conditioned to group-think and addicted to that supreme intellectual opiate, negotiations, we hear — even from conservative voices — that there’s no military solution, while the left repeats that “War never changes anything.” 

As to the latter claim, warfare has been humanity’s ultimate means of resolving intractable issues since the first cave-dwellers went at the gang from the cave down yonder with rocks. We may not like it — I don’t — but to insist that war isn’t humanity’s sometimes-necessary default means of survival is to ignore all of human history.

Ahh, the same song they played in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.  Only this time the stakes are far higher and the death toll will be as many dead South Koreans as there are North Koreans when the trumpets of war sound.

Genocide is such a popular tune, isn't it?

Waking Up From The DREAM, Con't

Can we stop pretending that Trump's six-month punt on DACA isn't anything more than a cruel, fantastically racist and bloody-minded stunt to shore up the base after Harvey and Mueller, and that even if Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell could pull anything out of their asses and pass legislation keeping the referrals that Trump would ever sign it?

Can we stop the song and dance about Trump not being a monster?  Because he's not pretending anymore either.

White House talking points on Tuesday urged DACA recipients to prepare for a "departure from the United States," a much starker possible future than Trump administration officials used in public when announcing an end to the program.

The statement was contained in a background document that was sent by the White House to offices on Capitol Hill, obtained by CNN from multiple sources. 

In the "DACA talking points" memo, the White House laid out a number of bullet points for supporters on Tuesday's announcement outlining the administration's action. One bullet point suggests DACA participants should prepare to leave the country. 

"The Department of Homeland Security urges DACA recipients to use the time remaining on their work authorizations to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States -- including proactively seeking travel documentation -- or to apply for other immigration benefits for which they may be eligible," the memo says. 

Neither the White House or Department of Homeland Security disputed the contents of the document to CNN. 

"As noted, we expect Congress to pass legislation so this will hopefully be a moot point," DHS spokesman David Lapan said. "However, of course we would encourage persons who are in the country illegally to depart voluntarily, or seek another form of immigration benefit for which they might qualify." 

"No one has an entitlement to live in the United States illegally," Lapan added. "Individuals have an independent obligation to comply with the laws that Congress passes, in all contexts."

Make plans to self-deport now, those of you whose families brought them over from another country at age 2.  Save Dear Leader Trump the expense of hunting you down and forcibly expelling you from glorious country America!

Or else.

That's the "heart" Trump is showing.  If he's going down, he's going to do as much damage as he can before he goes.  And if you're expecting congressional Republicans to play fair, they're already plotting the price that Dems will have to pay in order to save DACA...that is if Ryan can keep his caucus together.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill broadly agreed on Tuesday that something should be done about young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and who will eventually lose deportation protections if Congress does not step in to help them.

But Republicans are already placing conditions on their support that could kill the effort entirely. They are willing to vote for protecting so-called “Dreamers” ― but not without getting something in exchange for it.

“Hopefully there will be some give and take and we can accomplish something,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, suggesting Democrats could support efforts to boost border security.

Build Trump's wall or we deport them all...and Dems are stupid if they think the Republicans won't screw them over on this and do both.

Last Call For Trumped University

Over at Nate Silver's place, Dave Wasserman argues that the 2018 midterms could be the year where college educated white voters turn against the GOP and deliver a big win for the Dems.

Even with the political winds at their back, Democrats enter the 2018 congressional midterms at a historic geographic disadvantage. They also face demographic hurdles: Midterm electorates tend to be older and whiter than those that show up in presidential years. That’s part of the reason Republicans picked up so many House and Senate seats in 2010 and 2014. 

But there is one crucial demographic dynamic working in Democrats’ favor: The 2018 midterms are poised to feature the most college-educated electorate in American history. 

Almost exactly eight years ago, I argued that Democrats were in deep danger because 2010 could be the “Year of the Angry White Senior.” The premise was simple: Midterm elections had always skewed toward older voters, but never before had there been such a generational divide. In 2008, Barack Obama carried voters 18 to 29 by 34 percentage points but lost seniors by 8 points — a whopping 42-point gulf. Sure enough, Democrats’ young base stayed home in the midterms, and they lost 63 House seats. 

Eight years later, there’s an analogous dynamic working the opposite way. Midterms have always skewed toward college-educated voters, but never before has there been such an educational divide, particularly among whites. In 2016, exit polls found that Donald Trump carried white voters with a college degree by just 3 percentage points, but won whites without a college degree by 37 points — a massive 34-point gap. By contrast, this gap was just 14 points in 2008. 

This leaves Republicans dangerously exposed. Just as Obama’s legions of young supporters failed to show up at the polls for Democrats in 2010 and 2014, Trump’s base of whites without college degrees could leave the GOP stranded in 2018.

Sure, it's possible, especially if the Mueller investigation turns up massive corruption on the part of the Trump regime and then congressional Republicans do precisely nothing about it.  A lot could happen in the next 15 months: impeachment recommendations, resignations, war, illness, an event we haven't anticipated yet.

But all things being the same, I just don't buy this for a second.

The majority of college-educated white voters still voted for Trump knowing full well what he was going to try to do.  They still voted for the same GOP-controlled Congress that they voted for in 2010 and 2012 even as many of them pulled the lever for Obama then and for Hillary last year.  The fact is all the disapproval for Trump in the world doesn't mean that white folks with college degrees are going to stop being overwhelmingly Republican at the local/state/House/Senate level.

They're not going to start voting for the Democrats.  If anything, most of them are going to say "Well my reasonable Republican representative/senator is needed more than ever to stand up to Trump like they did on health care" conveniently forgetting that 97% of the GOP voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Dems need to stop chasing them and start turning out the base for midterms, and that would help by giving them a reason to come out.  "Stopping Trump" should be enough, but that clearly failed in 2016.  That wasn't enough for a lot of people.

Will it be enough in 2018 given all Trump's awfulness?

I don't honestly know and that frightens me.

Houston, We Have A Problem, Con't

As Houston remains flooded and the Caribbean and Florida prepare for Category 5 Irma later this week, the question of rebuilding after storms depends not just on drywall and dry roads to reach homes, but of labor too. The cruel irony of Trump's DACA announcement today is that his campaign of fear and terror among America's undocumented is going to make the response to Harvey that much more difficult.

It will take an army of workers to reconstruct a vast swath of Southeast Texas, including the sprawling metropolis of Houston, that was devastated by Hurricane Harvey. Whether the region can do it without fully embracing workers like Enríquez will soon be put to the test — with reverberations that could be felt nationwide.

Under President Trump, authorities in Texas have been bearing down on immigrants who are in the country illegally. Until a judge blocked the measure last week, they threatened to enact a new state law that would outlaw sanctuary cities. Texas also has been leading a group of 10 states demanding that Trump end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which granted reprieves from deportation to nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as minors. 

It is a harsher landscape for those in the country illegally than it was 12 years ago, when the Gulf Coast faced the similar-size task of cleaning up from Hurricane Katrina. Eight days after that storm made landfall, President George W. Bush bowed to pressure from construction firms and relaxed worker ID rules. By some estimates, that allowed more than a quarter of all government-paid recovery jobs to go to undocumented immigrants. 

But 10 days after Harvey struck Texas with record-setting rains and caused unprecedented flooding, the Trump administration has made no similar proclamation. Worse, immigrant rights groups say, federal authorities have sent conflicting signals about whether they might start simply detaining and deporting those flushed out into the open by the storm. 

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who was critical of Bush’s decision, said in a statement Sunday that he sees even greater challenges in recovering from Harvey. “But that does not mean federal immigration laws should be ignored. Nor should regulations that require federal contractors to verify legal work authorization of their employers,” he said. “These policies were put in place to protect American workers and taxpayers.”

Weird, because American workers and taxpayers aren't exactly signing up for Harvey rebuilding jobs, Lamar.

 

More than 200,000 homes sustained damage in the storm, including more than 13,500 that were destroyed, according to early local estimates that don’t provide solid numbers for some of the hardest-hit areas. Leaders in the construction industry have begun sounding alarms that there will not be enough American-born workers to rebuild as quickly as needed. 

“If they would relax the rules, honestly, that would be great, we could use it,” said Jeffrey Nielsen, executive vice president of the Houston Contractors Association, whose members include the city’s largest firms that build roads, bridges and other public works.
Nielsen said that even before Harvey hit, almost every member of the association was grappling with a shortage of workers. With a crushing list of jobs now growing by the day, thousands need to be hired — and fast. 

Nielsen said he and other construction industry officials were told at a weekend briefing that roughly 30 percent of all roads in and around Houston will remain impassable without some construction work. 

“The truth is, there are not a lot of people jumping up and down to do civil construction work in Texas. It’s hot, and these jobs are pouring concrete or, worse, hot asphalt,” Nielsen said. “That’s the reality of it, and we need more people than ever.”

There are plenty in and around Houston who might consider taking on the work, which can pay $20 an hour or more, if ID requirements were relaxed, construction industry officials say.

So weird that we have a major need for workers and a major group of workers that want jobs and are willing to do the work, but Trump can't relax these requirements or his base will implode.  I'm sure the geniuses who believe Obama was president during Katrina won't care, but the fact of the matter is Harvey should serve as a refutation of modern Republicanism to its core.

And let's not forget, that core is white supremacist racism and "I got mine, screw you."

Bit Of A Break

On vacation this week, so light posting (as I've sure you've seen.)

Should be back to regular order next week.