Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

As I keep saying, the odds of any major gun safety legislation passing is low even if Democrats had the House, the White House, and 60 Senate votes, because as former Democratic Rep. Steve Israel points out in the NY Times today, any Republican who crosses the NRA is immediately done.

There were moments when I thought, “Finally, we will do something.” I remember sitting at my desk in my district office on Long Island watching the grisly images of the murder of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., in 2012, and President Barack Obama with tears streaming down his cheeks. I was confident that at the very least we’d expand background checks or make it harder for people with mental illness to obtain guns.

My confidence ebbed when I heard my colleagues turn this into a debate over the rights of gun owners instead of the right to life of children. In the confines of the members-only elevators, where my colleagues could speak honestly, I heard colleagues confide that any vote for gun safety would lower their N.R.A. scores, making them casualties in the next election. 

“Finally, we will do something,” I thought after the June 2016 mass shooting in an Orlando, Fla., nightclub. I was in a leadership meeting with Nancy Pelosi when we heard that several colleagues had taken to the floor and started a sit-in to force the House to address gun violence. I was stunned to see dozens of my colleagues sitting and chanting, just before we were about to take a long recess, “No bill, no break.” 

We held the floor for 24 hours. Thousands converged spontaneously on Capitol Hill in support. This was a moment I thought we could no longer be ignored. I was right. Congress did act. It declared that fines would be slapped on House members who broadcast audio or video from the House floor. Thank God the decorum of the House was safe, at least. 

Then there were the annual rituals in the House Appropriations Committee. Democrats would offer amendments to prevent people on the terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms. A no-brainer, I thought. If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy an assault weapon, a common-sense position shared by over 80 percent of Americans. 

I remember the Republican chairman of the committee rising in opposition to the amendment, arguing that in America, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. I’m not sure he ever extended that argument to other populations, but it didn’t matter. The amendment failed. 

So did our attempts to rescind the infamous Dickey Amendment, which prevents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from even researching the relationship between gun violence and public health. The Dickey Amendment was so absurd that it was ultimately opposed by its own sponsor, Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican. Still, we failed. The result? The government can’t study gun violence but is spending $400,000 analyzing the effects of Swedish massages on rabbits. So at least the rabbits feel safe. 

And finally, there are those moments when members ourselves became victims. Gabby Giffords in Tucson; Steve Scalise at the congressional baseball game. Even the proximity of bullets resulted in shock and inaction. 

Why? Three reasons. 

First, just like everything else in Washington, the gun lobby has become more polarized. The National Rifle Association, once a supporter of sensible gun-safety measures, is now forced to oppose them because of competing organizations. More moderation means less market share. The gun lobby is in a race to see who can become more brazen, more extreme. 

Second, congressional redistricting has pulled Republicans so far to the right that anything less than total subservience to the gun lobby is viewed as supporting gun confiscation. The gun lobby score is a litmus test with zero margin for error. 

Third, the problem is you, the reader. You’ve become inoculated. You’ll read this essay and others like it, and turn the page or click another link. You’ll watch or listen to the news and shake your head, then flip to another channel or another app. This horrific event will recede into our collective memory. 

That’s what the gun lobbyists are counting on. They want you to forget. To accept the deaths of at least 58 children, parents, brothers, sisters, friends as the new normal. To turn this page with one hand, and use the other hand to vote for members of Congress who will rise in another moment of silence this week. And next week. And the foreseeable future.

And he's right.  You'll also notice I said "former" Representative Israel.  He retired in January 2016, Democrat Tom Suozzi was elected in his place.  But Israel dropped out of the House to pursue gun safety advocacy because he knew Congress would never get things done until the American people changed their minds.

It's possible.  Attitudes have certainly shifted on smoking and same-sex marriage in the US in the last 10-20 years.  But guns, well, Gunmerica is Gunmerica, and that's not going to change in my lifetime I believe.

Oh, and that GOP silencer bill in the House is now off the docket for the week, but don't expect it to be for long.

That may now be scuttled after a shooter opened fired on a crowd of country music concert-goers in Las Vegas, killing 58 and injuring more than 500—the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. A spokesman for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) declined to speculate on whether Sunday night’s tragedy has changed the GOP’s calculus. But according to the House schedule, the bill is not on the docket for this week. 

That the SHARE Act even got to this point underscores the potency of the gun rights lobby and the relationships it has cultivated both in Congress and within President Donald Trump’s innermost circle. 

Utah-based SilencerCo is one of the top manufacturers of suppressors in the United States. And its CEO Josh Waldron counts Donald Trump Jr. as a top ally.

Prior to Trump’s inauguration, Waldron got an assist from the president’s eldest son in helping to popularize his company’s products. Trump Jr., an avid hunter, appeared in a promotional video for SilencerCo in September of 2016.

Trump's adult sons are avid hunters and boy, do they want silencers.  Expect this to get passed quietly (if you'll excuse the pun) next week and head to the Senate before the end of the month.

Making America Gunmerica Always.

Not Doing So Welfare These Days

The Trump regime reportedly has welfare programs in their sights as part of GOP across-the-board austerity cuts, and that means every part of the safety net for the working poor and unemployed has to take a hit.

Trump administration officials are mulling an executive order that would instruct federal agencies to review low-income assistance programs, part of a coming effort to make sweeping changes to the country’s welfare system.

The White House began circulating a draft order to federal agencies for comment last week, according to two administration officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations.

One of the officials said the draft order calls on agencies to review existing regulations and propose new rules that conform to a set of broad welfare principles, including tighter work requirements that encourage recipients to shift back into the labor force.

The order also calls for streamlining or eliminating duplicate services and establishing metrics for holding agencies accountable for program performance. It also encourages greater cooperation with state and local governments.

The initiative comes as President Donald Trump shifts attention to his ambitious tax reform initiative in the wake of his failed effort to repeal Obamacare. Administration backers of the welfare executive order hope he signs it before Thanksgiving, one of the officials said.

Trump has mostly backed off his train of executive orders that marked the opening months of his regime, apparently having picked all the low-hanging fruit when it comes to erasing Barack Obama's legacy from existence, the rest will require Republicans in Congress to act (and take the blame).

But as with the Affordable Care Act, the executive branch is still quite capable of sabotaging the implementation of programs like SNAP, WIC, housing assistance, and more to the point where they will fail to work at all, and then Republicans can claim they're doing us a favor by getting rid of them.

The major austerity is coming with the next GOP budget. Until then, Trump's sabotage will do in a pinch.  But red state governors and state legislatures are more than happy to cooperate with the GOP sabotage of government in general.  Just look at what's happening to rural hospitals in red states that have refused Medicaid expansion, like my beloved western North Carolina where I grew up, where women like Lucia Parker will have to drive at least an hour to get to a hospital with a maternity ward now as hospitals are closing maternity wards just to stay open.

As Congress debates repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, rural hospitals are in a kind of purgatory, unsure about their Medicaid budgets and the private health insurance that sustains them. At least 81 rural hospitals have shut down across the country since 2010, according the North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center at UNC. The pace of closures has been increasing since the Great Recession, but the current health care policy limbo—which leaves hospitals and insurers unable to predict their income—exacerbates the problem. “The uncertainty is really impinging providers, particularly hospitals, from making the kinds of decisions that might put them on a better footing,” says center director Mark Holmes. 

Parker lives in an impoverished swath of rural Appalachia where the hospitals are particularly vulnerable. In her Congressional district, 20 percent of families with children live below the poverty line and more than 40 percent of residents—roughly 318,000 people—rely on some form of publicly-funded health care. Another hospital in the district, Angel Medical Center in Franklin, North Carolina, shut down its maternity ward in July, after officials said the unit was losing $2 million a year. And Parker’s congressman, Republican Mark Meadows, has not intervened to keep them open. The Freedom Caucus chairman has been one of the nation’s most vocal critics of Obamacare, favoring legislation that ends insurance subsidies and makes deep cuts to Medicaid. 

Any cuts to Medicaid would hurt rural hospitals, says Diane Calmus, government affairs and policy manager for the nonprofit National Rural Health Association. Seventy-five percent of patients in the Mission Health system—the nonprofit that runs Blue Ridge, Angel, and four other western North Carolina hospitals—are either uninsured or on Medicare or Medicaid. These hospitals were especially hard hit when the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly refused to expand Medicaid in 2013. Eighteen other states made the same decision, and the impact was clear: more than 70 percent of the rural hospitals that shut down in the past seven years were in 16 of those states. Four hospitals in rural North Carolina have closed since 2013, and Blue Ridge has been losing money every fiscal year since 2013. Last year it lost $3.1 million. Charity care—services that no one pays for—at rural hospitals has increased more than 50 percent since Obamacare passed. “We have a rural hospital closure crisis,” Calmus says. 

Holmes and other experts say the lack of Medicaid expansion is not the only cause of the crisis. They point to low Medicaid reimbursement rates, patients who can’t afford their deductibles, consolidation of hospital ownership, declining rural populations, medical staffing shortages, and a longstanding trend of Southern hospitals struggling to make ends meet. “You really have a death by a thousand paper cuts situation here,” Holmes says. But if a hospital wants to stay open, Calmus says, it may close a unit that is well-known for losing money: the maternity ward.

It's red state Trump voters in rural GOP districts who are going to get hurt the most by the Trump regime's austerity cuts.  They're going after not just the safety net, but the entire health infrastructure that keeps America together just to give the richest Americans another million a year in tax cuts.

And remember, none of this matters to the Republicans.  They just want to destroy as much government as possible in order to justify to voters why massive draconian cuts are necessary in order to make the rich who donate to them richer.

StupidiNews!

• Music legend Tom Petty is dead at the age of 66 of cardiac arrest, the 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee had just completed his final tour with his band, the Heartbreakers.
• The Trump regime is expected to expel as many as two-thirds of Cuban embassy staff from the US after Friday's announcement to slash US embassy staff in Havana.
• Donald Trump will travel to Puerto Rico today to survey the ongoing relief effort after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, millions still lack power, clean water, cell service, food and fuel.
• Activists in Catalan continue to take to the streets for a second day of protests after Sunday's independence referendum from Spain as Catalan leaders decide the next step.
• Microsoft is folding up its Groove music service, users will be able to migrate their music to Spotify through January 31, 2018.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump regime is turning over documents on Trump's Russian contacts and surprise!  Turns out that the White House has been lying again about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, yet again. This time it's Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in the hot seat.

Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. 

In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence. 

In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the Russian Senate, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light. 

Cohen declined the invitation to the economic conference, citing the difficulty of attending so close to the GOP convention, according to people familiar with the matter. And Cohen rejected the Moscow building plan. 

Nonetheless, the information about the interactions has been provided to congressional committees as well as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as they investigate whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election, according to people familiar with the inquiries who, like others cited in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the inquiry. 

Details of the communications were turned over by the Trump Organization in recent days to the White House, defense lawyers and government investigators and described to The Washington Post. 

Though there is no evidence that these Russia-related entreaties resulted in further action, the email communications about them show that Trump’s inner circle continued receiving requests from Russians deep into the presidential campaign.

In other words, the Trump organization had no problem with listening to "requests" from Putin's circle of Russian oligarchs for the purpose of putting a Trump Tower in Moscow.  It really is all about greed with these guys, pure, unadulterated avarice.

Trump sold our country for a goddamn chunk of prime Moscow real estate, but hey, the Russians had some help, and that was from an all too eager Silicon Valley who wanted in on the presidential ad campaign millions.  Turns out that Vlad and friends know a little something about catapulting the propaganda, and they were more than happy to use social media to do it.

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.

The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.

The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.

People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians.

One such ad featured photographs of an armed black woman “dry firing” a rifle — pulling the trigger of the weapon without a bullet in the chamber — the people familiar with the investigation said.

Investigators believe the advertisement may have been designed to encourage African American militancy and, at the same time, to stoke fears within white communities, the people said. But the precise purpose of the ad remains unclear to investigators, the people said.

Another showed an image of Democrat Hillary Clinton behind what appeared to be prison bars.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Russia’s exploitation of the Custom Audiences system. Facebook officials have previously said that they were caught off guard by the Russian propaganda campaign because the accounts, pages and ads appeared to be legitimate.

In addition to Custom Audiences, Russian operatives used other Facebook tools to target groups by demographics, geography, gender and interests, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The Custom Audiences tool differs because it allows advertisers to feed into Facebook’s systems a specific list of users they want to target. 

You mean exploiting technology to micro-target your message directly to the people most susceptible to that message has a dark side?  Gosh, who knew.

Ahh, but the Russians were more than eager to lead us down the path of destruction, after all were more than happy to follow the trail of blood where their propaganda led America.

And now we have Trump.

Another Day In Gunmerica

The death toll from last night's domestic terrorist attack in Las Vegas is now 58 with at least 400 injured, and over in the House, Republicans are hoping you won't notice two pro-gun bills they're trying to pass, because what we really need is more lethal guns in more places.

The House could pass legislation as early as this week that would roll back decades-old restrictions on gun silencers, opening up the market for a device that critics say would make it difficult in a mass shooting to detect where gunfire is coming from.

The House is also expected to move this fall on separate legislation that would allow people to carry their legally concealed weapons across state lines into jurisdictions, such as California, that tightly restrict weapons concealment.

The silencer measure is part of the Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, a broad-ranging gun bill delayed in June after House GOP Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and two Capitol Hill police officers were wounded by a gunman who opened fire on a congressional baseball practice session. 

Critics say silencers — called noise suppressors by supporters and heavily regulated by the federal government for more than eight decades — would make it harder for police officers to locate a shooter in an attack. 

“What it does is it disperses the sound, so you can’t identify where the sound is coming from,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, a St. Helena Democrat and avid hunter who opposes the bill. “It puts both law enforcement and the public at risk.” 

But Republicans say the provision, called the Hearing Protection Act, doesn’t really silence the sound of gunfire, only diminishes it enough to shield hunters and recreational shooters from hearing damage. 

“It isn’t a silencer because it still makes sound, but what it does is cuts the percentage of the noise down to make shooting sports a little nicer for people’s hearing,” said Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale (Butte County). 

“There’s a lot of false narrative being driven by this,” he said. “Anything to do with making guns more available or more convenient for people is going to find opposition by the left.”

Sure, because the real problem is hunters shouldn't have to wear ear protection.  Jesus wept.

Oh, and the bill would basically trash the Endangered Species Act by allowing more types of weapons to be used to hunt on federal land, and more animals to be hunted.  Even cops hate this silencer bill, but apparently this is one of those situations where cops are dirty government union employees and not cops, because what America really needs right now is more silencers.

Oh well.  Just another day in Gunmerica.

CHIP Off The Old Blockheads

While Republicans were busy trying to take health care coverage away from tens of millions over the last week, their incompetence actually did accomplish something: they took away health coverage from 9 million kids as federal funding for CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program, expired Saturday night.

Congress just allowed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provided low-cost health insurance to 9 million children, to expire.

If action is not taken soon to restore the funding, the effects will become obvious in schools across the country, with many of the children in the program unable to see a doctor for routine checkups, immunizations, visits when sick and other services.

The program, created under a 1997 law passed with bipartisan support during the administration of President Bill Clinton, provided coverage for children in families with low and moderate incomes as well as to pregnant women. It was instrumental in lowering the percentage of children who were uninsured from nearly 14 percent when it started to 4.5 percent in 2015. It was last reauthorized in 2015 and was due to be renewed by Sept. 30, 2017.

Amid unsuccessful efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the Republican-led Congress allowed the CHIP deadline to pass without action.

The program was primarily funded by the federal government, with states paying a good deal less. States still have some CHIP money available, but if Congress does not act quickly to restore the program, they will start to run out. Several states and the District of Columbia are expected to drain CHIP funding by the end of this year and many more by March 2018, according to this government report.

There doesn't seem to be any effort by the GOP to want to restore CHIP funding either, but hey, playing with the lives of millions of kids in order to get political leverage sure makes things fun, right?

Again, CHIP covered basic services like checkups, dental services, immunization and emergency services for kids from families that needed the most help.  It was very successful and helped a generation of young people over the last 20 years.

Right now it's broke, and there's zero urgency from Republicans in Congress to get anything done to reauthorize the program.  None.

As I've said numerous times, Trump is far from the only monster leading our government right now.

StupidiNews!

• Las Vegas police say at least 50 are dead and at least 200 are injured as a gunman opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort into an outdoor concert crowd below.
• Puerto Rico faces its 12th day without power, water, fuel and food as distribution of aid into rural areas cut off by Hurricane Maria continues to be a problem for relief efforts.
• Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy says Spain will remain united as Sunday's Catalan independence vote came in at over 90% to secede, despite Spanish police breaking up voting with tear gas.
• The US Supreme Court's new term begins today as Justice Neil Gorsuch and the Roberts Court will hear cases on union dues, abortion access, affirmative action, voting rights, and more.
• Energy Secretary Rick Perry is proposing new power generation rules that favor the "security" of  "reliable" coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power instead of solar and wind.

Sunday Long Read: The Impact Of An Accident

Forty years ago, Maryann Gray was the driver when a fatal accident occurred where a boy darted across the street and into the path of her car.  Now she's trying to help other people who have caused fatal accidents put their lives back together with a website called Accidental Impacts.

Until 3:35 p.m. on June 15, 1977, Maryann Gray was happy. She was twenty-two, and had just decided to take a leave of absence from Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in clinical psychology. Graduate school had been her mother’s idea, and Gray was unpleasantly surprised by how scientific the program turned out to be. Inside the front cover of her statistics textbook was a squashed bug, which she had circled and labelled “Maryann at the end of Stat.” 

That summer, Gray was preparing to move into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in a neglected area of Cincinnati, which its residents called an “urban commune.” There, she hoped, she would eat curry, burn incense, and talk politics late into the night with new friends. Her father, a businessman, and her mother, a homemaker, who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, were not supportive of the plan. But Gray couldn’t wait to move in. She spent the day painting her new bedroom yellow. 

By the afternoon, Gray was sweaty and paint-stained, and she decided to go back to her boxed-up apartment in Oxford to take a swim. The hot, hour-long drive crossed through suburban sprawl and then into emerald countryside. Gray had the windows of her father’s 1969 Mercury Cougar down, and the radio tuned to the news. She was only fifteen minutes from the apartment, driving at the posted forty-five miles per hour along a wooded, two-lane country road, when she saw a pale flash and felt a bump. 

The statement Gray gave to the police later that afternoon is written in the neat script a young student might use on a final exam: “A child (blond male) ran into the street from my left, running in front of the car. I tried to go around him (left) but couldn’t get by. I hit my brakes instantly + skidded to the left.” The signature at the bottom of the page looks as though it had been written slowly and with care. 

When Gray read the affidavit forty years later, she was surprised by the precision of her account. “There was no way I actually remembered that,” she told me. “Hitting him I remember, and I remember sort of pulling over on a side street, getting out of the car, and there I lose a few minutes.” Gray recalled crouching behind a bush, terrified and hiding. “I remember thinking, What’s that noise?, and then realizing it was me, screaming.” She was still concealed by the shrubbery when the boy’s mother ran out of her house and began to wail. “She was with two women, and her knees buckled. She began to fall, and they held her up,” Gray said. “She wanted to go to him, of course, but they held her back.” 

The police arrived about twenty minutes later, and, rather than wait for an ambulance, they put the boy in the back seat of a squad car and drove him six miles to the hospital, where, Gray later learned, he was pronounced dead on arrival. Only after the boy had been taken away from the bloodied road did Gray emerge. A few policemen had stayed behind, and she approached them, with one hand raised. “Like a schoolgirl,” Gray recalled. “I was so young.” Her voice caught. “I said, ‘I did it. I did it.’ ” 

She was ushered into the back of a police car, where she sat until a woman who lived nearby approached, offered her a cool towel, and asked an officer if Gray could wait at her house instead. The officer agreed, and Gray sat in the kind stranger’s kitchen, sipping water. It was early evening by the time the Butler County sheriff’s office finished its site evaluation and asked Gray if she would be O.K. driving home. She said no. A professor picked her up and persuaded her to call her parents, in New York. “I said, ‘Mommy, Mommy’—and I never called her that—‘it was an accident,’ ” Gray recalled. Her mother replied, “Of course it was.” 

Gray’s father flew out and took care of logistics. He called the insurance company, got the car towed, hired a lawyer, and paid the condolence call. Gray spent the week refusing to leave her old bedroom. “I had what I now consider to be a hallucination,” she told me. “I heard this voice, so clearly, saying, ‘You took a son from his mother and your punishment is that you can never have your own child.’ ” She told her therapist, whom she had been seeing for two years, that she was afraid the accident would ruin her forever. 

In the following months, Gray drove slowly and uncertainly. She would see vague figures in the road, slam on the brakes, and then realize that nobody was there. An insect hitting the windshield could send her into a panic. She didn’t know how to act around her new roommates, who treated her with a kind of hesitant benevolence. “Here I was in this house that was all about peace and love and community, and I had just killed a kid,” Gray said. “I really wanted these people to like me and to accept me, so I just tried to act sad but not crazy.” 

By the first anniversary of the accident, Gray was packing up her yellow bedroom. She took on odd jobs—at an exercise studio and then at an accounting firm—and lived with a roommate whom she rarely saw. In 1979, she moved to Southern California and returned to graduate school, at U.C. Irvine. In Gray’s telling, her life improved with the elegance and the inevitability of a film dissolve. “It was a new start,” she said. “I felt like I was leaving the horribleness behind.” She loved her academic program, made friends, and went to the beach. But the accident remained with her. She said, “There was this voice: ‘You don’t deserve to feel happy. Look what happened last time you felt happy.’ I lived with a ghost, with this child inside me, speaking to me, not very kindly. But I never talked about it.”

It's good that Gray is now working to try to help others like her, but I can't get over the fact that if Gray weren't white, the odds of her spending the rest of her life in prison would be exponentially higher.  Forgiveness is divine, they say, but the American justice system is far from able to handle things evenly and fairly.

Still, having looked at the website, Gray is doing a good deed here.  Just because the system is broken doesn't mean she has to let others be broken as well.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Remember how Republicans said that Hillary Clinton using private email showed she should never hold a government office that requires a security clearance again because her data was hopelessly compromised by our enemies and would assure that if elected she would be blackmailed?

Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn, Ivanka Trump, and several other top Trump regime officials have been using private email for months now.  The NSA warned them immediately that this was a hideously bad idea.  They ignored the NSA and did it anyway.

The briefings came soon after President Donald Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20, and before some top aides, including senior adviser Jared Kushner, used their personal email and phones to conduct official White House business, as disclosed by POLITICO this week.

The NSA briefers explained that cyberspies could be using sophisticated malware to turn the personal cellphones of White House aides into clandestine listening devices, to take photos and video without the user’s knowledge and to transfer vast amounts of data via Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth, according to one former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the briefings.

The briefings were held in the White House Situation Room because of the sensitivity of the topics discussed, according to that official and three other former officials familiar with such briefings, which have been given to each incoming administration.

The officials said White House aides also were told they should assume that foreign cyberspies had already penetrated their personal email systems to some degree and used that access to vacuum up everything not just on their own computers and phones but those of their contacts.

The NSA briefers told the Trump aides that using their personal devices for work, including passing files and emails from one system to the other, could give cyberspies access to their work computers and email, too, the officials said.

If Kushner did not adhere to the security precautions, it could lead to a significant security breach, the officials said, given his access to President Donald Trump and unique portfolio of responsibilities. Kushner, who is Trump’s son-in-law, is the president’s point man on China, Syria, Middle East peace, and Afghanistan, along with innovation, infrastructure and other issues.

“Jared is probably one of the top five or 10 targets in the U.S. government because of his access to the president and because of the portfolios he’s been given,” said Richard Clarke, a former top cybersecurity advisor to three presidents. “It’s a pretty safe bet that his personal devices have been compromised by foreign intelligence services. And therefore there is some risk that meetings he attends are compromised too.”

 Even setting aside the caustic levels of irony that would come from the NSA calmly telling Trump's son-in-law that his private email just might be compromised by the Russians, the fact that Kushner and the rest of Trump's inner circle continued to do exactly what they warned America that Clinton could never be allowed to do is just hysterically funny and sad.

But that's life in 2017 now, isn't it.

Paying The Price

Trump regime Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was the victim of another Friday Night Firing­­ as he was forced to tender his resignation over spending close to $400,000 on charter jets to travel the country with.  The reality is though that the jet issue was the excuse Trump needed for the real reason to cut Price's throat and bleed him out: Price's multiple failures to shepherd Obamacare repeal through the Senate.

Price’s lack of goodwill with Trump and other senior administration officials ultimately doomed his chances of survival, even though many administration officials believed the furor would blow over when news first broke that Price spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private jets.

By early this week, however, it became clear that the growing firestorm over Price’s travel was only getting worse. A number of officials in the White House said HHS had badly handled the response to the controversy — and was caught off guard by the facts. And it was hard to find a power player in the White House who would defend Price to the president.

POLITICO published five stories over the last 10 days that revealed Price had spent more than $1 million in taxpayer money on travel since May, including overseas flights on military aircrafts and more than two dozen domestic trips on private planes.

Other media outlets amplified the revelations, with cable news frequently running damaging chyrons and reporters peppering Trump and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the growing scandal throughout the week. 

The president grew more angry, fuming to West Wing aides about the optics of a member of the administration spending so lavishly. The almost daily drip of revelations — including that Price took a government-funded private jet in August to get to a Georgia resort where he and his wife own land — further incensed the president.

Meanwhile, Trump was intensely frustrated by his unsuccessful health care push and associated Price with the failure, several aides said. He joked at a rally in July he would fire Price if he didn't get the votes for the Obamacare repeal.

While the White House has weathered a steady stream of mini-scandals since Trump took office, this one was different, according to administration officials, because it made Price look like the kind of creature of Washington that the president had railed against on the campaign trail.

Trump himself blasted Price on Friday for what he suggested was frivolous spending in light of the administration’s efforts to impose fiscal conservatism on the federal government.

“I've saved hundreds of millions of dollars,” the president told reporters on Friday when he was asked if he had lost confidence in Price. “So I don’t like the optics of what you just saw.”

The notion that Trump "saved" taxpayer anything, considering his own travel budget for 2017 is rapidly approaching the amount of money that Barack Obama spent on taxpayer travel for all eight years of both terms combined is utterly ridiculous, as is Trump punishing any of his cabinet members for charter jet use (he's leaving that to WH Chief of Staff John Kelly).

No, the real reason is somebody's head had to roll for failing to repeal Obamacare, and I'm betting the leaks to Politico over the last 10 days concerning Price's travel came from somebody who wanted Price gone.

My guess is somebody in the White House.  After all, leaks and firing are now common occurrences in the Trump regime as the failures keep piling up.

Botas Anaranjadas En La Noche

The Trump regime is mostly too incompetent to deliver relief supplies to islands, for example, but the one part of the machinery that is working brilliantly is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, our good friends at ICE.  They know exactly where to go and exactly how to find undocumented immigrants and round them up, as their latest raids earlier this week deliberately targeted sanctuary cities in blue states with almost ruthless efficiency and flawless execution.

Fifty immigrants across the state were among nearly 500 nationwide arrested for federal immigration violations in an operation that targeted so-called sanctuary cities and, in the case of Massachusetts, a state that had not fallen in line with President Trump’s aggressive deportation policies. 

In a statement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said its four-day “Safe City” operation, which ended Wednesday, was “focused on cities and regions where ICE deportation officers are denied access to jails and prisons to interview suspected immigration violators or jurisdictions where ICE detainers are not honored.” 

About two-thirds of the immigrants arrested nationwide are wanted on criminal charges, ICE said. According to figures provided by ICE, 30 of those arrested in Massachusetts had criminal records, and the other 20 did not.

Local municipalities including Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville have declared themselves sanctuary cities for immigrants, establishing policies that forbid law enforcement officials from assisting their federal counterparts in enforcing immigration laws. 

In July, the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that local law enforcement cannot hold a person who is wanted solely for immigration violations, a decision that provided legal support for sanctuary cities in the Commonwealth. 

In the statement from ICE, Massachusetts was the only state singled out. Other areas targeted in the “Safe City” operation were cities and counties. They included Santa Clara County, Calif., and Cook County, Ill., which contains Chicago, and seven cities: New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Denver; Baltimore; and Portland, Ore. 

“We have always done these kinds of operations historically, for the decades past, including the last administration,” said Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for ICE. He went on to say that this operation was distinctive in that “this is focused on areas that have . . . self-proclaimed they are not going to cooperate with ICE.”

He said the decision by the state SJC had led to the state’s inclusion among those areas.

They want people scared in sanctuary cities and in smaller blue states like Massachusetts  They want people to know that being a sanctuary city means nothing to ICE, and I would expect more raids like the Orwellian "Operation Safe City" to continue in these places specifically.

As the raids continue and get worse, the goal will be to turn immigration advocates and the people they protect against local governments who won't be able to stop ICE, and I don't see any reason why it won't continue to work as long as Trump remains in charge.

To once again paraphrase Grand Moff Tarkin in A New Hope, "Fear will keep the sanctuary cities in line. Fear of this ICE force."

The orange jackboots in the night will keep coming I suspect for a long time as long as Trump can be motivated to crack down by revenge.

Last Call For The Confederacy Of Dunces

Last time I checked Ohio was on the Union side in the Civil War, but apparently that never stopped a monument plaque to Gen. Robert E. Lee going up in Franklin Township north of Cincy (in Boehner Country, of course) some 90 years ago.  The township took it down after the events of Charlottesville last month, figuring "nobody's going to miss a Confederate plaque in small-town Ohio."

Oh, were they ever wrong.

Franklin Twp. trustees said they working out details to return a Confederate marker to public display and hold a re-dedication ceremony. 

A handful of residents attended Wednesday evening’s meeting to ask why there has been little information about the 90-year old marker honoring Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Dixie Highway that was removed overnight Aug. 17 from the intersection of Hamilton-Middletown Road and Dixie Highway. 

The controversy started Aug. 16 when reporters asked about Franklin Township’s plans for the monument after the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

“The monument is going back,” said Trustees President Brian Morris. “It might not be in the exact same spot. You’re going to get essentially what we all want, but it might not be in the exact same spot.” 

Morris said he is looking at several places in the township along Dixie Highway but no site has been selected and more details remain to be worked out. 

“We’ll have a re-dedication ceremony,” Morris said. “It’s going to be put back out in public. Rest assured, get the word out, it will be back.”

Apparently the answer to "who would miss a Confederate plaque in small-town Ohio" is "racist small-minded old white people complaining to township officials."

Which is exactly what Ohio is like in 2017, for those of you who keep saying I should move across the river to "less" racism or something.

Collective Trumpunishment

The Narcissist-in-Chief's ego has gotten so swollen and infected that as Paul Krugman points out, Americans are going to die as a direct result of this kakistocratic administration.

When Hurricane Maria struck, more than a week ago, it knocked out power to the whole of Puerto Rico, and it will be months before the electricity comes back. Lack of power can be deadly in itself, but what’s even worse is that, thanks largely to the blackout, much of the population still lacks access to drinkable water. How many will die because hospitals can’t function, or because of diseases spread by unsafe water? Nobody knows. 

But the situation is terrible, and time is not on Puerto Rico’s side: The longer this goes on, the worse the humanitarian crisis will get. Surely, then, you’d expect bringing in and distributing aid to be the U.S. government’s top priority. After all, we’re talking about the lives of three and a half million of our fellow citizens — more than the population of Iowa or metro San Diego. 

So have we seen the kind of full-court, all-out relief effort such a catastrophe demands? No. 

Admittedly, it’s hard to quantify the federal response. But none of the extraordinary measures you’d expect to see have materialized. 

The deployment of military resources seems to have been smaller and slower than it was in Texas after Harvey or Florida after Irma, even though Puerto Rico’s condition is far more dire. Until Thursday the Trump administration had refused to lift restrictions on foreign shipping to Puerto Rico, even though it had waived those rules for Texas and Florida. 

Why? According to the president, “people who work in the shipping industry” don’t like the idea.

And as Krugman adds, it's not just Puerto Rico, it's healthcare too.

Obamacare repeal has failed again, for the simple reason that Graham-Cassidy, like all the other G.O.P. proposals, was a piece of meanspirited junk. But while the Affordable Care Act survives, the Trump administration is openly trying to sabotage the law’s functioning. 

This sabotage is taking place on multiple levels. The administration has refused to confirm whether it will pay crucial subsidies to insurers that cover low-income customers. It has refused to clarify whether the requirement that healthy people buy insurance will be enforced. It has canceled or suspended outreach designed to get more people to sign up. 

These actions translate directly into much higher premiums: Insurers don’t know if they’ll be compensated for major costs, and they have every reason to expect a smaller, sicker risk pool than before. And it’s too late to reverse the damage: Insurers are finalizing their 2018 rates as you read this. 

Why are the Trumpists doing this? Is it a cynical calculation — make the A.C.A. fail, then claim that it was already doomed? I doubt it. For one thing, we’re not talking about people known for deep strategic calculations. For another, the A.C.A. won’t actually collapse; it will just become a program more focused on sicker, poorer Americans — and the political opposition to repeal won’t go away. Finally, when the bad news comes in, everyone will know whom to blame.

No, A.C.A. sabotage is best seen not as a strategy, but as a tantrum. We can’t repeal Obamacare? Well, then, we’ll screw it up. It’s not about achieving any clear goal, but about salving the president’s damaged self-esteem. 

It's worse than that.  It's collective punishment of the people who dared to vote against Trump in 2016.  He lost the GOP primary there to Marco Rubio, remember?  As a result, he is trying to cause as much suffering to those who, as far as Trump is concerned, no longer matter as Americans and therefore no longer deserve anything from the country other than the coercive power of the state at point-blank range.

This is about Trump making sure his regime hurts anyone and everyone who stands up to him in any way.  And if thousands of American citizens in Puerto Rico have to be sickened or even die from neglect in order to make that point, if millions have to lose their health care coverage and some will die as a result?

So be it.  Dear Leader Trump has spoken.

He is a monster, full stop.

Flaking Out Over Sinema Verite'

My favorite pain in the ass conservative Democrat, Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, is finally throwing her hat into the ring to take on embattled GOP Sen. Jeff Flake in 2018.  While I definitely believe Sinema will end up in the Heitkamp/Donnelly/Manchin wing of the Conserva-Dems and will be a major roadblock to broadband regulations and health care legislation in the future, that's what Jeff Flake was now, plus he votes with Trump far more often than Sinema does.

U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema is running for the Senate seat held by Jeff Flake, ending months of speculation about her political future and giving Democrats a top-tier fundraiser with experience on Capitol Hill.

In a video announcing her bid,the Arizona Democrat recounts her upbringing in a family that fell from the middle class into homelessness. She made her way to Congress, Sinema says, with hard work and help from "family, church and, sometimes, even the government."

"I really feel like I have a duty to serve and give back to this country, which has given so much to me," she said in an interview with The Arizona Republic. "Working hard is all I know; it's who I am. I believe I'll be the hardest worker for Arizonans in the United States Senate."

Sinema, who has a reputation as an energetic problem-solver not focused on partisanship, said she intends to make her work on behalf of military veterans and in cutting regulatory red tape for businesses the core issues of her campaign.

"Our nation is facing a lot of problems right now, but we can fix these problems if we work together," Sinema says in the video. "It's time to put our country ahead of party, ahead of politics. It's time to stop fighting and look for common ground."

The fact of the matter is the Dems need to win Flake's seat next year.  As I've said multiple times, Heitkamp, Manchin, and Donnelly all face tough re-elections in Trump states, along with Claire McCaskill, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Jon Tester, and Bill Nelson.  If Flake and Dean Heller survive and the GOP runs the table on these, that's 60 for them, and that's the end of the ball game.

Frankly, I'd expect the GOP to pick up four or five of these, but all eight is certainly not out of the question.

So yes, I want to see Sinema win.  Even if she does do obnoxious things like meet with Donald Trump, and still hasn't learned that for all her "bipartisan" leanings, Republicans are still happily depicting her as an "extreme liberal" who hates America and loves "illegals".

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Trump regime HHS Secretary Tom Price says he will reimburse taxpayers for his travel on chartered jets, but only for the cost of his seat, not the cost of the jets themselves.
• Former Illinois Democrat Rep. Mel Reynolds has been convicted on several counts of failure to pay income tax, Reynolds resigned in 1995 in disgrace after an affair with a 16-year old.
• Voters in Catalonia will go to the polls Sunday in what Spain is calling an illegal independence referendum, thousands of Spanish police officers will be on hand to stop voters.
• A stampede in Mumbai, India has killed at least 22 and injured dozens as commuters on India's rail system sought shelter from a sudden storm on a covered footbridge.
• As casinos turn to more skill games to bring in new players, video games are coming to pit players against each other for cash.