Wild, Not So Wonderful West Virginia Voters

WaPo's Karen Tumulty argues that a toxic combination of corporate greed, crippling poverty, green energy and anti-Obama racism has turned blue West Virginia into the reddest of states.

Leaders in both parties say that what has happened to politics in West Virginia begins with what has happened to coal — an industry that employs about 32,000 in the state, fewer than half the number of jobs it provided in 1976. 

Although there always have been booms and busts, people “are convinced that President Obama wants to destroy the coal industry, and that’s what’s driving our politics,” said Raamie Barker, a top adviser to Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. 

In purely economic terms, coal and the industries it feeds no longer dominate. Nor do the labor unions that gave the Democrats so much of their political muscle. In 1997, Weirton Steel was West Virginia’s largest private employer; every year since then, Wal-Mart has held that spot — as it does nationally. 

But coal has a grip on the state’s psyche and identity that cannot be quantified by economic statistics. Mining brought generations of strivers to the mountains, where they took on dirty, deadly work. By the 1970s, those were high-paying jobs; even today, with overtime, a miner can make six figures.

“You can’t hardly talk to anybody who doesn’t say, ‘My great-grandfather was a coal miner,’ ” said West Virginia Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette. “It’s not uncommon for anybody, anywhere to look back at a time when things were different and long for those days.” 

Kevin Richardson’s father has been a coal miner for 42 years — one tough and determined enough to have gone back into the ground after a double knee replacement. The younger Richardson, who lives in Glen Daniel, is a Wal-Mart manager. 

“Driving from my house, it used to be you would pass four coal mines. Now you pass one,” he said of his daily commute to the store. Richardson also has noticed that customers lately buy only essentials: “We feel the crunch of it. It’s cutting into everybody’s pay.”

Yes, the King Coal giants broke the unions and Wal-marted the state's economy to death.  But this is also a state that's 94% white.  Nobody in West Virginia ever accused Bush of trying to destroy West Virginia, even when his economic plan doubled the state's unemployment and under Obama, West Virginia is now doing better than the national average and has seen unemployment drop to around 6%.



But Obama is the bad guy in this picture.  Gosh, what's different about him compared to the other 43 Presidents?  Poppy Bush sure tanked the state's economy with unemployment reaching nearly 12% due to the recession he caused, Bush Junior tanked the state's economy again with the near depression he caused at the end of his term, but everyone is convinced Obama is trying to destroy the state, and by God they're going to vote for the people who exploited the hell out of them, destroyed their unions, and left them one of the poorest states in the nation.

Watch what happens when Hillary Clinton shows up here on her road to 2016.  Suddenly Democrats will be awesome again.

Daze Of Future Past

California Republican Jeff Denham has seen the future, and it's a future where he's no longer in Congress if he opposes immigration reform.

A Republican congressman from a heavily Hispanic district is breaking ranks from his party to join Democrats in an eleventh-hour push for a broad immigration overhaul before the end of the year. 

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) plans to sign on as the lone GOP member with 185 Democrats to co-sponsor a plan that would give millions of unauthorized immigrants the chance to attain citizenship. 

A handful of House Republicans have expressed support for citizenship legislation similar to the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate over the summer. But Denham is taking the additional — and politically provocative — step of locking arms with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democrats trying to neutralize opposition from House conservatives and shake up a polarized immigration debate. 

“I’m the first Republican,” he said in an interview. “I expect more to come on board.”
With fewer than 20 working days left in the year and Congress focused largely on high-stakes budget negotiations, some House Republicans have argued in recent days that they won’t have time to debate immigration this year. Asked in a Bloomberg TV interview over the weekend if a broad immigration overhaul stood a chance of passing in the coming weeks, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said flatly, “No.” 

Denham’s announcement comes as Democrats and immigrant advocates are trying to force House Speaker John A. Boehner’s (R-Ohio) hand on the issue. Key to their strategy is a new compromise bill designed to lure away enough centrist GOP members that the speaker would feel compelled to allow a vote of the full chamber — just as he did to end the government shutdown and avoid a financial default. 

If Boehner were to refuse to allow an immigration vote, Democrats say, they could blame him and Republicans for blocking a “bipartisan” bill on the campaign trail next year .

It's going to be bad enough for the GOP with the shutdown, but the shutdown plus killing immigration yet again will finish off enough purple district Republicans that the Dems take back the House, and they're not going down with Ted Cruz and company.  So by all means, GOP "purists", primary people like Denham with rabid, racist, anti-immigrant lunatics and we'll happily turn those purple districts blue for you.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Ezra Klein pegs the "lack of self-awareness" meter:

This chart is the best reason to stop freaking out about Obamacare! http://t.co/ehG7AXeTAZ
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 25, 2013

Now if only he would stop freaking out about Obamacare, because Jon Cohn's chart there really is solid evidence that more people (many, many more people) will sign up for insurance at healthcare.gov as we get closer to the deadline.

Sadly, Ezra just can't help himself.

Sorry liberals, Obamacare's problems go much deeper than the web site: http://t.co/Rm83LDVFKB
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 25, 2013

Le sigh, le moan.

Master Villain, Meet Reality

Sometimes police work is a grueling, painstaking, and dangerous battle against some truly frightening criminals who are ruthless and have nearly unlimited resources.  Of course, sometimes police work is just waiting for complete morons to Darwin themselves right into prison time, too.

Allen Wayne Densen Morgan, a 29-year-old veteran from Munford, Ala. entered a guilty plea in federal court Thursday for attempting to hire Ku Klux Klansmen to murder his neighbor. According to court documents, Morgan told an undercover FBI agent he wanted to see his neighbor "hung from a tree like he is an animal" and "his dick cut off" over accusations that the man, a convicted sex offender, had raped his wife. 

An affidavit given by FBI Special Agent Cornelius Harris Jr. in support of a criminal complaint filed Aug. 26 explains that Morgan believed his neighbor, Clifford Maurice Mosley, raped his wife earlier that month. Records show that Mosley, who is African American, was arrested in 2008 for sexual abuse, a fact Morgan was aware of. Harris wrote that Morgan told an undercover FBI agent he responded to the alleged rape by attempting to "force a confrontation" with Mosley on Aug. 22 by firing "multiple rounds of ammunition" at Mosley on the street outside their homes. 

"Mosley fled on foot as Morgan fired several shots in the ground beside him in an effort to intimidate him," explained Harris. "Morgan assessed that Mosley must be guilty of the rape of his wife because Mosley never tried to defend himself by standing his ground or offering to reason with Morgan." 

Shortly after this incident, Harris said an undercover FBI agent who identified himself as a Klansman called Morgan in order to "verify his desire to murder" Mosley. According to the complaint, during that conversation, Morgan described the shooting incident and said he would meet with the agent on Aug. 25 to arrange payment. The undercover agent claimed he was "en route to Tennessee to pick up a partner to take care of this matter for Morgan." 

"Morgan advised that he and his family are supportive of the plan to murder Clifford Maurice Mosley," Harris wrote, adding that Morgan said his father-in-law and mother-in-law wanted "to dynamite the entire block."

Sometimes I just don't know how humanity has made it this far without wiping ourselves off the face of the earth.  We may yet still do that, frankly.  Hell, we're probably in the process of doing that right now.

StupidiNews!

• Five people were injured Thursday, two seriously by a carnival ride at the North Carolina State Fair in Raleigh.
• The FDA is pushing for tighter regulations on painkillers, particularly hydrocodone, which the agency wants to see controlled as tightly as Oxycontin.
• European leaders are furious over allegations of NSA spying on European leaders stretching back to 2006, and some are now calling for postponement of important US/EU trade talks.
• Contractors testifying before Congress on the government's health insurance website admit that testing of the site was limited to only a few weeks at best.
• Samsung is reportedly taking on Google Glass with its own version of wearable computing glasses, the "Samsung Spectacles" .

Last Call For The Race To The Bottom

Buncombe County, NC GOP precinct chair Don Yelton is a painful reminder of what I left behind when I left NC for good seven years ago.  Despite being the home of Asheville, pretty much the most liberal city in the state (and where I went to college), Buncombe County Republicans are pretty horrific, and Aasiv Mandvi's candid interview with Yelton from The Daily Show Wednesday night is breathtaking only if you didn't grow up a minority in small town western NC.

Yelton basically explains exactly what the intent of North Carolina's ridiculous new Voter ID law is:  to keep minorities from voting for Democrats, period.

There is some good news, however:  Yelton has been canned so fast he's considering a stint as a jar of preserves.

Buncombe GOP Chairman Henry Mitchell said Don Yelton officially stepped down from his position Thursday.

In a segment that aired Wednesday night, Yelton blasted "lazy black people that wants the government to give them everything," one of a slew of racially inflammatory comments he made in the interview.

Mitchell called the remarks "offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party."

"Let me make it very clear, Mr. Yelton's comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon," Mitchell said in a press release. "This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party."

I got news for you, Henry.  Nobody outside the Buncombe County GOP believes for a millisecond that "this mentality will not be supported and propagated within your party" when your side has spent the last six years telling us how awful a black President would be, is, and always will be, and has made a cottage industry of being the Last Bastion Of White Male Privilege In America.  When your side makes laws designed to disenfranchise people so that you can win elections, then you lose any moral high ground you think you have. 

You lose, sir.  In more ways than one.

Young And Home Free

Meanwhile America has hit a new record:  the number of schoolkids in the US who are homeless has now reached nearly 1.2 million.

During the 2011-12 school year, there were 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled in preschool or K-12, a 10 percent increase over the previous year. A total of 55.5 million students were enrolled in preschool or K-12 that year, meaning nearly 2 percent of all students were homeless.

According to First Focus, a children’s advocacy organization, “the number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.” The states with the largest increase in student homelessness include North Dakota (212 percent), Maine (58 percent), and North Carolina (53 percent).

It’s important to note that the number of homeless students in the United States doesn’t capture the full extent of youth homelessness. Many young homeless people are infants, weren’t properly identified as homeless by the survey, or have dropped out (or been kicked out) of school.

The last factor is particularly true for LGBT youth, who represent a disproportionate share of homeless youth. According to a new report from the Center for American Progress, factors like family rejection, bullying, and poor performance in school forces many LGBT youth onto the streets.

But clearly the answer is more cuts to schools, more cuts to affordable housing programs, more cuts to food stamps, more cuts to government workers, more cuts, more cuts, more cuts.  Oh, and refusal to expand Medicaid coverage.  It's what Jesus would do, right?

The Real Obamacare News

Republicans are relentlessly attacking the Affordable Care Act over the healthcare.gov website (and the critics include more than a few liberals who should know better) but it's all an effort to hide the fact that the law is saving American taxpayers billions in lower premiums.  The Center for American Progress:

The Affordable Care Act is already working: Intense price competition among health plans in the marketplaces for individuals has lowered premiums below projected levels. As a result of these lower premiums, the federal government will save about $190 billion over the next 10 years, according to our estimates. These savings will boost the health law’s amount of deficit reduction by 174 percent and represent about 40 percent of the health care savings proposed by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles commission—in 2010. 

Moreover, we estimate that lower premiums will lower the number of uninsured even further, by an additional 700,000 people, even as the number of individuals who receive tax credits will decline because insurance is more affordable. 

In short, the Affordable Care Act is working even better than expected, producing more coverage for much less money.

But how can that be?!?   It's a failure because lawmakers are all top-end web portal system architects and they say so!

In an analysis of plans offered in the marketplaces, the McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform found that new entrants into the market make up 26 percent of all insurers. These new entrants are introducing competitive pressures into the individual market. The McKinsey analysis found that new entrants tend to price their plans lower than the median premiums in their market. 

Moreover, in a preliminary analysis of plans offered in 18 areas, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that premiums are lower than CBO’s projected premiums in 15 of those areas. 

In March 2012, CBO projected an average family premium for the second-lowest-cost silver plan in 2016. This projection is equivalent to an average individual premium in 2014 of $4,700 (see sidebar). The actual average premium for the second-lowest-cost silver plan in 2014 turned out to be $3,936—16 percent lower than projected.

But 404 Healthcare Not Found error on the website LOL and stuff!  But horror stories!  But nobody can sign up!  But...it's all smoke and mirrors designed to take away from the fact this law is working better than intended overall.

Now why would you suppose web glitches would be the only news you're hearing daily about Obamacare?

StupidiNews!

• Four Louisiana men have been arrested after a warehouse reported a missing pallet of Colt AR-15 rifles, some 63 firearms are missing and have yet to be recovered.
• The NYPD has finally caught up to and stopped street artist Banksy, who has been leaving a new piece of street art somewhere in NYC every day for the entire month of October.
• The House has quietly passed authorization 417-3 to spend $8.3 billion for a number of water-related infrastructure projects across the country over the next decade.
• New 3rd quarter numbers show Spain has finally emerged from a 24-month recession with a positive growth rate of 0.1%, but unemployment remains at a whopping 26%.
• South Korean phone giant LG has released the world's first curved smartphone, the LG G Flex, in Argentina, but no word on a North American release.

Last Call For The War Of Nawthun Aggression

As I noted Sunday, Mississippi GOP Sen. Thad Cochran is now being targeted for political obliteration by the Tea Party for not sending the government into default.  It turns out his Tea Party primary challenger Chris McDaniel really is as awful as the things that the phrase "Mississippi Tea Party primary challenger" bring to mind.

Chris McDaniel is taking the "GOP Civil War" to a new level. Two months ago, the tea party-backed Mississippi Senate candidate addressed a neo-Confederate conference and costume ball hosted by a group that promotes the work of present-day secessionists and contends the wrong side won the "war of southern independence." Other speakers at the event included a historian who believes Lincoln was a Marxist and Ryan Walters, a PhD candidate who worked on McDaniel's first political campaign and wrote recently that the "controversy" over President Barack Obama's birth certificate "hasn't really been solved."

And that's just for starters.  MoJo's Tim Murphy is all over this slimebag's long and rich history of being a neo-Cofederate assclown:

With their endorsements of McDaniel, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth have shown just how far they are willing to go in terms of embracing the far right to prosecute their war for the soul of the party. In August, McDaniel addressed a neo-Confederate conference in Laurel, Miss., near his hometown of Ellisville. A local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the Jones County Rosin Heels, hosted the two-day event, which the group described in invitations as a "Southern Heritage Conference" for "politically incorrect folks." Attendees were advised to dress in "Confederate uniforms and antebellum ball gowns or wee kilties." McDaniel's appearance at the Rosin Heels heritage conference was not a one-off occurrence; weeks earlier he was the keynote speaker at a separate event in Jackson.

The Rosin Heels does more than regret the outcome of the Civil War. Its monthly newsletter routinely features articles and essays advocating for present-day secession. Its August newsletter highlighted the seven-year-old "Burlington Declaration" from the First North American Secession Convention, which stated that the right of secession was a "[truth] of natural law and the human experience." (While it did not advcoate for specific secession movement, the proclamation affirmed the right of the conference'svarious attendees to do so.) In September, the newsletter included an essay on secession from the League of the South, lamenting the loss of southern independence at the hands of the "plutocracy and proletariat of the world." A note from the editor stated that "we are living in the times that Jefferson Davis predicted would one day come," in which the conflicts that presaged the Civil War would flare up again. The June issue compared Obama's policies to the ravages of Reconstruction: "Our people have had to put up with for the last FIFTEEN DECADES!!!"

McDaniel is "just proud of his heritage and grateful for it, and that's the reason we wanted him to come in and speak a couple of times," says George Jaynes, a member of the Rosin Heels and the newsletter's editor, who confirmed that McDaniel had attended the events. "We're mainly here to remember the Confederate soldier, our Confederates beliefs, our culture, our civilization. We're here to remember their good names upheld them to tell the truth and to give the facts of the war whether it falls on our side or the other. We're here to tell the truth—that's what the SCV's about and that's the kind of speaker we bring in."

 And this outstanding example of a festering, pus-filled boil on the ass of humanity is most likely going to end up Mississippi's next junior senator.  So please, tell me again how the GOP doesn't have a race problem, and I'll tell you why 98% of African-American voters don't vote for Republicans.

Keep up that big tent effort, guys!

The Coming Left Turn At Albuquerque

With same-sex marriage now the law of the land in New Jersey, the battle to bring America kicking and screaming into equality one state at a time moves to New Mexico's Supreme Court.

The highest court in New Mexico is set to take up a case on Wednesday that gay rights activists hope will soon make New Mexico the 15th state to recognize same-sex marriages.

At issue is the same basic question arising in a growing number of courts across the country: Do gay men and lesbians enjoy a constitutional right to marry?

Such litigation has taken on increased momentum following the US Supreme Court’s decision in June invalidating a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Although the DOMA decision did not address the more fundamental constitutional issue, gay rights advocates are seizing on language from the decision to lay the ground work for a series of constitutional showdowns in both federal and state courts across the country.

On Wednesday, that campaign arrives at the New Mexico Supreme Court, where the court’s five justices will be asked to determine whether the state constitution requires recognition of same-sex marriages statewide.

“The plaintiffs have asked us to apply fundamental principles of constitutional law,” Albuquerque lawyer Peter Kierst, working with the ACLU of New Mexico, told reporters in a briefing.

“When the state creates a benefit it must make the benefit available to all equally,” he said. “Similar people must be treated similarly.”

New Mexico is the only state that hasn't weighed in one way or the other with any laws, referendums, or constitutional amendments either banning or allowing same-sex marriage, so this is a rather big case.  The plaintiffs are arguing that the SCOTUS decision on DOMA in June means that New Mexico has to weigh in on the affirmative here, given that the state hasn't taken a position yet.  We'll see what the court has to say, but I'm betting the state's nickname as Land of Enchantment will take on a very special meaning and soon.

Great Expectations

Steve M. notes that Rasmussen's latest Virginia gubernatorial poll finds Democrat Terry McAuliffe with a huge 17-point lead (double the lead seen in other recent polls) over GOP Tea Party favorite Ken "Your Cooch" Cuccinelli, and wonders if Rasmussen isn't inflating the numbers on purpose.

Maybe this race really is turning into a blowout -- but I have to wonder whether Rasmussen, seeing that McAuliffe is solidly but not overwhelmingly ahead, is exaggerating the Democrat's lead in the hope that a single-digit McAuliffe victory will now be interpreted as McAuliffe falling short of expectations. 

I don't have to remind you that Republicans sneeringly discounted the 2012 polls that showed President Obama leading, claimed that these polls were skewed, then cooked up a lot of excuses for the Obama victory -- Dick Morris said it was because of Sandy, Karl Rove said it was an act of voter suppression for Obama to say negative things about his opponent.In any case, Republicans didn't accept that Obama really won.

The creative interpretation of electoral results by Republicans continues -- Cory Booker, we're told, kinda-sorta lost his Senate race in New Jersey because his victory margin over Steve Lonegan was in the low double digits, and now Lonegan says the government shutdown, which he supported, cost him the election.

The fact that this makes sense to me, and that I wouldn't put it past Rasmussen to do this, sums up everything you need to know about the organization's accuracy and partisanship.  After all, this is the joint that has decided that the only thing that matters with Obama's approval ratings is not the totals (latest numbers have him up 50-49%) but the percentage of people with strong opinions about him:

The latest figures include 25% of all likely voters who Strongly Approve of the way Obama is performing as president and 38% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -13.

So yes, Rasmussen goes out of their way to make Democrats look as bad as possible as they've been pulling this "Presidential Approval Index" crap for years now.  Should McAuliffe not win by 17, as with Booker, Republicans will then say that the failure of a blowout is proof that the shutdown really isn't hurting them, and that they are performing far better than expected.  The real story, by the way, is the fact that Obama's approval numbers have been hanging around the 45-50% mark since the 2010 election.

There's a reason I call Rasmussen's entirely invented number the "Obama Derangement Index".

StupidiNews!

• Dozens of wildfires are converging near Sydney, Australia and blanketing the city in smoke and smog in what is being called the worst fire outbreak in that country's history.
• Greek lawmakers have elected to suspend recognition of the country's Golden Dawn party after six party lawmakers were charged with criminal ties.
• Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is calling for an end to US drone strikes in his country, ahead of a Wednesday meeting with President Obama in Washington.
• The recent government shutdown will delay the date at which the IRS will begin accepting tax returns in January, according to IRS chief Danny Werfel.
• Apple's latest software upgrade for OS X, codenamed Mavericks, is available today, and in a big change, the upgrade to 10.9 is free.

Last Call For NatSecWonk

If you're going to go on Twitter and relentlessly criticize the White House on national security issues, make sure you're not working for the White House's national security team when you do it.

A White House national security official was fired last week after being caught as the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years.

Jofi Joseph, a director in the non-proliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, has been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk, a Twitter feed famous inside Washington policy circles since it began in February, 2011 until it was shut down last week. Two administration officials confirmed that the mystery tweeter was Joseph, who has also worked at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Joe Biden. Until recently, he was part of the administration's team working on negotiations with Iran.

During his time tweeting under the @natsecwonk name, Joseph openly criticized the policies of his White House bosses and often insulted their intellect and appearance. At different times, he insulted or criticized several top White House and State Department officials, including former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and many many others.

Now as @natsecwonk, Joseph was brutal towards the GOP as well, but as any real national security wonk would know,  there's no such thing as completely covering your tracks if you continue to use the same modus operandi for two years.  If you're going to go after the people who employ you, eventually, they're going to notice.

Check out Daily Beast's record of some of @natsecwonk's most...interesting...tweets, too.  There's a lesson to be learned here.

Apparently Denial Is A River In New Jersey

Because failed US Senate candidate and GOP nutjob Steve Lonegan is now blaming the GOP shutdown he wanted for his loss to Cory Booker last week.

"There is no doubt in my mind or in the minds of any of my campaign staff that the shutdown cost me the election," Lonegan said in an interview with the New Jersey Star-Ledger on Monday. "If I had known it was going to happen and that it was going to be handled so badly in Washington, I wouldn't have run for Senate."

Lonegan supported the shutdown while he was running for Senate.

Booker was long expected to clinch the nomination and win the Senate seat. Lonegan trailed in most polling of the race, even before the shutdown.

It's one thing to lie to the universe and blame a position you supported for your loss.  It's another thing entirely to do it on something as asinine as a government shutdown in a state like New Jersey.  This guy isn't competent enough to run a leaf blower.  He's going to find out the hard way that he won't get any Chris Christie style passes from the NJ GOP or the press on this one.