Last Call For An Orange Boy Named Sue

Orange Julius is responding to the news that President Obama will soon take executive action on immigration by threatening to expand the House GOP's lawsuit against the President for being from a different party or something.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) is considering expanding a proposed federal lawsuit over President Obama’s executive orders to include action on immigration. Filing a separate lawsuit over the president’s authority to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation is another option that gained traction Thursday during talks among party leaders. 

The idea to use the courts as an initial means of dissent, should the president move forward in the coming weeks to protect millions from deportation, moved to the front of the House GOP’s playbook after the leadership reviewed it. Boehner reportedly wants to respond forcefully and quickly should the president act and believes a lawsuit would do that, as well as signal to conservatives in his conference that he shares their frustrations about the president’s use of executive power. 

Several Republicans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid confirmed Boehner’s outlook and the thrust of the leadership’s discussions. They cautioned that any final decision by House Republicans will be made only after consulting rank-and-file members in the wake of a White House announcement — if the president decides to issue executive orders on immigration.

Ahh, now you remember, the lawsuit where the House GOP can't get any actual lawyer to take it up because it's so patently stupid.

Boehner first announced plans to initiate a federal suit against Obama in late June, when he called the president’s executive orders an unconstitutional power grab by one branch of government. 

But the suit has wallowed ever since as GOP lawmakers have struggled to find a D.C. area law firm willing to take up their legal fight. In recent weeks, many observers have speculated privately that Boehner was purposely stalling his legal fight to include whatever actions Obama opts to take to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. 

Whether the lawsuit will hold merit in federal court remains unclear. But Obama himself has strongly disputed the merits of the case. 

“I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something while they’re doing nothing,” he said during an interview with ABC News shortly after Boehner’s announcement. “The suit is a stunt.”

Once again, John Boehner cannot find a lawyer in all of Washington DC willing to take this case. Think about that.  And let's also think about the notion that if somebody doesn't like what the President is doing, the opposition party can drag the President into court.  Would anything ever get done in Washington at all?

Oh, and there's the little thing about the previous 43 Presidents not being sued.  I wonder why number 44 is being treated differently despite being the first President in decades to win two elections with more than 50% of the popular vote.

It's a goddamn mystery, I tell ye.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Net Neutrality

So Tuesday President Obama announced that he wanted the FCC to regulate broadband internet as a public utility, the way phones are regulated, in order to keep the internet free from "fast lane/slow lane" deals, site blocking, and to make internet more available to Americans.

Apparently somebody forgot to tell FCC Chairman (and former cable lobbyist mind you) Tom Wheeler, because it looks like none of this regulation stuff is going to happen.

Hours after President Obama called for the Federal Communications Commission to pass tougher regulations on high-speed Internet providers, the agency’s Democratic chairman told a group of business executives that he was moving in a different direction. 

Huddled in an FCC conference room Monday with officials from major Web companies, including Google, Yahoo and Etsy, agency Chairman Tom Wheeler said he preferred a more nuanced solution. His approach would deliver some of what Obama wants but also would address the concerns of the companies that provide Internet access to millions of Americans, such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable and AT&T. 

“What you want is what everyone wants: an open Internet that doesn’t affect your business,” a visibly frustrated Wheeler said at the meeting, according to four people who attended. “What I’ve got to figure out is how to split the baby.”

So it looks like Wheeler answers to the internet giants, not the President.

A growing source of frustration for White House and congressional Democrats is that they have three of their own on the five-member commission at the FCC, a majority that should give them the power to push through a policy of their liking. But if Wheeler charts a different course, he could bring the other members along with him. 

And, as Wheeler reminded participants at his meeting with Web companies Monday, the FCC does not answer to the Obama administration. 

“I am an independent agency,” Wheeler told them repeatedly, according to several officials. 

In hindsight, perhaps putting a lobbyist in charge of the FCC was not the best idea, yes?  Of course, Wheeler isn't the problem, internet giants like AT&T are the problem, especially with such pissy behavior as this.

A&T Inc will stop investing in new high-speed Internet connections in 100 U.S. cities until regulators decide whether to enact tough “net neutrality” rules proposed by President Obama, Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said on Wednesday.

The investment pause is the most dramatic action yet by a telecommunications or cable company after Obama on Monday urged the Federal Communications Commission to regulate Internet service providers more like public utilities.

At the same time, AT&T had been spending heavily acquisitions and had cut its capital spending estimate for 2015.

Companies and industry groups have already protested Obama’s proposal, saying it would stifle growth and investment.

“We can’t go out and invest that kind of money deploying fiber to 100 cities not knowing under what rules those investments will be governed,” Stephenson said at an analyst conference.

So this is a CEO punishing potential customers until it gets what it wants, and because broadband internet is a matter of a handful of providers or even a monopoly for many Americans, AT&T can get away with it.  What are consumers where AT&T is the only choice going to do?

So yes, think America needs a broadband policy?

Gotta Get Those Priorities Straight

Nevada's legislature goes Republican for the first time since the Great Depression and GOP lawmakers immediately prepare their priorities: making sure black, Latino, and poor voters are disenfranchised through "voter ID" laws in 2016.

Yet another Republican-controlled state is looking to impose a voter ID law just in time for the 2016 elections. 

GOP state lawmakers in Nevada are readying ID bills for early next year, Secretary of State-Elect Barbara Cegavske told msnbc in an interview. Cegavske said she knew of two separate bills that might end up being merged together. 

“They’re writing them now,” said Cegavske, a Republican and a supporter of voter ID. “It just depends on how soon they get them in.” 

Last week, Republicans took full control of state government for the first time since 1929, meaning a voter ID bill would likely have a strong chance of passing. Governor Brian Sandoval has said in the past he supports voter ID. 

The GOP takeover also has raised fears of a broader rightward shift for the state, on everything from immigration to Stand Your Ground laws. 

Although Nevada’s session doesn’t begin until February, Cegavske said the bills could appear on a “placeholder” list of upcoming measures as early as next month, indicating their high priority for Republican lawmakers.

Republicans: the party that can't win without keeping those people from voting.

Over the last decade, Nevada has shifted from red to purple, driven by a massive influx of Hispanic voters, especially in the fast-growing Las Vegas region. President Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012, after it went twice for President George W. Bush.

You think that's maybe the problem?

Cegavske said she’d only support a bill if it didn’t restrict access to the polls—“we want to make sure nobody’s disenfranchised”—but added that she was confident Nevada could get IDs to those who need them. 

“We do have a fund in our DMV that provides for the homeless, which is I think very helpful,” she said. “And there are organizations that help seniors out. So I don’t think we’d be a state that would struggle.”

Guess who gets to define "who needs" state IDs provided to them?

Cegavske also mentioned a 2008 controversy in which the now-defunct community group ACORN turned in fraudulent voter registration forms—something that didn’t lead to any documented fraudulent votes being cast, and wouldn’t have been stopped by voter ID. 

“I think it’s a way to ensure the integrity of elections,” she said. “Just to make sure that everything is good.”

ACORN!  Drink!

“To be honest, every time I’ve gone, I’ve shown my identification,” she said. “I think it’s a privilege and an honor to be able to vote in our country, and I don’t think showing your identification is an issue. I mean, I personally just don’t have a problem with that.”

And she echoed a common argument made by ID supporters: “You have to have identification for any of the social agencies that you get either food stamps or everything from,” Cegavske said. “You have to have identification for everything—driving, you name it.”

Except food stamps and driving are not constitutionally protected rights, nor are they the basis of modern democracy.

Once again, if red states would provide ID for all citizens so that all eligible citizens would then be able to vote, we wouldn't have a problem.  That's not what's happened in any GOP state with these new "voter ID" laws, and that's not what's going to happen in Nevada.  What will happen is that Nevada will make it nearly impossible to get identification, and thousands, if not tens of thousands, will lose their ability to vote.  The vast majority of those who will lose that right will be Democrats.

And that has always been the plan.

StupidiNews!

• An audio message purportedly from wounded Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has surfaced, where he taunts the US and its coalition partners and promises "death and destruction".
• An internal US Secret Service review of September's White House fence-climbing incident has found a number of failures leading to the security breach that the agency should have corrected.
• President Obama says he will veto a planned GOP passage of a bill forcing him to approve the Keystone XL pipeline in the House and Senate.
• Gasoline futures in the US continue to drop as oil prices are the lowest in years, meaning some motorists could see gas prices under $2 a gallon.
• Amazon and publisher Hatchette have come to an agreement on e-book pricing for Amazon's Kindle platform after months of negotiation.

Last Call For That Word Does Not Mean What You Think It Does

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar is convinced that Joni Ernst, Cory Gardner, and the rest of the incoming GOP Senate class are going to govern as pragmatists.

This year's congressional majorities were built on the victories of center-right candidates, not the bomb-throwers who disrupted their party's leadership over the past two years. Of the 16 House Republicans who picked up seats for the party, 11 of them represent districts President Obama carried in 2012. And the freshman Senate class may be filled with conservatives, but ones who have expressed willingness to work across party lines.

The next generation's pragmatism is no accident. Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and aided by outside groups, worked assiduously to intervene in primaries, ensuring that far-right candidates like Chris McDaniel and Milton Wolf didn't win nominations. 

The biggest bellwethers in determining how unified the new Republican-controlled Senate will be are four newly elected conservative stalwarts: Sens.-elect Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Dan Sullivan of Alaska. Three were endorsed by the antitax Club for Growth, while a fourth was a Sarah Palin favorite. But all of them had strong support from the establishment, too, and Republican leaders expect they will be team players in the new Senate.

Martin "BooMan" Longman is convinced that Josh Kraushaar is out of his freakin' mind.

Silly me, but I thought the "trope" about Cory Gardner was that he knew how to put a moderate sheen on an extreme anti-contraception record. He didn't say stupid things like Sharron Angle or Ken Buck, but his left-right alignment isn't any different. Thom Tillis presided over the most radical state legislature in North Carolina in living memory. Joni Ernst spent much of time talking about how she was going to come to Washington and start cutting the balls off the place. What these folks did was win where their radical predecessors had lost, and they gave lip service here and there to finding solutions, but all that happy talk was accompanied by completely uncompromising paranoia and lunacy regarding the president.

Let's remember that Joni Ernst has gone on record saying if elected she will work to abolish the Department of Education and the EPA.  The tax plan Thom Tillis and the NC GOP put together benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle-class  Cory Gardner backed Colorado's abortion-ending personhood measure. Dan Sullivan campaigned on being responsible for Alaska's "stand your ground" law (and he wasn't, he lied).

And all the incoming GOP Senators have vowed to take health care away from millions of Americans by repealing the Affordable Care Act.

And in the House, Steve M. points out that the same old battles over health care and stupid show trials prove there was never going to be a "more moderate GOP interested in governance."

Congressional Republicans seized Wednesday on controversial comments made by a former health-care consultant to the Obama administration, with one leading House conservative suggesting that hearings could be called in response as part of the GOP effort to dismantle the law in the next Congress and turn public opinion ahead of the 2016 election.

"We may want to have hearings on this," said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), an influential voice among GOP hardliners and a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in an interview at the Capitol. "We shouldn't be surprised they were misleading us."

But you're supposed to believe these clowns are going to "work with President Obama to govern."

Okay, Josh.

Stimulus/Response Theory, Immigration Edition

The Stimulus:

President Obama will ignore angry protests from Republicans and announce as soon as next week a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration enforcement system that will protect up to five million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide many of them with work permits, according to administration officials who have direct knowledge of the plan.

The Response:

Even if Obama goes ahead w/immigration action, McConnell says: We will not shut government down over it. Spending bill won't be held hostage
— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) November 13, 2014

Now things get very, very interesting, but right now it looks like Obama has won this round convincingly and that there's nothing they can do about it.  We'll see what the GOP does between now and next week, but if McConnell is folding on this, then that GOP civil war I keep hinting at will surely burst open like a rotten melon.  Greg Sargent agrees.

Because this combines a fight over “amnesty” with one over alleged executive overreach, it will probably put the conservative media into five-alarm overdrive. Virtually every Republican official in the country will speak out against it. Ted Cruz will rampage throughout the Conservative Entertainment Complex warning of a Constitutional crisis. 

If this reaches such incendiary levels, how far will GOP leaders feel compelled to go in fighting it? McConnell is already pledging that “there is no possibility of a government shutdown.” But if there is any area where conservatives will continue to demand maximum confrontation, you’d think it’s here. If so, they will demand a Total War posture against Obama’s efforts to defer the deportations of millions.

So either McConnell has no real power over his caucus either, just like John Boehner, and we're headed into complete GOP anarchy, or the Tea Party never had any power and executive immigration action will happen regardless of what Republicans do.  Those really are the only two eventual outcomes at this point...

...Unless the Democrats panic and collapse, and somehow force President Obama to roll back his own executive orders.  That's always a possibility.

GOP Voter Suppression Worked

Welcome to the new Jim Crow era, folks.  Disenfranchisement of millions of voters is now a reality nationwide. WaPo's Catherine Rampell:

The days of Jim Crow are officially over, but poll-tax equivalents are newly thriving, through restrictive voter registration and ID requirements, shorter poll hours and various other restrictions and red tape that cost Americans time and money if they wish to cast a ballot. As one study by a Harvard Law School researcher found, the price for obtaining a legally recognized voter identification card can range from $75 to $175, when you include the costs associated with documentation, travel and waiting time. (For context, the actual poll tax that the Supreme Court struck down in 1966 was just $1.50, or about $11 in today’s dollars.)

A hundred bucks just to vote?  But doesn't the state pay for it?  Sure, if you can go through the hardship process to prove you can't afford it, which of course takes months.  The new poll taxes are certainly real enough to keep millions from voting, and that could have affected the 2014 elections:

In the meantime, some ­back-of-the-envelope calculations from Wendy Weiser — director of the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice — should at least give us pause: Right now, it looks like the margin of victory in some of the most competitive races around the country was as big as the likely “margin of disenfranchisement,” as Weiser puts it. That is, more people were newly denied the right to vote than actually cast deciding ballots.

Let that sink in.  More people were disenfranchised this year due to new Voter ID laws than the margin of victory for Senate and/or Governor's races in some states.

Take, for example, Kansas. 

In the state’s nail-biting gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Sam Brownback bested his Democratic challenger, Paul Davis, by a mere 33,000 votes out of nearly 850,000 cast. Now, compare that with the estimated effects of Kansas’s new restrictions on voting. 

We know that more than 21,000 people tried to register but failed because they lacked the necessary “documentary proof of citizenship” required by a new Kansas law. The state’s separate, strict voter ID law also had an effect: Applying findings from a recent Government Accountability Office reportthat examined how the voter ID law affected the state’s turnout in 2012, Weiser estimates that it probably reduced turnout this time around by about 17,000 votes.

38,000 votes disenfranchised.  Davis beat Brownback by 33,000 votes.

Weiser finds similarly troubling results for close races in other states with restrictive voting laws, including North Carolina (where the U.S. Senate race was decided by about 47,000 votes, or 1.6 percentage points, in favor of the Republican candidate) and Florida (where the governor’s race was decided by about 66,000 votes, or 1.1 points, also in favor of the Republican).

Yes, 2014 turnout was low in blue states with no voter suppression laws.  That doesn't mean that voter suppression laws in red states didn't have an effect in turnout in those states and the races in them.

And even more voter suppression laws go into effect for 2016.

Won't that be fun?

StupidiNews!

• The European Space Agency has successfully landed its Philae probe on the surface of a speeding comet after a 10-year mission.
• The Senate will vote on approving the Keystone XL pipeline next week after a whirlwind of negotiation by Democrat Mary Landrieu, facing a runoff election in December.
• Same-sex marriage advocates won victories in two states yesterday as the Supreme Court lifted its stay on marriages in Kansas, and a federal judge struck down South Carolina's ban.
• Tensions in Ukraine are high as NATO is accusing Moscow of sending in troop convoys and ballistic nuclear missiles into Ukraine, a charge the Kremlin angrily denies.
• Some 91% of Americans feel digital surveillance is out of control and that consumers can't do anything to stop it in a new Pew Research poll.

Last Call For The State Of Play

This month's Pew Research poll is up on the state of American politics in the wake of the GOP wins last week, and they're very informative.  First of all, while Democrats want President Obama to work with Republicans, Republican want Congress to tell President Obama to go to hell, effectively the same place things were in 2010.



Secondly, nearly half of Latino voters see no difference between President Obama and Republicans on immigration reform legislation.




Food for thought, and much more at the link.

The Sinister Six

Senate Republicans seem pretty confident they can get things past a Democratic filibuster in the Senate to force president Obama to veto things.  There's three scenarios there: 

1. Mitch McConnell will use budget reconciliation tricks to require a 51-vote majority with no filibuster on things like Obamacare,
2. Senate Republicans will get rid of/severely limit the filibuster altogether,
3. There's enough Democrats that will vote with the GOP to break a 60-vote filibuster.

TPM's Sahil Kapur looks at scenario three there and identifies six Dems who can be flipped.  Regular readers should be able to guess who they are already.

If he does manage to keep his caucus united, here are McConnell's six top Democratic prospects for reaching 60 votes.

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri

It took Todd Akin of "legitimate rape" notoriety to save McCaskill from electoral doom in 2012, and this second-term Missourian recognizes that she can't vote in lock-step with her party if she wants to stay in the good graces of her conservative-leaning state. Look for her to side with Republicans from time to time to appease her right flank, on issues such as the Keystone pipeline. 

Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia

This conservative Democrat has always looked for ways to make himself attractive to West Virginians, from literally shooting the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign ad to voting against Reid on filibuster reform. With the ranks of conservative Democrats diminished in the wake of the 2014 blowout, Manchin will look for opportunities to tout his bipartisan bona fides. 

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota

Heitkamp won her first Senate election in 2012 by a razor-thin 1 percent margin in deep-red North Dakota. Not shy about breaking with her party, she was one of just four Democrats who voted to block the popular gun background checks legislation in 2013 — the other three have retired or lost reelection. Expect her to hunt for issues where she can align herself with the new Republican majority. 

Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana

Donnelly largely owes his seat to Indiana Republicans who threw out an untouchable incumbent in 2012 in favor of a candidate to imploded amid a rape gaffe in the general election. One of the more conservative Democrats, he'll likely be willing to partner with McConnell's Republicans in some cases, such as reversing the 30-hour work week definition under Obamacare. 

Sen. Angus King of Maine

King, a progressive-leaning independent who says he'll continue to caucus with Democrats, has often looked for ways to polish his nonpartisan credentials. In two years as a senator, King has tried to play deal-maker and split with Democrats on issues like gun control and student loans. 

Sen. Jon Tester of Montana

Tester survived reelection in the Democrat-friendly year of 2012, but his party got wiped out this year in the race for Montana's other Senate seat. Tester has been willing to buck Democratic leaders at times, most notably when he helped kill the DREAM Act by filibuster in 2010.

Of those six, Manchin and King are going to be the largest problems, but McCaskill is wholly involved in her own self-aggrandizement as well, and the rest can be counted on from time to time to play the same role Olympia Snowe did as a Maine Republican and Evan Bayh did as an Indiana Democrat: the person who will make the call on pass or fail and who can extract the most from both sides.

Manchin is especially keen on allowing the GOP majority to pass bills.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) made in clear in an interview published Monday that he has no plans to support Democrats who want to take a page out of the GOP playbook by obstructing the new Republican majority. 

"That's bullshi—…. I'm not going to put up with that," Manchin told Politico when discussing the prospect of Democrats blocking the Republican agenda over the next two years. 

Manchin didn't appear to be alone either. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) also talked about the need to get something done. 

"Our caucus needs to take a hard look at the way we do things and make sure we are putting the policy issues first before politics," McCaskill told Politico. "The habit we got into in doing nothing, no one was happy with that. I hope that we never go back to that."

In other words, if you thought President Snowe jokes were annoyingly accurate in 2009, you've not seen anything yet with these six lovely individuals, who won't waste a minute in rushing to screw over Obama heading into 2016.

And Manchin?  Well, don't be surprised if he decides to stay in West Virginia and run for Governor again, opening the door for a second GOP senator from that state in 2016 to go along with Shelly Moore Capito's win last week.

What a guy, huh?

The Real 2014 Election Winners

Let's not forget that the real winners in last week's elections were the billionaire Republican donors who bought eight new Senators for their oligarchy.

To get from the 2012 doldrums to the 2014 victory, GOP groups went through significant transformations. The network of groups backed by David and Charles Koch started buying attack ads with a new super-PAC instead of the nonprofit it used two years ago. The upside for them is the operation is more efficient (tax rules require nonprofits to spend at least 50 percent of their budget on nonpolitical activity, so every dollar on TV political ads must be matched with nonpolitical work). The downside is donor names are disclosed.

Perhaps the greatest example of a turnaround is Rove's American Crossroads. The group was the biggest loser two years ago, dumping more than $120 million into campaigns and watching 10 of the 12 Senate candidates it backed go down in defeat. This time Rove's group won 8 of the 11 Senate races where it made investments.

Crossroads went on a well-publicized soul searching mission last fall, including a donor meeting that kicked off the week of the government shutdown in 2013--an event that infuriated the business community. Despite the group's efforts to improve it's image, big checks were slow to come in. Over the summer Republicans were outspent in key races, Crossroads President Steven Law said in an interview. "Many of our candidates hit Labor Day and were underwater with their image," Law said. 

Unlimited money made all the difference this year.

The donor freeze started thawing in September when polling began to tighten in a number of races and big-names such as Sheldon Adelson started opening their wallets. He wrote a $10 million check to Crossroads GPS in September, a nonprofit arm of the Rove organization. GPS, as a nonprofit, is not required to disclose its donors. Adelson's windfall was leaked to the news media. "Typically donors who support Crossroads are pretty sophisticated consumers of political information," Law said. "My guess is donors paid attention to what they saw on sites like Real Clear Politics."

The group scraped together $36 million to put into television for senate races in the last 90 days of the campaign, according to figures provided by Crossroads. It was the lead spender in Colorado, Arkansas and Alaska, where GOP Dan Sullivan is about 8,000 votes ahead of Democrat Mark Begich.

And money buys cooperation.

However, resources weren't arriving evenly or predictably. That forced Crossroads and some of the other GOP groups to cooperate this year in ways they've never done before. One example came in October when Crossroads realized there was a "hole in our budget" for Colorado, Law said. 

Law emailed Brain Baker at Ending Spending Action Fund, the super-PAC backed by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and the two worked out a deal—the Ricketts group would go up on the air and continue pounding incumbent Democrat Mark Udall while Crossroads took a week off. "Ending Spending filled a gap," Law said. "The take away for all of us was sharing information and strategy was smart for all of us." Udall lost to Republican Cory Gardner. 

Ending Spending took the lead in other places, including Georgia where Republican David Perdue beat back Democratic challenger Michelle Nunn, in a race that was widely thought would go to a runoff.

So these GOP billionaires joined forced and coordinated their attacks worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  As a result, Democrats were utterly crushed across the country.

There's a lesson here if Democrats wish to choose to learn it.  You'd better believe the 2016 ads designed to depress voter turnout are already starting too.

Billionaire Republican donors bought Congress outright with this election.  If they get the White House as well, this country is done.

And it doesn't look like anyone can stop them unless we vote.  While you still can, that is.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping have announced a bilateral agreement to cut carbon emissions by more than 25% over the next two decades.
• Republican Dan Sullivan is claiming victory in Alaska's Senate race with a margin of absentee ballots of less than 8,000 votes.
• Five global banks have been hit by fines totaling $3.4 billion for allowing currency traders to manipulate foreign exchange markets.
• Iran has signed a deal for up to eight nuclear reactors with Russia as nuclear talks with the West are stalled out.
• A major Windows vulnerability bug in transport layer stacks could allow hackers to take over entire computers and Microsoft is urging all Windows users to update this week's security patch.

Last Call For The Fold On Lynch

Who would have predicted that after running away from President Obama and losing the Senate that Senate Democrats would no longer have President Obama's interests at heart in the lame duck session?

President Obama will have to get his nominee for attorney general past a Republican-controlled Senate, Democratic and Republican aides say. 

A packed schedule after the election is almost certain to push the vetting process for Loretta Lynch into January, when Republicans are set to take power in the upper chamber. 

“It seems likely [the Lynch vote] would be in the next Congress. It’s difficult to process an [attorney general] that quickly,” said a Democratic aide. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has not yet made a decision on whether to move Lynch’s nomination in the lame-duck session, according to spokesman Adam Jentleson.

But aides say the time crunch and growing GOP opposition to Lynch make it exceedingly unlikely that the replacement for Eric Holder will be confirmed in December. 

That means the task of approving a new attorney general — a position that is a lightning rod for controversy — will fall to the new Republican majority of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

“Ms. Lynch will receive fair consideration by the Senate. And her nomination should be considered in the new Congress through regular order,” McConnell said in a statement.

So yeah.  Outgoing Senators have their own agendas, and helping the President is absolutely not one of them.  But sure, the problem is Obama hasn't reached out enough to the people in his own party who told him to go to hell, right?

The Long Knives On Vee Jay

Washington insiders have long resented Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, comparing her to everyone from "the voice in Obama's head" to Othello villain Iago to the last guy to hold the role in the last White House, Karl Rove.  But after 2014's brutal loss for the Democrats, a lot of pressure is now on the President from the left to clean house, and to start with letting Jarrett's head be the first to roll.

And nobody on the left hates Valerie Jarrett quite like New Republic editor and author Noam Scheiber, who has quite the extensive post-midterm hit piece on Jarrett up.  My feeling is that it would have gone up even if the Democrats had done well.

Jarrett’s work behind the scenes served the president well so long as people like Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, and Robert Gibbs (the former press secretary, with whom Jarrett also clashed) remained inside the building. She diversified the views he received without stifling internal debate. But then, one by one, the big personalities left. After two years, Summers and Gibbs had been replaced by far more amenable actors; Emanuel’s strong-willed successor, Bill Daley, lasted less than a year before being replaced by a relative cipher, too. 

Today, Obama’s top economic adviser is Jeff Zients, a former management consultant and Jarrett pal who had no experience in government before joining the administration. The senior adviser seat that David Axelrod once occupied now belongs to Dan Pfeiffer, and the chief of staff is Denis McDonough. Both joined Obama in 2007 and have long since made their peace with Jarrett’s influence. “My sense is Denis does his best to not turn that into a reckoning kind of relationship,” one former White House official told me. “He doesn’t want to test it.” 

As Jarrett has outlasted her rivals, it has increasingly fallen on her to do more than simply protect Obama from those who might undermine his presidency. She must nudge him when he becomes self-satisfied and rein in his worst political impulses. It is a position for which she is uniquely unqualified.

And then Scheiber goes on a pretty epic roll.

Valerie Jarrett is not above keeping a shit list—or as hers was titled, a “least constructive” list. One progressive activist recalls Jarrett holding the document during a meeting and noticing her own name on it, along with the names of others in the room. “It was kind of an honor,” the activist told me. This was not out of character for Jarrett. The woman who once resisted Emanuel’s commandment against rewarding bad behavior has often gone out of her way to suppress dissent among ideological allies and others who question the president. (A White House official says the document was prepared by a staffer acting without orders and that it is not a common practice.) 

Consider her interactions with the LGBT community when they agitated for an executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors. Jarrett had been one of the Obama team’s biggest supporters of gay rights since the campaign (long before Obama himself “evolved” on the marriage question). She had even authored a memo advising the president to sign the executive order. But when Obama decided against it in 2012, he dispatched Jarrett to deliver the news to four or five groups active on the issue. 

The meeting was a minor fiasco. A BuzzFeed reporter had broken word of the gathering just before it began, prompting Jarrett to lecture everyone in the room for several minutes about speaking to the press. She fumed that the reporter was outside “writing stories,” and told the activists that “we can’t have White House meetings if you do this kind of thing.”

Scheiber goes on for another 3,000 words or so of anecdotes and stories on how Jarrett is basically the Bitch From Hell and how everyone hates her and how she's destroying Obama's legacy,  It's amazing then to find somebody that Scheiber hates more than Obama himself, and that person is definitely Jarrett.

He ends with this:

It’s no surprise that Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett would govern as reasonable people. It’s who they are. The tragedy is that we live in surpassingly unreasonable times.

Why can't Obama just give me my pony?

No Longer Neutral On Net Neutrality

President Obama weighed in this week on the issue of Net neutrality, and he's instructing the FCC to regulate broadband internet as a utility.  It may sound boring to you, but it would mean a lot of good news for consumers.

Obama, who campaigned on the issue of net neutrality, said the FCC's new rules should explicitly ban such paid prioritization deals and sided with consumer advocates who have pushed for the FCC to reclassify ISPs so that they can be regulated more like a public utility. 

"Simply put: No service should be stuck in a 'slow lane' because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth," Obama said in a statement. 

"I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online."

He also said the FCC should apply its new rules equally to mobile and wired ISPs, with a recognition of special challenges that come with managing wireless networks.

Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have been fiercely lobbying against this, claiming government regulations will crush their business and the internet.  Republicans will certainly go berserk over this too.  But America has the slowest, most expensive internet in the developed world and the only way to fix it is by treating broadband internet as a public utility the way we do power, water, and sanitation.

Of course, we're behind by several trillion dollars in maintenance of power, water and sanitation, so I wouldn't hold your breath on all that getting fixed any time this generation either.

The reality however is that up until this week, tens of millions of voters had no idea what net neutrality meant.  Now they know that Obama is for it and Ted Cruz is against it, so it has to be evil, and everything that you don't like about your internet will be Obama's fault.

And that's all that matters.