Last Call For A Heart(beat) Habit To Break

Guess what's back, kids?  The GOP nutjob Heartbeat Bill!

Republican lawmakers in Ohio on Thursday advanced a bill that would ban abortion as soon as the fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. 

H.B. 248, the so-called "Heartbeat bill," advanced out of the House Health and Aging Committee by a party-line vote of 11 to 6. If it passes the Republican-controlled House and Senate, doctors who perform abortions after the imposed limit would face a fifth-degree felony. Opponents warn the bill would ban abortions before some women even realize they're pregnant. 

“The members of the Health Committee are so callous that they refused to add amendments to provide exceptions for victims of rape and incest or to remove criminal penalties that could be used to imprison doctors that provide abortion care," said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio. "The chilling effect of this crusade is being felt throughout the medical community and will no doubt result in talented physicians leaving Ohio to practice in other states.”

HB 248 would essentially eliminate abortion in Ohio, and the anti-choice nutjobs in the Ohio GOP have been trying to muscle this bill through now for two years.  The only reason it's not law is because the bill is even too extreme for some Ohio Republicans, who fear that an inevitable court battle over the bill would actually tell America the truth about the "pro-life" movement: that its goal is to eliminate safe and legal abortions in the US and return women back to the days of back alleys and black markets to get them.

The bad press might finally clue working-class white women in to the fact that the GOP wants to regulate them like chattel.  Wouldn't go so well for them in 2016 and they know it, especially if they, you know, need Ohio in order to win the White House.  Most of all it would blow a giant hole in John Kasich's 2016 plans.  If he signs the bill, he's done for as a moderate, and if he vetoes it, frankly there's enough Republicans in the Ohio State House to override it and he gets both sides angry at him.

So will this bill pass the Ohio House and Senate?  We're about to find out, and pretty quickly.

I've Got One Word For You...

Legendary (and the superlative is absolutely applicable here) director Mike Nichols has passed at the age of 83, and his body of work speaks for itself.  He was the man in the chair on some of the most famous films and most treasured Broadway plays over the last 50 years.

Mike Nichols, a gifted director whose film, TV and stage hits such as "The Graduate," "Working Girl" and ''Angels in America" amplified the aspirations and tragic losses of generations, has died. He was 83. 

The Academy Award- and Tony Award-winning director's career spanned more than six decades, and ranged from stand-up comedy with then-partner Elaine May, to Broadway and Hollywood classics of surreal, caustic humor and tortured personal dramas. 

The husband of journalist Diane Sawyer, his death was confirmed by ABC News. 

Nichols won a Tony Award for directing his very first play, "Barefoot in the Park," and would win eight more Tonys for directing "The Odd Couple," "Luv," "Plaza Suite," "The Prisoner of Second Avenue," "The Real Thing," "Monty Python's Spamalot," and the 2012 revival of "Death of a Salesman." He also won for producing the 1977 musical, "Annie." 

He also received an Oscar nomination (one of five throughout his career) for directing his very first film, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), and won the Academy Award for his second feature, the Dustin Hoffman classic, "The Graduate."

And yes, as a kid I got to see Annie on Broadway, although I was only 4.  The Graduate is still an amazing movie, and the rest of his film works were by and large the movies I grew up with: Biloxi Blues, Working Girl, The Birdcage, Wolf, and Primary Colors.

Primary Colors in fact was the movie that got me to pay attention to politics as a kid in his early 20s who thought he knew everything already (that and Bulworth).  Clinton's impeachment nonsense broke soon after and the rest made me a Democrat for life.

Here's to you, Mike.

Plastics!

The White House Needs Better Messaging Though

The President's prime time address to the nation tonight on immigration?  The networks aren't carrying it, because In The Tank For Democrats or something.

The White House is exasperated with the major broadcast networks – ABC, CBS and NBC -- for skipping out on President Barack Obama’s Thursday primetime address on his executive actions on immigration.

“In 2006, Bush gave a 17 minute speech that was televised by all three networks that was about deploying 6000 national guard troops to the border. Obama is making a 10 minute speech that will have a vastly greater impact on the issue. And none of the networks are doing it. We can’t believe they were aggrieved that we announced this on Facebook,” a senior administration official told POLITICO.

When the president wants to make a primetime address, White House officials will reach out to the big networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS, to gauge whether they would consider running the speech live before putting in a formal request for airtime.

But on Wednesday morning, with plans underway for a Thursday night address on Obama’s plans to issue executive actions on some of the most sweeping immigration reform in decades, those feelers came back with a negative report. None of the major networks wanted to take time away from their primetime programming for Obama’s 8p.m. speech. So the administration did not send out a formal request to the networks and took to Facebook to publicize the speech with a special video message from Obama along with a link to the livestream.

You know who is showing the speech live?  Telemundo and Univision.  And this isn't the first time the networks have told this President that they refuse to carry his speech, either. 

But you'd better believe the networks will be full of Republicans reacting angrily to the speech tonight.  Hard to get your message across to the people when the networks refuse to broadcast it.

Maybe this White House will finally learn to go around them.

StupidiNews!

• Three Florida State University students are hospitalized after a gunman opened fire at the school's library early Thursday morning, the gunman has been shot and killed by campus police.
• A federal judge has struck down Montana's same-sex marriage ban, allowing marriages to begin immediately in the Treasure State.
• President Obama is expected to announce his immigration plan in an address tonight, but immigration lawyers say implementing the plan may be very difficult even without GOP interference.
• Parts of upstate New York around Buffalo may get another several feet of lake effect snow today after some locations received as much as 4-5 feet of snow.
• A California company has introduced the Knightscope K5, a robotic night watchman that can patrol hallways and warehouses and deter intruders with alarms and cameras.

Last Call For Yet More Counties In Kentucky In Which Zandar Won't Visit

Remember, America has a black president, so racism is over.  Especially here in Kentucky.

In a Bullitt County Sheriff’s deputy’s body camera recording obtained by WDRB, Southeast Bullitt County Fire Chief Julius Hatfield can be heard discussing a car accident on I-65 in September. 

Hatfield first goes out of his way to provide assistance to Loren Dicken, who is white.
“You got a jack, ain’t you?” Hatfield asks the driver. “If you show me where them things is at, I’ll get my guys to start changing the tire for you.” 

At first, Dicken turns down the offer, but Hatfield insists, saying, “It will save you a bill.” 

Firefighters working for Hatfield even picked Dicken up from the hospital and took him back to the firehouse, where his car was ready and waiting.

Seems like a nice guy.  Bullitt County is just south of Jefferson County and Louisville, so it's not totally in the boondocks, and I-65 runs north to south through it. It's about a hour and change from here.

Yep, seems like a nice guy, Chief Hatfield.

But Hatfield treats the family of four black motorists completely differently. 

“Well, I’ve got a family of four from Cincinnati, I got to do something with,” the Bullitt County deputy tells Hatfield over the radio. 

“We ain’t taking no n*ggers here,” Hatfield replies, laughing. 

Instead of offering to help driver Chege Mwangi, the deputy recommends that he call the AAA motor club.

Oh.  I see.

And when WDRB’s Valerie Chinn attempted to ask Hatfield about the financial management of Southeast Bullitt Fire Department at a town meeting, he suggested that she didn’t understand English, and threatened to have her arrested. 

“Do you understand English darling?” he says in video recorded at the public meeting by WDRB cameras. “Do you understand English?” 

“Turn that camera off,” Hatfield barks. “I’ve asked you that in a nice way. Buddy, call the cops and get them here.” 

“I asked you once tonight if you understand English,” the fire chief adds after Chinn presses the issue. “I’m speaking English.”

Oh. I see.  Well then.

Remind me not to take 65 down through Bullitt County anymore.

Ever.

Stand With Rand In Quicksand

The Senate bill to reign in the NSA, end metadata collection, and provide more oversight to the agency in the wake of Edward Snowden came up for a vote yesterday, and Republicans were able to kill the bill with the filibuster.  That shouldn't surprise you, as 41 Republicans (and Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida)voted to filibuster the bill that Democrats (and Ted Cruz!) voted for.

But what's this?  Rand Paul voted against the NSA bill.

Rand Paul, a leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, helped kill a bill meant to rein in the National Security Agency. Huh?

The USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), received 58 votes on Tuesday night -- two short of cloture, the magic number in the Senate that allows a bill to proceed to an actual roll call.

The 40 Republicans and one Democrat who voted against cloture mostly did so because they thought the bill went too far. Paul also voted against NSA reform -- because, he said, it didn't go far enough.

Paul said he voted against the bill because it would have extended the Patriot Act provision that allows the NSA to search Americans’ phone records. He has consistently opposed the Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Leahy’s bill extended the provision’s expiration to June 2017 -- as a compromise, in order to change the law to stop the NSA from holding onto phone records. Under Leahy’s bill, that duty would have been handed off to phone companies. The companies' records could only have been searched with a surveillance court's order.

While Paul said he “felt bad” that the bill failed, because it “probably needed my vote," he also claimed the country was "one step closer to restoring civil liberties," because the Patriot Act provision's expiration date will not be extended.

But killing the bill does allow metadata collection on Americans to continue, and Rand Paul I guess is okay with that.  Turns out the enemy of the perfect we were warned about was Rand Paul, Typical Republican, who voted along with 41 of his Typical Republican buddies, to allow the NSA abuses to continue.

What say you now, Rand Paul civil liberties guys?

Horrible, Soulless Clock Is Right Twice A Day Alert

Douchebag, Son of Douchebag is correct for once over at RedState, which shall not be linked.  The words shall be displayed.

And he's goddamn right.  When, not if, the GOP shuts down the government again in order to stop President Obama, they will suffer no lasting harm from it at all.  Clinton was impeached, and not only did the GOP keep the House and pick up Senate seats, they won the White House.

There is nothing the GOP can do that will cause voters to punish them for anymore in the Age of Obama.

Nothing.  2014's election was 100% proof of that.  The insanity is coming. They will defund Obamacare and immigration and EPA coal plant rules and tens of millions of voters will cheer them on because screw the black-ass President and those people.

End of line.

StupidiNews!

• Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline failed by one vote in the Senate, but Republicans vow to pass the bill in the next GOP-controlled Congress in January.
• A federal appeals court has refused to issue a stay preventing same-sex marriages from taking place in South Carolina, but the state will make an emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court.
• Record lake-effect snowfall in upstate New York could bring storm totals to over 6 feet as officials in the area say at least four people have died from weather-related problems.
• A suicide car bomb in the Iraqi Kurd capital of Erbil has killed five as militants attacked the governor's office, leaving several wounded.
• School textbook makers have removed confusing and conflicting information about climate change from Texas's student textbooks ahead of a state school board meeting on teaching materials.

Last Call For More Gruber Grubbing

New Republic health care reporter Jonathan Cohn pens a look into the actual truth behind the statements made by MIT health economist and Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber, and discovers what America needs most is health economists with political common sense.

Faithful readers of the New Republic may remember Gruber’s role in what became a significant, if ultimately ironic, moment of the 2008 campaign. It’s easy to forget now, but when Obama first ran for president he rejected the idea of an individual mandate. John Edwards, who had included a mandate in his plan, and Hillary Clinton, who planned to include one in hers, attacked Obama for this—and cited a rough calculation that reform without a mandate would mean an additional 15 million people without health insurance. The figure had come from an article I wrote at the time. My source for the figure was a back-of-the-envelope extrapolation by Gruber. 

Obama campaign staff were not pleased. But after Obama won the election, and decided upon health care as a priority, his advisers tapped Gruber to provide calculations. The Department of Health and Human Services hired him as a contractor and paid very good money for his services—nearly $400,000, fees that are, health care experts tell me, roughly in line with what private consulting firms charge for similar work. In that capacity, Gruber provided the White House and sometimes its congressional allies with data—predictably similar to what CBO official projections would ultimately show—that they could use to devise policies or to defend their positions in public.

It’s possible that Gruber offered informal advice along the way, particularly when it came to positions he held strongly—like his well-known and sometimes controversial preference for a strong individual mandate. Paul Starr, the Princeton sociologist and highly regarded policy expert, once called the mandate Gruber's "baby." He didn't mean it charitably. But lots of outside advisors were offering the Administration opinions. On only one occasion, to my knowledge, did Gruber meet directly with President Obama in an advisory role. In that instance, he was part of a delegation of outside economists urging Obama to adopt reforms that would help restrain the cost of care. Otherwise, Gruber’s role was primarily to provide numbers.

So no, he wasn't the "architect" of  Obamacare any more than the CBO is the architect of the Obama budget.  What he said was politically tone-deaf, and all of us need to remember that Republicans are doing is using that to justify taking health coverage away from millions of Americans.

That's the only actual scandal here.

Frankly My Dear, I Can't Even

Salon's Tim Donovan argues that Millennials really have no reason to vote for either party, and should just stay home and write posts in Salon about how Millennials aren't voting.

For those of us who follow “millennial issues,” this generation’s low turnout hardly came as a surprise. Last April, the Harvard Institute of Politics found something surprising while talking with young voters: considerably more young Republicans expected to vote than Democrats. Armed with this troubling data, Democratic candidates had months to adapt their messaging and court our votes. What happened? Universally, Democratic candidates didn’t bother to address the (very real, very serious) problems that are on the minds of many millennials: the racist and costly drug war, ballooning student loan debt, long-term unemployment, flat wages at shitty retail and restaurant jobs, and an imperiled climate. Democratic strategists seemed to assume that running as the Not-Republican Party would carry them to victory among young voters. Perhaps they were just too comfortable, believing that, since millennials would never vote for Republicans, those votes were secure. The election firmly behind us, we all know how well that turned out. 

If Democratic strategists thought they could simply ignore the needs of millennial voters because we find Republican politicians to be noxious, hopefully this election taught them a lesson they won’t soon forget. People who need jobs, a pay raise, or just some debt relief are unlikely to put partisan loyalty over more immediate needs. Personally, I’d vote for Rand Paul for president faster than you can say “libertarian wacko” if I thought he would actually end the drug war, slash corporate welfare and plow the savings into student loan debt relief or a robust infrastructure bill. If someone like myself — a pajama-festooned, latte-sipping, liberal hipster who writes for Salon, fer chrissake – is willing to ignore party preference in favor of actual legislative gains, I can only assume that less ideologically committed millennials are even more willing to vote Republican for the right candidate or platform. 

Democrats are far too committed to being a centrist, business-friendly party that eschews economic populism at every turn. Hating your opponent might be a motivating impulse for some voters, but there’s already a party that believes in nothing beyond the destruction of its ideological enemies. Where’s the party for the rest of us, a generation who’ve come of age under the heavy thumb of neoliberal maximalism? Where’s the party that promises to fight back with unapologetically progressive politics? My suspicion is that the growing segment of disengaged millennials are looking for left-leaning candidates willing to shed the yolk of Clinton-era conformity and compromise — and they’re not finding it. (Help us, Elizabeth Warren, you’re our only hope!) Indeed, a simple examination of the exit polling seems to confirm this interpretation. Democrats lost millennials this cycle (as they did in 2012 compared with ’08), but it’s not like the Republican Party made any comparable gains among young voters that would suggest we’re moving rightward. Young people may be abandoning the Democrats, but it’s not because they’re rushing to endorse the public policy platform of Reince Priebus. (Thankfully.)

 You know what this says to me?

This says "I shouldn't have to vote for a party that isn't 100% on the issues I want, so I'll sit at home instead.  And I don't really give a damn if the Republicans win as a result."

And it's painfully clear that is exactly where Millennials and young Gen X voters like myself under 40 are.  Why should our generation have to eat the crap samdwich, when our grandfathers only had to survive the Civil Rights era and our fathers had to make it through Reaganomics?

The people that actually vote want to put out generation in indentured servitude in more ways than one, but why should we care, right?

Jesus wept.  If you consider voting for Rand Paul, you're not a goddamn progressive, you're an asshole.

New Tag:  Millennial Stupidity.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Team WIN THE MORNING asks:

Does Mary Landrieu have a prayer?

No.

She's going to lose by double digits and end up working for an energy lobbyist firm anyway because of Keystone XL, which will pass the Senate as it did the House but get vetoed.  Then she'll work to get it approved by the State Department anyway some time next year, depending on if Nebraska's Supreme Court blocks the routh through the state or not (it won't.)

Thanks for playing.

StupidiNews!

• Jerusalem police say a pair of Palestinian men armed with axes and knives broke into a synagogue and killed four Jewish worshipers and injured six others, including two police officers.
• DEA agents conducted surprise investigations of NFL team doctors and trainers over the weekend looking for abuses of prescription pain drugs for players.
• Japanese PM Shinzo Abe will call for snap elections in order to bolster his fortunes as the country slipped into its fourth recession in six years.
• Republican operatives used encoded Twitter feeds to pass along internal polling data so outside groups would know where to spend money, something that could be considered illegal.
• Social messaging app Snapchat wants users to be able to send money with its new Snapcash service, routed through online payment vendor Square.

Last Call For San Fran Nan, Twitter Queen

Nancy Pelosi wins the internet today.

Happy 65th Birthday, @SpeakerBoehner! Welcome to Medicare and Social Security!
— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) November 17, 2014

Exquisite.

The Grand Screwing Comes To Ferguson

Gov. Jay Nixon has just declared, for all intents and purposes, a preemptive state of emergency in Ferguson.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) declared a state of emergency Monday in anticipation of possible unrest following the announcement of findings of two separate criminal investigations into the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by a Ferguson, Mo. police officer. 

“Regardless of the outcomes of the federal and state criminal investigations, there is the possibility of expanded unrest,” Nixon said in an executive order. “The state of Missouri will be prepared to appropriately respond to any reaction to these announcements.” 

Nixon said in the order he directed the Missouri State Highway Patrol, St. Louis County Police Department, and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to “operate as a Unified Command to protect civil rights” and put the St. Louis County Police Department in charge of security in Ferguson related to protest areas and demonstrations. 

He also said the adjutant general of the Missouri could “call and order into active service such portions of the organized militia as he deems necessary to protect life and property.”

Nixon certainly seems to think there's going to be the need for military-grade weapons to be on hand to deal with his own constituents, which is great.  I had no idea the plural of "black citizen of Ferguson, Missouri" was "preemptively declared state of emergency".

And yes, I'm well aware of the fact Nixon's said he was going to call out the National Guard ahead of the grand jury decision, and that he's declaring the state of emergency so that he can activate said National Guard.

That is, as they say, the entire goddamn problem in the first place.

Joe Six Pack Is a Terrible Labor Economist

As David Atkins points out at Political Animal, your average American is very very bad at guessing labor economics figures (but then again so are most citizens of industrialized nations).

Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox has a fascinating article about real unemployment versus perceived unemployment. It turns out that not only Americans but workers all around the world vastly overestimate the number of people who are out of work.In America, people think the unemployment rate is an astonishing 32%, though the official figure is closer to 6% and wouldn’t top 12% even using much more relaxed definitions of “out of work.” Citizens of other countries are similarly wrong about their own unemployment rates. 

Why does this matter? Well, first of all because you’ll be likelier to oppose social welfare programs for the jobless if you believe that one out of every three people isn’t working at all. 

But second, it leads people to believe that the problem is that there aren’t enough jobs, when the bigger problem is that people with jobs are struggling due to low wages. That has an impact, for instance, on immigration policy: no one believes that undocumented immigrants are taking high-wage jobs, so you’ll be likelier to oppose immigration reform if you believe that there just aren’t enough even low-wage jobs, as opposed to that the jobs that exist don’t pay well enough. 

While mechanization, outsourcing and flattening are eliminating industries and jobs entirely, the bigger impact is to flatten wages. This is the first recovery in modern history in which median wage growth has actually fallen.

Now my guess is that Americans are including the number of retired people in these figures, and if this is a guess at how many Americans are considered to be out of the labor force, they're actually both closer to the answer and underestimating it a bit (it's 37.3%, which means Americans are actually better economic ballpark figure guys than people give them credit for.)

The rest of Atkins's stuff holds true however:  median wages have fallen because corporations are hoarding record profits, then complaining about labor costing too much.  The last six years has been the best opportunity ever to shift wealth upwards and that's exactly what's happened.  The richest Americans are super-wealthy, and average Americans haven't seen wages go up in 40 years.

So yeah, "immigrants are going to take our jobs" plays really well in white middle-class America right now.  It's not immigrants, it's the one percent.  And in the end, neither party is willing to take those guys on too much.