Last Call For Maximum Godwin

What happens when Daily Caller founder and bowtie enthusiast Tucker Carlson gets together with America's favorite conspiracy theorist, Infowars radio host Alex Jones? Obama the eugenics loving Nazi, that's what!

During a bizarre appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested the Obama administration is engaging in "Nazi stuff" by using ethnic politics, and wants to confiscate all the country's firearms and put people "in jail for even having them." 

Jones, America's leading conspiracy theorist, believes the government perpetrated mass catastrophes like the September 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the Boston Marathon bombing, and several mass shootings. Jones has recently been pushing the conspiracy theory that a military training exercise, Jade Helm, is an attempt to create martial law in the United States (it isn't). Jones is an ally of Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul and helped launch his political career. 

Fox News executive vice president Bill Shine has dismissed Jones, saying he "wishes he had a platform on Fox News ... That's not going to happen, so he should stick with trying to locate the black helicopters." Some of Carlson's colleagues have dismissed Jones as a "nut job radio guy" who owns a "radical far-right Web site." 

Despite Fox's disapproval of Jones, Carlson appeared on his May 19 program to commiserate about the downfall of America under President Obama. (Carlson has previously appeared on the program.)

Carlson, who is also the founder and editor in chief of The Daily Caller, claimed during the appearance that progressives use ethnic politics and identity politics to divert attention from their "policy failures." He said the strategy is "really dangerous," comparing it to countries where there is a violent ethnic divide. He said of the Obama administration: "They categorize people by race in a way that, you know, you can't even imagine -- 30 years ago you would have said, 'Wait a second, that's like Nazi stuff.'"

Of course we go from zero to genocide in under 60 seconds here, which is a painful reminder that is there is anything that unites the lunatic fringe of the left with the most odious operatives of the right, it's comparing President Obama to Hitler.

It's amazing stuff.  These guys are insane, but they're both laughing all the way to the bank.

Grifters Are Indeed Going To Grift

320 million Americans or so, and yes, some of them are horrible, horrible people.

A Tennessee man and his family used much of the $187 million it collected for cancer patients to buy themselves cars, gym memberships and take luxury cruise vacations, pay for college tuition and employ family members with six-figure salaries, federal officials alleged Tuesday in one of the largest charity fraud cases ever, involving all 50 states. 

The joint action by the Federal Trade Commission and the states says James T. Reynolds Sr., his ex-wife and son raised the money through their various charities: The Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and its affiliated Cancer Support Services; The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona; and the Children's Cancer Fund of America in Powell, Tennessee. 

The charities hired telemarketers to collect $20 donations from people across the country, telling consumers that they provided financial aid and other support to cancer patients, including pain medication, transportation to chemotherapy visits and hospice care. 

But little money made it to cancer patients, as the groups "operated as personal fiefdoms characterized by rampant nepotism, flagrant conflicts of interest, and excessive insider compensation" with none of the controls used by bona fide charities, the FTC said Tuesday. 

Anyone who donated money to these groups shouldn't expect a refund anytime soon. While litigation against Reynolds Sr. and the Cancer Fund of America is ongoing, the settlement agreements with Reynolds' son, ex-wife and a long-time associate of the family — Kyle Effler — notes that much of the money has already been spent. The agreement bans the three from fundraising and shuttered their organizations. 

"The money is mostly gone," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. Rich declined to say whether a separate criminal investigation might be underway, noting only that the regulatory agency doesn't have that authority.

$187 million bucks worth of fraud.  Why, those are almost Bank of America numbers if you add a couple of zeroes or so.

Seriously, you scammed people for cancer patients, twenty bucks at a time, and made that much off of it. Amazing stuff, frankly. And of course, the money's all but gone.  Oh well.

Perhaps we should cut the FTC's budget.  I'm sure that would solve the problem, right Republicans?

Thanks, O-Bee-Ma!

The White House has released a strategy this week to help the country's honeybee supply, which has seen sharp drops every winter for the last ten years or so. For now, the nation's beekeepers have been able to breed enough honeybees to cover losses, but that's not a sustainable practice.  It's good to see some help coming for them.

The White House strategy lays out a goal to reduce winter losses of managed honeybees to no more than 15 percent in the next 10 years. Winter losses of managed honeybees for the 2014-2015 season topped 23.1 percent, according to a survey released last week. Beekeepers say that the maximum level of losses they can experience and still remain economically viable is 18.7 percent. Part of the White House’s strategy to reduce bee losses will be ramping up research and surveying efforts on honeybees, in an attempt to determine what stressors are most dangerous to bees and what are the best ways to manage bees’ habitat. 

The strategy, which grew out of a pollinator task force created by executive order last year, doesn’t just tackle managed honeybees — bees that are kept by beekeepers to pollinate crops around the country. It also singles out monarch butterflies, another pollinator that has been facing serious declines over the last several years. 

Over the last two decades, monarch populations have declined by 90 percent, a drop that has been precipitated in part by removal of milkweed — a key food source for monarch larvae — along with changing weather patterns, and deforestation. The White House wants to increase the eastern monarch butterfly population to 225 million butterflies by 2020, a goal it aims to accomplish through public-private partnerships and actions in both the U.S. and Mexico, where the butterflies spend the winter. 

The strategy also spells out a goal to “restore or enhance” seven million acres of pollinator-friendly habitat over the next five years. That goal will help native pollinators, such as wild bees and butterflies, as well as managed honeybees. Last year, summer losses for managed honeybees exceeded winter losses for the first time, and Dennis VanEngelsdorp, assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, told ThinkProgress that poor bee nutrition due to meadows being plowed under for crops might have contributed to the summer losses.

Not only is this good for the environment and the ecosystem, but it's good business too. Pollinated crops are worth billions of dollars every year, from blueberries to okra to watermelon to sunflowers to cabbage and a whole range more. We'd be in a hell of a fix without honeybees, and it's excellent that the White House is taking this seriously.

StupidiNews!

• While Democratic AG Jack Conway won his primary easily, Kentucky's Republican gubernatorial primary is headed for a recount, with Matt Bevin ahead of James Comer by just 83 votes.
• A federal judge has ordered the State Department to release thousands of e-mails from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's tenure.
• Japanese airbag maker Takata has now doubled its recall of airbags to include 34 million US vehicles, making it the largest safety recall in US history.
• A new survey finds 32 states face budget shortfalls in fiscal 2015 and or 2016, many of them led by Republican governors.
• Tech companies are telling the White House that requiring government policies to create "back doors"in products will mean these doors will be exploited by repressive foreign regimes.

Last Call For The Speed Of Derangement

President Obama got his own Twitter account Monday (@POTUS) and as Jonathan Capehart notes, it took all of ten minutes for Post-Racial America to show up with the virtual white hoods and the crosses to burn.

The first racist tweet appears to have come in at 11:48 a.m. from a particularly nasty fellow who addresses the president as the N-word and advises him to “get cancer.” The racist affront is the equivalent of being called the N-word by a coward in a passing car as you’re walking down the street. 

If you follow me on the beast that is Twitter, you have seen me do battle with racists, homophobes and the willfully uninformed and ignorant. I strongly believe those folks need to be exposed for sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes. And I strongly believe those folks need to endure the public censure and ridicule that comes with being revealed as a hate-filled bigot. It is then that whatever sliver of hope I have in humanity is restored. 

No doubt, Obama was neither shocked nor surprised by the racist reception he received. After all, this is a man who has endured six years of gasp-worthy sleights. But I wonder whether deep down on some level the president wasn’t disappointed. It wouldn’t make him naive. It would make him human.

I'm black and I still don't know how President Obama puts up with it without drone striking half of Alabama and Oklahoma in a fit of rage.  He's a better man than I will ever dream of becoming.

Ready, Fire Your Mouth Off, Aim!

The nation's largest police union isn't anywhere close to happy with President Obama taking away their military-grade toys, claiming the president is making scapegoats of them, and that keeping M-16 rifles and armored APCs away from local police puts them at risk against the heavily armed insurgents citizens of the United States.

James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, told POLITICO on Monday that he hopes to have a White House meeting as soon as Tuesday to discuss his concerns about how the plans could put cops at risk. 

“The FOP is the most aggressive law enforcement advocacy group in Washington, and we will be at our most aggressive in asserting the need for officer safety and officer rights in any police changes that are to be effected,” Pasco said. 

He said in particular he objects to a measure that would require police departments to get permission from city governments to acquire certain equipment, including riot batons, helmets and shields, through federal programs. 

“We need to only look back to Baltimore to see what happens when officers are sent out ill-equipped in a disturbance situation,” he said. “Because you don’t like the optics, you can’t send police officers out to be hurt or killed.”

To recap, local governments that have a problem deploying military-grade equipment against their own citizens are only worried about "optics" and not, you know, deploying military-grade equipment against their own citizens.  Interesting premise.  Luckily, cooler heads are prevailing.

Under the new standards, local police departments have to get sign-off from a civilian governing body, like a city council, and provide a “clear and persuasive explanation” for why the controlled equipment is necessary. They also have to commit to training officers on community and constitutional policing approaches, as well as collect data on when the equipment is used for a “significant incident.” 

Data collection is a major element of broader administration recommendations on 21st-century policing, also released Monday. 

A dozen cities have agreed to share data with academic-data scientists to help develop a sort of early warning system that would “[home] in on problems before they manifest themselves in the community,” Muñoz said. During his visit on Monday, Obama plans to visit Camden’s Real-Time Tactical Operational Intelligence Center and greet a group of volunteer tech experts who’ll spend a few days helping Camden shore up its internal data system. 

The administration is also planning “hackathons” and other efforts to help agencies make the data accessible to their communities through visualizations and mappings.

The task force’s report centers on six broad areas—or “pillars”—for improvement: building trust and legitimacy, policy and oversight, technology and social media, community policing and crime reduction, training and education, and officer wellness and safety.

Both Cincinnati and Lexington are two of those twelve cities cooperating on this venture, and that's good news locally at least.  Attorney General Loretta Lynch will kick off her tour of these cities here in Cincinnati today.

The U.S. attorney general is looking to Cincinnati as a model for how police departments should operate. 

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch is traveling around the country, highlighting "collaborative programs and innovative policing practices." 

Her visit later today comes as some American cities grapple with distrust between their residents and police forces. The distrust and anger have boiled over in some places , in light of several recent police-related deaths of black men. 

Cincinnati's Collaborative Agreement is often looked to as a model for how police departments should work with the communities they serve. It was forged in the wake of the police shooting death of Timothy Thomas in spring 2001. His death sparked riots in Cincinnati's historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, where Thomas was shot and killed; the community's reaction was a flashpoint that uncovered long-simmering tensions and frustrations between residents and police, and eventually led to reforms in the city's police department. 

Lynch is looking to Cincinnati for ways to "advance public safety, strengthen police-community relations and foster mutual trust and respect."

Well before Ferguson, South Charleston, and Cleveland made news, the shooting death of Timothy Thomas and the resulting days of protest in Cincinnati made national headlines.  The country's focus changed sharply just a few months later on September 11th, but people here haven't forgotten. While the city still has a long way to go, things are markedly different now.

Obvious HINT from Notorious RBG

Irin Carmon is one of several people to make this catch as Justice Ginsburg may have let the country see a card or two hidden in her jabot for June as she officiated at a same-sex marriage over the weekend.

Over the weekend, less than a month after the Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage bans, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over the wedding of Shakespeare Theatre artistic director Michael Kahn and interior designer Charles Mitchem. According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a guest at the wedding, Ginsburg delivered her portion, including saying she was officiating by the power vested in her by the United States Constitution, “with a sly look and special emphasis on the word ‘Constitution.’“

Dowd wrote that guests applauded, though “no one was sure if she was emphasizing her own beliefs or giving a hint to the outcome of the case the Supreme Court is considering whether to decide if same-sex marriage is constitutional.” A decision in that case, which will determine whether same-sex marriage is recognized throughout the country, is expected at the end of the term, usually late June.

No one seriously believes that Ginsburg, a liberal stalwart on the court, will be the swing vote in the decision in the case, Obergefell v. Hodges – that would be Justice Anthony Kennedy. The justices generally meet a few days after a case is argued for a closed door conference to take an initial vote tally and assign opinions, so under normal circumstances, Ginsburg would already know the case’s outcome. But more likely, the often-careful Ginsburg was emphasizing “constitution” at that moment to underscore her own vision of that document, which she has long held can expand to embrace people who were left out at the founding – including gays and lesbians.

So more likely she's making her own legal views (as well as her own personal ones) clear, which is nothing that should surprise anyone paying attention.

As for the constitutional language, it’s part of Ginsburg’s standard wedding terminology, according to this reporter’s forthcoming biography of Ginsburg, much to the awe of one of her clerks. In 2000, Ginsburg presided over the wedding of her former clerk, Paul Berman, to a former clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun. “I’ll never forget the end,” Berman, now a law professor at George Washington University, recalled. “Instead of ‘by the power invested in me, by whatever’ she said, ‘by the power vested in me by the United States Constitution.’ My wife always jokes that if we got divorced it would be unconstitutional.”

Or maybe it's a wink and a nod.  Who knows?  We have about a month and change to find out for sure.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama is issuing new guidelines that will restrict the heaviest military equipment being donated to police departments as part of an effort to restore trust among communities and police.
• Geologists at the US Geological Survey say multiple signs show the odds of a major eruption of Hawaii's Mt. Kilauea volcano has increased significantly over the month of May.
• The US State Department says it will finish its review of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's e-mails in mid-January, just before next year's earliest presidential primaries.
• Alaska independent Gov. Bill Walker has vetoed $3 billion in spending in the state's budget and is warning of thousands of state government furloughs as tax revenues plummet along with oil prices.
• AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is predicting FCC net neutrality rules regulating broadband internet as a public utility will eventually be killed by the Supreme Court or a Republican Congress.

Last Call For Dying Dinosaurs

Daniel McGraw does some math for Politico and comes up with the figures that show a lot more Republican voters than Democratic voters will have died off between 2012 and 2016, enough so that the GOP will have even more of a hurdle in capturing 270 electoral votes next year.

Since the average Republican is significantly older than the average Democrat, far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. To make matters worse, the GOP is attracting fewer first-time voters. Unless the party is able to make inroads with new voters, or discover a fountain of youth, the GOP’s slow demographic slide will continue election to election. Actuarial tables make that part clear, but just how much of a problem for the GOP is this?

Since it appears that no political data geek keeps track of voters who die between elections, I took it upon myself to do some basic math. And that quick back-of-the-napkin math shows that the trend could have a real effect in certain states, and make a battleground states like Florida and Ohio even harder for the Republican Party to capture.

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.

Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.

So again, with all things being equal, the ruthless calculus of mortality provides yet another problem for the GOP heading forward.  Whether or not it will be enough of a difference to help the Democrats remains, but it's certainly not helping the Republicans at this point. They have enough problems, and this only adds to them.

Ed Kilgore however has serious doubts about the whole thing.

Even if you buy McGraw’s math, the GOP’s “death deficit” amounts to about one-third of one percent of the electorate. I do think there’s something to be said for taking a good look at the generational change within the over-65 vote, in which less pro-GOP baby boomers are replacing a profoundly conservative Silent Generation.

But for those who are convinced Republicans are in some sort of demographic death spiral, the temptation will be strong to take it a bit too literally and believe that even in a four-year interval the GOP has bought itself a ticket to the boneyard. Don’t count on it.

Again, the difference is marginal at best, and it's not much of a headwind considering 125 million people plus voted in 2012.  At most, it's icing on a cake that will definitely be decided by far more meaningful factors, the largest of which is if anyone running for the Dems in 2016 will be able to turn out the Obama voter coalition.

My gut answer is no, but will they be able to build enough of a new coalition to win?

We'll see.

Married To The Slob

Jeb Bush's disastrous interview tour continues, this week with a fresh foray into the same-sex marriage minefield as he once again proves Republicans hopelessly out of touch with America.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida hardened his position against same-sex marriage in an interview that aired on Sunday, making clear he did not believe in constitutional protection for gay marriages — an issue now before the United States Supreme Court — and leaving out his past call for “respect” for gay couples.

Appearing on “The Brody File” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Mr. Bush, a likely Republican candidate for president in 2016, was asked in a brief interview if he believed there should be a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

“I don’t, but I’m not a lawyer, and clearly this has been accelerated at a warp pace,” he said. “What’s interesting is four years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had the same view that I just expressed to you.” He added: “Thousands of years of culture and history is just being changed at warp speed. It’s hard to fathom why it is this way.”

He also warned that the country’s future would be at risk without traditional marriages between a man and a woman who go on to raise children.

“To imagine how we are going to succeed in our country unless we have committed family life, committed child-centered family system, is hard to imagine,” Mr. Bush said. “We need to be stalwart supporters of traditional marriage.”

So he's a "stalwart supporter of traditional marriage" when the audience is the Christian Broadcast Network, but when it comes to a more national audience...

“We live in a democracy, and regardless of our disagreements, we have to respect the rule of law,” he said in a statement to The New York Times in January. “I hope that we can show respect for the good people on all sides of the gay and lesbian marriage issue — including couples making lifetime commitments to each other who are seeking greater legal protections and those of us who believe marriage is a sacrament and want to safeguard religious liberty.”

So either he's a liar, he thinks evangelical Christian Republican voters are complete morons, or both. So which is it, Jebya?

They May Take Our Bear Claws, But They Will Never Take Our Freedom

The next great conservative outrage is coming, one baker's dozen at a time.

The Obama administration is expected to all but ban trans fat in a final ruling that could drop as soon as next week, killing most uses of an ingredient that has been put in everything from frozen pizza to Reese’s Pieces but since deemed harmful to human health. 

The agency may create some very limited exemptions, but the ruling could force food companies to cut trans fat use beyond the 85 percent reduction already achieved over the past decade — a key piece of the Obama administration’s broader agenda to nudge Americans toward a healthier diet.  

The food industry believes low-levels of trans fats are safe. Industry leaders have banded together behind-the-scenes to craft a food additive petition that will ask FDA to allow some uses of partially hydrogenated oils, such as in the sprinkles on cupcakes, cookies and ice cream. The industry hasn’t shared details, but officials maintain the uses will represent “very limited amounts.” 

For more than 60 years, partially hydrogenated oils have been used in food products under the status generally recognized as safe, which does not require FDA’s approval. But since the 1990s, reams of studies have linked trans fat consumption to cardiovascular disease, causing somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 premature deaths before the industry started phasing it out. 

In late 2013 the Obama administration issued a tentative determination that partially hydrogenated oils are not generally recognized as safe. The move sent shock waves through the food industry, which has already brought down average consumption from more than 4 grams per day to about 1 gram per day — an exodus largely fueled by mandatory labeling imposed a decade ago. Scores of popular products, including Oreos and Cheetos, have quietly dropped partially hydrogenated oils over the years, but it remains an ingredient in many products, including Pop Secret microwave popcorn, Pillsbury Grands! Cinnamon Rolls and Sara Lee cheesecake, as well as some restaurant fryers and commercial bakery goods. 

If FDA sticks to its guns in its final determination — and most in food policy circles assume it will — the agency will be taking a firm step toward pushing out more of the remaining uses of trans fat. 

“This is a massive win for public health,” said Sam Kass, the former senior adviser for nutrition at the White House and executive director of Let’s Move!, noting that FDA has estimated removing trans fat could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and some 7,000 deaths. 

“There are few targeted actions you can take in this space that have that kind of direct impact,” said Kass. He said he expects FDA will ultimately allow negligible uses of trans fat, because there’s no science that shows such levels are harmful.

Prepare to hear stories about how this will wipe out millions and millions of food industry jobs and heroic restaurant and bakery owners, even though as the article says, the move away from trans fats has been a nationwide trend for years.  And the reason why food companies have been moving away is because they are dangerous, and there's plenty of lawsuits in the works over them. The industry is also expected to have years to phase the rest of trans fats out.

Needless to say, the right is going to go bonkers for weeks over this.  Watch.

StupidiNews!

• At least nine people are dead after a shootout among at least three rival biker gangs at a Waco, Texas restaurant parking lot.
• Ice cream maker Blue Bell is laying off 1,450 employees after recalling all of its product line as a result of an outbreak of listeria killing three and sickening seven.
• Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi has called up Shi'ite paramilitary reserves to deploy to Anbar province after the fall of Ramadi to ISIS forces over the weekend.
• Amtrak will resume service from Philadelphia to New York City today after replacing track damaged in last week's fatal derailment.
• Penn State University's College of Engineering was disconnected from the internet to clean up after a pair of  network intrusions, with at least one of the attacks originating in China.

Last Call For The Redline Express

As the Fair Housing Act faces being gutted by the Supreme Court this summer, the NY Times editorial board reminds us that the law was never really enforced in the first place.

George Romney served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Richard Nixon. He set out to dismantle segregation and what he described as a “high income white noose” formed by the suburbs that surrounded black inner cities. Under his Open Communities initiative, he instructed HUD officials to reject applications for sewer and highway projects from cities and states with segregationist policies. He believed that ending residential segregation was “essential if we are going to keep our nation from being torn apart.”

As Nikole Hannah-Jones reported in a 2012 investigation for ProPublica, Nixon got wind of Romney’s plan and ordered John Ehrlichman, his domestic policy chief, to shut it down.

In a memo to his aides, Nixon later wrote: “I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong.”

He understood the consequences of his decision: “I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools.” Nixon began to ostracize Romney and eventually drove him out of his administration. Over the next several decades, presidents from both parties followed the Nixon example and declined to use federal muscle in a way that meaningfully promoted housing desegregation.

Ronald Reagan was openly hostile to fair housing goals, as the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have shown in their book, “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.” The Justice Department under President Reagan challenged the ability of civil rights activists to sue for fair housing violations. The administration also conspired with the National Association of Realtors to undermine HUD’s already feeble enforcement authority.

Bill Clinton tried to bring pressure to bear on states and localities to further integration. But the bureaucracy at HUD resisted these efforts, and, as usual, the politics of the issue became treacherous.

Mr. Clinton’s second HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, tried in 1998 to retrace the path that George Romney had walked exactly 30 years earlier. He proposed rules that would have denied federal housing money to communities that flouted fair housing laws. This drew outrage and opposition from local governments that were accustomed to getting billions of dollars from HUD with no preconditions attached. Weakened by scandal and impeachment, Mr. Clinton lacked the political capital for a big fight over fair housing.

In the absence of strong federal leadership, the task of securing fair housing has largely fallen to housing and civil rights groups, which have routinely taken cities and counties and the federal government itself to court for failing to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Their lawsuits have changed the lives of many citizens who were once trapped in dismal neighborhoods.

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And now, that last avenue of recourse is under fire.  The Supreme Court is expected to decide next month whether the FHA can be used to show patterns and practices of segregation as well as individual examples.  If the court decides that the FHA was never designed to cover large-scale examples of housing discrimination, then the law is effectively dead.

The Obama administration does have new proposals on the way, but will those even be enforceable if the Supreme Court wrecks the Fair Housing Act?

And yes, the NY Times does call it what it is: apartheid.

The Coming Clown Car Catastrophe

As the Washington Post notes, the combination of Tea Party primary voters, the 24/7 news cycle, a weak "frontrunner" in Jeb Bush, and the gut of Clown Car Crazy candidates is a recipe for a massive disaster heading into 2016, and the odds of an explosion are ridiculously high.

Party officials are growing worried about a wide-open nominating contest likely to feature a historically large and diverse field. At best, they say, the Republican primaries will be a lively showcase of political talent — especially compared with the relative coronation taking shape on the Democratic side. But officials also acknowledge just how risky their circumstance is for a party that hasn’t put on a good show in a long time.

With no clear front-runner and Bush so far unable to consolidate his path to the nomination — his fumbles over the Iraq war and his brother’s legacy further exposed his vulnerabilities — the GOP’s internecine battle could stretch well into the spring of 2016.

This could cost presidential aspirants tens of millions of dollars; pull them far to the right ideologically, from hot-button social issues to foreign policy; and jeopardize their general-election chances. And in such a muddled lineup — officials are planning to squeeze 10 or more contenders onto the debate stage — candidates will be rewarded for finding creative ways to gain notice.

“We’re in a danger zone,” said Doug Gross, a top Republican establishment figure in Iowa. “When the party poobahs put this process together, they thought they could telescope this to get us a nominee who could appeal to a broad cross-section of people. What we’ve got instead is a confederation of a lot of candidates who aren’t standing out — and in order to stand out, you need to scream the loudest.”

Looming above the GOP show is Hillary Rodham Clinton, the dominant Democratic candidate whom Republican officials brashly dismiss as a scandal-plagued, out-of-touch relic of the past but whose early strength and political durability is nevertheless giving them a serious scare.

Republican officials are dismayed that months of relentless, negative press coverage of her use of private e-mail servers, foreign donations to her family’s charitable foundation and her six-figure paid speeches have done minimal damage to her favorability ratings.

At last week’s Republican National Committee meeting in Scottsdale, Ariz., party leaders plotted their path back to power and confronted the demographic changes that have made the Electoral College more challenging for Republicans, with their heavily male, overwhelmingly white base.

“To win in a presidential election year, the Democrats have to be good,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said. “As Republicans, we need to be about perfect in order to win.”

And nobody among the GOP faithful can handle that kind of pressure.  There's just going to be too many Todd Akin moments over a protracted primary mess with too many debates and too many opportunities to let the mask slip and to remind the American people that Republicans are pretty much insane.

But it'll be fun to watch.

Sunday Long Read: Poppy, The Gipper, And Haig

Dallas Morning News journalist Alan Peppard gives us this week's Sunday Long Read as he interviews Poppy Bush about the events of the last day of March, 1981, the day John Hinckley shot President Reagan, and how that turned Reagan's most bitter GOP foe into his best friend.

Accounts of the afternoon tend to be dominated by the sensational storyline of Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s declaration that “I’m in control here.” But Vice President George H.W. Bush’s pitch-perfect reaction to the crisis lies largely unexplored in the shadow of history. He had only recently been Reagan’s energetic opponent, a fact that was fresh in the memories of Reagan loyalists. The steady hand he showed after the assassination attempt would linger in the minds of his admirers as one of the defining moments of his public career.

Now 90, Bush consented to an email interview for this story. His comments, along with hours of tapes from inside the White House Situation Room, never seen photographs taken aboard Air Force Two and interviews with participants in the crisis shed new light on the day Reagan became the fifth sitting president to be shot and the only one who lived.

“I recall thinking about Nancy and the president when I first heard how bad the situation really was,” Bush told The News. “Even though it was still early in the administration, I didn’t think about them as president and first lady, but rather as friends.”

Yeah, I know.  Reagan and Bush went on to cause untold damage to the American middle class over the next eleven years.  But I also remember sending the White House a crayon picture I drew of Space Shuttle Columbia as a get well card for President Reagan when I was six.  And Al Haig tried some crazy, crazy stuff back then.

It's worth a read just from a historical perspective, at least.