Last Call For The Bernie Coalition

If you listen closely, Bernie Sanders is telling us exactly who he is, and which Obama voters he cares about...and which ones he wants to be rid of in this conversation with NYT Upshot's Nate Cohn.

But Mr. Sanders, who has surged in the polls against Hillary Clinton, called to advance a different theory of the race. “I look at these things more from a class perspective,” he said.

“I’m not a liberal. Never have been. I’m a progressive who mostly focuses on the working and middle class.”

The difference between a liberal and a progressive focused on workers might seem slim, but it nonetheless shapes how he envisions the potential of the political coalition he hopes to assemble. He believes he can mobilize a working-class coalition spanning ideological divides.

“Ordinary people are profoundly disgusted with the state of the economy and the fact that the middle class is being destroyed and income going to the top 1 percent.”

Many of these people “may not be liberal” or may not “agree with me on gay marriage,” but “they want a fighter,” he said in the cordial conversation.

The issues that could potentially rally disaffected lower- and- middle-class voters “cross traditional liberal-conservative lines,” Mr. Sanders argued. He is in a good position to raise these issues, he said, citing his positions on trade, issues affecting older Americans and the minimum wage.

If Bernie's own words are raising alarm bells in your head right now, there's a reason for that, if you look at Cohn's analysis.

If Mr. Sanders did build a coalition of working-class voters, it would look a lot different from the coalitions assembled by recent liberal Democratic primary candidates. It would be positioned to do far better among Hispanic, black and less educated white voters than recent anti-establishment Democratic challengers, like Barack Obama, Howard Dean, Bill Bradley and Jerry Brown.

Far better among black and Latino voters than Obama?  Obama got 93% of the black vote with record black turnout in 2012 and 71% of the Latino vote, for a combined 23% of the entire 2012 electorate.  Exactly how does Sanders do "far better" than that?

In fairness to Mr. Sanders, few, if any, recent Democratic candidates represented the economic, populist left. The anti-establishment candidate of the last four competitive primaries all featured challenges from intellectual, professional-class liberals. Mr. Brown, Mr. Bradley, Mr. Dean and Mr. Obama — each educated at some point at an Ivy League university — all fared well in Marin County, Calif., and Greenwich, Conn.; none appealed much to voters in the Appalachians or along the Rio Grande.

And there we have it (despite the fact that Obama in fact did very well among voters in the Texas border area.)  It's always back to the white West Pennsatucky vote, and this is where Bernie thinks he can do better, while keeping black and Latino voters.

The problem is Bernie's idea of appealing to us isn't working real well.

When asked why his campaign was struggling to attract the working-class, less liberal voters he thought he might be reaching, Mr. Sanders acknowledged the challenges facing his campaign. “I’m not well known in the African-American community, despite a lifelong record,” he said, acknowledging one of the most consistent critiques of his chances. “That’s a real issue, and I have to deal with it.”

Maybe your support of gun manufacturers and your slagging of Obama has something to do with it, Bern.  Just saying.  When you try to broaden your appeal to voters in the Appalachians at the expense of voters in black neighborhoods, you're going to lose and keep losing.

Or, you could just go the Jim Webb route and be statistical noise and a giant joke.  Your call.

An Early Sighting Of Haley's Comment

GOP South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley knows that whatever bloody massacre happened in the state where she is in charge, the fact Dylann Roof bought a gun when the law said he shouldn't have been able to is anyone but her fault.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) said on Sunday that she did not support increasing waiting periods to allow federal officials ample time to conduct background checks even though flaws in the current law allowed Charleston shooter Dylann Roof to purchase a gun.

Not her problem, not her fault, not her job to fix it.  Leadership!

“Do you think the background check should be expanded, instead of a three day period, maybe longer?” NBC host Chuck Todd asked Haley during an interview on Sunday.

Haley insisted that she was “literally sick” to her stomach when she received the news that Roof was able to purchase a firearm because of a failed background check.

“When the feds say they are going to do something, we take them at their word that it’s going to get done,” the South Carolina Republican opined. “And the fact that it didn’t get done is terrible. And it’s one more thing that these families are going to have to go through that they don’t deserve to have to go through.”

“I think we need to look at the fact that it’s not about time,” she continued. “It’s about technology. You know, this is something, when someone has a charge filed against them, it should go into a database and it should be shown immediately to anyone that’s looking at it.”

“So, I would be more interested in what went wrong. What sort of — why are they dealing with paperwork and not dealing with technology that they wouldn’t have had this.”

Oh, so perhaps Congress should allot more money to improve the nation's background check system and pass legislation requiring states and the federal government to work together on these checks.

Except that's exactly the opposite of what the Republicans who control Congress actually did: since they took power in January they've made background checks more difficult, federal databases harder to access, and cut budget money to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  Republicans also filibustered a national background check bill in the Senate in 2013.

Perhaps Governor Haley should be speaking with Speaker Boehner and majority leader McConnell instead of wasting time with Chuck Todd whining how nothing that happens in South Carolina is actually her fault.

Senate Democrats on the other hand want to make background checks work. They will be blocked again by Republicans for sure.  And Nikki Haley will continue to blame everyone but herself.

Demography May Be Destiny, But Not Anytime Soon

I disagree strongly with former NY Times editor Howell Raines on the Democrats taking over the South.

Even more dramatic changes in voter attitudes will shift the region’s party balance, to the detriment of the Republicans. This won’t come about because current Republican voters and their elected officials now in office will somehow be converted, but because they will be overwhelmed by new voters in the burgeoning Hispanic and Asian communities, who will join the black minority. Over half of the nation’s 40 million blacks live in the South.

For the time being, however, a traveler through the South can’t help but notice that its affluent, suburban whites remain myopic about the obvious signs, like the multiracial families to be seen among Walmart shoppers on any given day in any shopping mall.

Houston and Dallas are among the 11 American cities with the largest Hispanic populations. Vibrant Vietnamese communities are all along the Gulf Coast. Major cities have Spanish-language advertising, and have or soon will have sleek Latino-oriented shopping centers, like the new one on the fashionable southern side of Birmingham. The Asian presence in the medical, academic and business communities is substantial and growing, perhaps most notably in Baton Rouge, where Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and presidential candidate (who is Asian-American, like Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina), works.

Judging from the laws they are passing, Southern Republicans seem untroubled by Mitt Romney’s 17 percent of the minority vote in the last presidential election. It seems an overstatement to say that Southern Republicans are in outright denial about the fact that whites will be a minority in America around 2043. It does seem fair to say that the national Republican Party is underreacting, and Southern Republicans seem to be especially resistant to appealing to their minority neighbors.

Like their counterparts in the national G.O.P. and the current crop of about 15 me-too Republican presidential candidates, Southern legislators seem unwilling to make any change on social welfare, retirement, health care or women’s and gay rights that would attract Southerners not voting Republican at present.

A survey of demographic and polling data in what the Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey calls a New Sunbelt, stretching across the Southern Rim from Miami to Los Angeles, makes an ironclad case for this huge recalibration in political and cultural attitudes. Yet, for example, in the Florida Panhandle the same whites who cheer the new Hispanic stars at high school soccer matches deliver a bloc vote for the most conservative-sounding candidates at local, state and national levels. Anecdotal evidence indicates that affluent Southern Republicans continue to believe that minority voters can be attracted with punitive polices based on the Paul Ryan model.

The statistical evidence shouts otherwise. “Demography is destiny” is the theme of Mr. Frey’s new book, “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America,” and another recent book, “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown,” by Paul Taylor and his colleagues at the Pew Research Center.

Did anyone Howell cited in the article pay attention to the 2010 and 2014 elections, where Republicans gained 80+ seats in the House and turned a 60-seat Democratic majority into a 54-seat Senate control, and gained governor's mansions in deep blue states like Illinois and Maryland, or did I miss that?  Did anyone pay attention to Chief Justice John Roberts gutting the Voting Rights Act and assuring the GOP will control the South for another 30+ years at the very minimum?

Yet Howell craps out this pipe dream:

In presidential politics, the transition will most likely be seen first in red states like Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, all states that could be in play next year and could become purple, if not yet blue, as early as 2020.

All three of those states will be red states for the rest of my lifetime.  Demography doesn't equal destiny when Republicans suppress the minority vote and stir white resentment politics to the max.

StupidiNews!

• After an all-night negotiating session Sunday, EU and Greek leaders have a new $96 billion bailout plan that now must be sold to Greek parliament and voters.
• With news of a possible Iran nuclear deal being announced today, GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is warning that any deal will be a tough sell in Congress.
• Notorious Mexican drug cartel kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman remains at large after his escape from Mexican prison over the weekend.
• In a speech today Hillary Clinton will outline her campaign's plan to encourage corporate profit-sharing with employees to boost wages for the middle-class.
• Nintendo of Japan president Satoru Iwata died this weekend at 55 due to complications from cancer, leaving behind a legacy that included the Nintendo GameCube, 3DS, Wii and Wii U.

Last Call For Greece Getting Das Boot

Zee Germans have decided that Greece not only must give in to eurozone demands, but that they must do so in the most ridiculous and demeaning way possible.  Yes, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras badly miscalculated the EU position on Greece with his referendum.  But German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Parliament President Martin Schulz are basically asking all but asking for Greece to be drawn and quartered for creditors and made and example of. Paul Krugman explains:

Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.

Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.

Can anything pull Europe back from the brink? Word is that Mario Draghi is trying to reintroduce some sanity, that Hollande is finally showing a bit of the pushback against German morality-play economics that he so signally failed to supply in the past. But much of the damage has already been done. Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?

In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line. This has no bearing at all on the underlying economics of austerity. It’s as true as ever that imposing harsh austerity without debt relief is a doomed policy no matter how willing the country is to accept suffering. And this in turn means that even a complete Greek capitulation would be a dead end.

Can Greece pull off a successful exit? Will Germany try to block a recovery? (Sorry, but that’s the kind of thing we must now ask.)

The solution to Greece's bad austerity is now crippling austerity that will lead to open revolt.  And at this point, you have to assume that this is what Germany wants.

European leaders gave Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras a straightforward choice on Sunday: disown his principles or quit the euro.

Euro-area leaders presented Tsipras with a laundry list of unfinished business from previous bailouts he’d pilloried in opposition and during six turbulent months in office. They gave him three days to enact their main demands into Greek law in exchange for the third bailout in five years.

No, Germany wants this to blow up so they can toss Greece out and scare Italy, Portugal and Ireland into accepting even more austerity.  Because of course Merkel wants to keep her job, you see. The pitchforks come for her next unless Greece is staked out for the slaughter.

With friends like these, I don't think the European currency is long for this world.

Grump Trump Dumps On Chumps

In an amazingly awful speech in Phoenix Saturday night, Donald Trump went from being a painfully unfunny one-man sideshow on the traveling GOP clown bus to instead becoming an uncomfortably bad reminder of who the Republican party and who the GOP's 50-state Southern Strategy is built around.

Trump’s 70-minute address here, which sounded more like a stream-of-consciousness rant than a presidential-style stump speech, put an exclamation point on his bombastic push since his presidential announcement last month to return immigration to the forefront of the national conversation.

Bush and illegal immigrants were not the only targets of Trump’s scorn: He also criticized Macy’s, NBC, NASCAR, U.S. ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and, several times, the media.

Republican leaders say they believe the celebrity billionaire has virtually no chance of being their nominee, much less of making it to the White House. And, for now at least, his following seems limited to the far right as opposed to the party’s mainstream.

Yet Trump has reignited a heated debate over an issue, immigration, that the GOP had been determined to settle after it hurt Republicans in the most recent presidential election.

Party leaders increasingly fear that Trump could do damage to more viable candidates, such as Bush, who could lose their own footing on immigration. These candidates confront a familiar challenge: During the primary season, they must deal with the anger and anxiety that many on the right feel about illegal immigration. But they must do it in a way that will not damage their appeal to a broader electorate in November 2016.

Republicans are handling Trump delicately for another reason as well: They fear that he could leave the GOP entirely and wage a well-funded third-party campaign, a possibility that Trump has not ruled out.

On the other hand, Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Robert Costa are 100% wrong on one point: being the party of white resentment towards Latinos didn't hurt the GOP one bit in 2014.  Republicans racked up the highest House margin they've had in generations and won control of the Senate.

So pay careful attention to the Republicans trying to run away from Trump's obvious hatred and bigotry.  The Rpeublican base is 100% built on this and has been for years, and the difference is they get out and vote.

This is who they always have been. And the politics of white resentment still wins in America.

Sunday Long Read: Twin Destinies

This week's Sunday Long Read is the story of two pairs of identical twins, mixed up at birth in Bogota, raised as two separate pairs of fraternal twins, and how they discovered each other.

They were two pretty young women in search of pork ribs for a barbecue later that day, a Saturday in the summer of 2013. Janeth Páez suggested that they stop by a grocery store not far from where her friend Laura Vega Garzón lived in northern Bogotá. Janeth’s boyfriend’s cousin, William, a sweet young man with a thick country accent, worked behind the butcher counter there, expertly filleting beef and cutting pigs’ feet that his customers liked to boil with beans. Janeth was sure he would give her and Laura a cut rate on the ribs.

As Laura walked into the grocery store, catching up with Janeth, she was surprised to spot someone she knew. Behind the butcher counter was a colleague from her job at Strycon, an engineering firm. She gave him a big wave. He hardly acknowledged her. ‘‘That’s Jorge!’’ she told Janeth. ‘‘He works in my office.’’ He was a well-­liked 24-year-old who worked a few floors up from her, designing pipes for oil transport, so she was surprised to see him waiting on customers in the shop.

‘‘Oh, no, that’s William,’’ Janeth said. William was a hard worker and rarely left that butcher counter, except to sleep. He definitely did not work at Strycon.

‘‘No, it’s Jorge — I know him,’’ Laura said. But he was not smiling back at her, which was strange. A few minutes later, he came out from behind the counter to say a quick hello, embracing Janeth. Janeth introduced him to Laura as William.

Laura was baffled: Why was Jorge pretending to be someone else? Maybe, she thought, he was embarrassed to be seen moonlighting this way — the bloodied apron, the white cap. Janeth insisted she was mistaken, but Laura was not convinced. It was almost easier for her to believe that Jorge was playacting as someone else, rather than that there could be two people who looked so much alike. It was not just their similar coloring or the high cheekbones. It was their frame, the texture of their hair, the set of their mouth and dozens of other details that Laura could not have readily identified but that she knew all added up to a rare likeness.

The following Monday at Strycon, Laura told Jorge about her funny misunderstanding with his double at the butcher counter. Jorge laughed and told her that he did have a twin, named Carlos, but that they looked nothing like each other.

At that moment, Jorge had before him sufficient evidence to suggest that his life was not what he thought it was, that his family was not what he thought it was. But there is a saying that Carlos, a man of many sayings, sometimes applied to Jorge: ‘‘The blindest man is the one who does not want to see.’’

Having been adopted myself at birth (along with two of my three siblings, who were adopted at ages 4 and 6) this story is fascinating to me.  I've always wondered if I ever had any biological brothers or sisters, and who they are.

A month later, Laura told Janeth that there was an opening in the drafting department at Strycon, and Janeth landed the job. Soon after, she saw Jorge for the first time and immediately understood Laura’s confusion at the butcher counter. The two men had the same soft brown eyes. Same bouncy, feet-­splayed walk. Same bright, flashy smile. She didn’t feel as though she knew Jorge well enough to bring the resemblance up with him, but she did show William a photo of Jorge; William laughed and showed it around the butcher shop but chalked it up to coincidence.

After six months, Janeth left Strycon for another job, but even then, whenever she and her boyfriend ran into William, she wondered if she should have told Jorge about his double. That question tugged at her until finally, on Sept. 9, 2014, a slow day at her new job, Janeth texted Laura an image of William to show Jorge.

Laura went upstairs to piping to get Jorge’s reaction to the photo. Jorge, smiling, took a look at her phone. He swore. ‘‘That’s me!’’ he said. He stared at the image.

William was wearing a yellow Colombian soccer jersey, practically a national uniform on the day of big matches. Jorge often wore one just like it, which made it all the more apparent just how thoroughly the young man in the photo looked like him. A friend was walking by Jorge’s desk, and Jorge flagged him down for a second opinion.

‘‘Tell me what you think of this photo,’’ he told his friend, handing him the phone.

You look fine, the friend said.

‘‘Except it’s not me,’’ Jorge said. He could not stop staring at Laura’s phone.

Jorge gave up on getting any work done. He sat down with Laura in the office kitchen so they could talk. Maybe his father, who was never more than an occasional visitor to their home, had another child he never mentioned. Jorge started flipping through more of William’s Facebook images, now on his own phone. Uneasily, he noted one of William in a butcher’s smock, looking just the way Jorge did on the rare days he had to wear a lab coat. He glanced at a picture of William holding a shot glass, a friend by his side.

Jorge moved to his desktop computer so he could see the images more closely. He clicked once more on the photo of William and the friend holding shot glasses. Now that the image was large, he could examine what he had failed, incredibly, to notice when he looked at the photo on his phone. He leaned in close, his nose practically touching the screen. The man’s hair was slicked up like a rooster’s crown, and the shirt was all wrong. But there was the full lower lip and thick brown hair that Jorge knew well. The buttons on the man’s shirt were straining slightly at the hint of a potbelly, in a way that was intimately familiar. Jorge felt a rush of confusion, and then his stomach dropped. The friend sitting next to his double had a face that Jorge knew better than his own: It was the face of his fraternal twin brother, Carlos.

This is an amazing story, so set some time aside for this one.  It's well worth it.

Last Call For Uncivil Disobedience

The big problem with the right's constant fetishization of victimhood is that it tries to pass the powerful off as suddenly powerless when their privilege is called into question.  The repeated attempts to co-opt the civil rights movement of the 60's as a conservative one, with Republicans standing for "freedom" against liberal "fascism", is part and parcel of this.

Pat Buchanan is just the latest Republican conservative to call for a "new era of civil disobedience" to somehow equate the the long journey to marriage equality as an assault on the "religious freedoms" of Americans to discriminate against the gay community. The problem of course is that if your religion calls for you to hate your fellow man, it's not exactly freedom.

Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan used his column today to praise Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, who recently announced that she will not move a Ten Commandments monument off public land even though it was found unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court, explaining that she will exhaust the appeals process.

“Fallin’s action seems a harbinger of what is to come in America – an era of civil disobedience like the 1960s, where court orders are defied and laws ignored in the name of conscience and a higher law,” Buchanan wrote. “Only this time, the rebellion is likely to arise from the right.”

Buchanan particularly focused on same-sex marriage, claiming that people who want to violate nondiscrimination laws are really no different than Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Rosa Parks is celebrated. But the pizza lady who said her Christian beliefs would not permit her to cater a same-sex wedding was declared a bigot,” Buchanan lamented. “[I]f cities, states or Congress enact laws that make it a crime not to rent to homosexuals, or to refuse services at celebrations of their unions, would not dissenting Christians stand on the same moral ground as Dr. King if they disobeyed those laws?”

Insert "women" or "black people" or "Asian people" or "Native Americans" or hey, "Jews" in that last paragraph instead of "homosexuals" and you begin to see the issue.  It's the same ridiculous argument used against anti-discrimination laws 50 years ago.  It's not "civil disobedience" when it's really good old fashioned bigotry and hatred.

Besides, when the right does disobedience, it's not exactly civil.  Ask Cliven Bundy or Dylann Roof about that sometime.

Charting A Course To Obamacare Success

The latest Gallup survey on Americans and health insurance shows one reason why Republicans are terrified of Obamacare's success.

The uninsured rate among U.S. adults aged 18 and older was 11.4% in the second quarter of 2015, down from 11.9% in the first quarter. The uninsured rate has dropped nearly six percentage points since the fourth quarter of 2013, just before the requirement for Americans to carry health insurance took effect. The latest quarterly uninsured rate is the lowest Gallup and Healthways have recorded since daily tracking of this metric began in 2008.

So the percentage of uninsured Americans overall has dropped significantly, and that's helping a lot of Americans across the board.  But here's why Republicans are so desperate to sell the health care law as a taxpayer giveaway to those people:

As you can see, all age groups (other than seniors over 65, 98% of whom have health insurance through Medicare) have benefited from the ACA.  But the real winners have been black and Hispanic folks, who have seen big drops in the percentage of uninsured in America under the law.  Granted, these groups had far more uninsured before the law took effect, so it makes sense that these are the groups that have been helped the most.

Those making less than $35,000 a year have also seen a big drop in the uninsured.

Are you beginning to see why Republicans hate the law so much and want to constantly repeal it?

Getting To The Roof Of The Problem

So it turns out that the three-day waiting period built into background check laws, and gun store owners all looing the other way because of that, is exactly how Dylann Roof got a .45 caliber handgun when he should have been stopped.

The man accused of killing nine people in an historically black South Carolina church last month should not have been able to buy a gun, the F.B.I. said Friday in what was the latest acknowledgment of flaws in the national background check system.

A loophole in the check system allowed the man, Dylann Roof, to buy the .45-caliber handgun despite his having previously admitted to drug possession, the bureau said. Those conducting the background check did not have access to that police report.

“We are all sick this happened,” said the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. “We wish we could turn back time.”

Mr. Roof now faces murder charges in a case that investigators say was racially motivated. Mr. Roof, who is white, is charged with killing nine people at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

And the NRA, Republicans, and the firearms industry have long fought against any law that would make background checks easier, because firearms and ammo would be more difficult to sell due to more accurate checks.  Right now all the NRA has to do is make sure background check laws remain weak, and then complain that they don't work and "can't stop criminals".

Well no, laws that are not enforced or are not able to be enforced aren't very good at deterring crime, now are they?  Imagine if the auto industry had police speed guns and traffic stops outlawed and then complained that speed limits did nothing to stop people speeding, so why have them at all?

And so Dylann Roof bought a gun when he shouldn't have been able to because the law wasn't enforced, and the NRA buys enough lawmakers to make sure that it never will be.

Last Call For Friday News Dump Time

OPM director Katherine Archuleta resigned this afternoon over Thursday’s “Well, you remember that 4 million people’s personal data hacked thing? Turns out it was 21 million plus in addition to that” story.

Ms. Archuleta went to the White House on Friday morning to personally inform Mr. Obama of her decision, saying that she felt new leadership was needed at the federal personnel agency to enable it to “move beyond the current challenges,” the official said. The president accepted her resignation. 

Beth Cobert, the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget, will step in to temporarily replace Ms. Archuleta while a permanent replacement is found. 

Ms. Archuleta, who assumed her post in November 2013, had been under pressure to resign since last month, when she announced the first of two separate but related computer intrusions that compromised the personal information of 4.2 million current and former federal workers, including Social Security numbers, addresses, health and financial histories and other private details. 

On Thursday, she divulged the breach had also led to the theft of personal data of 21.5 million people who had applied for government background checks, likely affecting anyone subjected to such an investigation since 2000.

So yeah, that was going to happen.  She was convinced to fall on her sword after Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia started making calls, and Warner has a lot of pull when it comes to federal employees affected by the data breach, representing the state with the most in the country.

Not surprised by this in the least.  When your agency loses personal info on every active, retired and potential federal worker since 2000, most likely to China, then yeah, you're going to be asked to resign, I'm sorry.

Supposedly the thieves got away with the data by using an admin password.  Oldest trick in the book in both spycraft and social engineering.

Everyone, government and private sector, needs to up their information security game, and that means passwords and authentication methods that inconvenience you from time to time.  You don't like it?  This is what happens when the weakest link in data security comes into play: the people too lazy to protect it properly.

Get used to more and more stuff getting locked down where you work, folks.

One Hundred Fourteen Million Reasons

While The Donald may be leading the polls right now, few Republicans believe he'll end up being the nominee.  And while the guy does have his own fortune in the billions, he's no match for Jeb Bush's fundraising tsunami.

Jeb Bush raised $11.4 million in his first 16 days as a presidential candidate, and the super PAC he tirelessly fundraised for before he formally entered the race netted $103 million in the first six months of 2015. 

The combined haul of the campaign and super PAC—$114 million—is likely double his closest competitor in the money race. 

It appears Bush raised even more than what was disclosed on Thursday. That mammoth figure still doesn't include a third political committee in Bush's orbit, the Right to Rise PAC Inc. When Bush first announced last December that he was "actively" exploring a presidential run, he said he was forming a PAC to help promote "leaders, ideas and policies." Neither the super PAC nor campaign responded to an inquiry about the other PAC's fundraising figures in 2015. 

The former Florida governor, as the son and brother of the last two Republican presidents, has long been expected to be the top fundraiser in the GOP field. His campaign team had downplayed talk of raising $100 million since the figure was first floated months ago, but in the end they blew past that figure by 14 percent. 

Bush formally declared his candidacy in Miami on June 15 and raised an average of $710,000 per day for the rest of the month. To put his $11.4 million haul in perspective, it would require Bush to have raised the maximum donation of $2,700 in primary dollars from more than 4,200 donors—in 16 days.

His super PAC, Right to Rise USA, run by one of Bush's longtime confidantes, is not constrained by contribution limits. Bush had roughly 500 donors contribute more than $25,000, according to figures released by his super PAC Thursday. Of the $103 million raised, the super PAC said that it had more than $98 million cash on hand.

And keep in mind Jeb can deploy that money now, a whole 16 months before the race, and six months before the earliest primaries.  If he keeps piling on money at this rate, plus pick up the money from his competitors once winning the primary, Jeb'll have half a billion plus on hand to buy the 2016 race at minimum.

In reality, he'll probably have billions to work with through PACs.  He'll need it to try to sell himself to the America public.

Question is, will we buy another four years of Bush?

Continuing To Trump Reality

The Donald is a blustering racist meathead, and it's no wonder then that he leads yet another poll among his fellow blustering racist meatheads in the GOP 2016 primary.

Media coverage of Donald Trump's controversial immigration remarks have lifted the GOP presidential candidate to the top of the Republican field, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll. 

Trump was the preferred GOP nominee for president for 15 percent of respondents — 4 points ahead of former Gov. Jeb Bush (Fla.) and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who were tied for second place. 

Gov. Scott Walker (Wis.), Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and former Gov. Mike Huckabee (Ark.) shared the third spot with 9 percent each.

In addition to being the first choice for the majority of likely voters who participated in the poll, Trump was also the primary second choice for those who preferred another candidate as their nominee.

12 percent of respondents said Trump was second in line for their vote, while only 7 percent picked either Bush or Paul as their safety candidate.

Donald Trump is the Republican party right now.  Here's a freebie: Donald Trump has been the Republican party for years: mean-spirited, greedy racist billionaires who think they should be able to buy and sell Americans like they do everything else.  And like Trump, you're only useful to the GOP as long as they can continue to exploit you for profit and not a second longer.

So yes, Republicans, Donald Trump is your racist, birther champion and has been for years.

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that aired Thursday night, the Republican presidential candidate said he was not that interested in talking about the issue, compared to other ones.

“Honestly, I don’t want to get into it,” Trump said. 

Asked whether he thought Obama was born in the U.S., Trump responded: “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records.”

The rest of us need to keep that in mind heading into November 2016.  The jackasses who want Trump for president will be voting then.

Will you?

StupidiNews!

• After GOP Gov. Nikki Haley signed legislation yesterday, South Carolina's Confederate flag on the capitol grounds will come down this morning and be moved to a nearby Civil War museum.
• Last month's reported hack of 4 million government employee's information has now been revealed to have affected more than 25 million Americans in total.
• In what observes say is an even more harsh austerity regime than the one rejected by Greeks on Sunday, PM Alexis Tsipras has proposed new spending and pension cuts for a bailout deal.
• FBI Director James Comey says at least 10 people have been arrested in connection with possible terror plots, including some who planned attacks over the July 4th holiday.
• A broken undersea cable is being blamed for the Northern Mariana Islands losing internet this week, as service is slowly being restored to the US territory.

Last Call For Zombie Death Panels

Medicare end-of-life care is back in the news, and that's a good thing.

Six years after end-of-life planning nearly derailed development of the Affordable Care Act amid charges of "death panels," the Obama administration has revived a proposal to reimburse physicians for talking with their Medicare patients about how patients want to be cared for as they near death.

The proposal, contained in a large set of Medicare regulations unveiled Wednesday, comes amid growing public discussion about the need for medical care that better reflects patients’ wishes as they get older.

Expect Republicans to start screaming that Obama wants to murder your grandmother again. Well...maybe not all Republicans...

Two months ago, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, suggested that Medicare patients should sign so-called advance directives that spell out the care they want if they become incapacitated.

So Jeb Bush is pro-"death panels" huh.  This should be fun.

In all seriousness, as James Joyner points out, palliative care is a legitimate Medicare issue and should be discussed by doctors and their senior patients.

Aside from the cleverness of “death panels” as a mobilizing tool, capitalizing on longstanding American fears about government control of healthcare, I’ve never understood the argument against the practice. Of course physicians ought to discuss with their patients what their end-of-life options are once they become terminally ill or sufficiently advanced in age. And, so long as we maintain a fee-for-service model, of course they ought get paid for it. 

To the extent that government is a prime payer of healthcare expenses—and for those over 65, there’s little controversy over the fact that it is—there is something of a conflict of interest at work, in that care for terminal patients eats up an inordinate percentage of lifetime costs. But it strikes me as absurd that doctors are going to talk their patients into ending their lives prematurely mostly on the basis of cost savings.

Oh, an absurd idea that Republicans aren't going to run with at full throttle?  That would be a first. Because that's exactly the fear Republicans stoked in voters in 2009 and 2010 and they won huge.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, urged her supporters to oppose Democratic plans for health care reform on her Facebook page. 

"As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!" wrote Palin in a note posted Aug. 7, 2009. 

She said that the Democrats plan to reduce health care costs by simply refusing to pay for care. 

"And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

It was PolitiFact's Lie of the Year, remember?

Republicans still won 60+ House seats.

I fully expect this Medicare rule change to be quietly pulled once again.  Republicans will keep winning that PR battle until the end of time.