Last Call For The Con-Man-Servative

The New York Times is hitting Sen. Ted Cruz on financial disclosure laws, it seems as Cruz is gaining in the polls against Donald Trump, there are new questions about Cruz's loan from Goldman Sachs for his Senate campaign four years ago.

Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.

A review of personal financial disclosures that Mr. Cruz filed later with the Senate does not find a liquidation of assets that would have accounted for all the money he spent on his campaign. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.

Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz’s presidential campaign, Catherine Frazier, acknowledged that the loan from Goldman Sachs, drawn against the value of the Cruzes’ brokerage account, was a source of money for the Senate race. Ms. Frazier added that Mr. Cruz also sold stocks and liquidated savings, but she did not address whether the Citibank loan was used.

The failure to report the Goldman Sachs loan, for as much as $500,000, was “inadvertent,” she said, adding that the campaign would file corrected reports as necessary. Ms. Frazier said there had been no attempt to hide anything.

The Cruz campaign is claiming that the failure to report is an oversight (an oversight that just happened to allow Cruz to get $1.2 million from two of the largest banks in the country that helped to crash the economy in 2008 without admitting it.)

It's not even close to being illegal, but it's just another example of how Cruz can't maintain both his outsider maverick status without taking GOP establishment cash without lying to everyone he can.

Mapping Millennial Mojo

A new USA Today/Ipsos poll finds that voters age 18-35 are most likely to support outsider candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Donald Trump easily leads the field among younger Republicans and independents, at 26%, but that is a lower level of support that the billionaire businessman now holds in the overall electorate. He is backed by 34% of GOP voters in the RealClearPolitics average of recent national surveys.

"I'm not really sure where I stand on him right now," says Acs, the student from New Mexico and a Republican. Trump's support nationwide and in key states means "he must be doing something right," she says, "but I don't know if I would vote for him."

No other Republican contender seems to have broken through, at least not yet. Retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are bunched within 3 points of one another. Other contenders are in low single digits.

But among Democrats, there's something of a surprise:

On the Democratic side, among the overall electorate in national polls, Clinton now leads Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by close to 20 percentage points. But Sanders, the oldest candidate running, has captured the allegiance of younger voters. The 73-year-old democratic socialist from the Green Mountain State is leading Clinton, 46%-35%, among millennial Democrats and independents.

"The Bernie Sanders thing has really got me on board," says McGeary, an IT professional from Seattle. "I was pretty cynical at first about the whole movement — I mean, I supported it, but I had no idea it would pick up this kind of steam." He praises Sanders' reliance on small donors and lumps Clinton in with the Republican field as "people who keep protecting corporations instead of people."

Indeed, he says he might leave the country if Sanders isn't elected because of his frustration that the United States isn't doing more to address issues such as social inequality and health care.

There is an age divide within the millennial generation. Among those 18 to 25 years old, Sanders has a big lead. Among those 26 to 34, Clinton has a small edge.

There is a gender gap as well — and not the one that favors Clinton among baby boomer women. Men under 35 support Sanders by 4 percentage points. Women back him by almost 20 points. The possibility of breaking new ground by electing the first female president apparently carries less persuasive power among younger women than their mothers' generation.

This isn't the first poll to find that Millennial women are backing Sanders and not Clinton.  Whether or not they show up to vote in primaries or in the general, remains very much to be seen as this remains the age group least likely to cast a vote at all in 2016.

The Supreme Sanction In Florida

The Supreme Court this week made a rare 8-1 decision that the practice of Florida trial judges being the sole arbiter of death penalty punishment without a trial by jury violates the Sixth Amendment and is unconstitutional.

In an 8-1 de­cision, the court said Flor­ida vi­ol­ated the Sixth Amend­ment by al­low­ing judges, rather than jur­ies, to de­term­ine wheth­er cer­tain cri­ter­ia for a death sen­tence had been met.

Timothy Lee Hurst was sen­tenced to death more than a dec­ade ago for the bru­tal murder of a wo­man he worked with at a fast-food res­taur­ant. Un­der Flor­ida law, murder is nor­mally pun­ish­able by life im­pris­on­ment; a death sen­tence can be im­posed only if a judge de­term­ines that “ag­grav­at­ing cir­cum­stances” war­rant the tough­er sen­tence.

But that de­term­in­a­tion ought to be­long to a jury, not a judge, the Su­preme Court ruled.

“The Sixth Amend­ment pro­tects a de­fend­ant’s right to an im­par­tial jury. This right re­quired Flor­ida to base Timothy Hurst’s death sen­tence on a jury’s ver­dict, not a judge’s fact­find­ing,” Justice So­nia So­to­may­or wrote for the ma­jor­ity. “Flor­ida’s sen­ten­cing scheme, which re­quired the judge alone to find the ex­ist­ence of an ag­grav­at­ing cir­cum­stance, is there­fore un­con­sti­tu­tion­al.”

Flor­ida’s sys­tem re­quired jur­ies to make an “ad­vis­ory sen­tence,” which judges are sup­posed to take in­to ac­count when they make the fi­nal de­term­in­a­tion about wheth­er to ap­ply the death pen­alty. The state’s law­yers ar­gued that was enough, and Justice Samuel Alito—the only dis­sent­ing vote—agreed.

“Un­der the Flor­ida sys­tem, the jury plays a crit­ic­ally im­port­ant role,” Alito wrote.

In last summer's Glossip v Gross death penalty ruling on the constitutionality of lethal injection, it was Alito that wrote the opinion for the 5-4 majority that the method of administering capital punishment had to itself be Constitutional, prompting dissent from Justice Steven Breyer that there was no way to do that.

In the 41 pages that followed, Breyer explained why he believed it was “highly likely” that the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment. “At the very least, the Court should call for full briefing on the basic question.” Two weeks later, in the first capital case after Glossip, David Zink offered them the means to do so. In his last-minute petition to the Court, Zink presented a question that the Court had not heard in over four decades:

Whether the death penalty today violates evolving standards of decency and concepts of human dignity embodied in the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and the Eighth Amendment as applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment?

So again, this makes sense, Alito has been the hard-hearted one here on the death penalty.  But the question of the practice amounting to cruel and unusual punishment is looking like an opinion looking for a case, and hopefully such a case will come soon.

StupidiNews!

• A series of attacks by armed militants involving firearms and explosives have killed at least six in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta on Thursday, officials believe ISIS may be involved.
• The Michigan National Guard continues to help residents of Flint get clean water as Gov. Rick Snyder has asked for assistance from FEMA to deal with the city's contaminated water.
• Winning tickets for last night's nearly $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot were sold in California, Tennessee, and Florida.
• Atlantic City may have to declare bankruptcy as deteriorating casino revenues force New Jersey lawmakers to consider options for dealing with the city's $90 million budget hole.
• The FDA has signed off on a new implant that will help patients kick the opioid habit, but critics say the product may have been rushed to approval amid safety concerns.

Last Call For Number One With White Supremacists

Gosh you guys, for some strange reason Trump keeps on racking up endorsements from white supremacist groups. It's really weird, because of course they tell me Trump can't possibly be racist, racism is over in America and the notion of a major party leading candidate getting endorsements from white supremacists groups would mean that racism is still with us.

That can't be, right?

William Daniel Johnson has a vision for America. The Los Angeles-based lawyer thinks that the United States will see the creation of a white ethno-state within his lifetime.

“I think Trump’s candidacy is helping move us in that direction,” Johnson said in a Monday phone interview with TPM. “Whether he is elected or not, his candidacy is a big factor in helping destroy this middle-of-the-road Republican mindset.”

Johnson is the chairman of the American Freedom Party, a white nationalist political party, and the founder of a super PAC that plans to blanket early voting states with robocalls encouraging voters to turn out for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. As TPM reported Saturday, voters in Iowa got their first taste of the automated recordings—which heaped praise on Trump’s anti-immigrant views—from the American National Super PAC this weekend. It branded Trump its "Great White Hope" in a press release for the robocall campaign.

But, but Chief Justice Roberts promised me racism was a barbarous relic of America's past.

The AFP has its own candidate for the 2016 race: a minor Reagan administration appointee named Robert Whitaker, whose campaign slogan is “Diversity is the codeword for white genocide.”

But the party sees no conflict in endorsing Whitaker and Trump simultaneously.

“Donald Trump’s campaign may help remind Americans that all genocide, even against white people, is evil," Whitaker notes in a statement on the AFP’s website. "My campaign is there to help keep the candidates on point regarding race in America.”

Johnson has assembled an all-star cast of white nationalists to assist him in spreading Trump’s message. The first round of robocalls featured Rev. Donald Tan, a Filipino-American minister, and Jared Taylor, founder of the white
supremacist magazine American Renaissance. Johnson told TPM that a number of additional Trump supporters would eventually lend their endorsements to the American Nationalist Super PAC's efforts.

Taylor also serves as the spokesman for the Council of Concerned Citizens, a white nationalist group Charleston shooter Dylann Roof credited with making him aware of the problem of “brutal black on White murders” in the U.S.

After Roof gunned down nine parishioners at a historically black church in June 2015, Taylor condemned the killings but defended the “legitimacy” of Roof’s grievances.

In a Monday phone interview with TPM, Taylor called Trump “the first candidate in many, many years to take positions that may in fact be beneficial to the white majority.”

Donald Trump, 2016. Not a white supremacist, just number one with white supremacists.

Look For The Union Label

All eyes will be on Justice Anthony Kennedy again this term as the only question after yesterday's oral arguments on public employee union dues before SCOTUS is whether or not he'll be the fifth vote to sink union agency fees.

In a closely watched case brought by 10 California teachers, the court’s conservative majority seemed ready to say that forcing public workers to support unions they have declined to join violates the First Amendment.

A ruling in the teachers’ favor would affect millions of government workers and culminate a political and legal campaign by a group of prominent conservative foundations aimed at weakening public-sector unions. Those unions stand to lose fees from both workers who object to the positions the unions take and those who simply choose not to join while benefiting from the unions’ efforts on their behalf.

Under California law, public employees who choose not to join unions must pay a “fair share service fee,” also known as an “agency fee,” typically equivalent to members’ dues. The fees, the law says, are meant to pay for collective bargaining activities, including “the cost of lobbying activities.” More than 20 states have similar laws.

Government workers who are not members of unions have long been able to obtain refunds for the political activities of unions like campaign spending. Monday’s case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, No. 14-915, asks whether such workers must continue to pay for any union activities, including negotiating for better wages and benefits. A majority of the justices seemed inclined to say no.

Collective bargaining, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, is inherently political when the government is the employer. “Many critical points are matters of public concern,” he said, mentioning issues like tenure, merit pay, promotions and classroom size.

The best hope for a victory for the unions had rested with Justice Antonin Scalia, who has written and said things sympathetic to their position. But he was consistently hostile on Monday.

”The problem is that everything that is collectively bargained with the government is within the political sphere, almost by definition,” he said.

If state laws to collect agency fees are rendered unconstitutional, then public employee unions will suffer, which of course is the point, but the view that everything a public employee union says or does is inherently political would ironically grant it more power under recent campaign finance reform rollbacks in a post-Citizens United world, yes?

Perhaps that's the next step, to call public unions political tools that somehow have to be invalidated because their "money as free speech" does not deserve the same freedoms of corporations. That's probably the angle Scalia's writings would supposedly prevent, but then again we know as of recent rulings that Scalia will gladly ignore his own precedent when it's politically expedient.

Still, it stands as I've said before that guessing SCOTUS is a crapshoot at best.

The Farewell Tour Begins

President Obama's final State of the Union address was a frank admission that he felt he could have done more for America, and should have been able to, when he was allowed to by Republicans.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama said America should harness innovation and not be intimidated by it. He called for a “moonshot” effort to cure cancer, to be led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., who lost his son to the disease last year.

The address before a joint session of Congress departed from Mr. Obama’s past practice of outlining executive actions intended to sidestep gridlock in Washington.

Instead, Mr. Obama sought to pose and answer the four central questions his aides said were driving the debate about America’s future, including how to ensure opportunity for everyone, how to harness technological change, how to keep the country safe, and how to fix the nation’s broken politics.

He called for an end to gerrymandering — the gaming of political districts to ensure one party’s advantage — reducing the influence of secretive campaign contributions and making voting easier. Mr. Obama also called on Americans to get more involved in politics and participate, a theme of his first campaign and of his presidency.

The speech was one of Mr. Obama’s few remaining opportunities to shape the public conversation before the nation’s attention shifts to the campaign to replace him that is already underway. Except for a final address at the Democratic convention this summer, Tuesday night might have been Mr. Obama’s last big speech.

“I know some of you are antsy to get back to Iowa — I’ve been there,” he said at the start, acknowledging that the political focus is on the state, which holds the country’s first nominating caucuses.

Mr. Obama was determined that the address be forward-looking, aides said, even as his time remaining in the White House is limited. The president called for compromise with Republicans on an overhaul of the criminal justice system, approval of a broad free-trade agreement spanning the Pacific Rim and new initiatives to address poverty and the opioid crisis in the United States. He proposed to provide jobless workers with retraining in addition to the unemployment payments they already received.

In an effort to find common ground with Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Mr. Obama noted that Mr. Ryan, a Republican, supports expanding a federal tax credit for low- and middle-income workers. “Who knows, we might surprise the cynics again,” he said, noting a bipartisan budget agreement they struck late last year.

And he repeated past calls for legislative action on his domestic initiatives that have fallen short, including raising the minimum wage, revising the nation’s immigration laws and enacting stricter gun restrictions.

It was less of a challenge of issues and more of a "It's my last year guys, cut me some slack" directed at both Republicans who probably would oppose efforts to research a cure for cancer if Obama called for it, and at Democrats who have spent the last seven years moaning about what could have and should have been.

We'll see if it motivates anything like an effort to come together to do something useful, but after all this time and all this rancor, it was more of an appeal to those who may be so exhausted of fighting this President that they just leave him alone long enough to get a couple last boxes on the list ticked off.

Which, frankly, is the best we can hope for at this point.

StupidiNews!

• As promised, Iran has released all 10 US sailors picked up in Iranian waters near Farsi Island, the sailors are aboard the USS Anzio.
• President Obama's final State of the Union speech including calling for a major research push to find a cure for cancer, led by Vice President Biden who lost son Beau to the disease.
• Turkish officials have detained three Russians suspected of working with ISIS after a suicide bomb killed 10 earlier this week in Istanbul.
• NFL owners have voted to allow the St. Louis Rams to relocate back to Los Angeles with a new $1.9 billion stadium they could end up sharing with the San Diego Chargers.
• Yahoo has agreed to settle a 2013 class-action suit over scanning emails to produce targeted ads, while laywers will split $4 million in fees, Yahoo Mail users will get $0.

Last Call For Behind The Powerball

While you're dreaming of that winning lottery ticket for Wednesday's drawing, remember that as Think Progress's Jedd Legum points out, multi-state lotteries like Powerball and Mega Millions are scams where the house always wins.

In October, the consortium of states that runs Powerball approved a series of rule changed that made it much harder to win the jackpot. Under the new rules you select five of 69 numbers, up from five out of 59 numbers. The choices for the Powerball was actually reduced from 35 to 26. Still, this decreased the odds of winning the jackpot from 1 in 175 million to 1 in 292 million.

The purpose of this change was to increase the chances that there would be no grand prize winner for any given drawing. When this happens, the prize pool rolls over creating giant jackpots. At the time the rule changes were first floated in July, FiveThirtyEight estimated that the chances of a $1 billion prize pool increased from 8.5% to 63.4% over a given five year period.

At the same time, the decreased number of choices for the individual Powerball made winning small $4 prizes more likely. “The rules change is intended to increase the odds of winning any prize, while making it more difficult to win the jackpot prize,” the New York State Gaming Commission wrote in a memo supporting the change.

The purpose of creating massive jackpots is because they induce more people to play. The prospect of big payouts spark a flood of free media attention, encouraging people to speculate on how a windfall would impact their life.

And it's a regressive tax that hits those who can least afford it.

The “slump” in lottery ticket sales, of course, is relative. In 2014, Americans spent $70.15 billion on lottery tickets. That’s about $630 for every household in the United States.

Spending on lottery tickets exceeds the amount of money spent on sports tickets, books, video games, movies and music, combined.

For all the money Americans spend, they get very little in return — particularly the poorest.

The odds of winning any lotto jackpot are extremely low. And that means people spend a lot of money without getting much, if anything, back. Players lose an average of 47 cents on the dollar each time they buy a ticket.

And it’s those who can least afford to lose any money who are most likely to be buying tickets. Low-income people account for the majority of lottery sales, while sales are highest in the poorest areas. One study found that the poorest third of households buy more than half of the tickets sold in any given week.

Profit from those ticket sales go to government coffers. The share of lottery profits that is paid out to players varies greatly by state, from just 15 percent in West Virginia to 76 percent in Massachusetts. But even that smaller share in the latter state is an important source of revenue. In 2009, lotteries in 11 states brought in more revenue than the corporate income tax. And thus the lottery acts like an implicit 38 percent tax on mainly the poorest people.

That right, in 11 states, people fork over more for lottery tickets than corporations do in taxes.  As a result, states cut services and taxes from those who can afford it, because the money's coming from those who can least afford it but are most willing to volunteer for the "sucker tax".

And in the end, we all lose this game, because the house always wins.

Without A CAIR In The World

Democratic Reps. are inviting representatives of the Council of American-Islamic Relations to President Obama's final State of the Union Address tonight, a move that's sure to piss off the GOP (But you know what? Good.)

Reps. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.) and Alcee Hastings (Fla.) will both be hosting representatives from CAIR chapters in their respective states, the group announced Monday.

Lofgren will be bringing Sameena Usman, a government relations coordinator in the San Francisco office, while Hastings will host Nezar Hamze, the chief operating officer of the nonprofit's Florida branch.The announcement comes days after Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim elected to Congress, challenged Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to bring a Muslim American as one of his guests to the speech.

"This is an opportunity to really drive the point home that there are no Americans who are suspect just based on their religious identity, that all Americans are welcome in the people’s house," Ellison said in an interview with The Hill.

Demoratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) has also urged Democratic lawmakers to bring Muslims to the speech as a rebuke to what she sees is anti-Islamic language from the right.

"The rhetoric and vitriol that has been targeted at this community has been absolutely outrageous and unacceptable," Wasserman Schultz said at a news conference according to The Sun-Sentinel.

"And as a member of a minority religion myself, one that has faced persecution throughout our existence, to me the idea that we would stand idly by and ignore that and not stand up and use our voices to stand up for our brothers and sisters in the Muslim-American community was just unacceptable."

My dislike for Wasserman Schultz aside, she has a definite point about the constant Republican rhetoric of rampant Islamophobia, and challenging these bigoted assholes at every opportunity is absolutely the right way to go.

Dipsatches From Bevinstan: Dis-Kynect-Ed

It's official: the most successful state health insurance exchange in the country had a good run, but as of end of the month, GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is closing the doors on Kynect.

Following through on a campaign pledge, Gov. Matt Bevin has notified federal authorities he plans to dismantle kynect, Kentucky's health insurance exchange created under the Affordable Care Act.

The decision drew immediate fire from health care advocates, including Bill Wagner, executive director of the Family Health Centers, a network of public health clinics in Louisville.

"It's a great disappointment," Wagner said. "It's an unwelcome setback in our efforts to reach the number of uninsured people and improve access to health care in Kentucky."

In a Dec. 30 letter to Sylvia Burwell, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bevin said he plans to wind down the state health exchange and transition Kentuckians to the federal site, healthcare.gov, to shop for insurance under the law also known as Obamacare.

Meanwhile, kynect remains open and the changes will not affect anyone shopping for insurance for the current enrollment period, which ends Jan. 31. Nor will the changes affect anyone who signed up for Medicaid, the government health plan for low-income citizens, through the kynect site.

Bevin's office said Monday in a statement that his goal is to eliminate "the redundancy" of Kentucky's online health exchange.

Advocates had urged Bevin to keep kynect, a website praised for its accessibility and ease of use. They said helped hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians sign up for health coverage. It also included a public information campaign and workers to help people get health coverage.

"That's really disappointing," said Emily Beauregard, executive director of Kentucky Voices for Health, a coalition of advocacy groups. "It's a lot more than just a website."

It is, or was, and now Kentucky will join the ranks of those who will have to sign up on the federal exchange.  There's the added bonus of taking the state exchange apart and getting Kentucky on healthcare.gov by October to cost Kentucky taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, but Bevin can just blame that on Obama too.

He can't keep an Obama program that works, after all.  It has to be destroyed. Otherwise, people in Kentucky might stop hating the black Democrat.

As they say, elections have consequences, and for hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians, those consequences are going to get really ugly, really soon.

StupidiNews!

• At least 10 are dead and 15 injured in an explosion at Istanbul's Sultanahmet Square on Tuesday, Turkish officials are afraid the death toll may go higher.
• New Jersey lawmakers have passed a bill raising the smoking age in the state to 21, Gov. Chris Christie has not indicated whether he will sign the bill.
• North Korean footage of a submarine-launched missile was faked according to analysis by a California firm, saying a SCUD missile launch was actually patched into the film.
• Charging smartphones in car USB ports adds a million tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year according to one study, with 33 times the electricity cost based on $2/gallon gasoline.
• A high school in Norway is putting competitive e-sports as a class elective, students will get physical exercise as well as gameplay in the course.

Last Call For Water Water Everywhere

In the comments, our good friend Prup has called me out on not covering the potable water situation in Flint, Michigan.

I was surprised to find no coverage of the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis, as far as the index goes, at least. I have somewhat questioned what I see as an overestimate on racism in some of your posts. Where I see it as one on many factors, or as a major, but not the only, contributing factor, you sometimes see it as the only factor. But there's no question in this one that racism and poverty are the main factors, and it shows HOW they create a situation.

As usual, Jim's right.  I haven't given the situation in Flint more than cursory coverage.  Michigan GOP Gov. Rick Snyder has largely gotten a pass compared to his neighbor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and especially since it involves Michigan. Much of America has given up on the state because there's only so much Republican outrage one can keep track of, given the clown car in 2016 and the growing disaster of Bevinstan here locally.

But the Flint story is hands down one of the worst abuses of Republican government power in a long time, and is definitely a story where, as Jim says, racism and poverty are the main factors. Rick Snyder is guilty of criminal negligence, and it's time for more people to make noise who, can, starting with myself, so here goes with David Graham's primer in The Atlantic:

In Flint, Michigan, a scandal over lead-tainted water keeps getting darker.

On Tuesday, Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency due to lead in the water supply. The same day, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it is investigating what went wrong in the city. Several top officials have resigned, and Snyder apologized. But that’s only so comforting for residents. They’re drinking donated water supplies—though those donations are reportedly running dry—or using filters. Public schools have been ordered to shut off taps. Residents, and particularly children, are being poisoned by lead, which can cause irreversible brain damage and affect physical health. It could cost $1.5 billion to fix the problem, a staggering sum for any city, much less one already struggling as badly as Flint is.

The story is horrifying, on a visceral, “this isn’t supposed to happen here” level. While attention has been slow to focus on Flint, the more that emerges, the worse the story seems. The latest question is when Snyder knew about the problem. This week, an email from Snyder’s then-chief of staff to a health-department official was turned over as part of a freedom-of-information request. In July 2015, Dennis Muchmore wrote:

I'm frustrated by the water issue in Flint I really don't think people are getting the benefit of the doubt. Now they are concerned and rightfully so about the lead level studies they are receiving. These folks are scared and worried about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off by us (as a state we're just not sympathizing with their plight).

On Thursday, while declaring the state of emergency, Snyder wouldn’t say when he became aware of the lead problem in Flint. The governor—who likes to portray himself as a can-do manager—reportedly grew testy when asked repeatedly about his own awareness.*

How did Flint's water supply get poisoned?  Effectively, Snyder's orders.

The problem dates back to April 2014, when Flint was under the direction of an emergency manager appointed by the state to try to fix the broken city. (Michigan law provides for the governor to select managers, and the provision has been used in several places in recent years, most prominently Detroit.) To save money, the city began drawing its water from the Flint River, rather than from Detroit’s system, which was deemed too costly. But the river’s water was high in salt, which helped corrode Flint’s aging pipes, leaching lead into the water supply.

The move saved millions, but the problems started becoming apparent almost immediately. The water starting smelling like rotten eggs. Engineers responded to that problem by jacking up the chlorine level, leading to dangerous toxicity. GM discovered that city water was corroding engines at a Flint factory and switched sources. Then children and others started getting rashes and falling sick. Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental-engineering professor, found that the water had nearly 900 times the recommend EPA limit for lead particles. As my colleague Alana Semuels noted in a deeply reported feature in July 2015, residents believe the city knew about problems as soon as May 2014. Yet as late as February 2015, even after tests showed dangerous lead levels, officials weretelling residents there was no threat.

The July 2015 date on Semuels’ story emphasizes the incredible slowness of authorities to respond. That was more than a year after the switch to water from the Flint River. This week’s state declaration of Emergency comes some 20 months after the switch. How did it take so long to get anything done?

Jim's already answered this question for us:

Not even his worst enemies would accuse Rick Snyder of deliberately trying to poison a community of poor, mostly black, working class people, any more than the pharm executive that sends out of date medicine wants to kill Africans. What it is is trying to handle a situation, usually a minor one ("We have to get rid of these pills but the bottom line would be better if we actually got something for them rather than throwing them into the dumpster" or "we can save money by switching the water supply in Flint, but buying and figuring out how to add this chemical is cheap, but it's such a hassle. And it's just for that bunch of n's in Flint, they're mostly criminals anyway, so why go through it. Probably the scientists are over-reacting, the water can't be that bad, can it. It smells funny -- but then so do they *snigger* -- and so, if some of them get upset tummies, it won't be that bad." Only, as we've found, lead in water gives a lot worse than upset tummies, like life-time brain damage.)

The intersection of Republican indifference to those people, institutionalized racism and classism, slashing even basic government services into non-functionality and a crumbling infrastructure that nobody wants to spend money to fix has directly resulted in the situation in Flint.  More of this will follow, and probably already is happening, in places around the country where the people that don't matter aren't able to make their voices heard over fracking lobbyists, mining companies, chemical giants and conservative think-tanks.

The fact is if this had been a white community, the water problem would have been fixed in 20 days or 20 weeks, not 20 months.

The best part?  The failure in Flint will be used by conservatives to say "See?  You can't even trust government to provide you with clean water anymore.  We need to privatize this now!"

Meanwhile the most vulnerable will continue to suffer, because hey, we don't even believe in fixing the pipes around here anymore, and we keep electing people who assure that will never happen.

Keep On Truckin'

Detroit has been rescued by the American auto market for sure and 2015 was a record year for sales among the Big 3, but the industry was saved not by electrics, hybrids and gas-sipping compacts, but by the very same gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs the Obama administration is trying to avoid.

At General Motors Co, the focal point of Detroit’s bailout, pickups and SUVs accounted for nearly 70 percent of last year’s sales. In 2016 one of the SUVs GM sells in America - - the Buick Envision - will be, for the first time, imported from China, to the chagrin of the United Auto Workers union, a key Obama constituency.

With oil prices expected to stay low for some time, all the major automakers are looking for a bigger slice of U.S. truck market profits.

Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co.  are using auto show press previews on Monday to promote new versions of their full-size pickups, the Titan and the Ridgeline, respectively.

The big splash from bailout beneficiary Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is not a small car, but a sleeker, updated minivan, which comes in a plug-in hybrid version and a powerful gasoline model more people are likely to buy. There are also new luxury vehicles to be unveiled: a revamped Lincoln Continental is expected from Ford Motor Co  and Hyundai Motor Co's new flagship luxury sedan, the G90.

Obama has made boosting fuel efficiency a cornerstone of his energy and climate policy. Mandates from California and other states are prodding automakers to continue rolling out zero emission electric vehicles, such as GM's Chevrolet Bolt, even if sales remain slow.

In his 2011 State of the Union Address, Obama renewed a call he made as a candidate in 2008 to get 1 million plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) on the road by 2015. But sales have been far slower than expected - only about 490,000 vehicles, including 115,000 in 2015, down 6 percent from 2014. Automakers have been forced to cut EV prices and sales forecasts.

The next president will decide the fate of Obama's goal of boosting average fuel efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon (23.2 km per liter) by 2025. A decision on whether the final 2021-2025 regulations are feasible is due by April 2018, under a new president.

The average fuel economy of new vehicles sold in the United States has improved over the past few years, standing at 24.9 mpg in December. It is down 0.9 mpg from the peak reached in August 2014, but still up 4.8 mpg since October 2007.

As long as oil stays low, Americans are going to go back to big SUVs and trucks.  It's who we are, and don't be surprised if they're doing it to stick it to Obama, either.  Hell, there's a whole culture of car and truck lovers "rolling coal" as a screw you to environmentalists nowadays, and gas under $2 a gallon is only going to keep that going as along as possible.  Hell, what happens when a Republican president reverses those EPA standards?

We're kinda terrible about that.

Getting Bad In Germany

The age of an inclusive Europe is likely coming to a bloody end, at least in Germany.

Attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year's Eve have prompted more than 600 criminal complaints, with police suspicion resting on asylum seekers, putting pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open door migrant policy.

The attacks, mostly targeting women and ranging from theft to sexual molestation, have prompted a highly-charged debate in Germany about its welcoming stance for refugees and migrants, more than one million of whom arrived last year.

The sudden nature of the violent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Hamburg to Frankfurt prompted Germany's justice minister Heiko Maas to speculate in a newspaper that they had been planned or coordinated.

The debate on migration will be further fueled by the acknowledgement by the authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia that a man shot dead as he tried to enter a Paris police station last week was an asylum seeker with seven identities who lived in Germany.

In Cologne, police said on Sunday that 516 criminal complaints had been filed by individuals or groups in relation to assaults on New Year's Eve, while police in Hamburg said 133 similar charges had been lodged with the north German city.

Frankfurt also registered complaints, although far fewer.

The investigation in Cologne is focused largely on asylum seekers or illegal migrants from north Africa, police said. They arrested one 19-year-old Moroccan man on Saturday evening.

Six hundred criminal complaints is not a coincidence, nor is it an isolated incident.  How Germany reacts to these North African men will affect far more than just Berlin, Frankfurt, and Cologne. If Merkel is forced out of office, the government that follows will likely be very reactionary and will be under intense pressure to start rounding people up and deporting them. It won't take much to light a powder keg like that.

Hell, we're not too far away from such a government ourselves, if you recall, with Trump calling for mass deportations.

But it's getting rather scary out there.