The Whitewashing Of History

It's one thing to constantly put up the Republican party's dog whistle Southern Strategy racism, but it's quite another to have a Republican Congressman go on television and pitch actual white supremacy arguments during the party convention. And of course, it's Iowa Republican Steve King making an ass of himself and his state again.

Appearing on MSNBC Monday evening, King was part of a panel of four people discussing the Republican National Convention. Esquire’s Charles Pierce, one of King’s co-panelists, commented on the dominance of “loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people” at the RNC. King objected not so much to Pierce’s factual premise as to the notion that the monochromatic nature of the GOP is a bug.

“This whole ‘white people business’ though does get a little tired,” King declared. “I’d ask you to go back through history,” he added, “and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people your talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

Holy hell.  He actually said this.

When host Chris Hayes asked King to clarify whether the congressman was asserting that no race contributed more to society than white people, King made a slight rhetorical shift, claiming instead that “western civilization” that is “rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world” is the greatest contributor to civilization.

And I mean this, guys, he actually said this.




So....yeah.  White people made the "greatest contribution" to the planet.  I'm sure that's news to Africa, The Americas and Asia, with civilizations around millennia before Europe was settled.  What the hell did the Egyptians, Babylonians, Mayans, Songhai, Aztecs, and Chinese ever do for the world, anyway?  Probably nothing as good as Hot Pockets and TV, man.

Asshole.

And yet this guy is a sitting congressman, spouting white nationalist garbage on TV.  This is your modern GOP, guys.  Own up to the racism, or do something to stop it.

It's Just A Piece Of Paper, Right?

John Nichols at The Nation reminds us that not only are Trump's ridiculous plans for the nation after his election obscenely unfeasible and heartlessly immoral, they are also strictly unconstitutional in just about every aspect.  Trump's stated platform (which is now the GOP's stated platform in many cases) is a massive violation of multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights.

As Republican Party “constitutionalists” prepare to nominate authoritarian billionaire Donald Trump for the presidency this week in Cleveland, the American Civil Liberties union has determined that the candidate’s proposals would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution. 

It is not news that Trump has, during the course of his campaign for the GOP nomination, put himself at odds with basic premises of a Bill of Rights that defends a free press, guarantees freedom of religion, and guards against torture and abuses of privacy. But when his proposals are pulled together—as the ACLU has done in a new analysis of the Republican candidate’s public statements and policy positions—the extent to which Trump would shred the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular is breathtaking. 

“Taken together, his policies and positions, if put into place, would violate the Constitution and federal and international law,” says Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, which reviewed the candidate’s agenda and determined that “Trump’s proposals would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution.” 

Trump has from the start of his campaign sparked controversy with statements, actions, and proposals that disregard the First Amendment. He and his aides have created blacklists of journalists, and the candidate has expressed an interest in rewriting libel laws in order to intimidate, punish, and potentially silence critics of powerful individuals and interests. Trump has, as well, proposed schemes to discriminate against Muslims and to spy on mosques and neighborhoods where Muslims live—with steady disregard for the amendment’s guarantee of protection for America’s diverse religious communities. 

But that’s just the beginning of Trump’s assaults on the Constitution.Trump has encouraged the use of torture and blatantly disregardedprivacy protections that have been enshrined in the founding document since the 18th century. He has attacked the basic premises of a constitutionally defined separation of powers, with rhetorical assaults on individual jurists and the federal judiciary so extreme that House Speaker Paul Ryan described one such attack as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” He has proposed instituting religious tests. He has shown open and consistent disregard for the promise that all Americans will receive equal protection under the law. 

“If implemented, Donald Trump’s proposed policies will spark a constitutional and legal challenge that would require all hands on deck at the ACLU,” says Romero. “The ACLU and its more than 300 attorneys in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., stand ready to challenge and impede implementation of his unlawful proposals, should he attempt to see them through.” 

It should never come to that.

I'm glad the ACLU stands ready to fight the GOP on this, but the simple fact of the matter is they are now the party of blatantly racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic fascism, and nominating Donald Trump will cement that for a generation.  Trump never should have gotten this far, but here he is, about to be nominated as the presidential candidate of a major political party, because that party has enabled hatred and bigotry in a desperate attempt to consolidate political power.

In the short term it has been wildly successful at the state and local government level, all but wiping out the Democratic party in the South and most of the Midwest, leaving isolated pockets of resistance between the coasts.

In the long term, we're going to see that fall apart.  But there's still quite a bit of damage that the GOP can do in its death throes, and the reactionary election of Trump is still not out of the question.

StupidiNews!

• Parts of Melania Trump's speech at the opening night of the GOP Convention appear to have directly plagiarized Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic Convention speech.
• A federal judge has thrown out parts of Bill Cosby's lawsuit against his accusers for allegedly violating a settlement agreement over Cosby's sexual assault charges.
• A tourist bus in Taiwan crashed and burst into flames, killing all 26 people aboard, including 24 Chinese tourists, officials are still investigating the cause of the crash and fire.
• North Korea has once again fired a round of ballistic missile tests into the sea, drawing condemnation ahead of what Seoul says might be an upcoming North Korean nuclear test.
• A former St. Louis Cardinals executive has received 46 months in prison for guessing the password to their rival Houston Astros' online scouting database in 2013.

Last Call For Feeding The Rough Beast

Something of a Monday Long Read this evening when you get a chance, but it's a good one nonetheless: BuzzFeed senior political writer McKay Coppins details Donald Trump feeding off the people who dislike him, and how his upcoming nomaination as GOP presidential candidate is almost certainly a product of Trump's drive to exact petty vengeance against slights both real and perceived, making him the perfect candidate for the Republican party in 2016.

Donald Trump stood on a debate stage in downtown Detroit, surrounded by haters he was determined to dispatch: Liddle Marco to his right, Lyin’ Ted to his left, Megyn Kelly at the moderator’s table straight ahead, and — somewhere out there, in a darkened living room 1,500 miles away — me.

About 30 minutes into the debate, Kelly asked Trump to respond to a recent BuzzFeed News report about his position on immigration. 

“First of all, BuzzFeed?” Trump said, waving an index finger in the air. “They were the ones that said under no circumstances will I run for president — and were they wrong.” My phone lit up with a frenzied flurry of tweets, texts, and emails, each one carrying variations of the same message: This is all your fault. 

Trump was referring to a profile I’d written two years earlier in which I chronicled a couple of days spent inside the billionaire’s bubble and confidently concluded that his long-stated presidential aspirations were a sham. He had tweeted about me frequently in the weeks following its publication — often at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day — denouncing me as a “dishonest slob” and “true garbage with no credibility.” 

Breitbart published an “EXCLUSIVE” with Trump and his employees claiming I’d boorishly harassed various women during my brief stay at his Palm Beach estate Mar-a-Lago. (“I don’t know how to say it — he was looking at me like I was yummy,” complained one hostess named “Bianka Pop.”) There were a lot of things about Trump’s wrathful, wounded reaction that seemed weird at the time, but in retrospect, the weirdest was that it never really ended; for two years, Trump continued to rant about how I’m a scumbag or a loser or “just another phony guy.” 

Trump’s performative character assassination led to plenty of teasing from friends and colleagues about how I had inadvertently goaded Trump into running. But as his campaign gained traction, the tone started to curdle into something more…hostile. Once, after discussing Trump’s latest outrage on cable news, the host grumbled to me, “Won’t it be great when Donald Trump becomes president because you wrote a fucking BuzzFeed article daring him to run? I mean, won’t that be fucking fantastic?” I mentioned to former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett that Trump’s candidacy had me yearning for a new beat. “So, wait a second, you get all of us into this, and now you decide it’s beneath you?” he demanded. “No, you stay ‘til it’s fucking over. The whole thing. You stay here with the rest of us until it’s done.” 

It’s not done yet. As Trump completed his conquest of the Republican Party this year, I contemplated my supposed role in the imminent fall of the republic — retracing my steps; poring over old notes, interviews, and biographies; talking to dozens of people. What had most struck me during my two days with Trump was his sad struggle to extract even an ounce of respect from a political establishment that plainly viewed him as a sideshow. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that he’d felt this way for virtually his entire life — face pressed up against the window, longing for an invitation, burning with resentment, plotting his revenge. 

I had landed on a long and esteemed list of haters and losers — spanning decades, stretching from Wharton to Wall Street to the Oval Office — who have ridiculed him, rejected him, dismissed him, mocked him, sneered at him, humiliated him — and, now, propelled him all the way to the Republican presidential nomination, with just one hater left standing between him and the nuclear launch codes. 

What have we done?

I find it very interesting that a media outlet is considering its role in creating the Rough Beast slouching its way towards Cleveland at all, much less the more specific charge of enabling Trump's rise through not taking him seriously as a threat to the nation until it was far, far too late.  Sure, it was extremely easy to dismiss Trump as a clown in 2012, but he learned from his mistakes, and he learned from his detractors as well.

I'm glad that Coppins realized what the problem was, but the question remains, political media: what have you done?

Trump Cards, Con't

While the focus this week in politics is on the RNC convention in Cleveland, it's important to note just how many people the Republican presumptive nominee has alienated through his racist, hateful rhetoric so far, the the point where it may not be possible for Trump to win.  Trump is at best in the single digits among black voters, but he's also doing nearly as badly among Latino voters.

Donald Trump remains overwhelmingly unpopular with Latinos, a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll shows, with only about one in seven Latino voters say they support the presumptive GOP nominee.

A whopping 76 percent of the 300 Latino registered voters in the poll said they back Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head race, while just 14 percent said they back Trump.

What's more, 82 percent of Latino voters say they have an unfavorable view of Trump, while just 11 percent view him positively.

Yeah, Trump is in the teens with Latino voters.  That sound you hear is the RNC having a heart attack because they know they've just lost North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia for sure if those numbers remain true.  Support that low from Latino voters could put other states in play too like Arizona, and could even have some effect in Texas if Trump keeps this up.

Latinos, a fast-growing bloc of voters nationwide, have supported Democrats by significant margins in recent elections. But Trump's low level of support with the group is unprecedented.

Mitt Romney won 27 percent of Latinos in 2012; John McCain - a champion of immigration reform - garnered 31 percent support; and George W. Bush won around 40 percent in his re-election effort in 2004.

Combining this with Clinton winning the college-educated white vote, something the Democrats haven't done since Eisenhower and a group that Romney won by 14 points in 2012, and the coming wipeout of Trump is going to be legendary.

If the voters show up, that is.

The First Month's Agenda

As Hillary Clinton will speak at today's final day of the NAACP national conference here in Cincinnati, a preview of what she has to say came from a video appearance at the Netroots Nation 2016 conference on Saturday in St. Louis, where she laid out her plan for the first 30 days at the White House:

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, made the announcement in a video for the annual Netroots Nation progressive conference.

"Today I’m announcing that in my first 30 days as president, I will propose a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and give the American people — all of us — the chance to reclaim our democracy," she said.

"I will also appoint Supreme Court justices who understand that this decision was a disaster for our democracy. And I will fight for other progressive reforms, including small-dollar matching and disclosure requirements."

In a statement, Clinton also pledged to "promote SEC rulemaking requiring publicly traded companies to disclose all political spending to their shareholders" and to sign an "executive order requiring federal government contractors to fully disclose all political spending."

Campaign finance reform is all well and good, but this is what got my attention.

Clinton also called for criminal justice reform, laying out two additional proposals for turning "talk into action," especially in the wake of recent deaths of black men shot by police.

"First, as president I’ll bring law enforcement and communities together to develop national guidelines on the use of force," Clinton said. "Second, I will target $1 billion in my first budget to take on implicit bias, which remains a problem across our society and even in the best of our police departments."

It's a start, and only a start, but getting that start is necessary.  I'm hoping there's a lot more to Clinton's CJ reform proposals, and the voter registration proposals she is expected to talk about in Cincinnati today, but again, any changes to the Voting Rights Act or to criminal justice and mandatory minimum sentencing depends on the makeup of Congress next January.

If the GOP still controls the House, all bets are off.

StupidiNews!

• French police have arrested an Albanian couple in connection with last week's truck attack that killed 84, meanwhile US officials have confirmed a third American was killed in Nice.
• Venezuelans are once again flooding into neighboring Colombia to buy food and other essentials as border crossings re-opened this weekend amid Venezuela's ongoing shortages.
• Chinese labor groups collaborated with a US worker's rights organization before striking against Wal-Mart in China, Reuters has learned.
• The European Union is looking to possibly force new British PM Theresa May's hand over Brexit by suspending Britain's EU voting rights in the European Parliament. 
• Starbucks is following the lead of McDonald's and other retailers that provide public Wi-Fi at stores by blocking porn websites that family consumer groups see as a public health crisis.

Last Call For Copping Out In Cleveland

Seems like Cleveland's Finest are a bit worried about the Republican National Convention and Ohio's open carry firearms laws, and want the city to do something about it ASAP.

The head of Cleveland's largest police union is calling on Ohio Gov. John Kasich to temporarily restrict the state's open carry gun laws during this week's Republican National Convention following Sunday's shooting in Louisiana that killed three officers and wounded at least three others. 

"We are sending a letter to Gov. Kasich requesting assistance from him. He could very easily do some kind of executive order or something -- I don't care if it's constitutional or not at this point," Stephen Loomis, president of Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, told CNN. "They can fight about it after the RNC or they can lift it after the RNC, but I want him to absolutely outlaw open-carry in Cuyahoga County until this RNC is over." 

State law in Ohio allows for licensed firearm owners to wear their weapons in public. With the exception of a small "secure zone" inside and around the Quicken Loans Arena, residents, delegates and protesters are legally permitted to walk around the city -- including within its 1.7 square mile regulated "event zone" -- with any firearm not explicitly banned by the state. 

Kasich, responding to the request, said: "Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested." 

"The bonds between our communities and police must be reset and rebuilt -- as we're doing in Ohio -- so our communities and officers can both be safe. Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal," he said. 

Earlier, he released a video offering his condolences in the wake of the Baton Rouge attack.

So no, cops, the Republican party doesn't exactly have your back when it comes to you -- and public safety -- versus the NRA.  Maybe you want to keep that in mind the next time you decide the GOP is the "law and order" party, huh?

Guns will alway be more important that cops to the GOP.  Always remember that.

Republicans Hanging Around

Meanwhile, as the GOP prepares to get a good exchange rate by trading in Obama Derangement Syndrome back in for Clinton Derangement Syndrome...

A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be "hung on the Mall in Washington, DC."

CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: "Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution... then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC."

Folk told the station that he posted the tweet over the FBI's decision not to charge Clinton over the investigation into her private email server.

The tweet, which has since been deleted, drew a swift rebuke from his employer, United Airlines.

"We are appalled by comments advocating harm to any person," said airline spokesperson Mary Clark. "They do not represent United Airlines and we are looking into the matter further."

So we've got a sitting Republican state lawmaker openly calling for the execution of the Democratic candidate for president, but let's start screaming about how there's no difference between the two parties again and how "Republicans are batshit crazy" is just not a good enough reason for you to vote for Democrats in 2016.

Because you need something more to stop the GOP.

OK, sure.

Police Killed In Baton Rouge

Seven police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were ambushed by gunmen Sunday morning, and at least two of the officers are dead.

Multiple police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot on Sunday morning, a department spokesman said, as the country remains on edge about police and community relations.

Two of the officers have died, Baton Rouge's chief administrative officer told the Advocate Newspaper.

The officers were taken to a local hospital, spokesman Sergeant Don Coppola said the local CBS affiliate, adding he did not know the extent of their injuries. Sheriff's deputies may have also been involved.

While the scene of the shooting was contained, police have still not taken the shooter into custody and warned local residents to stay away from the scene, near Airline Highway.

The reports come a week after a wave of protests against police violence in Baton Rouge and other cities after a 37-year-old father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers. At one of the demonstrations in Dallas, a gunman opened fire on white officers assigned to the protest, killing five of them.

Telephone video footage carried on a local news station showed police cars arriving at a suburban intersection, and then five shots rang out.

Baton Rouge was of course the place two weeks ago where Alton Sterling was killed by two police officers, the shooting captured on video.  Nothing justified Sterling's death, just as nothing justified the deaths of these Baton Rouge officers today.

Things were pretty scary before in 2016, now they're just getting worse during this long, hot summer.

Sunday Long Read: Mistake By The Lake

As the Republican National Convention gets underway shortly in Cleveland, Kyle Swenson explores the city's history of always looking for a fight and being at most two to three steps away from finding it.

Cleveland has always been quick to throw a punch. That’s not a homer tough guy boast. If I can lift a line from Jack Nicholson’s gangster boss in The Departed, I slander my own environment, and it makes me sad. But flare-ups of violence are status quo here, both if you dive into the historical record or consult your own eyeballed primary source memories of being ringside for bar brawls. That bruiser history is symptomatic of a civic arena marked historically by fractious competition and tension between groups, racial injustice, bad vibes pinballing all over the place. That track record will also tell you a lot more about the upcoming Republican National Convention than a busload of national pundits—particularly in the jacked-up political landscape that has draped the country in 2016.

Much of the prognostications about the upcoming RNC have been dooming and glooming over the possibility of chaos in Cleveland when Donald Trump accepts the GOP Presidential nomination. But those guesses assume the candidate himself is the wild card, the agent of possible chaos. In reality, the stage, not the players, is the x-factor here.

This is not to say my hometown isn’t full of lovely people. It is. But historically, Cleveland has been hot-wired with the kind of bad socioeconomic juju that not only has combusted regularly into violent public episodes, but also has fed local flirtations with homegrown fascism. Look at this history, you see there’s violence sitting close to the heart of depressed and distressed American metros like Cleveland. Look closer, you see that this energy is swelling behind Trump’s candidacy like wind filling a sail. Look closer still, get eye-to-eye with that history, and you’ll understand that despite his rise, Donald Trump has zero clue about the forces he’s set loose.

And those forces will indeed be loose in Cleveland this week. The problem is of course they've been swirling around this country for centuries now, and when they do explode, people get hurt or a lot, lot worse.

I really do think it's going to get bad in Cleveland.  We just don't know how bad.  But as I keep saying, should Hillary Clinton win in November, the people behind the rise of Donald Trump aren't going to magically vanish.

They've been here for a very, very long time.

Last Call For Gotta Deport 'Em All!

What is with Republican lawmakers and their nearly sociopathic need to purify America of people they don't approve of by deporting everyone they can find?

One day after the horrific terror attack on civilians in Nice, France, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) took to Twitter to call on President Obama to “immediately deport” immigrants on terror watch lists.

In a series of tweets, Duncan proposed that the president “halt the Syrian refugee resettlement program” and “immediately deport any non-citizens listed on a terror-watch list.” He later added that immigrants would be given a deportation hearing, “thus protecting due process.”

Duncan also suggested that the United States should be “careful” with “who we’re granting citizenship to and which countries we allow immigration from,” calling for a closer scrutiny of the visa waiver program with the European Union, which allows visa-free travel between United States and European Union residents.

It's not surprising, Republican have been like this for years (and more than a few Democrats, sadly, which is why we still have the Patriot Act as law.)  But at some point the rest of us have to decide whether or not we want to start going down the road of rounding up people for the crime of "Not having committed any crimes yet but..." and all that entails.

Here's a hint: that's actual, literal "textbook definition of fascism" stuff, folks.

The party of fear anyone who is not Christian (and it used to be "and not Jewish but Trump's more "energetic" supporters have put that to bed), not WASPy is getting pretty powerful these days. America has always struggled with racism, it has for 240 years and will most likely continue to struggle for another 240 years more.

Trump's Pence-sive Decision, Con't

Donald Trump made it official today, introducing Indiana GOP Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate. The problem is the act of choosing Pence itself, and the hysterically sad cavalcade of failure leading up to Pence's selection, hasn't quieted Trump's critics who say he'll get stomped in November and all but end the GOP while doing it.

Donald Trump’s selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a strait-laced and seasoned conservative, as his running mate Friday was designed to be a soothing overture that could repair the fractured Republican Party and signal a newfound discipline in the celebrity billionaire’s bid for the White House.

But Trump’s apparent 11th-hour indecision and private hesi­ta­tion about Pence, coupled with a delayed and fitful introduction, threatened to undercut part of the rationale for Pence joining the ticket: steadying a turbulent general-election campaign.

Trump announced Friday on Twitter that he had chosen Pence and that they would make their first joint appearance at a news conference Saturday in New York. The social-media proclamation capped a period of extraordinary uncertainty and mixed signals about the selection, just days before the Republican National Convention is set to open here in Cleveland.

“I’m very excited, very humbled and very grateful,” Pence told reporters gathered outside his Manhattan hotel as he made his way to Trump Tower for a 90-minute meeting with the candidate and campaign advisers.

In Pence, Trump has a classically credentialed if generic campaign partner. Trump, 70, will rely on the 57-year-old Midwesterner to shore up support where Pence has nurtured deep relationships, such as on the Christian right and with the conservative movement’s moneyed establishment. A former chairman of the House Republican Conference, the ideological purist was embraced by many corners of the Republican coalition Friday that had been cool to Trump’s candidacy.

But there were also immediate signs that Pence could shift the focus of the overall debate in ways Trump may not intend. Pence brings a visceral ideological edge to what has been a populist campaign centered on economic grievances and strident nationalism.

While Trump mostly avoids social issues on the campaign trail and his positions have evolved over the years, Pence has a history of vocally promoting a hard-line conservative agenda — from opposing same-sex marriage and abortion rights to defunding Planned Parenthood.

On a related note, "overt racism" is now known as "economic grievances and strident nationalism".  Thanks Robert Costa!

Seriously though, if you thought Donald Trump was doing badly with women before, well, let's talk about Mike Pence's record, shall we?

Take, for example, an ongoing outbreak of HIV in southern Indiana. From December 2014 to May of this year, 191 cases of HIV, nearly all linked to the injection of the painkiller Opana, were found in Scott County, a rural area near the Kentucky border. Before the outbreak, there had been numerous deaths and known risks from the increase in injection drug use in the area for several years. Pence had long been a vocal opponent of needle exchange programs, which allow drug users to trade in used syringes for sterile ones in order to stop the spread of diseases, despite evidence that they work. Such programs were banned in the state when the outbreak started.

At the end of March last year, four months after the outbreak began, Pence declared a public health emergency, allowing needle exchanges to be opened in Scott County. Scott County Health Officer Dr. R. Kevin Rogers described the program as having “a tremendously positive and dramatic impact” and recently made a successful request to have the program extended until May 2017. At least four other counties have been allowed to start programs as well. Still, Pence hasn’t moved to lift the state ban on funding for needle exchanges and has made it clear in the past that he would veto any bill that tried to lift the ban statewide.

Pence has also shown a deep misunderstanding of basic public health principles in the past. In 2001, he wrote an op-ed declaring that “smoking doesn’t kill.” The evidence? “Two out of three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness.” Diseases are rarely the product of one thing. With lung cancer, for example, there’s a strong genetic component. Some people who don’t smoke will get lung cancer.1 Many people who do smoke will not. Relative risk, which measures the strength of the relationship between an exposure and a health outcome (smoking and lung cancer in this instance), is a funny thing; it can’t be used to measure the risk for an individual, only a group. And at that macro level, the risk of smoking is quite clear, as this oft-cited American Cancer Society chart shows.

Lung cancer isn’t even the most common negative health outcome from smoking. That distinction goes to vascular diseases that cause heart disease and/or stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Pence’s home state of Indiana should be particularly concerned about tobacco: 23 percent of adults are smokers, the sixth-highest statewide rate in the United States. Fifteen percent of pregnant women smoke, nearly double the national average, and the state spent $2.93 billion in 2014 on health costs caused by cigarette smoking — more per capita than 31 other states, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Still, Indiana has a cigarette tax of just 99 cents,2 lower than 35 other states, despite a wealth of evidence showing that increasing taxes on tobacco reduces smoking rates.

And of course, there's the state's insane abortion law that Pence signed in March.

Indiana already tightly regulates abortion. Now, HB 1337 puts forth a laundry list of additional restrictions that lawmakers haven’t previously been able to get passed.

The legislation includes several provisions that fit into a larger strategy to shame women for the reasons they may decide to end a pregnancy. Women will be prohibited from choosing an abortion based on their fetuses’ gender, a policy that’s based on racist assumptions about Asian American women’s attitudes toward daughters. Women will also be barred from choosing an abortion if their fetus has genetic abnormalities like Down Syndrome, a rare restriction — only North Dakota has successfully enacted it so far — that seeks to drive a wedge between the abortion rights community and the disability rights community.

Doctors will be held liable if the state determines they performed an abortion on a patient who had one of those motivations in mind. It’s unclear exactly how this policy will be enforced in practice. But leading medical groups warn that it could compromise the doctor-patient relationship by chilling open conversation about pregnancy decisions.

There's more. HB 1337 also imposes strict regulations on abortion doctors, requiring them to obtain "admitting privileges" at local hospitals, that are designed to drive them out of business. It requires the remains of miscarried or aborted fetuses to be buried or cremated. And it restricts the donation of fetal tissue, a crucial tool in medical research that's come under fire thanks to asmear campaign against Planned Parenthood that construes the practice as "selling baby parts."

Parts of that law are now on hold due to the recent Supreme Court decision on Texas's TRAP laws, but the point is Mike Pence wants to have the government force women to cremate or bury their aborted fetal tissue as punishment.

And he's now Donald Trump's veep pick.

The most virulently misogynist ticket in American history?  Absolutely.  These two absolutely personify the Republican War on Women.

Istanbul, Not Constanti-No-Coup

At this point the coup attempt in Turkey by parts of the military to unseat President Erdogan has failed utterly, and now the cleaners are coming.

Some 2,839 soldiers, including high-ranking officers, have been arrested over an attempted coup that is now over, says Turkey's PM Binali Yildirim.

In a night he called a "black stain on Turkish democracy", he said 161 people had been killed and 1,440 wounded.

Explosions and gunfire were heard in Ankara, Istanbul and elsewhere overnight and thousands of Turks heeded President Erdogan's call to rise up against the coup-plotters.

It is unclear who was behind the coup.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed a "parallel structure", in a clear reference to Fethullah Gulen, a powerful but reclusive US-based Muslim cleric whom he accuses of fomenting unrest.

However, in a statement, Mr Gulen rejected any suggestion he had links to the events, saying he condemned "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey".

All this happened as US Secretary of State John Kerry was in Moscow meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the future of Syria, Turkey's neighbor (which Erdogan has been supporting for years militarily).

The CIA playbook on a military coup is pretty standard worldwide: make sure your guys get all the necessary A's.

• Armed forces
• Airwaves
• Airports
• Allies
• and the Asshole in charge you're trying to overthrow.

By my count, the junta had precisely none of those in hand when they pulled the trigger.  Erdogan was on vacation in the resort city of Marmaris, 400 miles away from Ankara or Istanbul.  His forces took the airports, defended State TV, and protected his allies in parliament.  It was a botched job from the word go, so comically inept that I'd almost believe Kerry and Lavrov decided to help Erdogan clean out his pool filter of idiots in exchange for staying out of Syria in the future. Almost. (Can't rule out stupid people being stupid.)

Shorter version: If you come at the king, best not miss.




They missed.

It's going to get nasty in Turkey.

May Or May Not In The UK

Welcome to the Theresa May era in British politics, where the new Tory government's first order of bsuiness is to rid the nation of that pesky department dealing with climate change.

The government has axed the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) in a major departmental shake-up. 

The brief will be folded into an expanded Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy under Greg Clark. 

Ed Miliband, the former energy and climate secretary under Labour, called the move "plain stupid". 

It comes at a time when campaigners are urging the government to ratify the Paris climate change deal. 

In his statement, Mr Clark appeared keen to calm concerns about the priority given to tackling global warming. 

He said: "I am thrilled to have been appointed to lead this new department charged with delivering a comprehensive industrial strategy, leading Government's relationship with business, furthering our world-class science base, delivering affordable, clean energy and tackling climate change."

Everything's fine, nothing to see here, please go about your business as May's Tories continue to take the country down the primrose path.  Expect more of this as the days, weeks, and months wear on and Brexit-era London decides more and more to pull out of international accords and apologize profusely, but it just can't be done, you see.  British wingnuts may be more polite, but they're just as awful.

New tag: Theresa May.