Last Call For The Same Old Bevin

Joe Sonka details the "changes" that Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin has made to his planned waiver of Medicaid expansion, which the federal government basically told him that he wasn't going to get approved.  Bevin apparently doesn't give a damn and is submitting it anyway, and is daring the Department of Health and Human Services to tell him to piss off so he can blame somebody else when Kentucky Republicans take health coverage away from ten percent of the state.

Under the waiver proposal dubbed Kentucky HEALTH and first unveiled in June, individuals with income up to 138 percent of the federal poverty rate would still be eligible for expanded Medicaid, though “able-bodied” persons would have to pay a monthly premium to maintain coverage and could be locked out from coverage if payments are missed. Such individuals also would no longer be automatically eligible for benefits such as vision and dental, having to earn credits in their My Rewards Account by having health risk assessments, volunteering, taking smoking cessation classes, having a job or being in school. 

Bevin reiterated in a press release announcing the submission of the 87-page waiver on Wednesday that his plan would lead to better health outcomes, ensure the long-term sustainability of the state’s Medicaid program — as Kentucky must begin to kick in a small percentage of costs for covering the expanded population next year — and “familiarize members with commercial insurance and prepare them for self-sufficiency.” 

“The submission of this waiver is the result of many months of extensive research, planning and time spent traveling the state listening to Kentuckians,” said Bevin in his press release. “Kentucky HEALTH will allow us to continue to provide expanded Medicaid coverage, but unlike the current Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, it will do so in a fiscally responsible manner that ensures better health outcomes for recipients.”

The major scam here is the "My Rewards Account", like any health savings account you put money into to cover your medical expenses, but you lose all the money in it at the end of the year.  It's a tax on people who are bad at predicting exactly how sick they'll get in the course of 12 months, underestimate it and you lose your coverage for non-payment of premiums, overestimate it and you pay the state extra tax money you really can't afford.  It's a fun guessing game, and the winner is Bevin, every time.

While Bevin’s proposal had received wide praise from Republican officials in Kentucky, health care advocacy groups have expressed concern that requiring premiums and locking people out of coverage for failure to make payments would serve as an obstacle to many low-income individuals and families gaining Medicaid insurance. HHS also has emphasized that states seeking a waiver to alter its Medicaid expansion may not limit access to coverage or benefits by conditioning eligibility on work or other activities, impose premiums or cost sharing at levels preventing low-income individuals from accessing coverage, or penalize people for needing Medicaid coverage for multiple years. 

When unveiling his proposal in June, Bevin warned that if HHS does not approve the waiver, then “there will not be expanded Medicaid in the state of Kentucky,” an indication that he would either repeal the executive order of former Gov. Beshear to expand Medicaid — which resulted in over 400,000 people receiving coverage — or decline to reauthorize it next year. When asked what he would do if HHS only approved of 90 percent of Kentucky’s waiver proposal, Bevin said at the time that there is still a “negotiating process” going forward. 

HHS press secretary Marjorie Connolly released the following statement after Gov. Bevin’s announcement, again praising the success of Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion over the past few years and indicating that the process going forward could still take considerable time. 

“Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion has been very successful in improving health coverage, access to care, health outcomes, and financial security for its citizens,” said Connolly. “HHS has been clear that, as we begin the review of this application, we will assess it based on longstanding Medicaid principles of access to coverage and affordability of care. As in other states, we are prepared to continue dialogue for as long as it takes to find a solution that maintains and builds on Kentucky’s historic progress, and avoids moving backwards.”

Except backwards is exactly where Bevin is heading with this.  He's holding health insurance coverage for 400,000 plus Kentuckians hostage, and either he gets what he wants or the people of the Bluegrass State get it right between the eyes.

That's our governor!

Trump Cards, Con't

So we've reached the point of this insane election season where a presidential candidate is now actively promising to use the power of the executive to prosecute and imprison his political opponent if elected, even though Clinton has been exonerated by said Justice Department.  But that's just a technicality, see...

On Monday night in Ohio, Trump unveiled his plan for clearing this hurdle. The GOP nominee decried the conspiracy between the FBI and Justice Department to “whitewash” Clinton’s use of a private email server, saying, “They certainly cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton’s crimes.” 

Thus, Trump demanded an “expedited investigation by a special prosecutor” into his rivals misdeeds. “The Clintons made the State Department into the same kind of pay-to-play operation as the Arkansas government was,” the mogul declared. 

Granted, Trump’s proposal doesn’t actually “make sense.” Only the Justice Department has the power to appoint a special prosecutor. If Trump is elected, he could, presumably, appoint an attorney general willing to appoint such a prosecutor — but at that point, why wouldn’t Trump just let Attorney General Chris Christie carry out the witch hunt himself? 

Nonetheless, the special-prosecutor plan appears to be a central part of Trump’s agenda going forward. After cancelling a series of campaign events on Monday — including a marquee speech on immigration policy — Trump released a revised schedule on Tuesday morning. On the docket: A speech in Austin that aims “to draw national attention to his call for border security as well as the need for a Special Prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s bought and paid for State Department.”

At this point, if you're somehow still on the fence over your 2016 presidential vote, and somehow Donald Trump vowing to send Hillary to prison is the one thing you needed to hear from him in order to secure your vote, then yeah, you have much bigger personal problems to deal with.

Meanwhile in Trump outreach to voters of color, we have something something Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations.

Standing before a vastly white crowd in Ohio on Monday evening, Donald Trump made a passionate pitch to African American and Hispanic voters, whom he described as living in poverty in neighborhoods that are more dangerous than war zones. 

"What do you have to lose?" Trump asked again and again. 

It's a question that Trump first posed to African American voters during a rally in North Carolina on Thursday. He then repeated it at a rally in Michigan on Friday evening and Virginia on Saturday night. In Ohio on Monday, Trump expanded his pitch to include Hispanics. 

"Our government has totally failed our African American friends, our Hispanic friends and the people of our country. Period," Trump said in Akron, Ohio, straying from the prepared remarks the campaign provided to reporters. "The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities. For those hurting the most who have been failed and failed by their politician — year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers. Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it's safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats. And I ask you this, I ask you this — crime, all of the problems — to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I'll straighten it out. I'll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?" 

The mostly white crowd cheered and then started chanting: "Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!"

Dear stupid black and brown people, why the hell won't you vote for me?  Your buddy, Don.

Still, it's nice that we've reached the desperate phase of the Trump campaign.   Another 11 weeks of raw, brutal misogyny and overt racism should be good for the country, right?

Who's Watching Charm City?

Since the start of the year the city of Baltimore has been under constant surveillance from the skies by the Baltimore PD in a newly-revealed program scooped by Bloomberg News, the same type of aerial spotting used by our forces in Iraq is now being used by a large police department against mostly citizens of color, conducted by a private firm called Persistent Surveillance. The company was founded by a former MIT engineer named Ross McNutt, and their goal was to show the country's major police forces that constant surveillance by air, using retrofitted Cessnas, was an invaluable tool.

Baltimore PD has apparently taken McNutt up on his offer, and it wasn't the first to do so.

A single, long-term contract with an American police department would be worth about $2 million a year, he says. By 2012, McNutt was approaching the police departments of the 20 most crime-ridden jurisdictions in the country, marketing his services. He floated several of them an offer: Let us fly over your city to show you what we can do, and then you can decide if you want to hire us.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department quietly took him up on the offer, allowing him to conduct a nine-day trial run over Compton, a largely minority city south of L.A., in 2012. According to Patrick Bearse, operations lieutenant for the Aero Bureau of the sheriff’s department, the county recognized the potential of Persistent Surveillance’s service, but it didn’t sign a contract with the company because the technology, particularly the quality of the images, didn’t meet the department’s expectations. The city’s residents didn’t find out about the flights until a year later. Angry protesters demanded a new “citizen privacy protection policy” from local leaders, but even those leaders—from the mayor on down—hadn’t been told about the test program. “There is nothing worse than believing you are being observed by a third party unnecessarily,” Compton Mayor Aja Brown told the Los Angeles Times.

The next city to try McNutt’s technology was his home base of Dayton. After the L.A. County trial, he improved the system by more than doubling the resolution, to 192 megapixels, increased the archive’s storage capacity, and sped up the image processing to allow analysts to conduct multiple investigations simultaneously. The Dayton police department and the city council were sold on it, and they aired the idea for a contract at a series of public hearings. Joel Pruce, who teaches human rights studies at the University of Dayton, helped organize the opposition. To the objecting residents, it seemed as if it hadn’t occurred to city leaders that the surveillance program might be interpreted as a violation of some vital, unspoken trust. “At the hearings, nobody spoke in favor of it except for the people working for the city,” Pruce recalls. “The black community, in particular, said, ‘We’ve seen this type of thing before. This will target us, and you didn’t even come to us beforehand to see how we’d feel about it.’ ” Dayton’s city leaders dropped their attempts to hire the company after those hearings.

Last year the public radio program Radiolab featured Persistent Surveillance in a segment about the tricky balance between security and privacy. Shortly after that, McNutt got an e-mail on behalf of Texas-based philanthropists Laura and John Arnold. John is a former Enron trader whose hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, made billions before he retired in 2012. Since then, the Arnolds have funded a variety of hot-button causes, including advocating for public pension rollbacks and charter schools. The Arnolds told McNutt that if he could find a city that would allow the company to fly for several months, they would donate the money to keep the plane in the air. McNutt had met the lieutenant in charge of Baltimore’s ground-based camera system on the trade-show circuit, and they’d become friendly. “We settled in on Baltimore because it was ready, it was willing, and it was just post-Freddie Gray,” McNutt says. The Arnolds donated the money to the Baltimore Community Foundation, a nonprofit that administers donations to a wide range of local civic causes.

In January, McNutt opened the office above the parking garage. The only sign greeting visitors is a piece of copy paper taped to the door that reads “Community Support Program.”

Almost everything about the surveillance program feels hush-hush; the city hasn’t yet acknowledged its existence, and the police department declined requests for interviews about the program. On Aug. 10 the U.S. Department of Justice released a 163-page report that detailed systemic abuses within the Baltimore Police Department, including unlawful stops and the use of excessive force, that disproportionately targeted poor and minority communities and led to “unnecessary, adversarial interactions with community members.” Within a week, civil rights groups filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission claiming that the department’s warrantless use of cell phone tower simulators known by the trade name StingRay—an activity the police acknowledged last year in court—violated federal law and targeted minorities. “The problem of radicalized surveillance is particularly pronounced in Baltimore,” the complaint stated. The city was already on the defensive, even as the aerial surveillance program was shielded from the public eye.

So now we find out that that a police department rife with massive abuses of people of color in the city, abuses so awful that the Justice Department detailed a major report scorching the department, now has on top of all that a secret aerial spying program.

These guys can't be sued into oblivion quickly enough.  What the Justice Department has done with Ferguson, Missouri they need to do to Charm City: dismantle the police, take the department over under federal guidance, and rip out the corruption at the root.

It's far past time for the Baltimore PD as we know it to cease to exist.

StupidiNews!

• At least 37 are dead after a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck central Italy near Rome overnight, several towns have been destroyed by the temblor.
• The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Ohio's law eliminating "Golden Week", where voters could both register and cast ballots before election day.
• North Korea has fired yet another test missile towards Japan, this one apparently launched from a submarine, in direct violation of UN sanctions.
• Tesla's all electric Model S has a new battery pack that allows the vehicle to go from zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds, making it the new fastest production car currently available.
• New estimates put the cost of cleaning up after a 2014 accident at Nevada's WIPP nuclear disposal site could be at least $2 billion.

Last Call For A Leaking Ship, Sinking

Can we finally stop pretending that WikiLeaks hasn't somehow become the very monster it supposedly set out to slay, and that Assange and company need to be shut down?

WikiLeaks' global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill, The Associated Press has found. 

In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom. 

"They published everything: my phone, address, name, details," said a Saudi man who told AP he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. "If the family of my wife saw this ... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people."

WikiLeaks' mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site's claim to have championed privacy even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site's allies.

Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn't immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks' stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material "involving war, spying and corruption" into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a "giant library of the world's most persecuted documents." 

The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the U.S. Democratic National Committee, Turkey's governing party and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records. 

The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed by AP. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children or refugees. 

"This has nothing to do with politics or corruption," said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document. 

"This is illegal what has happened," he said in a telephone interview. "It is illegal!"

Even if you still don't buy the reams of information pointing to the group as being a front to launder Russian intelligence interests against the West, the fact that they leak government information that sometimes turns out to be the very privacy violations that Assange and his friends are screaming about should be enough to turn the world against them.

I've never trusted the man, and the evidence against WikiLeaks has proven that to be a good assumption when dealing with Assange again and again.  It's awful.

And it needs to be stopped.

Worst Kasich Scenario, Con't

Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich takes to the NY Times in an op-ed where he complains that his own chief legislative accomplishment from his time in the House, the 1996 Welform Reform Bill, was a failure.  It's just not his fault, he'll tell you, even though his claim to fame as a fiscal conservative was writing this bill 20 years ago.

TWO decades ago, Republicans and Democrats in Congress came together to make historic changes to our nation’s welfare program, working to strike the right balance between helping people in need while setting standards for personal responsibility. Twenty years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed their bill into law, famously declaring, “Today, we are ending welfare as we know it.” 

Many people in both parties will look at this anniversary as a reason to celebrate one of the greatest legislative achievements of the 1990s. But I’m here to tell you that it didn’t work — our welfare system still isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. 

I should know. In 1996, as a Republican representative from Ohio and the chairman of the House Budget Committee, I was proud to be part of the bipartisan team that overhauled our federal welfare system. These reforms, for the first time, introduced personal accountability into the welfare equation and began moving America down a better path by imposing lifetime limits on cash benefits, requiring recipients to work or get training and giving flexibility to states in shaping their own welfare programs to meet their particular needs. 

But today, it’s clear that our welfare system is still deeply flawed, thanks in part to later changes from Washington. In 2005, Congress pulled power back from the states, reducing local flexibility by enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach that sets arbitrary time limits on education and training for people seeking sustainable employment. As a result, too many lives are thrown away by a rigid and counterproductive system that treats an individual as a number, not as a person who is desperate to gain new skills and opportunities in life.

Let's break this down: first of all, as Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Kasich would have been (and was) the numbers guy on the Welfare Reform bill.  Second, who controlled Congress and the White House in 2005?  That would be the Republican party itself that made the very changes Kasich is complaining about.

Kasich goes on to detail the workarounds and waivers he wants in Ohio, but let's not forget that in his recent presidential campaign Kasich ran chiefly on a balanced budget amendment, which would have drastically cut federal spending on the very same welfare programs he's complaining about not working for Ohio.

So it's hard to take Kasich's complaints seriously when he was a major author of the legislation he's moaning about, even more so when his own party made the situation worse by his own admission, and triply so when as President he was calling for making the situation of states like Ohio even more awful with a federal balanced budget amendment.

But that's Kasich for you.

The Coming Av-Hill-Lanche, Con't.

Joe Crespino at the NY Times makes the case that Georgia is truly in play for Hillary Clinton, just as it was for her husband when he won the Peach State in 1992, and argues that it may become the new key swing state going forward as Trump may have blown his chances there to lock the state down by using the Southern Strategy.

Richard M. Nixon pulled it off artfully in his two successful campaigns, appearing mostly in Southern cities and suburbs and letting Thurmond work the Deep South circuit. Ronald Reagan folded in religious conservatives in the 1980s to replace the generation of Dixiecrats dying off, thus consolidating the powerful mix of cultural reaction and economic conservatism that is modern Republicanism. 

Yet this year that mixture may not work. Mr. Trump’s extreme language and divisive policies are alienating moderate Republicans in places like the Atlanta exurbs — where Mrs. Clinton is running nearly even with Mr. Trump. And across the state, polls show a significantly low number of Republicans saying they’ll support their party’s candidate. 

Mr. Trump’s campaign most closely resembles the presidential campaigns of George C. Wallace, the arch-segregationist Alabama governor. Indeed, Wallace’s legacy is telling. An economic progressive, he remained a Democrat his entire life. True, he galvanized white working-class disenchantment and pioneered a populist, anti-liberal rhetoric that Ronald Reagan and subsequent Republicans would use to devastating effect. Yet he never had much appeal among the new class of suburban whites; the two were like oil and water. So, too, it would seem, are Donald Trump and moderate Southern Republicans today.

Whether or not Republicans hold on to Georgia and South Carolina this year, the lessons they are likely to take away are predictable. Democrats will assume that these states, like Virginia and North Carolina, are part of a long-term liberal trend and push traditional liberal ideas harder in future elections. Republicans will most likely write off Mr. Trump as a one-time phenomenon and not do anything. In doing so, both parties will ignore lessons from the history of the Southern conservative majority. 

What might be happening instead is something new in the South: true two-party politics, in which an urban liberal-moderate Democratic Party fights for votes in the increasingly multiethnic metropolitan South against an increasingly rural, nationalistic Republican Party. If that happens, it will transform not only the politics of the American South, but those of America itself.

Another thing to note is that Georgia now has 16 electoral votes, up from 13 when Bill Clinton won the state in 1992.  The new swing state axis in the future may not be Ohio-Pennsylvania-Florida anymore, but GA-NC-FL, especially given the fact Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, like Michigan and its 16 electoral votes, have been reliably Democratic since Bill Clinton's first term.

The country's new purple state battleground might be these states and maybe even the entire East Coast Southern region (including Virginia and even South Carolina) one day soon.

Speaking of Virginia, Clinton is up by a whopping 16 points, 48-32%, over Trump in that state in the latest Roanoke College poll.

We'll see how that holds up in the next few weeks.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama will tour flood-ravaged Louisiana today, having waited to do so by request of Gov. John Bel Edwards, Republicans are still criticizing the visit as too little, too late.
• A federal judge has ordered the State Department to review and release nearly 15,000 emails from Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary of State, beginning in October.
• A federal judge has denied a motion from three University of Texas professors to allow them to ban open carry in their classrooms this fall, ruling the motion is unlikely to succeed.
• The Pentagon is looking into how to defeat commercial drones possibly deployed by terrorists as weapons or flying bombs.
• Android's newest operating system, version 7.0, code name Nougat, goes live this week with new features aimed at VR headsets, Chrome web browser, and smartphones.

Last Call For Here Comes The Judge

The old saying "As goes Texas, goes America" doesn't actually apply to America mostly and doesn't even really exist, except it turns out in the mind of one fellow by the name of Reed O'Connor. Normally that cute little delusion wouldn't be an issue except for the fact he's a federal judge, and that Sunday night he issued a nationwide injunction against the Obama administration's guidance on treating trans students like actual human beings.

A federal judge in Texas Sunday blocked the Obama administration from enforcing guideline released by the Department of Education instructing public schools not to discriminate against transgender students. 

The judge, George W. Bush appointee Reed O'Connor, ruled in favor of the 13 states led by Texas suing the Obama administration over the guideline, in which the administration urged school districts across the country to permit transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms matching their identity.

The judge said his order was not yet weighing the "difficult issue of balancing the protection of students’ rights and that of personal privacy when using school bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other intimate facilities, while ensuring that no student is unnecessarily marginalized while attending school." 

Rather, Judge O'Connor said, he was placing an injunction on the directive because the states were likely to prevail on their argument that the administration did not go through proper rules and comment process for regulations, and that the Department of Education's interpretation of civil rights law was not in line with how the text was understood when it was passed. 

The Obama administration has argued that it has the authority to issue the directives protecting trans students because Title IX’s language barring discrimination on the basis of sex could be interpreted to include gender identity. The court Sunday said that the states would likely succeed in their arguments that the language was not ambiguous and thus does not lend itself to that interpretation. 

The order placed a nationwide injunction on the policy, and said that the administration cannot force the states challenging the directive to implement the policy. 

"Further, while this injunction remains in place, Defendants are enjoined from initiating, continuing, or concluding any investigation based on Defendants’ interpretation that the definition of sex includes gender identity in Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex," the order said. "Additionally, Defendants are enjoined from using the Guidelines or asserting the Guidelines carry weight in any litigation initiated following the date of this Order."

I'm assuming that the Obama Administration will appeal and probably get a stay on the order until an appellate court can make a ruling, but at some point this is going to end up in front of the Supreme Court and unless Democrats win control of the Senate back, there's no reason to believe that there will be nine justices actually deciding the case in a Hillary Clinton administration.

The larger issue is at some point America has to decide that laws protecting the right to discriminate are no longer acceptable in our society, and that's not going to happen until a number of Roberts court decisions get updated and/or reversed outright by a new liberal majority, starting with Merrick Garland replacing Antonin Scalia.

Here's hoping that's soon.

Trump Cards, Con't

Politico's Eli Stokols asks the obvious question: when Trump loses in November (hopefully) what happens when his months of "rigged election" rhetoric causes him, and his tens of millions of followers, not to concede or to recognize Clinton's win?

The implications—short- and long-term—are serious. Interviews with more than a dozen senior GOP operatives suggest growing panic that Trump’s descent down this alt-right rabbit hole and, beyond that, his efforts to de-legitimize the very institutions that undergird American democracy—the media and the electoral process itself—threaten not just their congressional majorities or the party’s survival but, potentially, the stability of the country’s political system.

“We’ve never had a presidential candidate who has questioned the legitimacy of an electoral outcome nationally,” said Dan Senor, who was a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “This does take us to a whole new world if the actual presidential candidate is questioning the legitimacy of this process, and the damage to our democracy could be substantial.”

In 2008, even as some on the far right questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy as president based on false suggestions he was not born in America, McCain conceded quickly. Most notably, after the Supreme Court’s 2001 Bush v. Gore decision, countless Democrats complained that the result was unjust—but Al Gore and Joe Lieberman did not.

“Among the values most necessary for a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power that’s gone on uninterrupted since 1797. What enables that is the acceptance of the election’s outcome by the losers,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP operative who was John McCain’s campaign strategist in 2008.

“Here you have a candidate after a terrible three weeks, which has all been self-inflicted, saying the only way we lose is if it’s ‘rigged’ or stolen—in a media culture where people increasingly don’t buy into generally accepted facts and turn to places to have their opinions validated where there’s no wall between extreme and mainstream positions. That’s an assault on some of the pillars that undergird our system. People need to understand just how radical a departure this is from the mean of American politics.”

Should Trump opt not to concede after a loss or deliberately roil his supporters and spark uprisings by refusing to accept the legitimacy of the election results, he would still have little recourse to alter a significant electoral victory for Clinton. Only if the election were close, hinging on one or two states where there were alleged voting irregularities, could Trump seriously contest the result in court.

But beyond who wins the White House in November, many Republicans fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and in politics itself will have a lasting impact.

When even Steve Schmidt, the man behind McCain's decision to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate, thinks Trump is way out of line, something is seriously wrong.  Not that Schmidt doesn't deserve a lot of blame for continuing the GOP down the path of delegitimizing elections and elevating the current bonkers Alt-Right to its place running the GOP or anything.

But if even Schmidt realizes Trump is well over the line, perhaps Republicans should ask themsleves how they plan to fix the cancer on American politics that their party has become, and that starts with getting rid of people like Trump, and the people who enabled him.

That of course won't happen.  Maybe it will after Trump's followers decide to take a few Second Amendment remedies to resolve their impending wipeout in November.  For now they can take comfort that in some swing states, there are Republicans registering to vote, or something.

For the rest of us, the watch continues. Greg Sargent figures this is all a play for Trump's white nationalist TV news network anyway, and he's probably right.

TrumpTV, the white network for the white time.

Black Lives Still Matter

Black lives still matter folks, even though we've actively got white supremacists like David Duke and Don Advo joyfully bragging about how they now control the Republican party:

Don Advo: So, something astonishing has happened. We appear to have taken over the Republican Party.

David Duke: Well, rank and file, but a lot of those boll weevils are still in those cotton balls, and, uh, the Republican Party may be a European-American populated party, but like a ball of cotton, you can have boll weevils in there that are going to rot it out from the inside.

And I see we're back to the defense of white supremacy through the ridiculous argument that the NAACP is inherently racist again. 

The Confederate flag waved in front of the NAACP office Sunday. The red flag with its blue X holding white stars hung over the shoulder of a White Lives Matter member who was joined by others in his group in a protest against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"We came out here to protest against the NAACP and their failure in speaking out against the atrocities that organizations like Black Lives Matter and other pro-black organizations have caused the attack and killing of white police officers, the burning down of cities and things of that nature," White Lives Matter member Ken Reed said. "If they're going to be a civil rights organization and defend their people, they also need to hold their people accountable."

The protest drew much attention as people took photos of the group which held assault rifles and "White Lives Matter" signs on the Third Ward block.

"We're not out here to instigate or start any problems," Reed said. "Obviously we're exercising our Second Amendment rights but that's because we have to defend ourselves. Their organizations and their people are shooting people based on the color of their skin. We're not. We definitely will defend ourselves, but we're not out here to start any problems."

So we're back to the days where white supremacists are demonstrating in front of the national office of the NAACP in Houston with rifles, Confederate flags and a big ol' "#WhiteLivesMatter" sign.
 
But they're not here "to start any problems."

They're just here to provide Second Amendment remedies for the problems they think they need to stop.

Gotcha.

StupidiNews!

• At least 53 are dead after a suicide bombing at a Kurdish wedding party in Turkey, Turkey's president is blaming ISIS and says the bomber was a boy age 12 to 14.
• The Justice Department is siding with poor defendants in misdemeanor charges, saying that states cannot jail people over failure to pay bail for those who cannot afford it.
• The Rio Olympics have officially come to a close as Brazil passed the Olympic flag on to Japan, who will host the 2020 Tokyo games.
• New data in South Korea shows that marriages and births are down sharply from 2000, the number one reason young people in South Korea are putting both off is the cost of housing.
• The latest update for Windows 10 apparently breaks the usage of most webcams, Microsoft has not indicated when a fix will be in place.

Last Call For Not-So Pro-Life

Texas's Republican rule has been deadly for women and babies, as the state GOP's Taliban-like fanaticism to end abortion has led to Texas having the highest mortality rate among childbirth in the developed world.

The rate of Texas women who died from complications related to pregnancy doubled from 2010 to 2014, a new study has found, for an estimated maternal mortality rate that is unmatched in any other state and the rest of the developed world.

The finding comes from a report, appearing in the September issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, that the maternal mortality rate in the United States increased between 2000 and 2014, even while the rest of the world succeeded in reducing its rate. Excluding California, where maternal mortality declined, and Texas, where it surged, the estimated number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births rose to 23.8 in 2014 from 18.8 in 2000 – or about 27%.

But the report singled out Texas for special concern, saying the doubling of mortality rates in a two-year period was hard to explain “in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval”.

From 2000 to the end of 2010, Texas’s estimated maternal mortality rate hovered between 17.7 and 18.6 per 100,000 births. But after 2010, that rate had leaped to 33 deaths per 100,000, and in 2014 it was 35.8. Between 2010 and 2014, more than 600 women died for reasons related to their pregnancies.

No other state saw a comparable increase.

And you can 100% lay this at the feet of the Texas GOP.

In the wake of the report, reproductive health advocates are blaming the increase on Republican-led budget cuts that decimated the ranks of Texas’s reproductive healthcare clinics. In 2011, just as the spike began, the Texas state legislature cut $73.6m from the state’s family planning budget of $111.5m. The two-thirds cut forced more than 80 family planning clinics to shut down across the state. The remaining clinics managed to provide services – such as low-cost or free birth control, cancer screenings and well-woman exams – to only half as many women as before.

At the same time, Texas eliminated all Planned Parenthood clinics – whether or not they provided abortion services – from the state program that provides poor women with preventive healthcare. Previously, Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas offered cancer screenings and contraception to more than 130,000 women.

In 2013, Texas restored funding for the family planning budget to original levels. But the healthcare providers who survived the initial cuts reported struggles to restore services to their original levels.

When your laws cut the number of women who get health care during pregnancy in half, the number of women who die from childbirth complications doubles. 

Now understand that Texas is the second most-likely state besides Florida to have a major Zika virus outbreak this year, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Pro-life my ass.

The Right To Discriminate

As LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik reminds us, this week the most dire predictions of Justice Ginsburg's blistering dissent in the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision have come to pass as a federal judge has used the decision to rule that a funeral home has the right to discriminate against a transgender employee based solely on "sincerely held religious beliefs."

"The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”

That’s how Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concluded her dissent to the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision. That’s the case in which the court ruled that businesses have a right to their own religious beliefs, and could use them to flout otherwise generally applicable federal laws — in this particular, the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that businesses provide contraceptive coverage as part of their employees’ health insurance.

The minefield Ginsburg warned about has now detonated. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Sean F. Cox of Detroit ruled that a local funeral home was well within its rights to fire a transgender employee because its owner had a religious belief that gender transition violated biblical teachings.

Cox’s ruling puts the lie to Justice Samuel Alito’s denial, in his majority opinion in Hobby Lobby, that the ruling would provide a shield for a wide range of discriminatory practices by allowing them to masquerade as religious scruples. “Our decision today provides no such shield,” Alito wrote.

Ginsburg, who was on the short end of a 5-4 decision, knew better. She said there could be “little doubt” that religious claims would proliferate, because the court’s expansion of religious freedom to corporations “invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith.” She asked, “where is the stopping point?… Suppose an employer’s sincerely held religious belief is offended by health coverage of vaccines, or paying the minimum wage … or according women equal pay for substantially similar work?”

She further cited court precedents holding that “accommodations to religious beliefs or observances … must not significantly impinge on the interests of third parties.”

As it happens, the case before Cox involves all those points. At issue was the firing of Aimee Stephens by R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, which she had joined as a funeral director and embalmer under the name Anthony Stephens in 2007. In July 2013, she informed her employer that she would transition to her female identity starting in 2013, living and working as a woman for a year before undergoing sex-reassignment surgery. Within two weeks, she was fired. A year later, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the funeral homes on her behalf.

And this decision is just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm hoping the EEOC appeals the decision all the way up the the Supreme Court, but that won't be a very fun time if Donald Trump gets to name a ninth justice, will it?

Sunday Long Read: Flair Apparent

The long-running joke behind restaurant chain T.G.I.Friday's is of course, the flair (and if you've ever seen the excellent 1999 comedy Office Space, you know exactly what I mean.)  But what happens to all the little doodads and collectible items that crowd the walls of your favorite casual dining watering hole when the chain finally decides to go twenty-teens minimalist?

Tall windows flood the vast dining room with natural light, illuminating a minimalist mix of rectangular and round tables—each ringed by tasteful, Modernist chairs—beneath a grid of industrial light fixtures and exposed wooden beams. Is this the city’s hottest new restaurant that everyone’s been talking about, the one with the locally sourced ingredients served on artfully presented plates? No, it’s the new T.G.I. Friday’s.



That’s right, Friday’s, the once-popular singles bars and burger joints found in the parking lots of many a suburban mall. In March 2016, the famously clutter-filled chain introduced the first prototype for its spartan new design concept in Corpus Christi, Texas. The most startling aspect of this otherwise inoffensive space is the complete lack of Friday’s characteristic kitsch. No tin signs or pedal cars adorn the walls; there’s no dark wood or Tiffany-style lamps; there are no chipper red-and-white stripes to be found anywhere.

If you live or work in San Francisco, as I do, this bare, open look has become as cliché and unremarkable as Teslas and luxury condos. The new Millennial-approved restaurant aesthetic, which Friday’s is attempting to replicate in Corpus Christi, has become the beige-linen wall covering of choice, papering over the scruffier textures of the city’s quirky saloons, galleries, bookstores, and mom-and-pop shops. Suddenly, everything is “nice,” and the steep prices, which well-paid techies can easily afford, are guaranteed to keep the riffraff out.

For the past 40-plus years, casual-dining chain restaurants have dominated the suburban landscape. Friday’s and its ilk have served as cozy sanctums for Baby Boomer collectors and other nostalgia junkies, filled to the brim with mostly authentic antiques, which ranged from low-value, easy-to-find items to rare, high-dollar picks. Now that the sterile, clutter-free look has infected T.G.I. Friday’s—it will soon spread to each of its 900 restaurants around the globe—2010s urban Modernism is about to go suburban. FourTaco Bell prototypes in Southern California suggest that the upscale minimalist look is spiraling rapidly down-market.

Truth told, restaurant kitsch has been dying a slow death for the last decade. There are exceptions, of course—the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store brand depends on folksy nostalgia to appeal to its long-standing customer base. But less-rural restaurants felt the sting when 1999 movie “Office Space” mocked the typical chipper casual-dining atmosphere and its myriad “pieces of flair.” In 2005, Friday’s went through the first of a series of make-unders, removing the fake Tiffany lamps and reducing the number of vintage tchotchkes on its walls. In 2007, Friday’s competitor Ruby Tuesday jettisoned its Tiffany-style lamps and flea-market mementos for a more sophisticated look while offering more expensive fare. Five years later, Chili’s Bar and Grill debuted its remodeled prototype in Mesquite, Texas, replacing its jumble of Southwest kitsch with Modernist furniture in natural woods and a few well-appointed antiques like framed sepia-toned photographs.

The new Corpus Christi Friday’s, however, is the first time the restaurant has completely severed itself from its original retro, candy-striped image. Jeff Walsh, president of Hospitality Solutions Design, spent decades adorning casual-dining spots with memorabilia. After starting his career as an antiques picker 35 years ago, Walsh launched his Beverly, Massachusetts-based interior design group, which has worked with Friday’s, Chili’s, Applebee’s, Bennigan’s, and Chevy’s, among others. Today, he says, restaurant owners are asking for a completely different style.

As something of a signage history junkie (Cincinnati is home to the American Sign Museum, a absolute must-visit if you come to town) this is a pretty fascinating story here at Collector's Weekly, detailing the history of how the kitschy restaurant got started and where all that stuff comes from. Enjoy.

And as always, tip your server.