Last Call For Methinks You Doth Protest Too Much

One silver lining in the election of Donald Trump to head a GOP government: gleeful Republicans aren't even trying to cloak their authoritarian impulses anymore and are making it perfectly clear that they plan to use the power of government to crush those that they see as enemies.  We're now seeing the first small signs of this just a week after the election, and I expect them to grow larger, even in blue states like Washington.

A Republican state senator who campaigned for President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday he plans to propose a bill for the upcoming legislative session that would take a firm stand against what he calls "illegal protests."

Sen. Doug Ericksen of Ferndale said in a news release his bill would create a new crime of "economic terrorism" and would allow felony prosecution of people involved in protests that block transportation and commerce, damage property, threaten jobs and put public safety at risk, he said.

"I respect the right to protest, but when it endangers people's lives and property, it goes too far," Ericksen said. "Fear, intimidation and vandalism are not a legitimate form of political expression. Those who employ it must be called to account."

But some people believe the term "economic terrorism" goes too far.

"To call it economic terrorism is just another way to silence it and another way to gain popular support." said Seattle resident Molly Boord.

"Frankly, I'm appalled," said Seattle city councilman Miked O'Brien.

He was detained by the Coast Guard when he joined kayaktivists protesting a Shell oil rig last summer.

"To me (it) strikes a complete disregard of the US constitution and our First Amendment rights," said O'Brien. "Our country is based, in part, on the ability to have free speech and public dissension."

Public dissension against Trump will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the (new) law, if the GOP gets its way.  And it's hard to imagine them not getting a bill like this passed in states where they have total control soon.

Being able to round up hundreds, maybe thousands and charge them with felonies will of course require a new for-profit private prison regime to handle political dissidents (maybe the most Republican party thing ever) and of course the automatic loss of the right to vote in many states for being felons.

This will never pass in Washington state, but in say, Texas or Missouri or Florida or Ohio, where there are large blue cities and the possibility of months, if not years of protest against Trump that are in states dominated by the GOP, or more likely, Black Lives Matter protests after another police killing of people of color?

You'd better believe legislation like this is in the works.  How far it will get, well who knows at this point?

The Gaslight Express

I'm definitely afraid of the havoc that the Trump administration will wreak in just a few months.  But what I'm also afraid of is that the "new, improved" Democratic party will make a hard right turn in order to placate the "white working-class" voter and that will lead to then abandoning voters of color.

Real Clear Politics pundit Sean Trende all but blames voters of color for Clinton's loss last week in his version of the Democratic party "autopsy" report that Republicans went through in 2008.

I have little doubt that a belief that demographics would save them at the presidential level led Democrats to take a number of steps that they will soon regret, from going nuclear on the filibuster to aggressive uses of executive authority. But one thing deserves special attention. A good deal of e-ink has been spilled describing the ways in which the culturally superior attitudes of the left drove Trumpism. This too, I think, derived from a belief that history had a side and that progressives were on it, combined with a lack of appreciation of just how many culturally traditionalist voters there are in this country. 

Consider these factoids: In 2004, white evangelicals were 23 percent of the electorate, and they cast 78 percent of their vote for fellow evangelical George W. Bush. In 2012, they were 26 percent of the electorate, and gave Mormon Mitt Romney 78 percent of the vote. In 2016, Donald J. Trump, a thrice-married man who bragged about sleeping with married women and whose biblical knowledge at times seemed confined to the foibles of the two Corinthians, won 81 percent of their vote. Notwithstanding the fact that I have been assured repeatedly that these voters represent a shrinking demographic and that Republicans had maxed out their vote share among them, they were once again 26 percent of the electorate. 

Two points demand attention. The first, which “demographics-is-destiny” types typically gloss over, is that Trump received more votes from white evangelicals than Clinton received from African-Americans and Hispanics combined. This single group very nearly cancels the Democrats’ advantage among non-whites completely. This isn’t a one-off; it was true in 2012, 2008 and 2004. 

Second, you may wonder why this group voted in historic numbers for a man like Trump. Perhaps, as some have suggested, they are hypocrites. Perhaps they are merely partisans. But I will make a further suggestion: They are scared. 

Consider that over the course of the past few years, Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention (this is disputed, but it is the perception); endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations – despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights – and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners. In 2015, the United States solicitor general suggested that churches might lose their tax exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. In 2016, the Democratic nominee endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment, thereby endorsing federal funding for elective abortions. Democrats seemingly took up the position endorsed by critical legal theorist Mark Tushnet:

The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. . . . For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won. 

Perhaps comparing evangelicals to the Japanese in World War II was a bit much, and helped push evangelicals into a defensive crouch. Before my Democratic friends warm up their keyboards to protest “but we’re correct,” let me say that on some of these issues I agree with you! My point here is descriptive, not prescriptive. An aggressive approach to the culture wars and the sneering condescension of the Samantha Bees and John Olivers of the world may be warranted, but it also probably cost liberals their best chance in a generation to take control of the Supreme Court. That’s a pretty steep price to pay. It may well be that Democrats would be better able to achieve their goals if they were less, for lack of a better word, fundamentalist about those goals. Henry Clay famously declared that he would rather be right than president; he at least got his way on the latter.

If Republicans were told to pursue Latino and black votes in 2008, the advice to Democrats is now to kick these groups to the curb and actively court white evangelicals, the only group that matters politically anymore.

It's terrible advice, but I'm afraid Democrats are winding up to do just that, and should they do so, they will be lost for a generation.

And so will people of color.  We've seen 18 months of the most racist presidential campaign in modern history, and the analysis is that not only Republicans won by directly appealing to the racism of white voters, but that to have any hope in the future as a political party, the Democrats must embrace the same message.

That is wrong, and I will fight that every step of the way.

The Obamacare Repeal Reveal Deal

Barring sudden change in heart by the GOP, Obamacare is dead and gone in 2017, folks.  What will come after it is now the important fight once Republicans decide how to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and move forward with their crusade.  And as Jon Chait reminds us, what will come after is most likely "absolutely nothing".

So how will Republicans handle it? One possibility is to compromise with Democrats. Republican staffers speaking to reporter Caitlin Owens said they would not use the repeal bill their party had sent to Obama endlessly for vetoes. (“We’re not going to use that package. We’re not dumb,” said one.) They described their approach as “more massive reform” and “a rewrite of Obamacare.” The plan they loosely describe would keep Obamacare’s structure, and change the law to make it friendlier to Republican priorities. They could strip out some of the essential benefits required by the law. They could allow insurers, who are now allowed to charge older customers no more than three times as much as they charge a young one, something more (like, say, five times as much). And they could change the subsidies in a more Republican-friendly way — which generally means making them more generous to the affluent and stingier for the poor. This kind of compromise would impose a lot of hardship on vulnerable people. (A good summary of the impact of these changes can be found here— it would hurt more people than it would help.) But it might attract some Democrats eager to sustain some kind of safety net for the health-care system. Republicans could satisfy the blood lust of their base by framing this as a “repeal” of the law and a replacement with a somewhat altered version. 

After he met with President Obama, Trump seemed to endorse a version of this strategy. “We’re going to do it simultaneously. It’ll be just fine. That’s what I do. I do a good job,” he said. “We’re not going to have like a two-day period and we’re not going to have a two-year period where there’s nothing. It will be repealed and replaced. It’ll be great health care for much less money.” As is often the case, Trump’s verbiage did not convey any clear and definable course of action. But to the extent meaning could be extracted, he was promising not to pass a quick repeal bill or to wreck the law completely. 

Yet such a course of action seems likely to enrage conservative activists, who could ignite a firestorm of protest against the sellout leadership capitulating to nefarious congressional Democrats. Indeed, much of the conservative movement has invested itself heavily into the notion that Obamacare is an act of singular evil that must be destroyed — the very impulse that prevented Republicans from negotiating on the law in the first place. 

And so a second course of action seems more likely. Republicans would quickly vote, through a reconciliation bill, to dismantle the law’s subsidies. They could do this in a massive reconciliation bill that also advanced other priorities, like a large upper-bracket tax cut, cuts in spending on anti-poverty programs, defunding agencies that regulate Wall Street, polluters, and so on. But the defunding of Obamacare would be delayed for two years, until after the 2018 midterm elections, to shield the GOP from the political impact. In the meantime, Trump could deliberately impair the law’s functioning through administrative action, so that the exchanges lost customers rather than gained them. 

This plan would give Republicans two more years to design their alternative. By 2019, they would likely have eliminated the filibuster over some other dispute. If not, eliminating the law might give them leverage to try to force Democrats to participate in some kind of ultra-threadbare replacement plan. The leverage would be that, if they fail to support it, Obamacare would disappear without anything at all taking its place. When thinking through the Republican Party’s incentives, the option that makes the most sense is the immediate repeal vote with a two-year delay before it takes effect.

In other words, defund Obamacare subsidies immediately, blame Democrats when the individual market and state exchanges collapse and red state voters get out the long knives to decapitate the remaining Senate Dems in 2018, and then come up with a "new" plan in 2019.

It's a smart plan.  Sure, it'll cost tens of millions of Americans health insurance and affordable care and some of them won't be around in 2019 as a result, but hey, it'll be Obama's fault.

Voters have repeatedly rewarded the GOP for behaving like this.  Why would they stop now?

StupidiNews!

• Japanese PM Shinzo Abe will be the first Asian leader to officially meet with President-elect Donald Trump, the two are expected to discuss trade and the TPP, largely considered dead.
• New data from Pluto suggests that the distant planetoid may have a vast underground ocean of slushy ice containing as much water as all of Earth's seas combined.
• The Minnesota police officer who killed black motorist Philando Castle during a July traffic stop has been charged with second degree manslaughter.
• Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the UK should consider a second referendum on rejoining the EU after economic reform changes are made to the group of nations.
• A new UK study finds that pigs make the same kinds of bad decisions that humans do when faced with psychological stress and cognitive bias blind spots.

Last Call For Tea-rok, DINO-saur Hunter

At least a few former Sanders supporters have decided that the best way to move forward into the Trump era and the 2018 and 2020 elections is to scour the party and purge those Dems deemed impure.

Leaders of the groups organizing some of the first outbursts of direct action in response to Trump’s surprise election are making plans to take to the streets through January’s Inauguration and beyond. In frantic behind-the-scenes phone calls, text messages and Slack chats, they’re also planning to channel the energy unleashed last week into electoral politics, starting with Democratic primaries, to build what one organizer called a “tea party of the left.”

“Our big goal is to support primary challenges against those Democrats who negotiate with Donald Trump,” said the organizer, Waleed Shahid, a veteran of Bernie Sanders’ campaign who is working for a group called AllofUs, launched in September. The approach mimics that of the tea party, which has used insurgent primary bids to unsettle establishment Republicans and drive the Republican Party rightward. 

“It gave people in the Republican Party who are upset with the establishment an identity,” Shaid said. “You could be a tea party Republican. We think there’s a lot of power in that.” 

Progressive groups are planning to combine that tactic with direct actions like marches and sit-ins to more seamlessly merge an anti-Trump protest movement with electoral politicking. 

Already, AllofUs — which draws organizers from the environmental group 350.org and the Occupy movement — has organized a candlelight vigil at the White House on Saturday and a Monday sit-in at Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office that resulted in 17 arrests. Another organizer for the group, Max Berger, said it was in the process of planning additional mobilizations over the next several months. And in recent days, the group’s leaders have participated in informal talks with unions and other standard-bearers of the progressive left about orienting their efforts toward Democratic primary challenges while maintaining protests. 

Among the groups eyeing a stepped-up role in primaries are 350.org’s political action wing and National Nurses United, which backs Rep. Keith Ellison’s bid for chairman of the Democratic National Committee and is convening its board this week in Washington, where its members will participate in a Thursday afternoon rally with Sanders on the Capitol grounds. “Time for faux progressives to get out of the way,” said the union’s executive director, RoseAnn DeMoro. “Change is the only thing that will save that party.”

I don't think these guys are going to get much traction, or get much action, frankly.  I figure voters will get rid of DINO Dems like Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester and Joe Donnelly pretty quickly in 2018.

Of course they'll be replaced by Republicans, but we haven't gotten that far yet.  I'm sure states like West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana and Indiana will come around to far left Democratic candidates when presented.

You know, just like Russ Feingold in Wisconsin.

Last Call For The Moscow Shuffle

Don't look now, but this week the head of the NSA basically admitted that he believes Russia used WikiLeaks to influence the 2016 elections. Over at Mother Jones, David Corn says that actually is worthy of congressional hearings.

Despite all the news being generated by the change of power under way in Washington, there is one story this week that deserves top priority: Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, was asked about the WikiLeaks release of hacked information during the campaign, and he said, "This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect." He added, "This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily." 

This was a stunning statement that has echoed other remarks from senior US officials. He was saying that Russia directly intervened in the US election to obtain a desired end: presumably to undermine confidence in US elections or to elect Donald Trump—or both. Rogers was clearly accusing Vladimir Putin of meddling with American democracy. This is news worthy of bold and large front-page headlines—and investigation. Presumably intelligence and law enforcement agencies are robustly probing the hacking of political targets attributed to Russia. But there is another inquiry that is necessary: a full-fledged congressional investigation that holds public hearings and releases its findings to the citizenry. 

If the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies are digging into the Russian effort to affect US politics, there is no guarantee that what they uncover will be shared with the public. Intelligence investigations often remain secret for the obvious reasons: they involve classified information. And law enforcement investigations—which focus on whether crimes have been committed—are supposed to remain secret until they produce indictments. (And then only information pertinent to the prosecution of a case is released, though the feds might have collected much more.) The investigative activities of these agencies are not designed for public enlightenment or assurance. That's the job of Congress.

Unfortunately, the odds of this Congress ever addressing Mike Rogers's statement is approaching zero so quickly that it might throw off tachyons in the process.  Even if you don't believe the NSA (and yeah, there's ample reason to never trust the NSA on anything, ever) Congress should still investigate the Russian connections here on the off chance that this is actually legit (and there's ample evidence to believe it may very well be.)

And they won't, because the chief beneficiaries of the Russian interference were Donald Trump and the GOP Congress.  That's 100% true.

Kobach Chameleon, Con't

Regardless of whether Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach ends up Attorney General or not, he is currently Trump's transition team point man on immigration right now. Just to let you know how truly abysmal the man and his policies are, he's openly talking about bypassing Republicans and Democrats in Congress to build that mythical wall...and to start registering Muslims.

Kobach told Reuters last Friday that the immigration group had discussed drafting executive orders for the president-elect's review "so that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security hit the ground running."

To implement Trump's call for "extreme vetting" of some Muslim immigrants, Kobach said the immigration policy group could recommend the reinstatement of a national registry of immigrants and visitors who enter the United States on visas from countries where extremist organizations are active.

Kobach helped design the program, known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, while serving in Republican President George W. Bush's Department of Justice after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants.

Under NSEERS, people from countries deemed "higher risk" were required to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting on entering the United States. Some non-citizen male U.S. residents over the age of 16 from countries with active militant threats were required to register in person at government offices and periodically check in.

NSEERS was abandoned in 2011 after it was deemed redundant by the Department of Homeland Security and criticized by civil rights groups for unfairly targeting immigrants from Muslim- majority nations.

Kobach said the immigration advisers were also looking at how the Homeland Security Department could move rapidly on border wall construction without approval from Congress by reappropriating existing funds in the current budget. He acknowledged "that future fiscal years will require additional appropriations."

Yeah, on top of everything else this asshole came up with the Bush Administration's unconstitutional profiling of Muslims program, and now he wants to bring it back.  But for ten years, we regularly kept tabs on "high-risk" Muslims until the Obama administration put a stop to it.

Trump has said that he not only wants to bring NSEERS back but expand it to include all Muslims in the US, including US citizens. And yes, he wants to build that wall to keep them out.

Kobach is the most dangerous member of Trump's team that I've seen so far, somebody who can make Trump's dangerous immigration rhetoric into reality.

That's a serious problem.

The King Coal Con, Con't

Congratulations, coal country voters!  Donald Trump is about to play you for the useful idiots you are.  Meet your new Trump administration Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross!

After campaigning as a champion of coal miners, Donald Trump is reportedly close to choosing for Commerce Secretary a New York billionaire who owned a West Virginia mine where a dozen miners were buried alive in 2006. Trump’s favored candidate, Wilbur Ross, also engineered buyouts that cost workers their benefits, and their jobs. It’s a striking choice, considering Trump’s promises to improve the lives of coal miners and other working-class Americans.

Ross made his money collecting “distressed assets”—failing steel and textile mills in the midwest and south, and coal mines in Appalachia. Dubbed the “The King of Bankruptcy,” Ross cut jobs, wages, pensions, and health benefits at the companies he acquired, and reaped the profits. In the early 2000s, Ross’s foray into the steel industry netted him a $267 million personal windfall, but stripped health care benefits from more than 150,000 retired steelworkers. Then he moved on to the coal industry, at one point controlling as much as $1.2 billion in coal assets through his company, the International Coal Group.

That's right, Trump is about to make the guy who took health benefits away from a hundred and fifty thousand steel workers the head of America's business strategy.  And if the name Wilbur Ross sounds familiar, it should.  Especially in West Virginia.

One of ICG’s acquisitions in West Virginia was the Sago Mine, about 100 miles east of Charleston. The mine, a non-union operation, racked up a slew of safety violations from federal inspectors—more than 208 in 2005 alone. That year, the roof of the mine collapsed twenty times. Workers at Sago were injured three times as often as workers in similar mines elsewhere. Though Ross claimed not to be part of operating management at Sago, he admitted later that he was aware of the violations, and waved them away.

Then, early one January morning, methane ignited deep in the mineshaft. The explosion instantly killed one miner and stranded a dozen others about two miles from the mouth of the mine, in a passageway filled with carbon monoxide. It was more than an hour before company managers called for help, and four hours until a rescue team arrived. Nearly two days later, when they finally reached the trapped miners, all but one had died. Ross and ICG set up a $2 million compensation fund for the families of the deceased—an amount, critics pointed out, that paled in comparison to Ross’s immense personal wealth. (Trump contributed $25,000 to that fund.)

So the guy who overlooked safety violations that cause the Sago mine disaster ten years ago is now going to be overseeing the Commerce Department...you know, the guys in charge of, among other bureaus...NOAA.

Coal mine owner in charge of weather and climate science in America.

Nice knowing you.

StupidiNews!

• With wildifres raging across six states in the Southeast, hundreds have been hospitalized due to breathing difficulties from smoke since the beginning of the month.
• House minority leader Nancy Pelosi faces her first real challenge in years as a Democratic leadership vote scheduled for Thursday has now been delayed for several weeks.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel will run for a fourth term, according to lawmakers her in party, but an official announcement will come "at a suitable time".
• The election has bond market analysts nearly assured that the Fed will raise interest rates in December in anticipation of significantly increased government spending by the GOP.
• Volkswagen is nearing a deal to resolve issues with 80,000 US diesel cars and SUVs that could just need software fixes instead of expensive buybacks.

Last Call For Kobach Chameleon

I've talked about Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach a number of times on this blog, and at every juncture he's been on a crusade to disenfranchise as many Democratic party voters as possible in the name of "eliminating voter fraud".  He's the man behind Crosscheck, a compact of red states to compare voter registrations and to toss millions off the voter rolls in 2016. He's been involved in helping to neuter the Federal Election Assistance Commission to keep the federal government from helping to register voters. And in Kansas, he's been behind efforts to misinform Hispanic voters in the state by giving them false information.  Most of all, he's the man behind Arizona's awful SB 1070  "Papers, please!" law that Kobach later tried in Kansas and was struck down by the Supreme Court.

In other words, if the GOP effort to disenfranchise black and Hispanic voters has a face and name, it's Kris Kobach.

So guess whose name just surfaced as Attorney General of the United States in the Trump administration?

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, best known for his very hardline immigration stances, could be President-elect Donald Trump's choice for attorney general. Kobach helped formulate Trump's controversial plan to build a wall along the United States' southern border and crafted an Arizona law that made it a crimeto be in the country illegally and allowed Hispanic people to be asked to "show their papers." 

Phil Kerpen, president of the conservative group American Commitment, tweeted Tuesday that credible sources told him Kobach was the likely choice. But Bryan Lowry, a reporter at Kansas.com, tweeted that a Kobach representative said it was "just chatter" at the moment, signaling nothing was definite just yet.

Kobach is a controversial figure, in large part for his very tough stances on immigration. Kobach has indicated that Trump's immigration stances will immediately shift away from President Barack Obama's efforts to extend rights to undocumented immigrants. Trump has said he would deport between 2 and 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. Kobach suggested this week that Trump would also deport undocumented immigrants who are arrested but not convicted.

Understand that if Kris Kobach becomes Attorney General, the DoJ's Civil Rights and Voting Rights divisions will be used against people of color at every opportunity, and that I fully expect a national, federal effort to institute GOP voter ID laws nationwide, along with, oh yes, the nation's top cop almost certainly instituting national racial, ethnic, and religious profiling and "stop and frisk" policing.

Oh, yeah, and mass deportations.

Kobach cannot be allowed to be Attorney General, guys.

Period.

Burning Bernie Big Time

Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald argues that Bernie Sanders would have been buried by the GOP's opposition research if he had been nominated, and that believing Sanders had any chance was part of the reason why Clinton lost.

So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

My long-time blogging friend Steve M disagrees with Eichenwald, however.

Some of this might have stuck -- the environmental racism attack might have hurt Sanders with Hispanic voters (although, after all, he would have been running against Donald Trump). The vote for the crime bill might have hurt Sanders with African-American voters. Eichenwald says that the section of the GOP's oppo file "calling [Sanders] a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida" -- but Hillary Clinton lost Florida, too, and she wasn't supposed to need it to win.

Eichenwald says that "the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick" -- but we were also told that the Clinton campaign's anti-Trump oppo was pretty awesome, and that didn't work out.

I agree that some of what Eichenwald describes would have cut into Sanders's popularity. But none of it seems devastating enough to have knocked him out.

I continue to believe that Republicans would have just fallen back on the tried-and-true: Sanders believes in big government and will raise your taxes to stratospheric levels. I think that would have hurt him more than any of this oppo. So I still think it's unclear how Sanders would have done in a general election. I'm just surprised at how little the GOP had on him.

I tend to side with Steve on this.  "Socialist Sanders" would have been this year's "Crooked Hillary" in the VFW halls, the high school sports games, the Facebook posts from your relatives. He still hasn't learned to connect with the black community any better than he did 18 months ago, nor did he seem even remotely interested in trying to do so.  Eichenwald's oppo research would have been ignored, it would have been Sanders himself that ran into issues.

Besides, hard to run as an outsider when you've spent 25 years in Congress.

But the Socialist tag would have finished him with older voters, and "massive tax increases on the middle class!" with the heavily implied "To help those people at your expense!" would have done it with just about everyone else.

No, Bernie didn't have a chance either, but not for the reasons Eichewald brought up.  This was the "fact's don't matter LOL" campaign anyway, and Bernie was running on reality.

The Villains Are Ecstatic

The white nationalist movement hasn't had it this good since the days of Jim Crow, and they are more than happy to gloat right now over their man set to be in the White House in January.

"I think that's excellent," former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke told CNN's KFile. "I think that anyone that helps complete the program and the policies that President-elect Trump has developed during the campaign is a very good thing, obviously. So it's good to see that he's sticking to the issues and the ideas that he proposed as a candidate. Now he's president-elect and he's sticking to it and he's reaffirming those issues." 

Duke, who last week lost his longshot bid for the US Senate seat from Louisiana, said he plans on expanding his radio show and is hoping to launch a 24 hour online news show with a similar approach to Comedy Central's Daily Show. He argued Bannon's position was among the most important in the White House. 

"You have an individual, Mr. Bannon, who's basically creating the ideological aspects of where we're going," added Duke. "And ideology ultimately is the most important aspect of any government."

Issues don't matter, facts don't matter, we're all ideologues now.

Peter Brimelow, who runs the white nationalist site VDARE, praised Bannon's hiring, saying it gives Trump a connection to the alt-right movement online. 

"I think it's amazing," Brimelow said of Trump's decision to tap Bannon. "Can you imagine Mitt Romney doing this? It's almost like Trump cares about ideas! Especially amazing because I would bet Trump doesn't read online. Few plutocrats do, they have efficient secretaries." 

Brimelow added his site would continue to focus solely on their hardline position on immigration, saying he expects American whites to vote their interests similar to other minority groups. 

"To the extent that the 'alt-right' articulates that interest, it will continue to grow," Brimelow said. 

Brad Griffin, a blogger who runs the white nationalist website Occidental Dissent using the pseudonym "Hunter Wallace," said he thought Bannon's hiring showed Trump would be held to his campaign promises. 

"It makes sense to me," he said. "Reince [Priebus] can certainly get more done on Capitol Hill. He will be an instrument of Trump's will, not the other way around. Bannon is better suited as chief strategist and looking at the big picture. I think he will hold Trump to the promises he has already made during the campaign. We endorse many of those promises like building the wall, deportations, ending refugee resettlement, preserving the Second Amendment, etc. There's a lot of stuff in there on which almost everyone on the right agrees." 

Griffin added, "We're most excited though about the foreign policy implications of Bannon in the White House. We want to see our counterparts in Europe — starting in Austria and France — win their upcoming elections. We're hearing reports that Breitbart is expanding its operations in continental Europe and that is where our focus will be in 2017."

This was always the plan with the Trump/Bannon axis: a government based on being the new international beacon white supremacy.  They can't wait to get started dismantling the civil rights era.

As I've said before, it was always about punishing the Obama coalition and the people who voted for him, and leaving them politically powerless.  It's revenge, plain and simple, to make sure that America never dares to nominate someone like him again, or like Hillary Clinton.

You know, not a white guy.

But don't take my word for it,

Bannon has goals. One of those goals is maximization of personal power, which is why he spent the last decade and a half glomming onto powerful right-wing personalities (Bachmann, Morris, Palin), kissing their asses, and then moving on up the chain. With Breitbart and Trump, he picked two winners in a row – and that means he’s now at the pinnacle of American power. 

So, what will he do with that power? He’ll target enemies. Bannon is one of the most vicious people in politics, which is why I’ve been joking for months that should Trump win, I’d be expecting my IRS audit any moment. That wasn’t completely a joke. He likes to destroy people.

Granted, Ben Shapiro is a complete asshole who still doesn't think Bannon is a racist anti-Semite, but he does recognize a vindictive bastard when he sees one.  He's coming for his enemies, and he'll have the full power of the White House behind him.

And everyone who didn't openly support Donald Trump is an enemy to Steve Bannon.  Never forget that.

But please tell me again how Clinton was going to be worse because emails.

StupidiNews!

• Award-winning journalist and PBS newscaster Gwen Ifill passed away yesterday at age 61 due to complications from endometrial cancer.
• Lawmakers in New York aren't waiting for Donald Trump to appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, they're moving to guarantee abortion access by law in the state.
• Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump's choice for Secretary of State, also under consideration is former Bush 43 UN Ambassador John Bolton's Mustache.
• Russian Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev has been detained by police on bribery charges, reportedly he solicited $2 million in cash to approve a $5 billion oil deal.
• A Kentucky man is facing second-degree arson charges for allegedly setting a wildfire in order to increase viewership of his YouTube channel.

Last Call For The King Coal Con

Donald Trump's 30-point wins in Kentucky and West Virginia, and wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania were never, ever about "coal jobs".  They were about dismantling the Obama coalition and punishing the people who voted for the current president. But Mitch McConnell gave the game away over the weekend, and nobody will care.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hedged on Friday about when and if Republicans would be able to bring coal mining jobs to Kentucky, saying that is a "private sector activity." 

The issue has been a key campaign tool for Republicans who have accused President Obamaof waging a "war on coal." President-elect Trump promised during the campaign that he could save the coal industry in America. 

"Obama has decimated the coal industry, and we're going to bring the coal industry back,” Trump said at a speech in Louisville in March. “The coal industry is going to make a very big comeback.” 

But asked at a press conference at the University of Louisville if the GOP would be able to restore the industry that has shed jobs here and in other coal-mining states, McConnell demurred. 

"I certainly would like to see the war on coal come to an end," he said in a 20-minute press conference. "As I've said repeatedly over the last few years, the war on coal was not a result of anything Congress passed, there was no legislation. This was all executive orders or regulations that the president was involved in, unilaterally, on his own." 

The industry has been losing jobs for three decades and those losses accelerated under Obama, in part because of new environmental regulations, but more importantly, because of cheap natural gas prices. 

In 1985, there were 173,000 coal mining jobs in the United States, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In October of this year, that number had fallen to 53,000. 

Eastern Kentucky has been especially hard hit because the easily obtained coal is gone and it costs much more to extract it from the ground there. 

"We are going to be presenting to the president a variety of options that could end this assault," McConnell said. "Whether that immediately brings business back, that's hard to tell because this is a private sector activity."

Oh.  Oh well then.  The rest of King Coal's court didn't have much more to add either.

The interim president of the Kentucky Coal Association was more direct about the future of coal mining in Eastern Kentucky. 

“I would not expect to see a lot of growth because of the Trump presidency,” Nick Carter said in an interview. “If there is any growth in Eastern Kentucky, it will be because of an improved economy for coal.” 

Experts agree that environmental regulations placed on the coal industry contributed to a rapid decline of the coal industry over the past few years, but there have been other, more important economic factors at play. 

“The issues, particularly in the eastern part of Kentucky, are more than the increase of regulations,” said Ken Troske, Sturgill Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky. 

One of those issues is a decrease in demand for coal. 

Carter said the low price of natural gas contributes to the lack of demand for coal. As the energy industry builds new power plants, it’s more likely to build plants that run on natural gas because the price isn’t as high. 

“We don’t mind losing to natural gas because it’s the cheapest source,” Carter said.

Nat gas is good for the energy industry, but it's not going to bring back coal jobs.

That's because nothing will bring back coal jobs, and Kentucky made sure it elected people who will make sure those coal jobs will not only disappear for good, but that thos high-=paying union coal mining jobs won't be replaced by any jobs at all.

King Coal conned you, Kentucky.  But keep blaming the black guy while you have President Trump and the Democrats are wiped out in the state and across the Midwest.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article114197923.html#storylink=cpy

Black Lives Still Don't Matter, Con't

Meanwhile with all the election issues that America is neck deep in right now, it was very easy to overlook the fact yet another cop got away with killing a black man, and it happened right here in Cincy as the man accused of murdering Sam DuBose got a hung jury and mistrial last week.

After a judge ordered a mistrial in the Ray Tensing murder trial Saturday, it will be up to Prosecutor Joe Deters to decide whether or not he wants to retry the case. 

Deters said he was disappointed by the mistrial, but noted it's still a better result than a "not guilty" verdict for him and others who believe Tensing was wrong when he fatally shot Sam DuBose during a traffic stop last year.

"I am grateful for what the jury did in terms of the time and energy," Deters said. "I am very disappointed because I think we have put on an incredible case which demonstrated murder."

Tensing faced two charges in DuBose's death: murder and a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. 

"He intentionally shot him in the head," Deters said. "And that is not, in my mind, justifiable." 

Deters has repeatedly said he believes the evidence shows that Tensing is guilty. Whether or not he will retry the case depends on whether he thinks another jury would convict Tensing on one of the charges. He said he would keep the same charges, which were the charges returned by the grand jury. 

"If I think we can win, we'll retry the case," Deters said.

Look around, Mr. Deters.  Ohio is not a state where a jury would ever convict a cop for the execution of a black person.  The voters in this state made that loud and clear on Tuesday.  We're now to the point of questioning whether there should even be a trial.

Sam DuBose's life didn't matter, so like with everything else this week, we'll be told to "get over it" and move on to the next injustice.

When does that finally stop, I wonder?  When do black lives matter?

They haven't so far in this country's long history.  What will it take to change that?