Ugly Orange In Black And White

Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka is married to Jared Kushner, who owns and runs the New York Observer. And yes, The Donald's son-in-law is just as odious as he is. No surprise then that it turns out Kushner gave exclusive access to Maryland-based broadcaster Sinclair for favorable interviews with Trump that ran on TV stations Sinclair owned.

Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign, according to six people who heard his remarks.

In exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 listeners — than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000.

“It’s math,” Kushner said according to multiple attendees.

Scott Livingston, vice president of news at Sinclair, said the offer for extended interviews with local anchors was made to both candidates. Trump did a handful of interviews, while Sen. Tim Kaine did a few as well, though Hillary Clinton did not.

“Our promise was to give all candidates an opportunity to voice their position share their position with our viewers. Certainly we presented an opportunity so that Mr. Trump could clearly state his position on the key issues,” Livingston said. “Our commitment to our viewers is to go beyond podium, beyond the rhetoric. We’re all about tracking the truth and telling the truth and that’s typically missing in most political coverage.”

A Trump spokesman said the deal included the interviews running across every affiliate but that no money was exchanged between the network and the campaign. The spokesman said the campaign also worked with other media outlets that had affiliates, like Hearst, to try and spread their message.

“It was a standard package, but an extended package, extended story where you’d hear more directly from candidate on the issue instead of hearing all the spin and all the rhetoric,” Livingston said.

It's just math, right?  Except for the fact Trump has repeatedly denied access to networks he thinks are unfair to him, and he's producing a TV show on NBC next year while still President.   Oh, and Sinclair hates liberals.

Sinclair, a Maryland-based company, has been labeled in some reports as a conservative-leaning local news network. Local stations in the past have been directed to air “must run” stories produced by Sinclair’s Washington bureau that were generally critical of Obama administration and offered perspectives primarily from conservative think tanks, The Washington Post reported in 2014.

Of course Kushner went to them.  Why do you need the cable networks at all when you can get interviews on the local affiliates that people watch for news anyway?

Kushner, dressed in a suit and sneakers, told the business executives that the campaign was upset with CNN because they considered its on-air panels stacked against Trump. He added that he personally talked with Jeff Zucker about changing the composition of the panels but Zucker refused. He repeatedly said in the panel that CNN wasn't "moving the needle" and wasn't important as it once was, according to three of the people present.

The campaign then decided not to work as closely with CNN, and Trump ramped up his bashing of the cable network.

Two people present said that they were surprised how much Kushner talked about CNN. "He kept going on and on about it," one business executive said.

He also told the crowd that Google and Facebook are now more powerful, and that The New York Times and CNN aren't as powerful.

Get used to that.  Pretty soon the only game in town will be news outlets that are "fair and balanced" to Trump. Critics won't have access at all.

To anything.

How To Steal An Election, Con't

The massively immoral and anti-democratic power grab in North Carolina by Republicans bent on permanent one-party rule despite voters electing a Democratic party governor is just a preview of the GOP in the age of Trump, says Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen.

Republicans, having barely lost the governor’s mansion, have launched an anti-democratic legislative coup. In a hastily called emergency session — and with little deliberation or public review — GOP state legislators have proposed a series of antidemocratic measures that would fundamentally erode the power of Roy Cooper, the newly elected Democratic governor. The goal is simple: to use the authority of state law to ensure continued Republican political dominance.

The GOP’s power grab is both terrifying and comical in its breadth. Proposed legislation would force Cooper’s cabinet picks to be confirmed in the state Senate. Previously they were appointed without Senate confirmation.

It would reduce the number of political appointees that Cooper can chose, from 1,5000 to 300. This would reverse the Legislature’s earlier decision, when Cooper’s Republican predecessor, Pat McCrory became governor, to expand the number of appointees. It would also allow McCrory’s partisan picks to keep their jobs and become career state employees.

Cooper would be stripped of the right to appoint members to the state university’s boards of trustees — and that right would be transferred to the state Legislature, which, not surprisingly, has a Republican supermajority. That huge GOP advantage was obtained by a discriminatory and unconstitutionally drawn legislative map. A federal court has in recent weeks overturned the map and demanded it be redrawn, while also mandating a new election for the state Legislature to be held next year.

But since, apparently, North Carolina Republicans feel they haven’t done enough to rig the state’s voting system, they are now trying to radically erode Cooper’s control over state and local election boards. In perhaps the GOP’s most creative move, proposed legislation would also mandate that the board of elections be rotated between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats having the chairmanship in odd-numbered years and the GOP in even-numbered years. Guess which years most elections in North Carolina are held?

Just in case you think that state courts can reverse these decisions, the Legislature is also considering a bill that would make it more difficult to bring cases to the state Supreme Court, which — and you guessed it — is now controlled by Democrats.

The GOP’s actions fit a familiar pattern. This is the same group of legislators that in another emergency legislative session passed HB2, the so-called transgender bathroom law, which also prevented local jurisdictions from putting in place antidiscrimination laws to protect the rights of LGBT North Carolinians.

Together with McCrory, North Carolina Republicans cut unemployment benefits and funding for early childhood education. They gave generous tax breaks to the state’s wealthiest citizens while scrapping the earned-income tax credit. Perhaps most famously, the GOP passed the most onerous voting restriction law in the country, one that was overturned by a federal court because of evidence that the legislation “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

I’ve had my hair on fire for months now about the existential threat to democracy that Donald Trump represents. We’re already seeing evidence of his authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for democratic norms in the five weeks since he won the presidency. But what’s happening in North Carolina right now is the real deal. This is a frontal assault on democracy.

McCrory signed these measures into law last night and there's nothing Democrats can do right now.  He'll get to re-appoint nearly all of his state board choices for a four-year stint starting December 30, and Cooper will not have the ability to fire a single one of them, meaning that McCrory will get to appoint all of Cooper's picks.

The state's GOP Lieutenant Governor, Dan Forest, is even more rabidly right-wing than McCrory and will get to make a number of appointments himself, without any oversight from Cooper at all.

In short, this is a coup.  This would be like Congress and and outgoing Republican president signing a bill that would allow the outgoing president to pick all the new president's cabinet members, and a bill that would put Republicans in charge of elections in all 50 states during even-numbered years when federal elections were held.  It would be a disaster.

But that's exactly what will happen in NC now.  It's a banana republic, and I hope that voters throw the bums out.

 

Obama Takes The Podium One Last Time

In an epic (well, in length) press conference marking his final days in office, President Obama made it very clear that he wasn't going to magically save the Republic from Donald Trump, and that all the issues still outstanding in both domestic and foreign policy that suffered from constant GOP obstruction are now 100% their problems to try to solve. 

I think overall Barack Obama has done a pretty damned good job, especially given the constant hatred he's gotten from the Republicans since day one of his first term.  Republicans conspired to drive him out of office and while they failed in 2012, they did succeed in badly damaging Democrats in nearly every other state.

I'm not going to lie, the Dems are in dire straits right now, and are barely able to put up any sort of national defense against Trump's coming diplomatic, military and economic disaster.  Obama's not going to be able to save us.  Schumer and Pelosi aren't either.  We're going to have to do the hard work at the local and state level to try to build a foundation strong enough that we can get back in this fight, and that's going to mean lots of time, resources, and people willing to spend them effectively.

More of President Obama's statements after the jump.

Last Call For The No-State Solution

The Trumpian process of putting the worst possible person in charge continues unabated as The Donald continues to destroy decades of foreign policy. Meet David Friedman:

David Friedman is a bankruptcy lawyer who believes the two-state solution is an “illusion,” Barack Obama is anti-Semitic, and that Israel has a legal right to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank — or else to annex the territory in its entirety.

He believes that America’s embassy in Israel should be immediately relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — even though decades of Republican and Democratic administrations have opposed making such a move before a peace deal is secured, as both the Israelis and Palestinians see the city as their rightful capital.

Friedman has nothing but contempt for Jews that disagree with him. Last June, he wrote the following about members of J Street — an advocacy group for pro-Israel Americans who oppose the occupation of the West Bank and support a two-state solution: 

Finally, are J Street supporters really as bad as kapos? The answer, actually, is no. They are far worse than kapos – Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas – it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.

None of this should be newsworthy. There are plenty of smug advocates of indefinite Palestinian subjugation lounging on sofas in New York City or in one of Sheldon Adelson’s well-appointed sitting rooms. Friedman is just some bankruptcy lawyer, who happens to have views that make Bibi Netanyahu look like Peter Beinart.

But Friedman isn’t just any bankruptcy lawyer — he’s Donald Trump’s personal bankruptcy lawyer.

And so, he is now the president-elect’s pick for ambassador to Israel.

Yep, Donald Trump's pick for ambassador to Israel wants to end the two-state solution, wipe out the West Bank, move our embassy to Jerusalem and thinks the liberal Jewry are literally worse than Nazis.

Ambassador. To Israel.  This guy.

I'd say this horror show will never end, except there's a very good chance it will "end" us all.

The Rough Beast Slouches Towards Wisconsin

Wisconsin talk radio host Charlie Sykes is blessedly hanging up his microphone after 25 years, in which he fully admits he helped Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus and Scott Walker come to power. Normally I'd note his retirement gleefully and yell "good riddance, asshole" but before the door hits him where the good Lord split him, in a NY Times mea culpa, Sykes at least admits that he helped bring about Trump as well.

How had we gotten here? 

One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited. 

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored. 

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right. 

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

I’m only glad I’m not going to be a part of it anymore.

Good to know Sykes admits the right has destroyed the country.  But hey, he's retiring, and most of the "Never Trump" GOP he'll suffer very little from Trump's American nightmare, nor do I expect him to lose too much sleep over it.

But hey Charlie, thanks for playing the game, and thanks especially for Paul Ryan, the guy who's going to ruin the retirements of all those hard working folks in Wisconsin that you care about so much, with Trump and Priebus's help.

You're a good soldier, Chuckles.

Drinking A Big Glass Of Fool-Ada

Over at Down With Tyranny, Howie Klein argues that Clinton campaign director Robby Mook depended way too much on a data-driven model algorithm called Ada, named for the mother of computer science, Countess Ada Lovelace.

It was a shock to the Clinton Machine when Bernie beat her in the March 16 Michigan's primary. Bernie took 595,222 votes (49.8%) to Hillary's 576,795 (48.3%). He won 73 of Michigan's 83 counties but she won big in the rich suburbs and the in Detroit. He beat her in all the little working class counties no one outside of Michigan ever heard of-- Cheboygan, Muskegon, Ingham, Eaton, Monroe, Kent, Benzie, Marquette, Jackson, St. Clair, Barry, Livingston, Allegan, Washtenaw, Charlevoix, Kalamazoo... He even beat her in Clinton County (55.8-42.1%). 

The Clinton Machine blames everyone and everything for Hillary's loss-- FBI Director Comey, Vladimir Putin, sexism, media bias-- except themselves... and ADA. (Bill Clinton is smart enough to blame ADA and he did all along but no one listened to him. We'll get to ADA in a minute.)

Imagine if Nate Silver was running your national campaign with his poll modeling software, and you made the bulk of your strategic and tactical decisions based on his models. You'd get something like Ada.

Yes, that was Ada. Let's go back to John Wagner's Washington Post little-noticed story of November 9 about Ada, when he wrote that Ada was like Hillary-- "she had a penchant for secrecy and a private server." So what's Ada? Wagner describes her as "a complex computer algorithm that the campaign was prepared to publicly unveil after the election as its invisible guiding hand. Named for a female 19th-century mathematician-- Ada, Countess of Lovelace-- the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads-- as well as when it was safe to stay dark."

So let's go one step further.  We know at this point the Russians compromised the Democrats and the Clinton campaign.  What if the strategic advice Ada gave was also compromised?

What if Ada was deliberately giving Clinton terrible advice?

While the Clinton campaign's reliance on analytics became well known, the particulars of Ada's work were kept under tight wraps, according to aides. The algorithm operated on a separate computer server than the rest of the Clinton operation as a security precaution, and only a few senior aides were able to access it. 

According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too. 

What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources. 

The use of analytics by campaigns was hardly unprecedented. But Clinton aides were convinced their work, which was far more sophisticated than anything employed by President Obama or GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, gave them a big strategic advantage over Trump.

So what if Ada was fed bad info, and Robby Mook was going off that?  It would be like you were using a GPS with a bad, outdated map.  You would follow the directions but end up in a much different place than what you expected.

So what if the Russians got into the server and fed Ada garbage?

Maybe I'm nuts.  Maybe Ada was just badly coded.  Maybe it overlooked obvious stuff that Clinton should have caught.and nobody was willing to challenge the assumptions.  Maybe the garbage was fed to Ada by Clinton's own team, based on wildly awful assumptions bordering on incompetence, which is most likely the reality at least in part.

But what if the Russians made things worse?  It would explain a lot of things, especially in the last week or two in the campaign.

Something to consider.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama is expected to announce retaliatory measures against Russia at an afternoon White House press conference over foreign interference in last month's elections.
• Protesters were forcibly removed from the NC State Capitol in Raleigh as Republicans passed measures to strip significant powers from incoming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
• The World Health Organization says evacuation of Syrian civilians from Aleppo has aborted and transport vehicles were told to immediately leave as shelling appears to have resumed.
• IMF Director Christine Lagarde took the stand in the final day of her misconduct trial on corruption charges she faces from her time as French Finance Minister.
• With in-house editorial staff eliminated and AI algorithms having failed miserably, Facebook will turn to news-checking watchdog groups in order to fight fake news.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump continues to be petty and vindictive, using the presidency to settle scores...or at least the transition period to do so.

Twitter was told it was "bounced" from Wednesday's meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary, according to a source close to the situation. 

Twitter is one of the few major U.S. tech companies not represented at Wednesday afternoon's Trump Tower meeting attended by, among others, Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla's Elon Musk — an omission all the more striking because of Trump's heavy dependence on the Twitter platform. With some 17.3 million followers of his account, the president-elect has made Twitter into the de facto press channel of his transition operation.

Trump has had public beefs with other tech execs at the sit-down. He's criticized Cook over Apple's refusal to decrypt a cellphone whose owner was implicated in a terrorist incident, for example, and Bezos over his ownership of The Washington Post. But, it seems, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's role in what the Trump operation saw as the breaching of a deal was a step too far for those close to Trump. 

The incident at issue was detailed in a Medium post last month by Gary Coby, director of digital advertising and fundraising for the Trump campaign. According to Coby, Dorsey personally intervened to block the Trump operation from deploying — as part of a $5 million deal between the social media company and the campaign — an emoji showing, in various renderings, small bags of money being given away or stolen. That emoji would have been offered to users as a replacement for the hashtag #CrookedHillary, a preferred Trump insult for his Democratic opponent.

The message to tech companies is clear: do what Trump wants, or else the power of the government will be used against you. Twitter wouldn't take money as a social media platform to officially insult Trump's opponent, so now it will be locked out of White House access.

Actually, that message is to everyone on the planet.  Better play Trump's game, because it's the only game in town, losers.  You have no choice...

...or you could resist.

How To Steal An Election, Con't

I've talked about NC Republicans actively trying to steal the election of Democratic AG Roy Cooper to the Governor's seat several times, and when I thought current NC GOP Gov. Pat "Bathroom Bill" McCrory conceded ten days ago that Cooper would be able to take office and move the state towards the light again.

How absolutely wrong I was.

Expanding beyond the disaster recovery legislation the General Assembly approved Wednesday, Republican lawmakers quickly proposed sweeping changes to state government, including proposals that would diminish the governor’s authority to make appointments. 

Lawmakers want to hobble the incoming Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, before he takes office Jan. 1 by making his Cabinet appointments subject to approval by the state Senate and cutting his ability to appoint members to UNC schools’ boards of trustees and the state Board of Education. 

Another proposal in the mix would equally divide election boards between the two major political parties, ending control by the governor’s party. 

Yet another provision would cut the number of employees who serve at the governor’s pleasure from 1,500 to 300, reversing an expansion approved for Republican Gov. Pat McCrory at the start of his term. 

Of the two dozen bills filed by both Republicans and Democrats on Wednesday night, only a handful are likely to be voted on during this special session. Those that are likely to move forward represent a significant shakeup by the Republican-controlled legislature.

Rick Hasen reads the fine print and discovers that the GOP, having been thwarted in stealing the election, are now trying to steal the office of governor itself.

It is much, much worse than it looks now that the bill is posted. The Democratic party appointees to the election board would chair in odd numbered years, and the Republican party appointees would chair in even numbered years (see page 4 of the bill), meaning that they would chair in each of the years in which there are legislative, congressional, and presidential elections. 

The state supreme court would be limited in reviewing state constitutional and federal challenges, giving the power instead first to an en banc panel of intermediate appellate court judges (who of course are Republican majority) and limiting appeals as of right (see from pages 20 on in the bill). 

If the bill passes in this form, I could see potential Voting Rights Act and federal constitutional challenges here, in part because the legislature would potentially be diluting minority voting power and making minority voters worse off, just at the time that their candidate of choice (Gov. Cooper) is poised to assume power.

Guess how far such a challenge would go in Trump's Supreme Court or Justice Department voting rights or civil rights divisions?

Folks, NC Republicans are essentially transferring all the governor's power to the GOP controlled assembly in an attempt to completely neuter Democrats, for the sole reason that a Democrat dared to win the race.

This is how America works now.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article120832758.html#storylink=cpy

Russian To Judgment, Con't

With the Russian DNC hack exposing the party's secrets to both the Russians and the GOP, it's important to remember that Hillary Clinton wasn't the only victim that leaks were used against in the 2016 elections.  Several House Democrats were done in by Putin and friends as well.

South Florida has long been a laboratory for some of the nation’s roughest politics, with techniques like phantom candidates created by political rivals to siphon off votes from their opponents, or so-called boleteras hired to illegally fill out stacks of absentee ballots on behalf of elderly or disabled voters.

But there was never anything quite like the 2016 election campaign, when a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers.

“It was like I was standing out there naked,” said Annette Taddeo, a Democrat who lost her primary race after secret campaign documents were made public. “I just can’t describe it any other way. Our entire internal strategy plan was made public, and suddenly all this material was out there and could be used against me.”

The impact of the information released by the hackers on candidates like Ms. Taddeo in Florida and others in nearly a dozen House races around the country was largely lost in the focus on what was done to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But this untold story underscores the effect the Russian operation had on the American electoral system.

“This is not a traditional tit-for-tat on a partisan political campaign, where one side hits the other and then you respond,” said Kelly Ward, executive director of the D.C.C.C. “This is an attack by a foreign actor that had the intent to disrupt our election, and we were the victims of it.”

Democrats in state races were also victims of WikiLeaks.

The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee.

The document dump’s effectiveness was due in part to a de facto alliance that formed between the Russian hackers and political bloggers and newspapers across the United States. The hackers, working under the made-up name of Guccifer 2.0, used social media tools to invite individual reporters to request specific caches of documents, handing them out the way political operatives distribute scoops. It was an arrangement that proved irresistible to many news outlets — and amplified the consequences of the cyberattack.

“It’s time for new revelations now,” the Guccifer 2.0 website proclaimed, as it began to pass out the D.C.C.C. documents, trying to entice reporters to look at them on their own. “All of you may have heard about the D.C.C.C. hack. As you see I wasn’t wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the D.N.C. breach.”

Cybersecurity consultants believe the hacking of the D.C.C.C. took place around March or April of 2016 after a staffer clicked on a so-called phishing email. The D.C.C.C. shut down its computer system for a week — from the moment it learned of the attack in June. But it was already too late to close the door. The consequences started to become clear in August when the hackers released the home addresses, cellphone numbers and personal email addresses of Democratic House members.

Internal Democratic party documents, including strategies and research, were used against Democrats in multiple close House races.  Those races were won by Republicans in nearly every case.

The Russians didn't just "damage our democracy".  They went after Democrats to keep Republicans in power.  They did that for a reason. And guess who was behind it?

Why, ol' Vlad himself.

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.

And of course, Trump knew.  So now we have a major, major problem.

What will President Obama's response be?

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump will face a deposition in early January involving a contractual dispute with celebrity chef Jose Andres after an order from a federal judge to proceed with the case.
• The Obama administration has issued a final rule on Title X federal funds, preventing states from blocking their use for family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood.
• China says it will be punishing an "unnamed US automaker" for violating trade laws in a move that is widely seen as a loud message to the incoming Trump administration's China criticism.
• New York's LaGuardia International Airport has once again taken the dubious honor of America's worst large airport, Portland International Airport is the country's best.
• Yahoo is now admitting that up to one billion email accounts have been compromised since August 2013, the largest corporate hack to date.

Last Call For An Unholy Christ-Mess

Religious freedom to Republicans means the right to beat you over the head with Christianity to the point where you have the "religious freedom" to accept Christian beliefs or face the wrath of the law.

Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton is not happy over a school district’s decision to remove a biblical verse from a Charlie Brown poster, TWC News reports. The line that was removed is recited by Linus and reads, “For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior.” 

Paxton released a statement about the matter, in which he noted that having the line removed is a violation of the state’s Merry Christmas Law, which was adopted in 2013. He noted that because of the law, schools cannot “silence a biblical reference to Christmas” and called the removal of the verse an “attack on religious liberty.” 

However, employees at the school argued that they were not allowed to impose their views on students. 

Part of the Merry Christmas Law notes, “A display relating to a traditional winter celebration may not include a message that encourages adherence to a particular religious belief,” according to CBS News. 

The school district decided that based on that section of the law, “it is clear that this display was not in keeping with the Merry Christmas Bill (House Bill 308), which requires that a display not encourage adherence to a particular religion.

The part where the school system was actually following the law?  That doesn't matter. It's how the law is interpreted by the state.  In this case, the law is interpreted that religious freedom only applies to Christians.  That's blatantly unconstitutional, but the power of the state to coerce the school into doing this will happen anyway.

Just wait until there's a national "Merry Christmas" law, citizen.

The Heartbeat (Bill) Of America, Con't

And Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich sucker punches women of the Buckeye State again and again as he bravely vetoes the ridiculously unconstitutional "Heartbeat Bill" only to heroically get the additional abortion restrictions he's wanted since taking office in 2010.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich today vetoed the Heartbeat Bill forbidding abortions when a fetal heartbeat can be detected while signing into law a second bill banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. 

The second-term Republican previously had expressed concerns about the constitutionality of the Heartbeat Bill, which would have been the most restrictive abortion law in the nation. 

Federal courts struck down identical measures in two states in finding it was an undue state restriction on a woman's right to an abortion at a point when some women do not realize they are pregnant. 

“I agree with Ohio Right to Life and other leading, pro-life advocates that SB 127 is the best, most legally sound and sustainable approach to protecting the sanctity of human life," Kasich said in a statement. 

With the Heartbeat Bill folded into House Bill 493, Kasich used his line-item veto to single out and remove the abortion language since it was accompanied by a $100,000 appropriation to create the Joint Legislative Committee on Adoption Promotion. He signed the other portion of the bill, dealing with child-abuse reporting requirements, into law. 

Kasich approved banning abortions after 20 weeks by signing Senate Bill 127, an Ohio Right to Life-supported bill, that forbids termination of "a human pregnancy of a pain-capable unborn child."

So Ohio now joins 18 other states with 20 week bans, the point of which is to argue that a fetus could be viable at less than the current legal definition of legalized abortion, 24 weeks, thus overturning Roe v. Wade.

Often referred to as “20-week abortion bans,” these laws nominally seek to ban abortion after or around 20 weeks’ gestation, though bills in several states effectively ban abortion at 18 weeks. Legal experts believe these laws are unconstitutional on their face because they undermine a key provision of Roe v. Wade, which established the right to an abortion in the United States up until fetal viability, generally determined by doctors to be around 24 weeks’ gestation. Were the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold one of these bans, it would effectively dismantle the backbone of the court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion in the United States. Anti-choice leaders have been open about their long-view strategy involving 20-week abortion bans—to persuade the high court to overturn the viability principle on which Roerests. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2009 roughly 1.3 percent of all abortions performed in the United States were after 20 weeks’ gestation. There are many reasons women need abortions at this stage. A number of fetal and genetic anomalies cannot be identified until later in pregnancy, and some women find themselves facing pregnancies gone terribly wrong. Health conditions that threaten the woman’s life or health can develop at any point during a pregnancy. And a large share of women seeking abortions late in the second trimester do so because they face dramatically changed life circumstances or were unable to obtain an earlier abortion—a situation that’s increasingly common in states where laws are making abortion more expensive, more time-consuming, and more geographically inaccessible.

This is the real reason behind banning so-called "late term abortions".  And now that pathway to overturning Roe rests with Donald Trump's selection to the Supreme Court, stolen wholesale from President Obama by the GOP.

Meanwhile, Kasich gets to burnish his moderate credentials, and the window for legal abortion procedures closes a bit more in the US.

Very soon I suspect it will be shut completely.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The NY Times pieces together the story of the DNC hacks by Russia into the 21st century's newest weapon of mass distraction, a Watergate of our era where most likely the criminals will never be punished, the abettors rewarded, and the country cracked into pieces.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones.

An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack. 

The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks. 

The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later. 

Even Mr. Podesta, a savvy Washington insider who had written a 2014 report on cyberprivacy for President Obama, did not truly understand the gravity of the hacking.
By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times. Mr. Trump gleefully cited many of the purloined emails on the campaign trail. 

The fallout included the resignation of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the D.N.C., and most of her top party aides. Leading Democrats were sidelined at the height of the campaign, silenced by revelations of embarrassing emails or consumed by the scramble to deal with the hacking. Though little-noticed by the public, confidential documents taken by the Russian hackers from the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, turned up in congressional races in a dozen states, tainting some of them with accusations of scandal. 

In recent days, a skeptical president-elect, the nation’s intelligence agencies and the two major parties have become embroiled in an extraordinary public dispute over what evidence exists that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved beyond mere espionage to deliberately try to subvert American democracy and pick the winner of the presidential election. 

Many of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides believe that the Russian assault had a profound impact on the election, while conceding that other factors — from Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate, to her private email server, to the public statements of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, about her handling of classified information — were also important. 

While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.

Clinton and Obama gave us the era of "smart power".  But Vladimir Putin perfected it, much to America's eternal dismay, as the coffers will be looted thoroughly by Trump and his team before they turn out the lights and set the building on fire with us inside.

Maybe they'll even watch it burn.

StupidiNews!

• A humanitarian ceasefire to evacuate civilians in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo has been shattered, both rebel and Assad regime forces are blaming each other.
• Bill Cosby returns to a Philadelphia courtroom today for a hearing on the number of witnesses who can testify against him in the actor's trial on multiple sexual assault charges.
• President-elect Donald Trump has named Montana GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke to head the Interior Department, Zinke is against selling public land but does want to open it to drilling.
• IBM CEO Ginni Rometty says the company's global plans to hire 25,000 will focus on US employees ahead of Silicon Valley execs meeting with President-elect Trump today.
• The Department of Energy says it will hand over public information to the Trump transition team, but not a list of staffers who worked on climate change issues as requested.