Christmas At Ground Zero

Still the best Christmas song ever, especially now!  Take her away, Weird Al!




Have a Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Christmas From The Trumps, Fort Worth!

So Donald Trump's tweets earlier this week trashing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter have people suddenly really worried that the Trump administration will force cuts to the Pentagon's notoriously over-budget weapons programs or even cancel the project altogether.  Not that I'm a huge fan of trillion-dollar jet fighter programs or anything, but that's bad news for the F-35's manufacturer, defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and for the city of Fort Worth, Texas, where Lockheed Martin and the US Naval Air Station there are the city's two biggest employers.

New York has Wall Street. West Virginia has coal. Los Angeles has Hollywood. And Fort Worth has the F-35 plane.

For more than a decade, this aircraft has served as the economic lifeblood of the west side of town, where it is manufactured. Yet, the F-35 is deeply unpopular elsewhere in the country, thanks to a series of cost and scheduling overruns.

And unfortunately for its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin — and Fort Worth — the F-35 is now in the crosshairs of President-elect Donald Trump.

Is Cowtown rattled?

“Oh, absolutely,” said U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, a Fort Worth Democrat. “Everybody’s talking about it.”

“It was something that I would say sent fear through the people that work for the plant, Republicans that are longtime, proud Fort Worth residents,” he added. “It was something that got everybody’s ear.”

It started this month, when President-elect Donald Trump tweeted: “The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.”

He since met with executives from Lockheed and rival Boeing and added to the anxiety on Thursday with a follow-up tweet, indicating he might pull back on the F-35 manufacturing in lieu of a Boeing aircraft.

“Long term, it would be catastrophic,” Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price said of the economic impact of canceling the F-35.

It's important to note that Tarrant County, where Fort Worth is located, voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 52-43% margin.  Nearly ten percent of Trump's statewide winning margin in Texas came from just Tarrant County alone, compared to Clinton winning neighboring Dallas County by almost 200K.

It's entirely possible that Tarrant County may have just end up voting themselves out of tens of thousands of jobs.

Merry Christmas, Fort Worth!

Last Call For Christ-Mess Eve

Everything's fine as we head into the end of the year and the holidays. Everything is perfectly fine and there's no reason to panic at all.

A fake news article led to gunfire at a Washington pizzeria three weeks ago. Now it seems that another fake news story has prompted the defense minister of Pakistan to threaten to go nuclear.

The defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, wrote a saber-rattling Twitter post directed at Israel on Friday after a false report — which the minister apparently believed — that Israel had threatened Pakistan with nuclear weapons. Both countries have nuclear arsenals.

“Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh,” the minister wrote on his official Twitter account, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too.”

Mr. Asif appeared to be reacting to a fake news article published on awdnews.com.

That story, with the typo-laden headline “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack,” appeared on the website on Dec. 20, alongside articles with headlines like “Clinton is staging a military coup against Trump.”

The fake story about Israel even misidentified the country’s defense minister, attributing quotations to a former minister, Moshe Yaalon. Israel’s current minister of defense is Avigdor Lieberman.

The Israeli Defense Ministry responded on Twitter to say the report was fictitious.

“The statement attributed to fmr Def Min Yaalon re Pakistan was never said,” the ministry wrote in Twitter post directed at Mr. Asif. The Israeli ministry added in a second post: "Reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false.”

Perhaps anticipating Donald Trump reacting to fake news about nuclear threats is the reason his chosen communications director bailed after just two days. 

Merry Christmas!

When In Doubt, Blame Obama, Con't

Political strategist Charlie Cook has some brutal words for Dems: better win over white Christian heartland voters or else, because they're literally the only voting demographic that matters now.

Simply put, Demo­crats need to ex­pand their sens­it­iv­ity-train­ing courses to in­clude people who live in small-town and rur­al Amer­ica—middle-class white voters, people who live paycheck to paycheck, and whites who at­tend church at least once a week. Frank­lin Roosevelt’s New Deal co­ali­tion of voters is now of­fi­cially dead. Demo­crats were los­ing these voters be­fore Don­ald Trump came along and will con­tin­ue to do so bey­ond his pres­id­ency un­less they show genu­ine con­cern for these con­stitu­en­cies. To be sure, the coun­try is chan­ging and be­com­ing more di­verse, but it is not do­ing so at the same pace every­where. Demo­crats are run­ning up the score in places that do not help them win ma­jor­it­ies in the House, Sen­ate, and Elect­or­al Col­lege.

An ana­lys­is by Tyler Fish­er and Alyson Hurt for NPR found that Trump won 70.6 per­cent of the vote from rur­al counties and places with pop­u­la­tions un­der 2,500 that were not near metro areas, com­pared to 25.1 per­cent for Clin­ton. Trump won 66.1 per­cent of the vote in small counties that were near metro areas (Clin­ton 30.1 per­cent), 65.8 per­cent in counties with pop­u­la­tions between 2,500 and 19,999 not near metro areas (Clin­ton 29.4 per­cent), and 66.3 per­cent in sim­il­arly-sized counties near metro areas (Clin­ton 29.5 per­cent).

While many Demo­crats and journ­al­ists are busy read­ing Hill­billy Elegy: A Mem­oir of a Fam­ily and Cul­ture in Crisis (I per­son­ally find the title of­fens­ive), far more can be learned from The Polit­ics of Re­sent­ment by Uni­versity of Wis­con­sin polit­ic­al sci­ence pro­fess­or Kath­er­ine Cramer. It is the product of nine years of in­ter­view­ing rur­al Wis­con­sin voters to learn about their anxi­ety, fears, and re­sent­ment of urb­an Amer­ica and its elites.

If any Re­pub­lic­an can­did­ate in mod­ern his­tory should have done badly with white church­go­ers, it was Don­ald Trump. And yet, exit polls show that Trump car­ried the 26 per­cent of the white elect­or­ate who con­sider them­selves evan­gel­ic­al or born-again voters by a 65-point mar­gin, 81 to 16 per­cent. Among the 33 per­cent of voters of all races who at­tend church at least once a week, Trump won by 16 points, 56 to 40 per­cent, and among those who go at least monthly, Trump won by 12 points, 54 to 42 per­cent. Demo­crats can take solace in win­ning people who say they nev­er go to church by 31 points, 62 to 31 per­cent, but they will be dis­tressed to learn that this group makes up just 22 per­cent of the elect­or­ate.

Demo­crats wor­ried about their poor show­ing among church­go­ers would be well-ad­vised to read God’s Polit­ics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It by So­journ­ers pres­id­ent Jim Wal­lis, whom I would describe as a lib­er­al evan­gel­ic­al. Wal­lis ar­gues that con­ser­vat­ives have no corner on re­li­gion in gen­er­al or Chris­tian­ity in par­tic­u­lar, but that Demo­crats are in­creas­ingly be­com­ing a sec­u­lar party while Re­pub­lic­ans are be­com­ing the party of people of faith.

In short, Demo­crats need to get over Don­ald Trump and the spe­cif­ics of what happened in 2016 and be­gin to think about how, in their rush in­to Amer­ica’s fu­ture, they left be­hind a large num­ber of voters who are still very much here, right now. To ma­lign these people as big­ots, ra­cists, and miso­gyn­ists ig­nores the fact that some ac­tu­ally voted for Pres­id­ent Obama at least once, have voted for wo­men in pre­vi­ous elec­tions, or have voted for Demo­crats in the not-so-dis­tant past.

It's complete nonsense, of course.  There's no "getting over" a candidate that ran on making people of color into second-class citizens (or non-citizens in the case of Muslim Americans.)  The stupidity of "they voted for Obama once can't make them racists" is manifest in this piece, and it's precisely because of the soft racism in so many of these voters who thought Barack Obama was "one of the good ones" that allowed Trump to win.

Most of all Cook is expecting the voters most loyal to the Democrats now to be the least vocal in efforts to court the people who have already demonstrated they are the most easily swayed by white identity politics enough to abandon the Dems when a vicious demagogue like Trump rolls up.

Again, this advice is disastrous.  Dems need to stick with the people loyal to the party.  As for the rest, well, another economic crisis precipitated by Trump and his goons should open America's eyes. I only hope it won't be too late by then.

When In Doubt, Blame Obama

Democratic consultants Stan and Anna Greenberg dump the last six years of Democratic losses on Barack Obama not listening to Democratic consultants like Stan and Anna Greenberg and being nicer to a nation of white Republican voters who questioned if he was even human born in Hawaii.

Faced with the economy’s potential collapse as he took office, Mr. Obama devoted his presidency to the economic recovery, starting with restoring the financial sector. But he never made wage stagnation and growing inequality central to his economic mission, even though most Americans struggled financially for the whole of his term.

At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing his opponents. 

Absent a president educating the public about his plans, for voters, the economic recovery effort morphed into bailouts — bank bailouts, auto bailouts, insurance bailouts. By his second year in office, he spotlighted the creation of new jobs and urged Democrats to defend our “progress.” 

When President Obama began focusing on those “left behind” by the recovery, he called for building “ladders of opportunity.” That communicated that the president believed the country’s main challenges were unrealized opportunity for a newly ascendant, multicultural America, rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans.

Wow.  Just wow.  That last paragraph is a dog whistle that could shatter lead crystal at 500 yards. "Multicultural" America is not "ordinary" America apparently, not "real" America, and that's why Obama lost.

It gets worse.

Mr. Obama also offered only tepid support to the most important political actor in progressive and Democratic politics: the labor movement. In the absence of progressive funders in the mode of the conservative Koch brothers, unions are the most important actors at the state legislative level. Yet when the 2010 election ushered in a spate of anti-union governors, who eliminated collective bargaining rights for public employees and passed “right to work” laws, Mr. Obama never really joined this fight. In fact, he spent the last couple of years of his presidency pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade law vociferously opposed by the labor movement. Under President Obama, union membership has declined to 11.1 percent from 12.3 percent. 

While the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 were models of innovation in online organizing and microtargeting, they did not translate into success in the midterm elections or in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Democratic turnout dropped in 2010, 2012 and significantly in 2014. Models, it appears, do not substitute for the hard work of organizing and engaging voters in nonpresidential years; models that apparently drove nearly every decision made by the Clinton campaign are no substitute for listening to voters.

The Greenbergs all but blame 2016 on Obama not listening to white union voters, "the most important actors" in state and local politics and apparently the only goddamn voters that actually matter, despite being such a small fraction of American voters before Obama even took office.

It's garbage like this that will get the Dems killed again in 2018.  White Midwest and Southern voters are going to vote for Trump no matter what, guys.  They decided they could win more with Trump's white nationalism than with the Obama coalition and frankly the way things are going right now that's probably correct.

They didn't vote against their self-interest.  They specifically voted for it.

Last Call For The No-State Solution, Con't

I've talked about David Friedman, Trump's odious ambassador to Israel pick before (a man whose literally single qualification for the job is the fact he's Trump's bankruptcy lawyer) but it's entirely another thing to hear just how frightening a departure Friedman is from diplomatic norms from somebody who's an expert on the situation like Emily L. Hauser.

It could be (and has been) argued that in choosing Friedman, Trump has merely removed the mask behind which U.S. policy and opinion have long hidden. Over the years American rhetoric has come to at least nominally acknowledge Palestinian rights and human dignity, with many beautiful words about peace and children who deserve to no longer live in fear, but U.S. policies have consistently belied these lovely words, unswervingly privileging (and facilitating) the official Israeli framing of the conflict as one in which Israel and Israel alone may determine the future of the region. 

Settlements are built and expanded, human rights abuses mount, and the occupation of what is internationally recognized as Palestinian land continues unrelentingly toward Israeli annexation of the West Bank, even as Israel insists that the Palestinians introduce no "preconditions" to peace negotiations. And then there's the Gaza Strip — which Israel maintains it no longer occupies, and yet the Israeli military is still somehow free to launch military incursions (and all-out wars) at will, as well as strictly controlling the comings and goings of Gaza's 1.8 million residents, along with much of their food and supplies. 

With the understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a war, and that in war all sides commit unforgivable acts (I have reported on suicide bombings in which I could very well have been among the dead), we conveniently ignore the fact that one side of this conflict maintains one of the world's most powerful militaries, and the other lives under the daily control of the first in a U.S.-enabled military occupation. Stated baldly, the subtext of American actions and policies has always been that Palestinians just don't matter very much. 

This is what the Friedman pick makes manifest. Not that successive U.S. governments have lacked the political will to facilitate the establishment of a secure peace for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples — that's as apparent as the map on your wall — but rather that in the American zeitgeist, Palestinians are second-class humans.

And given Trump and who he has surrounded himself with, this toxic realpolitik that the world consists of either Trump friends or second-class humans should surprise exactly nobody. Friedman's selection clearly indicates that Palestinians and much of the Muslim world falls into that latter category.

There's a reason Netanyahu ignored Obama completely this week and went to Trump to help kill a UN resolution on Israeli settlements.  He considers the Palestinians to be less than human himself. Of course he's going to be much happier dealing with Trump.

Oh, and simply replace "Palestinians" here with "liberals" and this view neatly governs Trump's domestic policy as well.

Banana (No Longer A) Republic

Gerrymandering election districts is a way of life in America, and Republicans have all but perfected the art, drawing districts so complex and convoluted that the courts have slapped them down in a number of states.

But the worst example by far is my home state of North Carolina, where from a statistical and mathematical modeling standpoint, Republicans have so completely rigged state general assembly and US House congressional districts that UNC-Chapel Hill poly sci professor Andrew Reynolds finds that the state technically no longer qualifies as a representative democracy.

In 2005, in the midst of a career of traveling around the world to help set up elections in some of the most challenging places on earth – Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan and Yemen, among others – my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots. 

In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place. 

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy. 

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world. 

Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project. 

That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy — Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project — all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy. 

The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.

That utter lack of integrity of the 2016 elections in the state are a large part of the reason why a federal judge is now forcing the state to redraw everything ahead of the 2018 elections.  But getting that fixed will require a Department of Justice that's actually intrested in fixing the problem, and there's precisely zero indication that the Trump administration will do anything in that regard under probable AG Jeff Sessions.

In fact, there's every indication that Republicans will try to do to the rest of the country what they've already done to NC, and very little reason to believe that they won't succeed in an impressive fashion.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html#storylink=cpy

Equal Opportunity To Hate

Republicans, now sensing that they can get away with pretty much anything they want to in the Trump Era, are swinging for the fences with new legislative priorities.  The big motif (as I've been warning about) is taking red state culture war and economic nonsense national in order to inflict them on blue states at the federal level, and our first contestant is none other than Ted Cruz.

Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, through his spokesperson, told Buzzfeed they plan to reintroduce an embattled bill that barely gained a House hearing in 2015. But this time around, they said, the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) was likely to succeed due to a Republican-controlled House and the backing of President-elect Donald Trump.

FADA would prohibit the federal government from taking "discriminatory action" against any business or person that discriminates against LGBTQ people. The act distinctly aims to protect the right of all entities to refuse service to LGBTQ people based on two sets of beliefs: "(1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage." 

Ironically, the language of the bill positions the right to discriminate against one class of Americans as a "first amendment" right, and bans the government from taking any form of action to curb such discrimination—including withholding federal funds from institutions that discriminate. FADA allows individuals and businesses to sue the federal government for interfering in their right to discriminate against LGBTQ people and would mandate the Attorney General defend the businesses. 

On December 9, Sen. Lee's spokesperson, Conn Carroll, told Buzzfeed the election of Trump had cleared a path for the passage of FADA. 

"Hopefully November's results will give us the momentum we need to get this done next year," Carroll said. "We do plan to reintroduce FADA next Congress and we welcome Trump's positive words about the bill."

The ridiculously broad bill would basically take Indiana's bill enshrining the right to discriminate as a federal law, specifically against LGBTQ folks, and take it national, forcing the government to take the side of the oppressor. It would turn the Justice Department's civil rights division into a weapon that would be used to allow people to openly discriminate against the LGBTQ community and most certainly would override all state-level protections in doing so.

It would be a nightmare.

It will almost certainly pass the House next year. The only question is how far it will get in the Senate.  Given Cruz's penchant for overplaying his hand, he's liable to piss off as many of his fellows in the Most August Deliberative Body as possible and the bill will die there.

We'll see.

But get used to this.  And should Democrats crumble in 2018 and the GOP get 60 seats, all civil rights and voting rights in this country will be subject to obliteration.

StupidiNews!

• Italian officials are reporting that the man wanted in connection with Monday's deadly Berlin Christmas market truck attack was shot and killed at a 3 AM traffic stop near Milan.
• The first yearly report on arrest figures mandated by state legislation finds African-Americans in Colorado are arrested at a rate three times that of the state's black population.
• A Libyan airliner was diverted by hijackers to Malta where the plane landed safely, 118 passengers were aboard and Maltese police are on the scene.
• An experimental Ebola vaccine developed by Merck in partnership with Canada is showing excellent promise in human trials and could be approved by US regulators in 2017.
• Canada is considering broadband internet to be a "basic communication service" and wants to expand 50Mbps broadband to all Canadian citizens for purchase.

Last Call For Chartering Out A Course For NOLA

The great Post-Katrina Scam Factory is almost complete: the last of New Orleans's public schools will soon become for-profit charter operations run on taxpayer dollars.

New Orleans may soon be the first city to have an all-charter school system -- a landmark in U.S. history. 

Orleans Parish Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. announced Friday (Dec. 9) he had "received informal expressions of interest from current school and charter leaders to convert some or all of our remaining five network elementary and high schools to charter schools authorized by OPSB." 

The five schools currently under school board control this would affect: Ben Franklin Elementary, Eleanor McMain Secondary, Mahalia Jackson Elementary, Mary Bethune Elementary, and McDonogh No. 35, comprising a middle and high school. 

Charters are publicly funded but run by independent boards, held to benchmarks set by an authorizing party -- in this case, the Orleans Parish School Board. 

Lewis offered no further details, saying only, "We are beginning the process of informing school board members, staff, principals, teachers and families. When that process is completed early next week, we will be in a better position to provide more details."
The School Board is scheduled to meet Tuesday.

If the decision proceeds, it will have been a long time coming. In 2014, the Louisiana Recovery School District finished converting to charters all the New Orleans public schools it took over after Hurricane Katrina.

The Louisiana Legislature made the victory of the charter model obvious this spring when they passed a law returning the Recovery schools to Orleans Parish School Board control -- but as charters.

By any reasonable metric, the conversion to charter schools has been a disaster for the city and its people.

Last year, 63 percent of children in local elementary and middle schools were proficient on state tests, up from 37 percent in 2005. New research by Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance shows that the gains were largely because of the charter-school reforms, according to Douglas N. Harris, the alliance’s director. Graduation and college entry rates also increased over pre-Katrina levels.

But the New Orleans miracle is not all it seems. Louisiana state standards are among the lowest in the nation. The new research also says little about high school performance. And the average composite ACT score for the Recovery School District was just 16.4 in 2014, well below the minimum score required for admission to a four-year public university in Louisiana. 

There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data.

That's the whole point of the charter operation: to drive out the "undesirable" kids and say "look at us, we've improved test scores!"  And now the entire district will most likely be charter. The reality of the existing charter schools has been ten years of neglect and shame.

Test scores have improved, according to two major reports that examine academic achievement over the past nine years. On Katrina’s 10th anniversary, RSD is being held up as a national model. The graduation rate has risen from 56 percent to 73 percent. Last year, 63 percent of students in grades 3-8 scored basic or above on state standardized tests, up from 33 percent.

But by other measures, the RSD suffers. In These Times received an advance copy of research conducted for the Network for Public Education (NPE) by University of Arizona researchers Francesca López and Amy Olson. The study compared charters in Louisiana, the majority of which are in New Orleans, to Louisiana public schools, controlling for factors like race, ethnicity, poverty and whether students qualified for special education. On eighth-grade reading and math tests, charter-school students performed worse than their public-school counterparts by enormous margins—2 to 3 standard deviations.

The researchers found that the gap between charter and public school performance in Louisiana was the largest of any state in the country. And Louisiana’s overall scores were the fourth-lowest in the nation. 

“You can say until you’re blue in the face that this should be a national model, but this is one of the worst-performing districts in one of the worst-performing states,” says NPE board member Julian Vasquez Heilig, an education professor at California State Sacramento.

Arguably New Orleans and its charter schools are among the worst in the country.  And our incoming Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants to do to America's public schools what charter schools have done to New Orleans, and she's already spent millions to make charter schools in the city to buy off politicians so that she can do so.

Trump's chosen Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her organizations have spent a lot of money in Louisiana. How much? Try $1.6 million in campaign contributions alone, according to Louisiana ethics filings. 

DeVos heads the Alliance for School Choice and the American Federation for Children, which in turn runs the Louisiana Federation for Children. Trump announced her as his nominee Wednesday (Nov. 23). 

Louisiana Education Superintendent John White commended the selection. He spoke at an AFC policy summit in 2015. 

"Betsy DeVos has long advocated for the rights of families and children to a quality education," he said. "We congratulate her on being nominated for Secretary of Education, and we look forward to working with her."

Eliminating public schools has long been a crusade of the far right, and New Orleans is the prime example of what will happen to the rest of the nation should people like DeVos get their way.

Invasion Of The Orangemen, Con't

Public dissent will not be tolerated in the Trump regime, and he hasn't even taken office yet.  The first to be made to fall in line by Trump's goons or face the consequences will be congressional Republicans, particularly in the House.

In early December, Rep. Bill Flores made what seemed like an obvious observation to a roomful of conservatives at a conference in Washington. Some of Donald Trump’s proposals, the Texas Republican cautioned, “are not going to line up very well with our conservative policies," though he quickly added that there was plenty the incoming president and GOP Congress could accomplish together. 

Little did Flores realize the hell that would soon rain down from Trump's throng of enforcers.

Breitbart seized on Flores' remarks a few days later, calling them proof that House Republicans planned to “isolate and block President Donald Trump’s populist campaign promises.” A conservative populist blogger for the site TruthFeed then warned Flores on Twitter to "get ready for a shit storm," and posted a headline that read: “BREAKING: Rep. Bill Flores Has CRAFTED a PLAN to BLOCK Trump’s Immigration Reform.”
Sean Hannity jumped in, too, featuring the Breitbart post on his syndicated radio show. That only further riled the impromptu anti-Flores mob. 

"@RepBillFlores get in @realDonaldTrump way & we will burn your career down until you are reduced to selling life insurance,” tweeted one person. "@RepBillFlores you can go hang yourself!!" another wrote. 

It’s little wonder that Capitol Hill Republicans have papered over their not-insignificant policy differences with Trump, shying away from any statement about the president-elect that might possibly be construed as critical. They’re terrified of arousing the ire of their tempestuous new leader — or being labeled a turncoat by his army of followers.

Again, this is Authoritarian Dictator 101 stuff here: get an official press organ, in this case Breitbart, and use it to brutally punish any politician who remotely looks like they might dissent by drumming up threats and abuse, all made that more effective by the celerity of the digital age.

"Nobody wants to go first," said Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), who received nasty phone calls, letters and tweets after he penned an August op-ed in The New York Times, calling on Trump to release his tax returns. "People are naturally reticent to be the first out of the block for fear of Sean Hannity, for fear of Breitbart, for fear of local folks." 

An editor at Breitbart, formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said that fear is well-founded. 

“If any politician in either party veers from what the voters clearly voted for in a landslide election … we stand at the ready to call them out on it and hold them accountable,” the person said.

Again, basic tyrant stuff here.  Those who speak out will be made an example of.  It will be exponentially worse starting January 21.

Republican Hill staffers have wrestled in recent months with how to respond to inquiries from Breitbart or other pro-Trump bloggers. Engage them or ignore them? One GOP aide told POLITICO members are “damned if you do, damned if you don't." Another said it's having a "chilling effect" on GOP lawmakers. 

The Republican officeholders see Trump’s unabashed use of his Twitter account to shame critics as the most foreboding threat. During campaign season, he regularly took shots at adversaries, including Marco Rubio (“Little Marco”), Ted Cruz (“Lyin’ Ted,”) and Speaker Paul Ryan (a “very weak and ineffective leader”). 

Trump hasn't gone after any lawmakers on Twitter since the election, but some worry it's just a matter of time. Eventually, some Republican will feel compelled to challenge his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, or slap companies that move jobs overseas with massive tariffs. And that’s when things will get ugly, insiders predict.

The 2018 election will be as much of a purge of Trump's GOP enemies list as it will be a test for the Democrats to see if they can muster any resistance to the Trump regime.  I fully expect a number of Republicans to be primaried right out of office, only to be replaced with even more dangerous rabid Trumpian partisans.

It's possible that Trump's regime could collapse under its own incompetence, but in the words of Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, "Fear will keep the local systems in line." Things will move very quickly once Trump has sufficiently consolidated enough power.

History tells that it will not take long to do so once events reach that tipping point.

The Bathroom Bill Blowback Bomb Blast

I have no idea why incoming Democratic NC Gov. Roy Cooper and Charlotte's City Council decided to trust the NC GOP, but it completely blew up in their faces as Republicans in the state legislature laughed and refused to repeal HB2.

The North Carolina Senate voted down a repeal of House Bill 2 Wednesday after a day of increasingly partisan rancor that pitted conservative Republicans against the Charlotte they so distrust. 

The state House adjourned without voting on repeal of the bill that has cost North Carolina millions of dollars in lost jobs, sports events and boycotts. With that, the hope of compromise between legislators and Charlotte, which enacted the ordinance that gave rise to HB2, dissolved. 

Protesters massed outside the Senate chamber rained down shouts of “Shame!”
After a long and frustrating day, the Senate’s top Republican Wednesday lashed out at Gov.-elect Roy Cooper, blaming the Democrat for the legislature’s failure to repeal the bill. 

“I think Roy Cooper tried to do everything he could to sabotage a reasonable compromise,” Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters after a more than nine-hour session. 

Berger said Cooper called Democratic senators and urged them not to support Berger’s bill, which would have coupled HB2’s repeal with a months-long moratorium on city ordinances like the one Charlotte passed and repealed. The Charlotte ordinance allowed transgender people to use the public restrooms of the gender with which they identify. 

Cooper had lobbied Charlotte council members for repeal, which they had twice before rejected, saying that in return Republican leaders had promised to “repeal HB2 in full.”

Charlotte repealed the ordinance that led to HB2 on Monday. It voted again Wednesday morning, wiping away all action taken in February, after legislative Republicans said they hadn’t rescinded it all.

The bottom line is that the NC GOP refused to vote on a repeal of HB2 until Charlotte eliminated the city's protections for LGBTQ community because no Republican considers a gay person to be human anyway, just a bundle of ambulatory oozing sin.  Repealing HB2 without getting rid of the protections would actually consider people with sexual orientations other than "1950's sitcom" to be actual human beings, and Republicans were not going to stand for that nonsense. The Charlotte City Council then happily sold out the LGBTQ community completely in order to get the NC GOP to the table.

Then the NC GOP tacked on an amendment that would prevent Charlotte from reenacting those protections long enough for Republicans to force through a new measure over a Cooper veto that would make the moratorium on local ordinances like that permanent.  The deal disintegrated after that, and the Bathroom Bill remains law into next year.

The reality is that Republicans in my home state are such gay-hating assholes that they're fine with the state continuing to take tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in financial boycotts and tourism damage just to stay true to their barbaric beliefs that they can "cure sexual deviancy" with the power of an invisible sky dude.  It's clinical mass insanity.

Not as insane as Democrats like Charlotte's knuckleheads in city council and Roy Cooper, who really should have known better, to trust the NC GOP for a picosecond however.  That is stupidity bordering on dereliction of duty and gross negligence on their part.

So off we go into 2017 with HB2 still doing the Damocles thing over the state, and Kentucky still being a slightly better place to live than North Carolina.  Who'd have seen that one coming?

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article122145494.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article122145494.html#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• In a special legislative session called specifically for the purpose, North Carolina Republicans reneged on a deal with Charlotte's City Council to repeal the state's HB2 "bathroom bill".
• A former Georgia police officer has been sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murder earlier this month for the taser-inflicted death of a suspect handcuffed at the time.
• German media is reporting at least four people have been arrested in connection with this week's deadly Berlin truck attack, but a manhunt continues for the chief suspect.
• President-elect Trump may have a massive conflict of interest with Germany's Deutsche Bank as he owes the lender $300 million while the Justice Department is investigating the bank.
• Ride-sharing giant Uber says it will take its self-driving test vehicle program to another state following California revoking the cars' registrations for not being properly licensed.

Last Call For A White-In Vote

The white nationalist viewpoint never went anywhere in American history, it just had various times where the country moved away from it a bit, almost always followed by a protracted period of heading right back down that path with often brutal results.  We're at the beginning of such a reversion cycle now, where Trump hasn't even taken office yet and FOX hosts like Bill-O are spouting overt racism on the air.

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly went on a diatribe against calls to abolish the Electoral College Tuesday night, arguing the political left is “all about race” and “wants power taken away from the white establishment.”

Throughout his mind-boggling Talking Points segment, O’Reilly conceded that “Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million,” but insisted the “hidden reason” behind calls to scrap the electoral college is actually the desire to marginalize and disenfranchise white working class men.

The O’Reilly Factor host said without the Electoral College, Democrats could campaign exclusively in “large urban areas and blue states” where “minorities are substantial.”

“Neutralizing the largely white rural areas in the Midwest and South will assure liberal politicians get power and keep it,” O’Reilly said, adding “this is all about race.”

“The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with,” O’Reilly said. “Therefore white working class voters must be marginalized.

“Very few commentators will tell you that the heart of liberalism in America today is based on race,” O’Reilly declared, presumably offering himself up as one of those few brave speakers willing to make such an asinine argument. “It permeates almost every issue: that white men have set up a system of oppression. That system must be destroyed.”

In summation, O’Reilly concluded, “the left wants power taken away from the white establishment. They want a profound change in the way America is run.”

When your FOX show sounds like it was taken from the bullet points on a Stormfront recruitment pamphlet on "white genocide", you might want to reassess things in your life.

But nobody should be shocked or surprised by this. Look at who we elected as president, in response to the man on the way out, and who that new president's closest advisers are.  Trump himself has retweeted this garbage several times during his campaign, that somehow the goal of liberalism and Democrats is to "exterminate" the white race through "breeding".

White nationalism is now the default mode of the federal government.

I look forward to O'Reilly having neo-Nazis on his show on a regular basis.  It'll be educational, I'm sure. 

A Veteran Of The Budget Wars

Next time Republicans scream about how "Obama failed our nation's veterans" and "refused to help our troops" please remember that the Senate GOP just killed a vet benefits bill less than a week before Christmas because "we can't spend that kind of money."

The largest piece of veterans legislation in decades — aimed at expanding health care, education and other benefits — was rejected Thursday by the Senate on a procedural issue after proponents failed to obtain 60 votes to keep the bill alive. 

Wrangling over an issue -- veterans -- that often receives bipartisan support, the legislation died on a vote of 56-41, with only two Republicans voting for it. 

Most Republicans said it was too large, too costly and would burden a Department of Veterans Affairs already struggling to keep up with promised benefits. 

Sen Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee who authored the bill, argued that many provisions in the bill have won bipartisan support in other pieces of pending legislation before Congress. 

Republicans complained about how to pay for it. Sanders' legislation had more than 140 provisions costing $21 billion over 10 years. 

Most of that money was to come from billions of dollars the government projected it would be allowed to spend on wars overseas in the fight against al-Qaeda. 

But Republicans argued that this is "phony" budgeting because U.S. participation in the Iraq War is over and operations in Afghanistan are winding down. 

The legislation would have restored cost-of-living increases for the pensions of future military retirees; expanded VA health care by allowing acquisition of 27 new medical facilities and paid for reproductive services for 2,300 troops wounded in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

It also would have expanded compensation for family caregivers of disabled veterans — something now provided for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan — to families of veterans of all wars. 

The bill was supported by nearly all veterans groups.

And yes, this is where I give Bernie Sanders credit because passing legislation in the Senate is his job, and this is absolutely a worthy piece of legislation.  But hey, $21 billion over ten years is a fraction of the Pentagon budget, literally less than a half a percent of what we spend on our military over that time period, and that was too much for Republicans.

Literally a fraction of one F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's cost.  Oh well.  Can't actually give the Department of Veteran's Affairs money, because screw them, right?

But military voters overwhelmingly voted for Republicans in November.  Congrats, soliders, sailors and airmen, you got what you voted for.