Last Call For Austerity In Bevinstan

And it begins.

Here in Kentucky the state is facing a $200 million shortfall, and GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is taking it out of the paychecks of state employees and the pockets of those who need state services by ordering a nearly 20% budget cut to state agencies.

The Bevin administration asked constitutional officers and cabinet secretaries Friday to cut spending in most state agencies by 17.4 percent this fiscal year to address an expected $200 million budget shortfall. 

The cuts would not affect SEEK, the state’s school funding formula; universities; Medicaid; the Department of Corrections; and debt payments, said Bevin communications director Amanda Stamper. 

In a letter to state officials, State Budget Director John Chilton said Kentucky “must start preparing for the ongoing financial challenges facing the state” and come up with a budget reduction plan by Sept. 25. 

Chilton said the cuts would save an estimated $350 million, enough to close the $200 million projected shortfall for the fiscal year that began July 1 and replenish the state’s $150 million rainy day fund for emergencies. He said the emergency fund will be spent in coming months and must be replaced to protect the state’s credit rating. 

“While challenging, the current fiscal constraints present a unique opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness and necessity of programs within state government,” Chilton said. “Limited resources must be allocated to programs providing critical services and a strong return on investment.”

Chilton said agency heads are “best positioned to make critical judgments about which programs deserve full funding, and which should be significantly reduced.”
The legislative and judicial branches of state government were also asked to make similar cuts. 

Bevin’s move to cut costs comes after a group of economists known as the Consensus Forecasting Group revised the state’s official revenue forecast downward last month by $200 million. 

Kentucky has endured repeated rounds of budget cuts since the Great Recession of 2008. In all, some state agencies will have seen more than 70 percent of their budgets disappear in the last decade, according to the liberal-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. 

House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins, D-Morehead, called Bevin’s request “unprecedented.” 

The possible cuts to services, programs and jobs “seem premature,” Adkins said. 

“We’re only in the third month of the new fiscal year and the governor’s move is based on a projection from a group of independent economists,” Adkins said. “It would seem to me to be better and more responsible to wait until more months pass in the fiscal year to get a better reading of what the shortfall might be.”

No wonder the Bluegrass State is one the unhappiest states in the nation, huh?

Attorney General Andy Beshear is probably going to have some words for Bevin's budget cutting by fiat, so we'll see how far this goes, but yeah.  Since I've moved to Kentucky, state agencies and services have been slashed and burned.  Yes, some of those cuts came under Steve Beshear, but a lot came from Bevin too and he's only been in office for a year and a half.

And you'd better believe a lot more cuts are coming as Bevin is freely going after Kentucky teachers and school employees for "creating" the state's pension shortfall, which ironically is only making things worse because retirements this fall are up sharply as people are getting out now before Bevin can scrap retirement benefits.

The guy's been a disaster for the state.  We're not as bad off as Kansas, but if Bevin has his way we will be, and worse.

Another Day In Gunmerica

There was a brutal and deadly mass shooting in Texas on Sunday and we've finally reached the point where something like that is no longer national news when it gets dismissed as a domestic violence incident that nobody wants to talk about.

Nine people are dead, including the gunman, after he opened fire on a football watching party at a Plano home Sunday night. 

The unidentified suspect was shot and killed by an officer who arrived at the home on West Spring Creek Parkway just after 8 p.m.

Monday afternoon Plano PD Chief Gregory Rushin held a press conference to notify media that an eighth victim had died at the hospital. The toll now stands at nine, including the gunman. 

Rushin says an officer found bodies in the yard and heard shots coming from inside the house. 

The Texas Rangers are assisting with the investigation, especially since it involved an officer, who Plano PD Chief Gregory Rushin says went into the house by himself and stopped the shooter before waiting for backup. 

"[He] made entry inside the house, confronted the suspect, ultimately shooting and killing him," Plano PD Officer David Tilley said. 

It is unclear whether the gunman returned fire. Rushin tells us multiple guns were recovered from the home. 

Monday, flowers marked the spot of the most unthinkable event to happen in the most unlikeliest of places -- Plano. 

"We've never had a shooting of this magnitude. We've never seen this many victims before," Chief Rushin said. 

Behind the police tape outside the home are still cars that line up against the road marking the spot of the shooting. These are the cars of the victims who did not make it home. 

Lane told WFAA that her daughter, 27-year-old Meredith Hight, owned the home and had recently filed for divorce from her husband. She says he showed up at her daughter's home and opened fire.

"As time passed we assumed the worst," said Meredith's mother Debbie Lane.

Even the real lede of the story is buried nearly ten paragraphs deep: the shooter was recently divorced from one of the victims and he showed up with a gun and slaughtered everyone before a police officer was able to shoot and kill him.

No national outpouring of grief, and after Harvey and Irma (and Jose on the way) maybe we don't have much grief left, but this was unfathomably tragic.  It wasn't terrorism.  It wasn't Antifa or Black Lives Matter.  It wasn't any of the usual bogeymen the right blame for this.

It was a pissed off guy with a gun who went to his wife's place where he knew she would be watching football and killed eight people, a cowardly, despicable act of a truly evil person.

We don't have just a domestic terrorism problem in America, we have a domestic violence problem in America, and in both cases firearms only make these problems exponentially more deadly.

Check The Vote '17

I don't think most Americans are truly cognizant of the level of danger posed by Trump's "voter integrity commission" scam run by VP Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  They want to make it as impossible as they can for regular Americans and in particular poor, elderly, and young Americans to be able to vote at all without going through the kinds of hassles and hurdles put up in the Jim Crow era. 

I've long been warning about Republicans crafting a federal Jim Crow voting law in the wake of the annihilated Voting Rights Act, and it looks like that proposal will take the form of federal background checks before being allowed to vote in this country.

President Donald Trump’s controversial voting commission will weigh a proposal Tuesday about requiring a background check before a person can register to vote — similar to buying a gun. 

John Lott, the president of the Pennsylvania-based Crime Prevention Research Center, will present the concept when the commission holds its second meeting of the year in New Hampshire. 

Lott’s PowerPoint, which was posted on the White House’s website in advance of the meeting, includes a slide titled “How to check if the right people are voting.” 

He notes that Republicans worry that ineligible people are voting, while Democrats contend “that Republicans are just imagining things.” Lott proposes applying the federal background check system for gun purchases, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, to voter registrations. 

Lott said in a phone call that the background check system, which was established under President Bill Clinton, checks whether a person is a non-citizen and whether they have a felony conviction among other pieces of information to determine their eligibility to own a gun.

Pretty slick move, and it comes with its own strawman: How can stoopid libtards be against background checks for voting when they are the exact arguments they make for background checks for guns?

Lott, who last year published a book called “The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” said that Democrats have praised using background checks for guns and questioned why they would oppose using the same system for voting when it’s already up and running. 

“They say it does not impinge on people’s right to self-defense… It shouldn’t be any harm in their eyes to check whether people are eligible to vote,” he said. 

“It just seems like if they believe what they’re saying it seems like a win-win.” 

Dale Ho, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in an email that only four states permanently ban people from voting for felony convictions. 

“For example, in Kansas, you can register to vote after finishing your sentence (including parole); but the rules on firearms are much more complicated, and have different waiting periods for different kinds of crimes,” Ho said. 

“So it’s not obvious why this would be a helpful idea for voting at all — even if you leave aside questions about practicality and possible burden on voters. Seems more like an attempted (and nonsensical) ‘gotcha’ for liberals rather than a serious suggestion,” he said.

Of course it's a gotcha nonsense argument.  But our entire government in 2017 is built on those, and expect this to become the battle cry of the right on "voter background checks" for a very long time.

The reality though is that this allows the right to frame the argument while Pence and Kobach and company come up with the real proposals that won't get attention until it's far too late.  It's a "win-win" alright...for the GOP.

StupidiNews!

• Eight million customers are without power across five states in the wake of Irma, including 60% of Florida residents, as remnants of the storm drift towards Tennessee and Kentucky.
• The Brexit process slowly continues as lawmakers in Parliament voted Monday to formally repeal the 1972 law that allowed the UK to join the EU.
• The Trump regime is weighing a new hard line approach to Iran, including possible changes to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal set under President Obama.
• Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has ordered the Ninth Circuit to restore the Trump Regime's ban on Muslim refugees until the court can make a full decision on the case.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to announce the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus today, along with the iPhone X which is expected to cost $1,000 or more.

Last Call For More DACA Please

As expected, several states are suing the Trump regime over ending DACA but the biggest state of them all -- California -- has now entered the fray this week.

California and three other states on Monday added to a barrage of states challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind protections for undocumented people brought to the United States illegally as children.

The lawsuit, in which California was joined by Minnesota, Maryland and Maine, comes five days after 15 states and the District of Columbia first filed suit to defend the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Flanked by two DACA recipients in Sacramento, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra called Trump’s order “unlawful and mean-spirited,” arguing it violates due process provisions of the Constitution and would hurt the economy in the nation’s most populous state.

“You don’t become the sixth-largest economy in the world just because,” Becerra said. “It just so happens that one of every four of the DACA recipients in this country — some 200,000 — live and work and call California their home, and they’ve been helping California become the sixth-largest economy in the world.”

He said repealing DACA would unfairly punish productive, law-abiding young people and that the economic cost of deporting them “would be felt by California businesses, California local governments who have depended on the economic success of the DACA program.”

Again, this is one of those matters that was always going to go before the Supreme Court. Trump pulled the trigger on his six-month time bomb last week because otherwise he was going to be sued by dozens of red states, now he's being sued by blue ones. We'll see where SCOTUS stands but a 5-4 Kennedy Special seems like the most likely outcome.

Meanwhile Trump's only doing this to keep his base loyal and to piss off Mexico, and considering Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto may be one of the few world leaders with a worse approval rating than Trump, it's actually a safe bet for Donny to keep that up for the foreseeable future.

But that's what he does, lie and piss people off.

Mitt-igating Circumstances

America's favorite binder-keeping loser is back.  Well, he's sort of back, maybe.  Possibly.  I dunno.  There's caveats and such, conditions, factors even to Mitt Romney's return.

Sources tell UtahPolicy.com that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is preparing to run for Senate in 2018 if Sen. Orrin Hatch decides to retire. 

Sources close to Romney say the two-time presidential candidate will jump into the 2018 Utah Senate scrum if Hatch opts not to. 

So far, Hatch has not made up his mind as to whether he'll run for an eighth term in 2018. He has previously said he was planning on running as long as his and his wife's health holds up.

Dave Hansen, a longtime political advisor to Hatch, told UtahPolicy.com last month that he didn't expect Hatch to decide on his political future until October. However, sources now tell UtahPolicy.com that Hatch may not make up his mind until December. 

Hatch's reticence to make a definitive announcement is presenting other candidates from getting in the race, but Romney has the financial resources to mount a campaign no matter when Hatch decides. 

Rep. Chris Stewart also has said he would like to jump into the race if Hatch decides against running for an eighth term next year.

Isn't that cute.  Mitt is waiting for Orrin to retire in order to run, Orrin is waiting for Mitt to run in order to retire.  You would think they would call each other and work it out, but Utah or something.

Anyway, I thought presidential losing candidates had to shut up and go away so gosh why is Mitt allowed to do this when Hillary has to eject herself screaming into the burning heart of the sun?

It's weird I guess.  I mean it's not like Mitt isn't going to prostrate himself and vote for Trump's position 90%+ of the time like all the other Republicans in the Senate, but whatever.  Orrin Hatch's 538 Trump Score finds him taking The Donald's position nearly 96% of the time as of today, so really Mitt *might* be an improvement on a vote or two and end up in the low 90's or something.

Who knew?

Irma Was A Terrible Tourist

Hurricane Irma will weaken into a tropical storm as it crossed the Florida panhandle into Georgia today, but late last week the storm was a monster category 5 force of nature that annihilated the Caribbean and wrecked multiple islands, the damage will take years to recover from.

From Cuba to Antigua, Caribbean islanders began counting the cost of Hurricane Irma on Sunday after the brutal storm left a trail of death, destruction and chaos from which the tourist-dependent region could take years to recover.

The Category 5 storm, which killed at least 28 people across the region, devastated housing, power supplies and communications, leaving some small islands almost cut off from the world. European nations sent military reinforcements to keep order amid looting, while the damage was expected to total billions of dollars.

Ex-pat billionaires and poor islanders alike were forced to take cover as Irma tore roofs off buildings, flipped cars and killed livestock, raging from the Leeward Islands across Puerto Rico and Hispaniola then into Cuba before turning on Florida.

Waves of up to 36 feet (11 meters) smashed businesses along the Cuban capital Havana’s sea-side drive on Sunday morning. Further east, high winds whipped Varadero, the island’s most important tourist resort.

“It’s a complete disaster and it will take a great deal of work to get Varadero back on its feet,” said Osmel de Armas, 53, an aquatic photographer who works on the beach at the battered resort.

Sea-front hotels were evacuated in Havana and relief workers spent the night rescuing people from homes in the city center as the sea penetrated to historic depths in the flood-prone area.

U.S President Donald Trump issued a disaster declaration on Sunday for Puerto Rico, where Irma killed at least 3 people and left hundreds of thousands without electricity. Trump also expanded federal funds available to the U.S. Virgin Islands, which suffered extensive damage to homes and infrastructure.

Further east in the Caribbean, battered islands such as St. Martin and Barbuda were taking stock of the damage as people began emerging from shelters to scenes of devastation.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the death toll on the Dutch part of St. Martin had doubled to four, and that 70 percent of homes had been damaged or destroyed.

Puerto Rico was already in the middle of a financial hurricane, the territory was locked in a battle with Congress over the island's bankruptcy declaration last year and what impact Irma will have on that restructuring of the island's $120 billion in debt and pension liabilities is unknown.

As bad as Irma's assessments will be for Florida as nearly five million are without power, remember that in Puerto Rico residents there could be facing that situation for months.

It's been a pretty rough couple of weeks weather-wise for North America...and with flooding still continuing in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, the world.

StupidiNews!

• At least 4 million are without power this morning as Hurricane Irma ripped up Florida's western coastline and continues into southern Georgia this morning as a Category 1 storm.
• North Dakota native Cara Mund became the first Miss America pageant winner from that state, crowned last night Mund said she disagreed with Donald Trump's stance on climate change.
• Norwegians go to the polls today to elect a government in a close race, PM Erna Solberg's Conservatives are looking for re-election against the opposition Labour Party. 
• North Korea is warning that the US will face the "greatest pain" as the UN Security Council votes on strict new oil import and asset freeze sanctions against Pyongyang on Monday.
• California lawmakers are banning autonomous drone delivery of marijuana ahead of the state legalizing recreational use of the drug on January 1.

Hillary Hangs It Up

Not that anyone really expected her to try again, and not that she would or would not have succeeded, but Hillary Clinton will not be running again for office she says.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Sunday that she will not pursue the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“I am done with being a candidate,” Clinton said on CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”

Clinton — who on Tuesday will release “What Happened,” her memoir of the 2016 campaign — does plan to stay involved in national politics, just not as an “active politician” who may launch a campaign.

“But I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country’s future is at stake,” she said in an interview with Jane Pauley.

Clinton also was critical of President Trump’s preparedness for the White House.

“We have a reality show that leads to the election of a president. He ends up in the Oval Office. He says, ‘Boy, it’s so much harder than I thought it would be. This is really tough. I had no idea,’” Clinton said. “Well, yeah, because it’s not a show. It’s real. It’s reality, for sure.”

 It's reality alright, and America will be extremely lucky to survive it as a democracy of any sort.

Still, we don't much tolerate presidential losers in America, at least since America gave that Nixon guy a second crack at the brass ring, and boy was that a mistake.  Fair or not, we don't really bother to give them the time of day, and Hillary officially saying she's out was necessary if only to (temporarily) stop the noise coming from the Village.

Probably not, though.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It's hard to overstate just how much social media network and search engine advertising helped the Russians plant their fake news stories, and nobody's more guilty of this than Facebook, the tool of choice for the discriminating Russian provatskiya agent.  Now that we know Russian front companies bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ads on Zuckerberg's toy, Congress has a few questions they want answered, and they have the means to get those answers.

The discovery that a Russian company bought election-related Facebook ads in last year’s presidential race opens new avenues for Justice Department and congressional investigators and likely will lead to subpoenas for confidential records of social media advertisers, former prosecutors say.

Facebook’s disclosure, which a key Senate Democrat called “the tip of the iceberg,” appears to show that Russians searching for ways to harm Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects broke criminal laws barring foreigners from attempting to influence U.S. elections.

The findings could ease investigators’ efforts to win Facebook’s voluntary release of records showing whether Russian intelligence agencies went even further to boost Donald Trump’s chances – by buying far more ads with much stealthier methods than the easily traceable $150,000 in purchases that the company divulged on Wednesday.

If Facebook, Twitter and other social media firms don’t cooperate, subpoenas could be in the offing.

The evidence of Russian ad buys on Facebook "is likely to be of great interest to all of the entities investigating Russian interference with last year’s election,” said Jennifer Rodgers, a former assistant U.S. attorney who now heads the Columbia University law school’s Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity.

“To the extent that Facebook and other social media companies don’t voluntarily cooperate, I would expect subpoenas to be issued and other legal avenues to be pursued," she added -- though it’s uncertain whether the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees would oblige Democrats' push to compel cooperation.

Russia’s use of social media is a focus of investigations into the Kremlin’s massive, multi-pronged cyberattack by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the congressional intelligence committees.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that he has believed since the beginning of his panel’s investigation that Russians were using “the very social media sites that we rely on for virtually everything – the Facebooks, Googles and Twitters … to intervene in our elections.”

Addressing a major intelligence conference in Washington, Warner called “the tip of the iceberg” Facebook’s revelation that it had tracked thousands of the ads to a Russian company linked to a so-called, Kremlin-directed “troll farm” that spread Russian propaganda.

The sponsored Facebook ads pop up near the top of Facebook users’ private news feeds. Ads that are targeted to a certain subset of people are known as “dark posts,” because only the recipients see them. Many such ads are designed to automatically disappear once they’ve been viewed by Facebook customers.

U.S. intelligence agencies also say Russian operatives unleashed automated attacks using computer commands known as “bots” to circulate fake news about Clinton, often via phony Twitter accounts.

Warner said he wants Facebook representatives “to come back in” for further questioning by Senate investigators.

“I want to see Twitter back in” as well, he said. “I want to see others come back in.”

My biggest hope is that subpoenas derail Zuckerberg's political aspirations for good (or at least until after 2020).  The last thing Democrats need right now is one of the world's richest white guys promising he can run America like a start-up and on the ticket by dint of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules.

Sunday Long Read: White Paper

This week's Sunday Long Read is the inimitable Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Trump regime, who he correctly classifies as America's first white president, a president for white America, of whiteness, enabled and powered by its fear of non-whiteness, and dedicated to the supremacy of whiteness in the United States.

IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuckcasts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.

And this is the key to understanding Trump, his supporters, and the people who voted for him.  It is not enough to reverse the Obama era, his legacy must be burned on the White House south lawn like a Klan cross warning, immolated along with the dream of anyone who isn't white. We must have that burned out of us, we must never raise our head high enough to glimpse the path to follow Barack Obama.  That must go up in flames, for that can never be allowed again.

That is what Trump sold for years, making the power of whiteness available to the least among the small empty towns, those in places without jobs or hope or much of a future.  Trump sold being white as the ultimate insider's card.

And it's a buyer's market.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Like any good investigator, Bob Mueller is conducting interviews with witnesses in order to obtain information, and the witnesses he wants to talk to regarding Trump and Russia are a half-dozen aides, all high-level Trump regime personnel, to get them to roll on the boss.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has alerted the White House that his team will probably seek to interview six top current and former advisers to President Trump who were witnesses to several episodes relevant to the investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the request.

Mueller’s interest in the aides, including trusted adviser Hope Hicks, former press secretary Sean Spicer and former chief of staff Reince Priebus, reflects how the probe that has dogged Trump’s presidency is starting to penetrate a closer circle of aides around the president.

Each of the six advisers was privy to important internal discussions that have drawn the interest of Mueller’s investigators, according to people familiar with the probe, including his decision in May to fire FBI Director James B. Comey. Also of interest is the White House’s initial inaction after warnings about then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s December discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

The advisers are also connected to internal documents that Mueller’s investigators have asked the White House to produce, according to people familiar with the special counsel’s inquiry.

Roughly four weeks ago, the special counsel’s team provided the White House with the names of the first group of current and former Trump advisers and aides whom investigators expect to question.

In addition to Priebus, Spicer and Hicks, Mueller has notified the White House he will probably seek to question White House counsel Don McGahn and one of his deputies, James Burnham. Mueller’s office has also told the White House that investigators may want to interview Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who works closely with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

White House officials are expecting that Mueller will seek additional interviews, possibly with family members, including Kushner, who is a West Wing senior adviser, according to the people familiar with Mueller’s inquiry.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is always a fun scenario to see acted out.  And if Spicer and Priebus don't roll over, Donny's family seems pretty vulnerable and self-centered to me, just like dad.

Hell, Mueller might end up with too much information, a pretty rare occurrence in a criminal investigation of a politician as dirty as Trump.  White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is the latest to lawyer up over Russia, and she won't be the last Trump aide to play this game of musical chairs to see who gets the immunity prize when Mueller kills the tunes.

Stay tuned, folks.

Last Call For Outfoxed Again

Dylan Matthews at Vox reminds us that despite Rachel Maddow and MSNBC enjoying a ratings spike in the Trump era, America is still very much FOX News country, and remains powerful enough by itself to determine American elections.

Fox News is, by far, America’s dominant TV news channel; in the second quarter of 2017, Fox posted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN. Given that Fox was founded by a longtime Republican Party operative and has almost exclusively hired conservative commentators, talk radio hosts, and the like to host its shows, it would stand to reason that its dominance on basic cable could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections.

A new study in the American Economic Review (the discipline’s flagship journal), with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds exactly that. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

They estimate that if Fox News hadn't existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

For context, that would've made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama's 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote.

"There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty" about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. "I personally don't think it's totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research." And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections.

Without FOX, America would be a far different place.  What's more, they are far more effective at moving Dems to the R column than anyone is at convincing Republicans to vote for the Democrats.

The effects of CNN and MSNBC on centrist voters are mostly negligible; MSNBC, in 2000 and 2004, modestly increased odds of voting Republican, before it turned left in time for 2008. But Fox News increases Republican voting odds for centrists, for Democratic viewers, and even, in 2004 and 2008, for Republicans already strongly inclined to vote that way. Watching three minutes more of Fox News per week in 2008 would have made the typical Democratic or centrist voter 1 percentage point likelier to vote Republican that year.

“Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," the authors find. While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizable minority aren't, and they're particularly suggestible to the channel's influence. In 2000, they estimate that 58 percent of Fox viewers who were initially Democrats changed to supporting the Republican candidate by the end of the election cycle; in 2004, the persuasion rate was 27 percent, and 28 percent in 2008. MSNBC, by contrast, only persuaded 8 percent of initial Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2008 cycle.

These are big effects, with major societal implications. The authors find that the Fox News effect translates into a 0.46 percentage point boost to the GOP vote share in the 2000 presidential race, a 3.59-point boost in 2004, and a 6.34-point boost in 2008; the boost increases as the channel's viewership grew. This effect alone is large enough, they argue, to explain all the polarization in the US public's political views from 2000 to 2008.

In other words, you can singlehandedly blame FOX for the Dubya years. Long before Trump or the Russians, the Republicans already had a substantial built-in advantage, and there may not be any way to stop it now short of another 2008 financial crisis magnitude disaster.

That's Great, It Starts With An Earthquake

Hurricanes on the east coast, flooding in the Gulf, massive wildfires in the west and just because, now we get a major earthquake off the southern coast of Mexico.

At least 16 people have died after the most powerful earthquake to hit Mexico in a century struck off the country's southern coast. 

During an interview with CNN affiliate Foro TV, Luis Felipe Puente, the country's national coordinator for emergency management, said 10 peopled died in Oaxaca state, four in Chiapas state and two in Tabasco state. 

The magnitude-8.1 quake, which was felt as far as Mexico City and Guatemala City, was registered off Mexico's southern coast just as heavy rains from Hurricane Katia lashed the east. The epicenter was in the Pacific Ocean, some 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) southeast of the capital and 74 miles (120 kilometers) from the Pacific coast. 

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said the quake was the strongest earthquake Mexico has experienced in 100 years. 

It hit just before midnight on Thursday, when many people would have been sleeping.

The planet will be fine long after we're gone, it'll adjust and keep being the third rock from the sun for several billion years.  Humans, well.  I'm thinking this particular trip around the sun that the earth might be reacting a bit to shed a few billion parasites.

Last Call For Checkmating The Credit Checkers

It was only a matter of time before hackers hit the Holy Grail of data jackpots: consumer credit agency Equifax was nailed by a breach that could have essentially exposed everyone with a credit record in the US.

Equifax, a provider of consumer credit reports, said it experienced a data breach affecting as many as 143 million US people after criminals exploited a vulnerability on its website. The US population is about 324 million people, so that's about 44 percent of its population.

The data exposed in the hack includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers. The hackers also accessed credit card numbers for 209,000 US consumers and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 US people. Limited personal information for an unknown number of Canadian and UK residents was also exposed. Equifax—which also provides credit monitoring services for people whose personal information is exposed—said the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July.

"Criminals exploited a US website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files," Equifax said in a statement late Thursday, without elaborating. That leaves open a wide range of possibilities, with injection bugs, faulty authentication mechanisms, and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities topping the list of the most widely exploited website flaws.

This isn't the first time a garden-variety website flaw has been exploited to obtain a massive amount of sensitive data. Associates of Albert Gonzalez, a convicted hacker who was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison, exploited a SQL-injection flaw that helped them obtain data for 130 million credit cards. On Wednesday, exploit code for a nine-year-old code-execution vulnerability in Apache Struts 2—a software framework used by many large financial service websites—went public, but there was no immediate indication that the Equifax site uses it.

You read that right. One hundred forty-three million credit records exposed.  Equifax is offering free credit monitoring to anyone affected, but that's pretty much everyone in the US with an Equifax credit file.

Which is, you know, anybody who ever had a credit card or loan application in the last 25 years.

Needless to say, you should consider your identity compromised and should take steps.

Until the next massive data breach, that is.  If you're wondering about consequences for Equifax's corporate leadership, well...let's just say they knew what was coming and acted in their own self-interest.

Three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach that may have compromised information on about 143 million U.S. consumers.

The credit-reporting service said late Thursday in a statement that it discovered the intrusion on July 29. Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 pre-scheduled trading plans.

In other words, they knew for over a month and didn't tell anyone, and sold shares before revealing the breach and the crash of Equifax stock.

Because corporate America.

Sure hope the credit records for these three aren't compromised, ya know?  That would be a shame.