Last Call For The Great Hole Of Bevinstan

Voters handed the entire state of Kentucky over to Gov. Matt Bevin and the GOP in 2015 and 2016, now they'll have to come up with a way to deal with the state's massive pension crisis and the multi-billion dollar shortfall expected for the next pair of fiscal years.

Kentucky’s General Assembly will need to find an estimated $5.4 billion to fund the pension systems for state workers and school teachers in the next two-year state budget, officials told the Public Pension Oversight Board on Monday. 

That amount would be a hefty funding increase and a painful squeeze for a state General Fund that — at about $20 billion over two years — also is expected to pay for education, prisons, social services and other state programs. 

There are two reasons for the dramatic increase. 

First, Gov. Matt Bevin and the legislature committed two years ago to paying the state’s full annual recommended contribution, or ARC, to the long-underfunded Kentucky Retirement Systems, which provides pension benefits for state and local government retirees. 

Second, KRS recently adopted more realistic financial assumptionsabout its investment returns and the state’s payroll growth. Those new assumptions made KRS’ numbers look far worse literally overnight.

The legislature will pass the next state budget during its 2018 law-making session this winter. 

“We realize this challenge is in front of us. That’s obviously part of the need for us to address pension reform,” said state Sen. Joe Bowen, R-Owensboro, co-chairman of the oversight board. 

“In the short-term, yeah, we’re obligated to find this money,” Bowen said. “And everybody is committed to do that. We have revealed this great challenge. We have embraced this great challenge, as opposed to previous members of the legislature, perhaps.” 

The only question is how bad the austerity budget is going to be here in Kentucky, and it's almost certainly going to start with massive cuts to Medicaid and other state health programs in what's already one of the least healthy states in the nation, one that's at the epicenter of the country's opioid crisis.

Expect more steep cuts to education and infrastructure too as Kentucky remains near the bottom of test scores and replacement of one of the busiest bridges in the Midwest, the Brent Spence bridge leading into Cincinnati, is delayed yet again.

I foresee massive state employee layoffs and pay cuts on top of the 17% across-the-board cuts Bevin ordered this year.  Finally, don't be surprised if Bevin decides that Kentucky needs to pull a Brownback and destroy the state's tax base in order to make it "more competitive to business" as we go down the road to fiscal destruction like Kansas as lack of good schools, crumbling infrastructure, and lack of health care options have driven skilled workers away from the state and may take businesses with them.

Kentucky Republicans are putting us on a path to be in ten years the disaster Kansas is now, and Matt Bevin is ready to run the ship of state into an iceberg just to prove a point.

The Island Of Misfit Americans, Con't

Something definitely slimy is going down in Puerto Rico with the Trump regime's "recovery efforts" as now lawmakers are being denied permission to fly to the island by the White House.

The Trump administration is restricting lawmakers in both parties from visiting storm-ravaged Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands aboard military aircraft this weekend in order to keep focused on recovery missions there, according to multiple congressional aides. 

The decision comes as the Pentagon is intensifying its relief efforts on the islands as the U.S. government struggles to respond to devastation caused last week by Hurricane Maria and earlier by Hurricane Irma. 

Multiple attempts have been underway in recent days for members of both parties to travel to Puerto Rico aboard military aircraft. Once there, they would have met with officials with the military and Federal Emergency Management Agency responsible for ongoing missions on the ground. 

At least 10 members of the House and Senate were hoping to go this Friday, according to two aides. Another trip of senators and House lawmakers would have gone on Sunday, said the aides, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the planning. 

But since Monday evening, permission to use military aircraft to make the trips has been denied by the White House and Pentagon, the aides said. One Republican aide familiar with the back-and-forth said that the administration and military officials had indicated that they need “resources for rescue and recovery, thus member travel will be restricted.” 

Trump said at a news conference on Monday that he would be traveling to Puerto Rico next Tuesday and may also visit the U.S. Virgin Islands, adding that he was told that is the earliest day he could do so without hampering ongoing relief missions.

So no Congressional oversight to see what's going on, and the Pentagon, which, you know, just got a $700 billion paycheck for the year, doesn't have the resources to spare for members of either party in Congress to inspect the island's recovery effort.

It's almost like they don't want any oversight.

Now, why would that be?

Some Stinky Wisconsin Cheese

As I long suspected, successful Republican voter suppression efforts from Wisconsin's strict "Voter ID" law was actually did cost Hillary Clinton the state of Wisconsin in 2016.

A comprehensive study released today suggests how many missing votes can be attributed to the new law. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison surveyed registered voters who didn’t cast a 2016 ballot in the state’s two biggest counties—Milwaukee and Dane, which is home to Madison. More than 1 out of 10 nonvoters (11.2 percent) said they lacked acceptable voter ID and cited the law as a reason why they didn’t vote; 6.4 percent of respondents said the voter ID law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. 

The study’s lead author, University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer, says between roughly 9,000 and 23,000 registered voters in the reliably Democratic counties were deterred from voting by the ID law. Extrapolating statewide, he says the data suggests as many as 45,000 voters sat out the election, though he cautioned that it was difficult to produce an estimate from just two counties.* 

“We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” Mayer told me.

Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes. 

The study, which was funded by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, provides some of the firmest evidence yet that new restrictions on voting lead to voter disenfranchisement. It’s a strong rebuke to supporters of voter ID laws like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has claimed that the notion the voter ID law reduced participation is a “load of crap.” (Wisconsin saw its lowest turnout since 2000, and there were 41,000 fewer voters in Milwaukee compared with 2012.) 

After the study’s release, McDonell and Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson joined together in calling for an immediate suspension of the law. “It is completely unacceptable that thousands of voters were deterred from exercising their sacred right to vote due to this law. Citizens’ basic belief in their democracy is seriously eroded when those in power target some for exclusion from self-government,” said McDonell. 

Mayer and Michael DeCrescenzo, the University of Wisconsin Ph.D. candidate who co-authored the report, didn’t ask those surveyed who they would’ve voted for, so it’s impossible to know if these thousands of lost voters might’ve tipped the election, but other studies—like a 2014 one by the Government Accountability Office—have found that voter ID laws disproportionately reduced turnout among voters of color, young voters, and newly registered voters, who were more likely to support Democrats. “If you were to re-run the election over without the voter ID requirement, would the outcome have been different? Possibly,” Mayer said. 

The study also found socioeconomic and racial disparities among those impacted by the new law. “The burdens of voter ID fell disproportionately on low-income and minority populations,” writes Mayer. More than 20 percent of registrants coming from homes with incomes less than $25,000 say they were kept from voting by the law; 8.3 percent of white voters surveyed were deterred, compared with 27.5 percent of African Americans.

Voter ID laws are the new Jim Crow.  They are designed specifically to keep black people, especially poor black people, from ever being allowed to vote, period.  Wisconsin's law was no exception and it almost certainly cost Hillary Clinton the state.  Michigan and Pennsylvania also had Voter ID laws, Pennsylvania's law was struck down by the courts but there was still confusion and mess in 2016.

Without these laws, Hillary would have won.  There was little doubt in my mind before, but there's none now.

StupidiNews!

• Former Alabama State Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore easily defeated GOP Sen. Luther Strange last night in the GOP primary runoff for Jeff Sessions's senate seat, 55-45%.
• The acting director of the Drug Enforcement Agency will step down at the end of the month, citing differences with Trump's comments on how law enforcement should treat suspects.
• Donald Trump will release the outline of the GOP tax overhaul proposal in Indianapolis today, the plan has major tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy but no details on revenue.
• The Trump regime will not lift shipping regulations on Puerto Rico as the vast majority of island residents remain without water, power, and food following Hurricane Maria.
• Twitter is testing users having 280 characters to work with in tweets instead of 140 in an effort to capture new users who may be put off by the lower message limit.

Last Call For The Island Of Misfit Americans, Con't

Pretty sure Donald Trump has no idea how much of a crisis is unfolding in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands this week.  It may be months before the power is back on, and without power, other systems are inoperable to the point of producing a major public health disaster.

Horrifying stories of Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico’s sickest and most vulnerable are now trickling in: a newborn who couldn’t get a scheduled surgery for her heart defectbecause the storm closed down her hospital, an elderly woman with diabetes struggling to keep her life-sustaining insulin cool. 

One theme underlying many of these tales: Power outages throw the health care system into chaos. As Vox’s Brian Resnick explained, the storm knocked out power for the entire island, and five days later, most of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million residents are still in the dark. Some hospitals are now running generators, but many households will have to wait up to six months for power to be restored. 

We often take electricity for granted, and don’t typically associate it with public health. A lot of the ways they’re tied together are hidden. But when the power is out, it becomes painfully clear how much the medical, public health, and sanitation systems rely on the electrical grid to keep people safe and healthy. 

Not long ago, researchers at Public Health England decided to scan the medical literatureto learn what was known about power outages and health with more extreme weather events threatening power systems around the world. They summarized their findings in the only systematic review of the research on the subject — and in this useful chart:

So imagine all the above systems down indefinitely: potable water, transportation, perishable food and medicine storage, communication, safety, and more.  On an island where all these systems are isolated and everything needed to repair these systems has to be shipped in.

Three and a half million people without these systems for months, best case scenario.

And Donald Goddamn Trump in charge of fixing it.

This is going to be an enduring nightmare.  Yes, flooded Houston and the wrecked Florida Keys face a similar situation, but the logistics of getting help to those affected is much easier than getting help to Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands right now.  There's not an immediate public safety crisis for millions brewing.  Yes, recovery for Houston and the Keys will take years, and there's a very good chance both those areas will get struck by another major hurricane again before they can fully recover.

But Puerto Rico, right now, today, is on the brink of disaster.  People aren't going to make it months or even weeks without help now, and Trump is too busy yelling at the teevee for it to matter to him.

This is precisely the scenario I expected would unfold with Trump running the show, and the results are going to be horrific.

Demand All, The Handle Vandals

The Trump regime wants the social media identities of every immigrant in America on file to keep an eye on them in real time, and this apparently includes naturalized citizens and permanent residents.

Federal officials are planning to collect social media information on all immigrants, including permanent residents and naturalized citizens, a move that has alarmed lawyers and privacy groups worried about how the information will be used. 

The Department of Homeland Security published the new rule in the Federal Register last week, saying it wants to include "social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results" as part of people's immigration file. The new requirement takes effect Oct. 18. 

DHS and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Adam Schwartz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for privacy and free expression, said the plan was disturbing. 

"We see this as part of a larger process of high tech surveillance of immigrants and more and more people being subjected to social media screening," Schwartz told BuzzFeed News. "There's a growing trend at the Department of Homeland Security to be snooping on the social media of immigrants and foreigners and we think it's an invasion of privacy and deters freedom of speech." 

This would also affect all US citizens who communicate with immigrants, Schwartz said, who could self censor out of fear that information they exchange with someone overseas could be misconstrued and used against them.

Of course these social media accounts will be flagged for permanent Trump regime surveillance, there's no other reason for DHS or Immigration Services to have this information.  It ridiculous enough that foreigners and immigrants to the US would need to surrender this info, but for naturalized US citizens to do it is crazy.

If that's found to be constitutional, there's no reason not to require this from every American. It's insane and ripe for abuse by both government and corporate actors, not to mention law enforcement and hey, hackers.

But this is where we are now, as we get a little more authoritarian and a little more fascist every day.

The Restaurant At The End Of America

While Trump's "friend" Luther Strange gets his ass handed to him by 18th century Judge Roy Moore in tonight's Alabama Senate primary runoff (Moore has a double-digit lead in nearly every poll) don't feel bad for Donald Trump. Tonight he will be at famous NYC eatery Le Cirque hosting a quarter-million-dollar-a-plate fundraiser for the RNC.

Some of the biggest names in U.S. finance and real estate are expected to gather at New York’s Le Cirque restaurant on Tuesday as President Donald Trump raises money for the Republican National Committee.

For $250,000 a couple, donors can attend a “private roundtable” with the president, while $100,000 will guarantee “VIP access,” according to people with knowledge of the preparations. The minimum donation is $35,000, and about 150 people will probably attend, these people said.

Good money if you can get it.  NYC hated Trump. Now they are coming to Donald to literally pay their respects just to eat dinner with him, and he loves every second of it.

Accompanying the president at Le Cirque will be Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, and Steve Wynn, the casino mogul and RNC finance chairman, the people said, adding that Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. also will be on hand. Many of the anticipated attendees, such as the executives Howard Lorber and Steve Witkoff, come from New York real-estate circles where the president’s career began, the people said.

John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire with interests in real estate, energy and supermarkets, said he might swing by. While the president has “made some mistakes,” Catsimatidis said, donors are happy with the change in tone Trump brought to the White House.

“Don’t forget, under Obama, the business people and the banks were the enemies of Washington,” Catsimatidis said. “The one thing Donald Trump has done is the business people and banks are no longer the enemies, and the business people feel better and they are making investments.”

Yes, this is about raising money for the 2018 fight, but this is more about Trump laying down the law that he's the most powerful man in the world right now.  And Wall Street is starting to get used to Trump being in power, and how it will be very good for them as the GOP tackles massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

They like Trump as long as he delivers, and Republicans haven't been in a position to deliver like this in decades.  Trump's the best chance Wall Street has had at unregulated greed since Reagan, and they know it.

They'll pay out the nose for it too.

StupidiNews!

• As Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins becomes the third announced Republican no vote on the Graham-Cassidy health care bill, both sides are unsure how to proceed on health care reform.
• A greatly weakened Hurricane Maria may brush North Carolina's Outer Banks before heading out into the Atlantic this week as Puerto Rico remains without power, water, food and fuel.
• Alabama Republicans go to the polls today to decide if Sen. Luther Strange will defend the seat once held by AG Jeff Sessions, or if former State Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore will.
• Trump National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster says that the US has multiple scenarios for dealing with the North Korean nuclear crisis, both diplomatic and if necessary, military.
• The nearly year-long union strike for voice actors in video games appears to finally be over, as both SAG-AFTRA and game producers have reached a tentative agreement.

Last Call For Weiners And Losers

Former Dem Congressman Anthony Weiner is going to jail, and rightfully so.

Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman who pleaded guilty in May to sexting with a 15-year-old girl, was sentenced Monday to 21 months in prison. 

Weiner, 53, also faces spending the rest of his life as a registered sex offender for his lengthy and lurid social media contacts with the North Carolina teen. 

Weiner cried as he read from a written statement in Manhattan federal court, saying he was sorry and that he was “a very sick man for a very long time.” 

"The crime I committed was my rock bottom," Weiner said. "I live a different and better life today." 

Weiner, who must report to prison by Nov. 6, wept again after the sentence was announced. 

“This is a serious crime that deserves serious punishment," federal Judge Denise Cote said.

Well Carlos Danger, you're going to be serving that better life in prison for a while, where maybe you can, you know, stop being a sex offender.

Jackass.  Glad to be rid of you for a while at least.

How far he has fallen since first crossing my radar seven years ago.

Zuck Trucks Amok But He Mucked Up

Back in August I came to this conclusion about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's nascent political aspirations:

So here's the exit question folks: which is more frightening? 

One one hand there's the notion that Zuck wants to run the country like he's running Facebook, as the ultimate Silicon Valley dudebro who thinks tech can solve everything. On the other hand there's the notion that he's lost control of his social network behemoth and not even he knows how to fix the fake news spewing volcano that he's helped to unleash under the body politic. 

Neither scenario exactly fills me with confidence.

Several weeks later as the evidence piles up that the Russians gleefully used $100,000 in Facebook ads as a pro-Trump propaganda tool and that Zuckerberg has lost control of the platform he built to the algorithms that rule it, now we find out that Zuckerberg was warned 15 months ago that his big blue toy was a target and that the Facebook founder ignored the warnings.

In the days immediately after the 2016 election, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg seemed offended by suggestions that the social network he created might have had any influence on the outcome, beyond serving as a marketplace for the exchange of ideas. “Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” he said, on stage at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, California. While some were quick to blame Facebook for amplifying misinformation about Hillary Clinton, Zuckerberg suggested that critics were betraying a “profound lack of empathy” by not taking voters who supported Donald Trump seriously. 

Zuckerberg wasn’t wrong to be skeptical of Democrats assigning blame rather than engaging in self-reflection. But in dismissing the possibility that social media might be anything other than a force for good, Zuckerberg was also slow to recognize Facebook’s own vulnerabilities in an age of information warfare. About a week after the Techonomy conference, however, Zuckerberg received a “wake-up call” from President Barack Obama, The Washington Postreports. During a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, nine days after the election, Obama tried to personally appeal to Zuckerberg, warning that unless Facebook did something, its fake-news problem would only be exacerbated in the next presidential election:

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy remedy, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation. 

The account of Zuckerberg’s post-election reckoning also reveals new details about what Facebook executives knew, and when they knew it. The Post reports that Facebook notified the F.B.I. as early as June 2016 when a hacking group working in connection to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence unit, started making fake Facebook profiles to disseminate stolen e-mails and manipulate public opinion—days before Guccifer 2.0, a hacking persona now thought to be a front for Russian intelligence, took credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee. But after looking into the accounts, which were linked to the GRU’s hacking group called APT28 or Fancy Bear, which set up a Facebook profile for Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks, the company came to believe they weren’t linked to a foreign government but were instead financially motivated.

Facebook thought it was about money, not politics.  Then they took the money anyway. Which just goes to show you that the part of technology most vulnerable to manipulation remains the humans who think they control it.

No wonder then that Steve Bannon sought to put a mole among Facebook's staff.

Steve Bannon plotted to plant a mole inside Facebook, according to emails sent days before the Breitbart boss took over Donald Trump’s campaign and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The email exchange with a conservative Washington operative reveals the importance that the giant tech platform — now reeling from its role in the 2016 election — held for one of the campaign’s central figures. And it also shows the lengths to which the brawling new American right is willing to go to keep tabs on and gain leverage over the Silicon Valley giants they used to help elect Trump — but whose executives they also see as part of the globalist enemy. 

The idea to infiltrate Facebook came to Bannon from Chris Gacek, a former congressional staffer who is now an official at the Family Research Council, which lobbies against abortion and many LGBT rights. 

“There is one for a DC-based ‘Public Policy Manager’ at Facebook’s What’s APP [sic] division,” Gacek, the Senior Fellow for Regulatory Affairs at the group, wrote on August 1, 2016. “LinkedIn sent me a notice about some job openings.” 

“This seems perfect for Breitbart to flood the zone with candidates of all stripe who will report back to you / Milo with INTEL about the job application process over at FB," he continued.

Whether or not anything came of it, we don't know.  But the Trump regime certainly knew how important Facebook was to their plans. And in the end, Doctor Zuckenstein here doesn't want to believe that his creation is a dangerous monster that can be used for nefarious purposes.

We're all in trouble as long as this goes on.

The Island Of Misfit Americans

While Trump is doing everything he can to distract from his problems, more than 3 million Americans on Puerto Rico now face a second week without power, and the damage from Hurricanes Irma and Maria were so awful that the island's infrastructure may take months or even years to recover and the immediate humanitarian crisis is far from over.

It’s been less than a week since Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, bisecting the entire island, bringing 150 mph winds and torrential rains to some of its most populated areas. 

But the crisis in Puerto Rico, a US territory whose residents are citizens of the United States, is just beginning, and will likely last months or years. 

Puerto Rico’s entire power grid was knocked offline during the storm. The New York Times reports it could be four to six months before power is restored on the island. That’s half a year relying on generators, half a year without air conditioning in the tropical climate, half a year where even the most basic tasks of modern life are made difficult. And remember: 3.4 million people live there. 

Making life even harder: Cell service is out on almost the entire island, and communications are generally strained. Thousands of people living in the mainland United States with relatives in Puerto Rico have yet to make contact. At least six people died during the storm, but this number could rise due to the fact that news is moving slowly on the communications-choked island. 

Meanwhile, new crises keep forming in the wake of the storm. On Friday, the National Weather Service issued a dire warning about the Guajataca Dam in the northwestern corner of Puerto Rico, which is reported to be near the point of breaking, threatening downstream areas with deadly floods. Seventy thousand people — enough to fill a small city — have been asked to evacuate areas that could be flooded by the nearly 11 billion gallons of water the dam holds back. 

Puerto Rican officials believe the dam’s failure is imminent. “It could be tonight, it could be tomorrow, it could be in the next few days, but it’s very likely [the dam will break] soon,” Christina Villalba, a spokesperson with Puerto Rico’s emergency management agency, told Reuters.

Evacuations of residents in the path of the dam's flood plain are already underway but the island's inhabitants are facing dire circumstances, and this administration and the Congress that doles out the money don't seem concerned in the least to do a single goddamn thing about it.

Sure, the Texas and Florida coasts are still reeling from billions in damage and there are still hundreds of thousands of people dealing with flooded and destroyed homes and no power in the lingering early fall heat.  But that goes for all of Puerto Rico right now and the Trump regime does not give a damn.

We're on our own, guys.  This is life under Trump.

StupidiNews!

• Nashville police say Emanuel Kidega Samson, 25, a Sudanese immigrant, is the suspect in Sunday's deadly church shooting, killing one and injuring seven.
• Donald Trump has signed a new expanded travel ban that includes extreme vetting measures for anyone from Chad, North Korea, and government officials from Venezuela.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has won a fourth term as Germany's leader in Sunday's elections, but for the first time in 60 years a far-right party will have seats in parliament.
• With time running out for a 50-vote reconciliation vote to repeal Obamacare, Republican leaders are mounting a last-ditch effort to pass Graham-Cassidy legislation this week.
• The Department of Justice is taking aim at Google for failing to comply with warrant orders on 22 e-mail accounts, the DoJ is seeking sanctions against the company from a federal judge.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

All I have to say about today's Jared Kushner story in Politico is "But his emails!"

Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.

Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

Aides who have exchanged emails with Kushner on his private account since President Donald Trump took office in January include former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and spokesman Josh Raffel, according to emails described to or shown to POLITICO. In some cases, those White House officials have emailed Kushner’s account first, said people familiar with the messages.

The decision to set up new, private accounts as Kushner was preparing to enter the White House came in the wake of a bitter election campaign in which Trump routinely excoriated his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for using a personal email account to handle government business when she was secretary of state.

There is no indication that Kushner has shared any sensitive or classified material on his private account, or that he relies on his private email account more than his official White House account to conduct government business. Aides say he prefers to call or text over using email.

And so we come full circle on "administration officials using private email addresses" and the same people who assured us this was a sign that Hillary Clinton was completely crooked and unfit for office won't lift a finger over multiple people in the Trump regime doing the exact same thing.

What's Kushner hiding from the American people?  Well, who knows.  But this has been going on for months now, and nobody seems to want to care enough to find out.

Fin. Exeunt stage right.

Trump's Sports Race To The Bottom

Even CNN's Chris Cillizza has figured out that Donald Trump is playing to white supremacy by attacking black NFL and NBA players as "disrepectful" and "ungrateful" for daring to protest.

On one level, this is classic Trump. He feels as though he is being disrespected -- whether by NFL players not standing for the national anthem or by Curry saying if it was up to him, the Golden State Warriors would not visit the White House. (The Warriors, in a statement Saturday afternoon, said they would come to Washington and do events to promote diversity and inclusiveness rather than meet with Trump.) 

They hit him, so he hit back. 

But, there's something far more pernicious here. Both the NFL and the NBA are sports in which the vast majority of the players are black and the vast majority of owners are white. In the NFL, there are 0 black owners of the 32 teams. In the NBA, Michael Jordan is the lone black owner of a team. 

Consider that in the context of what Trump said both Friday night and Saturday.
In Alabama, Trump called the players who refuse to stand for the anthem "sons of bitches" and insisted that any owner worth his or her salt should fire them immediately.
That got a lot of attention -- and rightly so. But it's what Trump said next that's really telling. "Total disrespect of our heritage, a total disrespect of everything that we stand for," he said --- adding for emphasis: "Everything that we stand for." 

Notice the use of "our heritage" and "we" in those two sentences above. 

But wait, there's more. In both his Curry tweet and his two NFL tweets, Trump expressed frustration that these lucky athletes felt the need to be ungrateful. 

Trump noted the "great honor" of going to the White House and the "privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL." You should just be thankful for what you have and not be making any trouble, Trump is telling these players. 

Here's the thing: Even if we lived in a color-blind society, that would be a dangerous sentiment. After all, freedom of expression is right there in the First Amendment. And our brave soldiers didn't fight and die so that everyone stood during the national anthem. They fought so people could have the right to make a choice about whether or not they wanted to stand. That's the whole damn point of the First Amendment. 

The thing is: We don't live in a color-blind society. Slavery sits at the founding roots of America. The goal of racial equality remains a goal, not an achievement. To pretend otherwise is to willfully blind yourself to hundreds years of history.

And I will say this again: it's so obvious that this is being driven by Trump's racial animus towards successful black people (and there's a slew of successful black people that Trump has personally singled out and attacked, reporter April Ryan,  Merck CEO Ken Frazier, sportscaster Jemelle Hill, now Colin Kaepernick and the NBA's Steph Curry)

Everything you need to know about this is that several NFL players not only took a knee during the anthem to protest this week, at least three teams, the Steelers, the Titans and Seahawks skipped the anthem altogether.  Meanwhile, NASCAR owners say they will happily take retribution out on drivers and crew who get the idea to join the protest.

Sports and protest, especially civil rights protests, have long been part of America.  For Trump to not see this coming is ridiculous. Some even say he's counting on it.

We'll see.

Sunday Long Read: Just The Facts, Ma'am

This week's Sunday Long Read delves into the arguably the last real bastion of fact-checking in the internet era: the man behind fake news-debunking website Snopes. In the era of Trump, they are being inundated more than ever by falsities to debunk, and they're trying their hardest to be up to the task.

IT WAS EARLY March, not yet two months into the Trump administration, and the new Not-Normal was setting in: It continued to be the administration’s position, as enunciated by Sean Spicer, that the inauguration had attracted the “largest audience ever”; barely a month had passed since Kellyanne Conway brought the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” to national attention; and just for kicks, on March 4, the president alerted the nation by tweet, “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

If the administration had tossed the customs and niceties of American politics to the wind, there was one clearly identifiable constant: mendacity. “Fake news” accusations flew back and forth every day, like so many spitballs in a third-grade classroom.

Feeling depressed about the conflation of fiction and fact in the first few months of 2017, I steered a car into the hills of Calabasas to meet with one person whom many rely on to set things straight. This is an area near Los Angeles best known for its production of Kardashians, but there were no McMansions on the street where I was headed, only old, gnarled trees and a few modest houses. I spotted the one I was looking for—a ramshackle bungalow—because the car in the driveway gave it away. Its license plate read SNOPES.

David Mikkelson, the publisher of the fact-checking site Snopes.com, answered the door himself. He was wearing khakis and a polo shirt, his hair at an awkward length, somewhere between late-­career Robert Redford and early-­career Steve Carell. He had been working alone at the kitchen table, with just a laptop, a mouse, and the internet. The house, which he was getting ready to sell, was sparsely furnished, the most prominent feature being built-in bookcases filled with ancient hardcovers—“there’s a whole shelf devoted to the Titanic and other maritime disasters,” Mikkelson told me—and board games, his primary hobby.

Since about 2010, this house has passed for a headquarters, as Snopes has no formal offices, just 16 people sitting at their laptops in different rooms across the country, trying to swim against the tide of spin, memes, and outright lies in the American public sphere. Just that morning Mikkelson and his staff had been digging into a new presidential tweet of dubious facticity: “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” Trump had the correct total, but the overwhelming number of those detainees had been released during the George W. Bush administration. “There’s a whole lot of missing context to just that 122 number,” Mikkelson said.

There are other fact-checking outfits, like PolitiFact, which is operated by the Tampa Bay Times, or FactCheck.org at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. But Snopes has kicked around the internet since 1994—which makes it almost as old as what we once called the World Wide Web. In this age of untruth, it has become an indispensable resource. Should your friend’s sister start a conspiracy trash fire in a Facebook comment thread, Snopes is a reliable form of extinguisher. Because of this reputation, Snopes was listed as a partner in a Facebook fact-­checking effort announced last fall after the social media giant acknowledged it had become a conduit for fake news. Potentially false stories could be flagged by users and an algorithm, and then organizations like Snopes, ABC News, and the Associated Press would be tasked with investigating them.

As pretty much anyone knows, the truth can be a slippery bastard. Getting to the bottom of something requires what you might generously call a fussy personality. Mikkelson possesses that trait. He spends hours writing a detailed analysis of a claim and feels frustrated when readers just want a “true” or “false” answer. He’s got the world­view of Eeyore, had Eeyore been obsessed with cataloging the precise history, variety, and growing seasons of thistles in the Hundred Acre Wood. He can even get pessimistic about whether his work makes a difference. “Since a lot of this stuff is really complicated, nuanced stuff with areas of gray, it requires lengthy and complex explanations,” he said. “But a lot of the audience, their eyes just tend to glaze over, and it’s just, they don’t want to have to follow all of that. So they just fall back on their preconceptions.”

Among those preconceptions is the right-wing view that Snopes is anti-Trump, its efforts to separate fact from fiction merely a cover for liberal bias. Mikkelson disputes this, saying that if you look at the totality of the posts Snopes has written on the subject of the president, “the vast majority of them are debunking false claims made about him, not affirming negative things said about him or disproving positive things said about him.” But nobody is looking at the totality; if that sort of intellectual honesty ever existed in the public sphere, it’s gone now. And sure enough, the week before I went to Calabasas, Tucker Carlson on Fox News had been jeering at “those holy men at Snopes, those gods of objectivity.”

Like an order of medieval monks recording history in the midst of chaos of the Dark Ages, the crew at Snopes are trying to preserve fact in a world of perception, manipulation, and obfuscation. And they need help.

We'll see how long they can hold on.