Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan, Con't

When we last checked in with Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, his bluff on threatening to end Medicaid expansion and revoke medical coverage for 450,000+ Kentuckians was called out in a major way as a federal judge blocked Bevin's plan to make Kentucky the first state to subject Medicaid recipients to work requirements.

A federal judge in Washington D.C. has struck down Kentucky's plan to start requiring some Medicaid recipients to work or volunteer in order to continue receiving benefits.

The ruling blocks Gov. Matt Bevin's administration from implementing the change, which was scheduled to start Monday in one Northern Kentucky county and extend to most of the rest of the state by the end of the year.

When the requirements were first challenged in January, Bevin warned that if the work requirements were defeated in court, he would unilaterally end Medicare expansion in the state and nearly a half-million Kentuckians -- more than 10% of the state -- would immediately lose health care coverage as a result.  He wasted no time in taking those hostages. 

Now it seems Bevin is slicing off fingers as proof he's willing to hurt as many of those hostages as possible...or in this case, he's sending back eyes and teeth.

Gov. Matt Bevin's administration announced it is cutting Medicaid dental and vision benefits to nearly half a million Kentuckians after a judge on Friday rejected his plan to overhaul the government health plan. 

The decision prompted an outcry Monday from Democrats who called the Republican governor's move rash, harsh and possibly illegal. 

"We've got to have the public rise up," said U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville. "This is going to be extremely dangerous for the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky." 

On Sunday, the Bevin administration in an email described the cuts as "an unfortunate consequence of the judge's ruling." 

On Monday, it followed with a statement saying it was "working through" impacts of the judge's order and that it hopes to "quickly resolve the fallout from the court ruling." 

Democrats including Yarmuth, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer, several state legislators and Louisville Metro Council President David James held a press conference to denounce the cuts, which were made after Bevin's Medicaid overhaul was rejected by a federal judge in Washington D.C. 

Medicaid, an $11 billion-a-year health plan in Kentucky, covers about 1.4 million people, more than 600,000 of them children. The federal government provides about 80 percent of the money for Kentucky's Medicaid program. 

Bevin's changes to Medicaid that include work requirements, premiums and other new rules, were to take effect Sunday. 

But on Friday, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg vacated Bevin's entire plan and sent it back to officials at the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services for further review, The judge said the Trump administration, in approving the plan, didn't consider the basic provisions of federal Medicaid law, which is to provide access to health care for low-income and vulnerable citizens. 

Speakers on Monday expressed outrage at Bevin's cuts. 

Fischer called Bevin's actions "unnecessary and callous." State Sen. Gerald Neal called the cuts "not only a rash step, but a harsh step."

And state Rep. McKenzie Cantrell, a Democrat from South Louisville, said the impact is hardest on the many poor people covered by Medicaid who work at low-wage jobs and are struggling to keep up with all the changes. 

"It's red tape for poor people," she said.

So Bevin has now taken vision and dental care away from more than 10% of the state, just to be an asshole.  Personally, I've never wanted a man to be defeated more soundly in a Governor's race than I do right now. 

Matt Bevin should resign in utter shame and he should have to face the hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians whose lives he just directly harmed through his complete disregard for human dignity.

When I say Republicans exist to punish the people Obama and the Democrats helped, this is exactly what I mean.  They are emotionally cauterized sociopaths.

And Matt Bevin?  He's one of the worst of the lot.

The Revenge Of Timmy And The Paydays

In the Trump era where the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been all but shut down, Dodd-Frank legislative provisions have been rolled back, and the Trump tax bill has put billions upon billions more in the pockets of Wall Street, it should be no surprise that the same guys who got us into subprime housing are now going into the payday lender business.

Meet Mariner Financial, who will literally give money away to customers...and then use its crushing corporate power to take twice the loan back, plus interest.

Mass-mailing checks to strangers might seem like risky business, but Mariner Finance occupies a fertile niche in the U.S. economy. The company enables some of the nation’s wealthiest investors and investment funds to make money offering high-interest loans to cash-strapped Americans.

Mariner Finance is owned and managed by a $11.2 billion private equity fund controlled by Warburg Pincus, a storied New York firm. The president of Warburg Pincus is Timothy F. Geithner, who, as treasury secretary in the Obama administration, condemned predatory lenders. The firm’s co-chief executives, Charles R. Kaye and Joseph P. Landy, are established figures in New York’s financial world. The minimum investment in the fund is $20 million. 

That's right, our old friend Timmy is back, and he's in the legal loan shark business.

And business is booming.

Dozens of other investment firms bought Mariner bonds last year, allowing the company to raise an additional $550 million. That allowed the lender to make more loans to people like Huggins. 

“It’s basically a way of monetizing poor people,” said John Lafferty, who was a manager trainee at a Mariner Finance branch for four months in 2015 in Nashville. His misgivings about the business echoed those of other former employees contacted by The Washington Post. “Maybe at the beginning, people thought these loans could help people pay their electric bill. But it has become a cash cow.” 

The market for “consumer installment loans,” which Mariner and its competitors serve, has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly as new federal regulations have curtailed payday lending, according to the Center for Financial Services Innovation, a nonprofit research group. Private equity firms, with billions to invest, have taken significant stakes in the growing field. 

Among its rivals, Mariner stands out for the frequent use of mass-mailed checks, which allows customers to accept a high-interest loan on an impulse — just sign the check. It has become a key marketing method. 

Just sign on the dotted line and cash the check.

And then the goon squad shows up to break your neck.

The company’s other tactics include borrowing money for as little as 4 or 5 percent — thanks to the bond market — and lending at rates as high as 36 percent, a rate that some states consider usurious; making millions of dollars by charging borrowers for insurance policies of questionable value; operating an insurance company in the Turks and Caicos, where regulations are notably lax, to profit further from the insurance policies; and aggressive collection practices that include calling delinquent customers once a day and embarrassing them by calling their friends and relatives, customers said.

Finally, Mariner enforces its collections with a busy legal operation, funded in part by the customers themselves: The fine print in the loan contracts obliges customers to pay as much as an extra 20 percent of the amount owed to cover Mariner’s attorney fees, and this has helped fund legal proceedings that are both voluminous and swift. Last year, in Baltimore alone, Mariner filed nearly 300 lawsuits. In some cases, Mariner has sued customers within five months of the check being cashed.

And all of this is 100% legal thanks to Trump and the GOP.  Oh, and Obama's Treasury Secretary, who definitely landed on his feet.

There are tons of these Wall Street-funded "finance companies" around.  Just here in NKY, there's Eagle Finance, One Main Financial, Heights Finance Corporation, Regency Finance Company, Republic Finance, and of course Mariner Finance, all within 5 miles of where I live.

Oh, and it's Kentucky, so the payday lenders are still there too.

But remember, the economy is doing great, right?

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Trump's trade war continues as new tariffs take effect this week against US products in Canada and China, and Trump seems fully committed to a full-scale conflict with the EU as well which could lead to a major economic depression in the US.

President Trump defiantly stood by his tariffs on Sunday as Canada hit back hard, Mexico elected a new leader who seems prepared to confront him, and the European Union issued a scathing condemnation of his policy as “in effect, a tax on the American people.”

Instead of backing down, Trump brushed off the mounting pressure from businesses and world leaders to scale back the taxes before they cause additional job losses and slower economic growth.

This week will be a critical test of Trump’s resolve as Canada on Sunday imposed tariffs on $12.6 billion of U.S. products and China is set to levy high tariffs on $34 billion worth of American goods, including soybeans, on Friday, the same day that Trump plans to tax an additional $34 billion worth of Chinese items.

The additional taxes make it harder for U.S. companies and farmers to sell some items abroad, and they raise costs on many products used in U.S. manufacturing. But Trump shrugged off fears that the tariffs will hurt the economy.

“Every country is calling every day, saying, ‘Let’s make a deal, let’s make a deal.’ It’s going to all work out,” Trump said Sunday, echoing his remarks earlier in the year that trade wars are “easy to win.”

Despite Trump’s rhetoric, concerns are growing that Trump’s appetite for tariffs only appears to be expanding as trade tensions escalate. Many who argued that Trump was just threatening tariffs as a negotiating tactic and would never let the skirmish intensify are now saying they may have miscalculated.

Trump said in an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that the European Union is just as bad as China on trade and that he didn’t intend to sign a new North American Free Trade Agreement deal until after the midterm elections in November.

“The European Union is possibly as bad as China, just smaller,” Trump said Sunday, pointing to the “car situation.”

The E.U. sent Trump’s Commerce Department an 11-page document on Friday threatening that the global community would put tariffs on up to $290 billion of U.S. products if Trump moves forward with tariffs on foreign autos, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post.

“Protective measures would undermine U.S. growth, negatively impact job creation, and not improve the trade balance,” E.U. leaders wrote, adding that auto tariffs would “damage further the reputation of the United States.”

Trump is now engaged in trade fights with most of the world’s major economies, including China, the European Union and Japan. Although Trump speaks periodically with leaders from these nations, formal trade talks have stalled with most of them as the two sides remain far apart and foreign countries say Trump’s wishes are unclear.

Trump's going to "win" this trade war no matter how many thousands, if not millions, of US jobs it costs. On top of all this, Trump wants the GOP Congress to pass a bill that would effectively allow Trump to go around the World Trade Organization and unilaterally make tariff decisions at will.

Amazingly enough, the draft legislation is currently titled the "United States Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act" which for those of you playing at home means that the bill would be the US FART Act.

This is who is running things in Washington right now, guys.

A walking fart joke.

StupidiNews!

• Leftist populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has easily won Mexico's presidential election on Sunday, Lopez Obrador will take office on December 1.
• Virginia GOP chairman John Whitbeck has resigned rather than working with GOP Senate candidate and white nationalist Corey Stewart, who promises a "vicious" campaign against Dem Sen. Tim Kaine.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is in trouble as German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is threatening to resign over Merkel's opposition to stiff new asylum limitations.
• The Trump regime's move to ban the spouses of H-1B work visa holders from taking any US job could cost up to 100,000 jobs or more as Trump plans yet another reversal of Obama administration policy.
• The suspect in last week's Annapolis shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper was identified using facial recognition technology after police discovered he had damaged his fingerprints.

Last Call For Hook 'Em While They're Young

The backlash against same-sex marriage and the nation's first black President has caught Generation Z squarely in its crosshairs, and America's colleges are being bombarded with hate speech that is increasingly finding purchase among a group that has never had their worldview challenged.

“Not Stolen. Conquered,” a flier found in a music building at San Diego State University read. “Your professor is scared of this book,” read a sticker outside a building at New York’s Baruch College, referring to a work by white nationalist Jared Taylor.

White supremacist propaganda on college campuses is on the rise, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. The nonprofit found 292 occurrences on campuses located in the District and 47 states, a 77 percent increase, compared with the 2016-2017 school year. The ADL relied on news reports, community complaints and extremist sources to complete the report, according to Oren Segal, director of the group’s Center on Extremism.

The propaganda typically appeared on stickers, posters, banners and fliers, and it varied from “veiled white supremacist language to explicitly racist images and words that attack minority groups, including Jews, Blacks, Muslims, nonwhite immigrants, and the LGBTQ community,” the report said.

“College campuses and their communities should be places for learning, growing and the future, not close-minded racism and hate-filled rhetoric from the past,” the ADL’s national director, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement. “We’re concerned to see that white supremacists are accelerating their efforts to target schools with propaganda in hopes of recruiting young people to support their bigoted worldview.”

[Hate groups make unprecedented push to recruit on college campuses]

The report highlighted Identity Evropa, an organization founded in 2016 that recruits college-age people though banners, stickers and online propaganda.

These Identity Evropa guys are 100% bad news, and in the era of Trumpian propaganda, they're going for broke with an audience that has never even considered building up a resistance to it.

The group was responsible for 48 percent of reported incidents in the past two years, the report found. In January, members posted fliers over historically significant African American images outside the black studies department at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, the report said.

“The ADL is clearly reporting in error or negligence, as the blanket allegations reflect neither Identity Evropa nor any statement from a current representative,” spokesman Sam Harrington said in an email. Harrington said the group is “seeking a better future for European Americans” and does not advocate for “supremacy, violence or illegal activity.”

“The ADL, and organizations like it, are attempting to stifle free debate and will continue to lose trust with the thinking public,” Harrington added.

The nonprofit describes Identity Evropa as a white supremacist group that avoids recognizable language and imagery on its symbols in an attempt to enter mainstream conservatism.

Members were present at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference and last year’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The night before the protest turned deadly, participants chanted their mantra, “you will not replace us.” The chant, Harrington said, refers to people “who believe there is something to be gained from demographically replacing European Americans through immigration [to the United States] and globalization.”

These guys grew up on FOX News and Alex Jones, mistaking shock value contrarianism for intellectual prowess.  It's not that they lost trust in government and institutions, it's that they never had it in the first place.  They grew up on rampant Islamophobia, conspiracy theories, racism, bigotry, and hatred.

And then they got to college and found an all-you-can-eat bigotry buffet and a kindred spirit in the White House.  It's been a long time coming, but it's here.  America's in serious danger of going 25, 50, 100 years backwards.

We have to fight it every step.

The Roe Tradeoff Begins

Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins is shopping her no vote on Trump's SCOTUS pick to Blue Dog Democrats in the Senate who will almost certainly vote yes in order to maintain the moderate line, even though Trump will repeatedly attack them by name and encourage his supporters to do the same over the next four months, as this is how the Senate works in 2018.

The Republican senator, a supporter of abortion rights, said Roe v. Wade is settled law that has been established as a constitutional right.

"A candidate who would overturn Roe would not be acceptable," she said.

Collins added that she urged the president to expand the number of people he is considering for the high court beyond his initial list.

She said there are people on Trump's list she could not support "because I believe that they have demonstrated a disrespect for the vital principle of stare decisis," which is Latin for judicial precedent.

The Maine Republican added that "it would be inappropriate" to ask a judicial nominee how they are going to vote on a future case.

"A discussion of precedent, however, is very important," Collins said. "What I want to see is a nominee who, regardless of his or her personal views on the very difficult and contentious life issue, is going to respect precedent, regardless."

Collins said, "A number of judges [have told her] that good judges are always unhappy with some of their decisions but they make the right call regardless of their personal views. And that’s what I want to see in this nominee."

Collins also left herself an out with weasel words over "respecting precedent", but the other four conservatives on the court, including Trump's first pick, Justice Neil Gorsuch, have shown no problem destroying precedent in the most recent term when it comes to serving corporations and the culture war on the right.

Also, let's remember Susan Collins had zero problems confirming Gorsuch, neither did John McCain, and Democratic Blue Dogs Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Manchin all voted yes too. I expect an almost identical vote despite Gorsuch's many promises in early 2017 that he would respect precedent.  In his first term, he helped destroy decades-long precedents in labor union law, voting rights, and separation of church and state.

Whoever Trump picks will be willing to overturn precedent.  It will be obvious from their judicial opinions what they are going to do, which is why Trump is going to pick them.  Sometime in the next 12-24 months, there will be a 5-4 decision to overturn Roe and leave abortion decisions up to states.  Most likely, same-sex marriage will follow.  A lot of federal rights will be returned to states, and a lot of states will say no to these rights.

It's not going to be a fun time for America.  And it won't be entirely Susan Collins's fault, but she's playing her part right now.  Don't be fooled for a moment.

Sunday Long Read: A Neighborhood In Canada

Before Fred Rogers changed American television forever with his PBS show, he appeared on Canadian TV for the CBC in a very similar show a few years earlier called Misterogers, and Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt Magazine has this look at his days as our northern neighbor.

This is the Fred Rogers we know: a thin, wholesome man straight out of a small-town pulpit, with a gentle manner, who looks directly at us, speaks slowly and tells us that he likes us just the way we are. This is the man Canadians have been watching since October 1963, when Misterogers was a fifteen-minute black-and-white children’s program on the CBC that lasted nine months. The show ended four years before the power of American broadcasting would crack it in two. The host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was almost identical to this one. Almost.

In the archives of the CBC’s headquarters in downtown Toronto, there is a longer master recording of a Christmas eve episode of the Canadian series. In it, guest Tom Kneebone finishes a discussion with the puppet X the Owl, who has been peeking out of a tree trunk, animated by the arm of Fred Rogers. The host only appears in this “neighbourhood of make-believe” in marionette form. The camera remains trained on the scene, when, suddenly, the illusion is broken as Rogers’s head emerges on the other side of the wall by the tree. He appears to be attempting to swiftly and unobtrusively make his way to another location. Owl still on his arm, a rushed-off-his feet Rogers turns to the camera and says, exasperated and apologetic, “I’m sorry, you’ll just have to…” motioning for either a cut away or another take.

This outtake from the prototype of one of the most popular children’s shows in the world recalls an aphorism from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, which would later appear in calligraphy form on the wall of Rogers’s office: “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” which reads in English, “The essential is invisible to the eye.”

Visiting the archives of Canada’s public broadcaster this past May was more complex than usual due to increased security in the building. Five days after Alek Minassian had killed ten people and injured multiple others by driving a white van through a crowd, Canadaland reported that a post had appeared on the Incels.me message board with the subject, “[Serious] our next task: shooting up CBC headquarters.” The post has since been removed, but reportedly called for “killing as many of those evil whores and normies reporters as possible.” The term which gives the message board its name refers to “involuntary celibates,” men who make up the misogynistic online subculture Minassian is believed to have been a part. The poster used Minassian’s image as an avatar. It was a disconcerting feeling, sitting in that office, watching archival footage of Fred Rogers, while being closely monitored by security, and wondering if some guy might enter the room and shoot me because he felt he had been overlooked by my entire gender.

The van attack was the sort of event that Rogers, were he alive, would be called to speak about. On the first anniversary of September 11th, he recorded a message which included the words, “I’m so grateful to you for helping the children in your life to know that you’ll do everything you can to keep them safe and to help them express their feelings in ways that will bring healing in many different neighborhoods.” We continue to feel comforted by Rogers, even after his death. His quote about helpers—“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping’”—has gone viral after various school shootings and, more recently, the Manchester attack. “The underlying message of the Neighborhood is that if somebody cares about you, it’s possible that you’ll care about others,” he told Christianity Today. “‘You are special, and so is your neighbor’—that part is essential: that you’re not the only special person in the world.”

What prompted his desire to deliver this message to children? Maxwell King, author of the forthcoming The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, thinks it was rooted in Rogers’s own experience growing up. Though he was brought up in a wealthy family in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Rogers was often isolated. “I had every childhood disease that came down the pike,” he told Wigwag magazine in 1989, “even scarlet fever.” Boys in the ’30s were expected to get “their hands dirty,” according to Canada’s first research chair in Masculinities Studies, University of Calgary’s Michael Kehler, but Rogers’s various ailments may have afforded him a pass for being unlike the others. “Sad though it is, you would get more sympathy for being a little more emotional, a little less aggressive, because it would be explained away as, ‘well, he’s not right,’” says Kehler. Opposing the era’s favoured seen-and-not-heard approach to children, Rogers’s family gave him “a lot of very careful attention, they took him very seriously, they listened to him, they talked to him a lot,” says King. “I think he wanted in his work to provide some of that for children but also to do work that parents could learn from.”

His guardians provided powerful examples. Fred’s grandmother, Nancy McFeely, bought him a piano, which encouraged him to express his feelings through music. Though it was his grandfather, also his namesake, who would leave the biggest impression, telling him , “You made this day a really special day. Just by being yourself,” a sentiment Fred would later repeat on Misterogers. It was a small statement, but a radical one considering boys then were not encouraged to be themselves. “Childhood at that time was a grooming to be just like your dad,” Kehler explains, what he calls “lock-step masculinity.” And while Fred’s father was powerful—he was an affluent brick manufacturer—his son was not. A chubby child, Fred was one day chased down the street by a bunch of kids taunting him with the nickname Fat Freddy. “I resented those kids for not seeing beyond my fatness or my shyness,” he wrote in his memoir, Life’s Journeys According to Mr. Rogers. “And I didn’t know that it was all right to resent it, to feel bad about it, even to feel very sad about it.” He was sad for years, according to friend Amy Hollingsworth in the documentary Mister Rogers & Me, but then one day he made a decision: “He would always look for what’s not apparent to the eye.”

The Focus Features documentary of Fred Rogers, his life, and his work, Won't You Be My Neighbor, is currently in theaters.  I have some time next week and hopefully I'll get to see it.  I grew up with Mr. Rogers in the 80's and the lessons he taught stayed with me: be a good neighbor, be a good friend, be a good person.

We need that lesson more than ever in 2018.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Don't look now, but the lock on Miami-Dade County's commission District 5 seat by Cuban-American Republicans in Little Havana was broken a couple weeks ago when Democratic candidate Eileen Higgins won and won big.

Eileen Higgins’s surprise victory in a heavily Hispanic district has deeply unsettled Republicans in South Florida, where local elections have long been determined by ethnicity. Now, some Republicans worry that her win portends more losses for the party in November. Democrats have won three consecutive special elections in Miami-Dade County over the past nine months.

“The blue wave is not coming,” said Jesse Manzano-Plaza, a veteran Republican political consultant who said he had been doubted by many in his party when he warned that Ms. Higgins could pull off an upset. “The blue wave came.”

Ms. Higgins’s win cemented the belief held by Democrats — and, privately, by many Republicans — that the 27th Congressional District, a Republican-held seat that includes all of Ms. Higgins’s county commission district, is likely to flip. But strategists from both parties see a far more significant development: a fundamental realignment of South Florida politics, which could in turn have consequences for all of the state.

For years, South Florida’s Cuban community voted reliably for Cuban-American candidates in local elections. Most often, those candidates were Republican: Three Hispanic-majority congressional seats are held by the party. The county mayor, perhaps the most powerful local official, is also a Republican.

But if Hispanic voters can no longer be counted on to favor Hispanic candidates, Mr. Manzano-Plaza said, then an increasing number of districts here might start performing as they do in state and national elections: blue. The presumed front-runner in the 27th District, the Democratic-leaning seat being vacated by Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican who is retiring, is Donna Shalala, a Democrat who is not Hispanic. Another non-Hispanic Democrat, Mary Barzee Flores, is challenging Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican, in a safer Republican seat.

“I don’t know if we want to call it a sign of maturity, but for many years in Miami-Dade County, ethnicity trumped party,” said Mr. Manzano-Plaza, who is Cuban-American. “We ran this town for 30 years like that. Now, potentially, we’re about to have a congressional district from South Florida that has a majority-Hispanic seat represented by an Anglo. I don’t think we’re understanding the impact that this has.” 

Turning around the once-hapless Democratic Party in Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county, could go a long way in allowing Democrats to win control in Tallahassee and Washington, said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic political consultant who ran Ms. Higgins’s campaign. Republicans control the governor’s mansion and State Legislature, and a majority of congressional seats.

“If you go back in history, it was the rise of the Cuban-American base in Miami-Dade that propelled the Republican Party of Florida to get power,” Mr. Ulvert said. “History is repeating itself — it’s the changing of the guard in Miami-Dade that’s likely going to propel the rise of the Florida Democratic Party.”

You have to go no further than Trump's policy towards Latinx folks in America to see why this is happening.   His reversal of relations with Cuba, his dereliction of duty towards Puerto Rico, calling Central American asylum-seeker criminals and vermin, putting kids in cages?

Did anyone think that would help the GOP in Florida with Cuban-American voters?

Republicans in Florida are in full panic mode.  If the state goes blue, and every indication is we've reached that inflection point heading into 2018 and 2020, then the GOP is done and they know it.  Without Florida, they cannot take the White House.

The blue wave hits hardest here.

Weaponizing The First Amendment

NY Times reporter Adam Liptak follows up on Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's end-of-term warning that the the right is "weaponizing" the FIrst Amendment in order to use it against classic liberalism in order to curtail labor, civil, voting, and human rights.

“The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.”

Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

Take pornography and street protests. Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship. Now many on the left see pornography as an assault on women’s rights.

In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va.

There was a certain naïveté in how liberals used to approach free speech, said Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

“Because so many free-speech claims of the 1950s and 1960s involved anti-obscenity claims, or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless,” he said. “But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that. The question, then, is why the left ever believed otherwise.”

Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo.

“When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” said Louis Michael Seidman, a law professor at Georgetown. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.”

To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a collection of essays to be published this year.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” she wrote. “Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”

And that's where we are.  The right constantly uses the rights of free speech and religious freedom to justify actions taken against others, and then to prevent the government from curtailing those action, no matter who is harmed in the process.  It's patently ridiculous, and yet it's where we are.

It's not an accident that the right constantly conflates being able to discriminate and preventing the government from censorship as "First Amendment rights".  They've been doing it for decades, guys.  Their entire legal framework is built on it.  It's also no mistake that they are constantly conflating the right to discriminate and the right to not be discriminated against too.  They believe in both, but only if it applies to themselves.

And not anyone else.

Your Even A Stopped Clock Can Be Right Alert

For the first time in years, Dana "Dickwhisperer" Milbank actually wrote something that I didn't want to use a wrapping paper for fish and chips as he notes that Orange Julius's "hell no" 2010 speech on Obamacare warning the Dems what was coming is where Mitch McConnell and the GOP are now as the blue wave roars towards them.

Now I think I know how Boehner felt in 2010. We see Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowing to ram through the Senate the confirmation of the decisive fifth hard-right justice on the Supreme Court, quite likely signaling the end of legal abortion in much of the United States and possibly same-sex marriage and other rights Americans embrace, in far greater number, than they ever did Obamacare.

One wants to cry out: Hell no, you can’t! But Republicans can. They have the votes. Democrats can and should fight, but the GOP controls the schedule, sets the rules and already eliminated the procedures that gave the minority a say in Supreme Court confirmations.

If anything, the fury should be far more intense on the Democratic side right now than it was for Boehner in 2010. The Affordable Care Act was the signature proposal of a president elected with a large popular mandate, it had the support of a plurality of the public, and it was passed by a party that had large majorities in both chambers of Congress and had attempted to solicit the participation of the minority.

Now we have a Supreme Court nomination — the second in as many years — from an unpopular president who lost the popular vote by 2.8 million. The nominee will be forced through by also-unpopular Senate Republicans, who, like House Republicans, did not win a majority of the vote in 2016.

Compounding the outrage, each of the prospective nominees is all but certain, after joining the court, to support the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade, which has held the nation together in a tenuous compromise on abortion for 45 years and is supported by two-thirds of Americans . For good measure, the new justice may well join the other four conservative justices in revoking same-sex marriage, which also has the support of two-thirds of Americans. And this comes after the Republicans essentially stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

You can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.

In a way Milbank is right, but frankly the Republicans have been getting away with it through incrementally tightening the screws on Democrats and making it harder and harder to resist them at the ballot box that voting alone isn't going to stop the GOP at this point.

We're going to be in the streets this summer, and long after I suspect as the Mueller investigation reaches its conclusion.  This is the part where we have to step in and do things, guys.

The conflict is coming.  It's been coming for years, but at this point it's time to admit that it's finally here.

 

Meanwhile In Bevinstan, Con't

Some rare good news here out of the Christian Republic of Bevinstan for once as a federal judge has struck down GOP Gov. Matt Bevin's Medicaid work requirements as "arbitrary and capricious".

A federal judge in Washington D.C. has struck down Kentucky's plan to start requiring some Medicaid recipients to work or volunteer in order to continue receiving benefits.
The ruling blocks Gov. Matt Bevin's administration from implementing the change, which was scheduled to start Monday in one Northern Kentucky county and extend to most of the rest of the state by the end of the year. 

Sixteen Kentucky Medicaid recipients sued the federal government in January to block Bevin's planned changes to the state's Medicaid program. The plaintiffs claim that Bevin's plan — known as Kentucky HEALTH — should not have been approved; they say it violates the 1965 law establishing Medicaid because it will reduce poor people's access to health care. 

Simultaneously, to uphold Kentucky HEALTH, Bevin is suing those same 16 Medicaid recipients in Frankfort before U.S. District Judge Gregory VanTatenhove. 

The Frankfort lawsuit is about a month behind its Washington counterpart, setting up the possibility that a judge in one federal circuit could strike down Bevin's Medicaid changes while a judge in another could say that he had every right to make them. 

Bevin says that if he loses in court and cannot prevail on appeal, he will end expanded Medicaid in Kentucky, which has extended health coverage to about 400,000 people with incomes just above the poverty line. 

"Kentucky HEALTH was developed in Kentucky for Kentuckians, and its validity ought to be decided in Kentucky," Bevin's attorney, Stephen Pitt, wrote in a May court filing before VanTatenhove. "This matter should be decided quickly so that the commonwealth can move forward with Kentucky HEALTH or withdraw from expanded Medicaid." 

While much of the controversy over Kentucky HEALTH has focused on Bevin’s 80-hour-a-month "community engagement" requirement, which could be satisfied by work, school or volunteering, the Washington-based suit also called attention to other new hurdles that Medicaid recipients will have to jump in order to keep their coverage. 

Those hurdles include monthly premiums, initially from $1 to $15, although they eventually top out at $37.50; monthly check-ins to report employment and income status; annual re-enrollments; and ongoing verification of extra tasks people must complete if they want to win back the vision and dental coverage they previously had as part of their basic coverage. 

Missing a payment or notification could trigger a six-month lockout on basic health coverage. Missing the enrollment window could mean waiting nine more months for the next opportunity. 

The Bevin administration estimates 95,000 people will lose their coverage over the next five years out of the more than 400,000 Kentuckians just above the poverty line who are currently enrolled in expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Bevin made this bluff back in January that if the courts blocked these work requirements, that he'd end Medicaid for 10% of the state or so.  He's locked into that now, as that bluff has been called.

What will he do?

We'll find out.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

As I keep telling folks, the Trump regime's goal is not to end illegal immigration, it's to end legal immigration as well as to revoke citizenship from undesirables.  Trump and his white supremacists want to roll back as much of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act as possible.  Part of that goal is to stop as many people as possible from entering the US, and that means ending asylum.

The Department of Justice, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is drafting a plan that would totally overhaul asylum policy in the United States. 

Under the plan, people would be barred from getting asylum if they came into the US between ports of entry and were prosecuted for illegal entry. It would also add presumptions that would make it extremely difficult for Central Americans to qualify for asylum, and codify — in an even more restrictive form — an opinion written by Sessions in June that attempted to restrict asylum for victims of domestic and gang violence. 

Vox has confirmed that the regulation is in the process of being evaluated, and has seen a copy of a draft of the regulation. 

When the regulation is ready, it will be published in the Federal Register as a notice of proposed rulemaking, with 90 days for the public to comment before it’s enacted as a final regulation. 

The version Vox saw may change before it’s finalized, or even before the proposal is published in the Federal Register. (The Department of Justice declined to comment.)
But as it exists now, the proposal is a sweeping and thorough revamp of asylum — tightening the screws throughout the asylum process. 

One source familiar with the asylum process but not authorized to speak on the record described the proposed changes as “the most severe restrictions on asylum since at least 1965” — when the law that created the current legal immigration system was passed — and “possibly even further back.” 

The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the attorney general, along with the Department of Homeland Security, discretion over asylum standards — saying that the government “may grant asylum” to an applicant who they determine meets the definition of a refugee. But the proposed regulation would make it nearly impossible for Central Americans, including families, to earn the government’s approval. 

It would eliminate the path that thousands of Central Americans, including families, take every month to seek asylum in the US: entering between ports of entry and presenting themselves to Border Patrol agents. It would make it all but impossible for victims of domestic or gang violence to qualify for asylum — going even further than a June decision from Sessions that sought to limit asylum access for those groups. It would create a presumption against Central Americans who travel through Mexico on their way to the US.

The endgame is to reduce the non-white population of the country.  Keep that goal in mind when you take a look at every immigration move that this regime makes.  All of that serves this overarching purpose: to not just to stop the ethnic diversification of America, but to significantly reverse it.

We have to get these assholes out of power.

The Actual President Weighs In

If we had all remembered "Don't boo, vote" we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place, but Barack Obama is more than happy to 100% rightfully remind us that we messed up.

Former President Barack Obama, re-emerging into the political fray for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser here on Thursday, had a message for troubled Democrats: Do more than just mope. 

Obama peppered his 45-minute appearance with subtle knocks for despondent Democrats, warning that it is not enough to lament Donald Trump's presidency or complain about the impact he is having on the country. Instead, a tie-less and visibly relaxed Obama urged Democrats to back up those concerns with action and avoid the belief that the party is bound to defeat Republicans in November. 

"If what you are doing requires no sacrifice at all, then you can do more," Obama told the tony crowd at a sweeping multi-million-dollar Beverly Hills home. "If you are one of these folks who is watching cable news at your cocktail parties with your friends and you are saying 'civilization is collapsing' and you are nervous and worried, but that is not where you are putting all your time, energy and money, then either you don't actually think civilization is collapsing ... or you are not pushing yourself hard enough and I would push harder." 

At one point, he turned to the crowd and declared, "Enough moping, this is a mope-free zone." 

And the former President even suggested to the roughly 200 donors in attendance, who also enjoyed a performance from Christina Aguilera, that Democrats can't get fixated on the glitz and personality of politics. 

"We shouldn't expect (politics) to be entertaining all the time -- and Christina Aguilera was wonderful -- but you don't need to have an amazing singer at every event," he said. "Sometimes you are just in a church basement making phone calls and eating cold pizza."

In other words, we have a lot of work ahead of us, and the time to get going on the heavy lifting: getting people registered, getting people to the polls, phone banking, turning out for marches and protests, all the way down to local county party meetings and door knocking?  The time for that was 24 months ago.

We have to do that now more than ever.  Don't mope, vote.  Help others to vote.  Double check your registration with your secretary of state's website, hell even Kentucky has that capability.  Double check your precinct voting site.  Don't take anything for granted anymore.

Let's get the work done.

Kennedy's Lagacy Will Be Justice Denied

As Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo point out at Rewire News, Justice Anthony Kennedy's decision this week to retire is basically dunking on his own legacy over the last 20-plus years and it's all but assured that Trump's pick will destroy it.

Let’s be fair, shall we? His votes in favor of LGBTQ rights from Lawrence v. Texas to Obergefell v. Hodges undeniably advanced the cause of equality for LGBTQ people. And the way that he writes about LGBTQ people would give the impression that he is deeply concerned about LGBTQ rights. 

For example, this is what he wrote in the majority opinion in Obergefell:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. 

Lovely, right? Certainly we thought so at the time, lauding Kennedy for recognizing that love is love and that gays, lesbians, and everyone else should be able to marry. Sure, it’s a conservative vision of love, rooted in patriarchal institutions. Still, though: It remains an important decision, and that passage makes us tear up. 

But given his retirement announcement and his abominable performance during this year’s Supreme Court term, those words have proven ultimately toothless. Because by retiring now—before the 2018 midterms—he has ensured that Senate Republicans will try to ram a Trump nominee through the confirmation process before the new congressional session begins in January. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has already promised as much. And that nominee is not going to be a friend to the LGBTQ community. It’s more likely than not that open hostility to LGBTQ rights will be an important qualifier for anyone Trump chooses to replace Kennedy. 

By retiring now, Kennedy has almost certainly thwarted Democrats’ chance to wrestle control of the Senate from Republicans and therefore keep them from confirming another right-wing extremist this year. He basically screwed us all. It seems purposeful, not to mention hurtful to the LGBTQ people in the United States who have come to rely on him to advocate for them. 

And yes, the Court is not supposed to be partisan or to concern itself with who is president and who might replace them. But the truth of the matter is that is bullshit: When a Supreme Court justice chooses to retire says a lot about their priorities. Whatever Kennedy’s priorities are, saving his legacy doesn’t seem to be one of them.
If Kennedy truly cared about LGBTQ rights, he would have stayed on long enough to ensure that he would be replaced by someone who shared that (somewhat feckless, let’s be honest) commitment. 

But he didn’t.

Either he doesn't care about his legacy now, or he never cared about it then.  Either way, that legacy will be gone as Obergfell and Lawrence and his many other 5-4 decisions are wrecked within a few short years.

When abortion, same-sex marriage, and even birth control options are unavailable in half the states and only "nearly impossible" to get in the other half, will Kennedy still be around to give a damn?

StupidiNews!

• Democratic NJ Sen. Cory Booker says that the Senate should "push pause" on confirming any Trump nominee to the Supreme Court until after the Mueller investigation wraps up.
• The Senate has overwhelmingly passed a farm bill in an 86-11 vote without the steep cuts to SNAP benefits in the House GOP version, the bill now faces an uncertain future in conference.
• California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a data privacy law into effect similar to recent EU privacy laws that went into effect this year, data firms warn of unintended consequences.
• Amazon's foray into health care continues with a $1 billion offer to buy online pharmacy service Pillpack, the online retail giant is directly going after pharmacy chains like CVS and Walgreens.
• Grocery retailer Kroger is working with autonomous delivery vehicle startup Nuro for grocery delivery by driverless vehicle trials in late 2018.