Last Call For Missing What We Had

A new Pew Research poll finds Americans greatly miss the last guy in the Oval Office, because you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

When asked which president has done the best job in their lifetimes, more Americans name Barack Obama than any other president. More than four-in-ten (44%) say Obama is the best or second best president of their lifetimes, compared with about a third who mention Bill Clinton (33%) or Ronald Reagan (32%).

Not yet halfway through his term, 19% say Donald Trump has done the best or second best job of any president of their lifetimes. That is comparable with the share who viewed Obama as one of the best presidents in 2011 (20%).

The survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 5-12 among 2,002 adults, asks people in an open-ended format which president has done the best job in their lifetimes. The analysis is based on their first and second choices.

About one-in-ten adults (12%) say John F. Kennedy did the best job in office during their lifetimes. But Kennedy is named as the best or second best president by about a quarter of those who were alive during his presidency: 24% of Baby Boomers and 25% of those in the Silent Generation.

People’s views of the best president of their lifetimes are partly tied to their ages. Millennials, who are currently ages 22 to 37, are far more likely than older generations to name Obama as one of the best presidents in their lifetimes: About six-in-ten Millennials (62%) view Obama as one of the top two, with nearly half, 46%, naming him the best president.

Older generations are much more likely than Millennials to name Reagan as one of the best presidents. Reagan was president before most Millennials were born.

Gen Xers (ages 38 to 53) are divided in their assessments: 45% of Gen Xers name Reagan, while nearly as many mention Obama (41%) or Clinton (39%).

As a young Gen Xer, Obama/Clinton is an easy one-two for me, but the sentimentality for Ronald Reagan is something I just don't get at all even though he's the first president I actually remember.  You can draw a straight line from Reagan to Trump today, the GOP has been a bunch of racist, bigoted, corporate dickbags my entire lifetime.

It's good to see that we miss Obama, but the people who think Trump's been the best president in their lifetimes are really hideous.

No Time For A Garbage Pie

Local pizza magnate and racist jackass "Papa" John Schnatter is in trouble again as news broke this week of a racist slur he used on a marketing conference call on racial sensitivity training in May, which should tell you exactly how successful Papa John's racial sensitivity training was.

Papa John's founder and former CEO John Schnatter resigned from the University of Louisville Board of Trustees on Wednesday after he admitted to Forbes that he used the N-word and 'hurtful language' during a training session on race in May.

The resignation was effective immediately, said board chairman J. David Grissom in a statement late Wednesday afternoon.

"After speaking with John, I’m confident that his comments, while inappropriate, do not reflect his personal beliefs or values," Grissom said. "No member of the board of trustees condones racism or insensitive language regardless of the setting. The University of Louisville embraces and celebrates diversity and is a supporter of all its students and stakeholders regardless as to their identity. The board appreciates his two years of service and thanks him for his generous support for so many years.”

The incident began with conference call with Papa John's executives and marketing agency Laundry Service that included a role-playing exercise for Schnatter to prevent public relations messes, Forbes reported in a story initially based on an unnamed source. Schnatter was asked how he would distance himself from racist groups online.

Schnatter responded by downplaying his statement last fall that NFL player protests have hurt his pizza business, according to Forbes.

"Colonel Sanders called blacks n----s," Schnatter said, before claiming the KFC founder never faced public backlash like he has received.

During the same conference call, Schnatter also said other remarks that the marketing agency deemed offensive, Forbes reported. Schnatter said that when he grew up in Indiana, people would drag black people behind trucks until they died, the source told Forbes.

In a statement released to Forbes Wednesday afternoon, Schnatter confirmed the allegations against him.

"News reports attributing the use of inappropriate and hurtful language to me during a media training session regarding race are true," he said. "Regardless of the context, I apologize. Simply stated, racism has no place in our society."

A separate statement by Papa John's, also released to Forbes Wednesday, condemned racism "and any insensitive language, no matter the situation or setting."

What a coincidence, Papa John's pizza has no place in my home, either.  And I used to work there after college, too, so I know how it's made.  Don't eat there, trust me.  Even if the founder wasn't a racist jackass, the pizza's still crap.

Oh and apparently late last night, Schnatter left the company completely after the fallout became, well, the last slice of pizza in his garbage pie life.

Papa John’s International Inc.’s Chairman John Schnatter resigned after coming under fire for making racist comments that battered the shares of the pizza chain he founded.

The independent directors of the company accepted Schnatter’s resignation, the Louisville, Kentucky, company said in a statement late Wednesday. Papa John’s will appoint a new chairman in the coming weeks, the company said.

Just seven months after exiting the CEO role over critical comments about the National Football League’s national-anthem dispute, Schnatter came under pressure following a media report that he used a racial slur and graphic descriptions of violence against minorities on a May conference call with a media agency.

I'm impressed it took this long for him to get fired.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Pay very close attention to this Justice Department confirmation news from Wednesday:

The Senate voted 51-48 on Wednesday to confirm Brian Benczkowski as an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, ending an 18-month delay in which its Criminal Division operated without a permanent leader.

Benczkowski, a Justice Department veteran who held top posts in the George W. Bush administration, had languished for months as critics raised questions about his legal work for a Russian bank and his close ties to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The attorney general praised Benczkowski on Wednesday after his confirmation was final and called attention to the central role he'll play within the department.

"At a time like this — with surging violent crime and an unprecedented drug epidemic — this position is especially important," Sessions said.

Senate Democrats had urged the White House to withdraw the nomination, citing "poor judgment," after Benczkowski acknowledged briefly performing legal work for Alfa Bank, which has ties to Russian government officials, in 2017.

"At a time when we need the Department of Justice's Criminal Division to help uncover, prevent, and deter Russian interference in our democracy, Mr. Benczkowski's choices so far have not inspired confidence that he is the right person to lead that fight," wrote Sens. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Dianne Feinstein of California, two of the longest-serving Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

Senate leaders brought the matter to a head this week, voting 51-48 to end debate on the nominee.

Benczkowski has won support from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who said in a speech earlier this year that the nominee was "highly qualified."

Benczkowski has no prosecutorial experience, but he played a major behind-the-scenes role in managing the daily affairs of the Justice Department late in the Bush administration. He also led the transition team at DOJ for the incoming Trump era.

Now, why is this important?

Because the latest Trump regime DoJ org chart states that the number three official at the Justice Department is the head of the Criminal Division.  Behind his former boss Jeff Sessions, and Rod Rosenstein.

Which mean should Rosenstein be fired, Robert Mueller's boss would almost certainly become Benczkowski, a person with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, somebody already tainted, if not compromised by Russian money laundering, and somebody who worked for Donald Trump's campaign directly. And no, he hasn't said that he would recuse himself should that become the case.

Do we understand the problem now?  Because when Trump tries to fire Rosenstein, he now has the perfect flunky to replace him, ready to go to slow down or even end the Mueller probe.  When the previous number three official at the DoJ, Rachel Brand, announced her resignation in February, I said that her replacement would be expected to swing the axe on Mueller should Rosenstein be fired.  Brand was afraid she'd be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, and that's part of the reason why she resigned.

I said back then that Trump would have time to make a careful selection of somebody already willing to follow his orders on Rosenstein, and even should Trump somehow be talked out of firing Rosenstein, as head of the Criminal Division, Benczkowski could cause serious damage to the investigation through leaks to Trump or by delaying requests from Mueller's office.

The last piece of the puzzle Trump needs to make his move on Rosenstein and Mueller just fell into place.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• Adult film star Stormy Daniels has been arrested at a Columbus, Ohio strip club, her lawyer Michael Avenatti believes the charges are in retaliation for Daniel's claims against Donald Trump.
• Details of this week's dramatic rescue of 12 boys from a flooded cave in Thailand are emerging, including news that the boys were sedated and put on stretchers to be evacuated.
• NATO leaders went into a special crisis session today after Donald Trump's blistering attacks on the treaty organization on Wednesday and threatened pullout over defense spending.
• NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is fighting back against US Border Patrol accusations that he crossed the US-Mexico border illegally while visiting a Texas migrant detention facility last month.
• Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he will turn his attention to fixing the water supply of Flint, Michigan, a city that still doesn't have clean water after nearly four years.

Last Call For The Abolition Position

Doug Mataconis has some hard truths for Dems about "Abolish ICE" and the midterms as only a quarter of Americans agree with getting rid of the agency.

Polls like this would seem to reinforce the argument I made late last week when I observed that rallying around the calls to abolish ICE could end up backfiring on Democrats. Yes, there is some support in the poll for this kind proposal among Democrats and one can make the argument that it is useful as a slogan to rally the base in advance of the elections, but even there support for the idea falls far short of being a majority. The more important numbers for Democrats to look at, I would maintain, are those that show majorities of both Republicans and Independents opposing the idea. This gap leaves Democratic candidates in anything other than a deeply blue state or district in danger of being tarred with the argument that their party is supporting ideas such as “Abolish ICE” that, according to Republicans at least, would mean weakening the Federal Government’s ability to enforce immigration laws and sounds as if they are essentially advocating for an end to the enforcement of immigration laws. That’s exactly how Trump and Republicans are framing the debate right now, of course, and if they succeed then Democrats could find that they’ve given Republicans a potent weapon come November.

ICE under Trump is an abominable weapon being used freely against immigrant families, and it's only a matter of time before it's unleashed against Americans.  But right now Trump and the GOP can deflect that by saying "Dems are for illegal immigration, we're against it."

The issue isn't ICE as much as it is the fact that ICE is controlled by Trump.

"Abolish ICE" isn't a position that's going to help Dems politically, even if you can make the case that it's morally right.  The reality is that it's another windmill to tilt at when the problem is Trump.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Trump's trade war has shifted into the scorched earth phase as today he planted a 60-day time bomb that will blow up in the faces of Republicans just in time for the midterm elections to heat up.

President Trump escalated his trade war with China Tuesday, identifying an added $200 billion in Chinese products that he intends to hit with import tariffs.

The move makes good on the president’s threat to respond to China’s retaliation for the initial U.S. tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods, which went into effect on Friday, and would eventually place nearly half of all Chinese imports under tariffs.

Administration officials said the tariff fight is aimed at forcing China to stop stealing American intellectual property and to abandon policies that effectively force U.S. companies to surrender their trade secrets in return for access to the Chinese market.

“These practices are an existential threat to America’s most critical comparative advantage and the future of our economy,” said Robert E. Lighthizer, the president’s chief trade negotiator.

Trump’s latest action will hit consumer products such as televisions, clothing, bedsheets and air conditioners, which were spared from the first import levies on Friday. But the new tariffs will not be imposed until the end of a two-month public comment period.

“This is where a painful situation gets more painful,” said Phil Levy, a former White House economist in the George W. Bush administration.

The current $34 billion in tariffs are going to hurt farmers and automakers especially, but the $200 billion coming August 30 will jack up prices for Chinese imports across the board and will quickly start damaging retailers and consumers everywhere in the US.

Early reaction to the president’s action was unfavorable. “Tonight’s announcement appears reckless and is not a targeted approach,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Beijing has vowed to respond in kind to any U.S. trade action. But China only bought about $135 billion in U.S. goods last year, meaning it will run out of American products to tax before it matches Trump’s latest move.

Chinese officials are expected to retaliate in other ways, hitting U.S. firms in China with unplanned inspections, delays in approving financial transactions and other administrative headaches.

“The Trump administration is gambling that by wielding such a big club, it will force China to back down,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That is almost certainly a serious miscalculation. China is far more likely just to find other ways to hit back in kind.”

The president has repeatedly described his resort to tariffs — which are paid by American importers — as a lever to extract negotiating concessions from U.S. trading partners.

A few rounds of talks with Chinese leaders this year made little progress, however, and no plans for additional meetings have been made public.

If these tariffs go through, the economic damage will be far higher than $200 billion.  Trump figures he can bully the Chinese in the same way he's bullied the EU, Canada, and Mexico, but the difference is the Chinese don't have to worry about the political fallout and they won't back down now. 

China fired back at President Donald Trump’s latest tariff barrage, saying it won’t back down in the trade war that was started unilaterally by the U.S.

China “never yields to threat or blackmail,” Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said in written comments to Bloomberg on Wednesday. “The U.S. side ignored the progress, adopted unilateral and protectionist measures, and started the trade war.”

When Americans start getting laid off by the tens of thousands and the economy goes south within a matter of months, Trump won't be so lucky.

Unfortunately, neither will the American people.

One Day In Louisville Makes A Hard Bevin Humble

Louisville, Bluegrass setting
And the city don't know that the city is getting.
The creme de la creme of the chess club
In a show with everything but Rand Paul!

Time flies doesn't seem a minute
Since Matt Bevin insulted the chess kids in it,
All change, don't you know that when you
Play at this level there's no ordinary venue...

Gov. Matt Bevin said in a promotional video featuring the West Louisville chess club that some people might be surprised by the connection between the club and the neighborhoods it draws children from, unleashing a barrage of criticism on social media.

"I'm going to go in and meet the members of the West Louisville Chess Club," Bevin said in the video. "Not something you necessarily would have thought of when you think of this section of town."

Bevin made his comments in a promotional video published online Tuesday. In the video, he took a tour of Nativity Academy, an independent private school in Phoenix Hill. The club often plays in locations around the city.

Also: Matt Bevin bashes Andy Beshear but won't say he's in governor's race

“Governor Bevin met with the West Louisville Chess Club to showcase an important program that is encouraging sportsmanship and character building among Kentucky’s youth,” Bevin’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Kuhn said in a statement. “It is disappointing that some are trying to shift the focus away from the incredible accomplishments of these talented kids.”

The West Louisville Chess Club "primarily targets" young children who live in the West End of Louisville, according to Lyndon Pryor with the Louisville Urban League.

The Louisville Urban League, located in the Russell neighborhood, is a partial source of funding for the club.

Councilman David James, who represents District 6 in Louisville, was present at the event where Bevin filmed the promo. James said it is a sign of Bevin's deteriorating relationship with the state's African-American community.

"It was just an obvious move by the governor to take photos with the African-American community," James said. "To perpetuate a stereotype of the African-American community like that is unbelievable."

As a black Kentuckian who likes to think that he plays chess fairly well, I have to say that Bevin perpetuating a stereotype of black Kentuckians is completely believable, because 1) he's a Republican and 2) he's a rather racist asshole, but I repeat myself.

Yes, his running mate, Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton, is Kentucky's first African-American elected to statewide office.  And she's been as silent on Bevin's cartoonishly bad racism since the day she was sworn in.  Frankly I haven't heard a peep from her on this "deteriorating relationship" in 30 months, and she seems pretty eager to get out from behind Bevin's shadow and get out of here, so why should she start caring now?

Considering Bevin seems to regularly engage in behavior where when he's not checkmating himself with obvious blunders like this, he's flipping the board over like an angry toddler and making sure nobody wins, and I remain convinced there's a significant chance that he may not run for re-election next year.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump opened this year's annual NATO Summit in Brussels by attacking Germany as "captive" to Russian energy companies and demanding immediate EU military spending increases.
• House Democratic deputy leader Steny Hoyer is out of the hospital and recovering from pneumonia after a week in a Maryland hospital, he is expected to return to Washington later this week.
• After 17 days, all 12 boys from a youth soccer team and their coach have been rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand, the boys lost weight but all are in good condition at a hospital.
• The Trump regime has missed a court-imposed deadline to reunite immigrant children taken from their families at the border, with a deadline for all separated children looming on July 26.
• The Defense Department wants software to help government employees handle classified documents better by integrating protections into the Microsoft Office products the DoD already uses.

Last Call For That Worker (Pay) Shortage

Unemployment is super low right now and we've actually reached the point where corporate America is grousing about not having enough people to fill jobs.  In a supply-and-demand universe, basic macroeconomics tells us that as demand for labor goes up and the supply of labor decreases, the price of labor that businesses offer to workers goes up.  But we're in Trump's America in 2018, and that's the last thing that's going to happen, as Mike Hiltzik at the LA Times explains.

“America’s labor shortage is approaching epidemic proportions,” reported CNBC, “and it could be employers who end up paying.” Well, yes. That’s how things are supposed to work: Businesses pay more to attract workers in a tighter, more competitive market for labor.

The rhetoric coming out of the employer lobby would leave one to believe that workers are somehow the guilty party in this — they simply won’t accept jobs that pay them less than they’re worth.

The underlying cause of the “labor shortage” is hiding in plain sight. It’s the long-term trend of funneling the gains from labor productivity not to the workforce, but to shareholders. As with any addiction, this process produces short-term euphoria, reflected in share prices, but long-term pathology, reflected in income inequality, poverty and social unrest.

But it’s been going on so long that the addicts, that is, corporate CEOs and their mouthpieces, have forgotten how to respond. The CNBC piece observed, as though this is a new discovery, that “employers are going to have to start doing more to entice workers, likely through pay raises, training and other incentives.” The harvest will be lower corporate earnings, Goldman Sachs has warned.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Goldman’s economists“predict that every percentage-point increase in labor-cost inflation will drag down earnings of companies in the S&P 500 by 0.8%.” That money won’t disappear, of course—it will go into the pockets of workers, and then find its way back into the coffers of corporate America via higher sales.

The narrow attitude that wage growth is bad for business is exemplified by the pummeling that American Airlines suffered from Wall Street a year ago, when it announced healthy wage increases for pilots and flight attendants, even before their union contracts expired. As we reported at the time, the airline's shares lost more than 8% in value over the ensuing two trading sessions, a loss of about $1.9 billion in market value in 48 hours. 

"Labor is being paid first again," Kevin Crissey, an airlines analyst for Citigroup, bellyached to clients after the announcement. “Shareholders get leftovers." Hardly: From 2014 through 2016, American had authorized $9 billion in share buybacks to fatten the shareholders’ take. By contrast, the pay raises will cost American $1 billion over three years.

What a shock.

And of course you'll hear the screams for miles: corporate profits will be "down" and shareholders will be the "big losers".  We'll have all kinds of gnashing of teeth over American workers making more money being a terrible thing.

Expect Trump to get in on the action, and soon. 

The New Guy's Paper Trail

Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's pick to succeed Anthony Kennedy on the US Supreme Court, has a paper trail a mile long and all of it is on the right side of the road. Josh Marshall explains:

We’re hearing a lot about how Kavanaugh thinks presidents should be largely immune from lawsuits, subpoenas and prosecutorial scrutiny while they serve as president. This appears to have been attractive to President Trump, unsurprisingly. These arguments stem mainly from a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article. The publication date was 2009. But it appears to have been first presented at a symposium in late 2008, while President Bush was still President. 

But this wasn’t Kavanaugh’s first take on presidential power. 

Kavanaugh was a young legal gun (early 30s) on one of the most thoroughly corrupt and brazenly partisan investigations in American history, the do-over Independent Counsel investigation which Ken Starr ran for most of the 1990s, investigating almost every aspect of Bill Clinton’s time in office and the decades which preceded his presidency. Kavanaugh, in addition to being part of the investigation, was also a or the principal author of the notorious Starr Report, a voluminous and gratuitous play-by-play narration of the Clinton-Lewinsky Affair and a brief for impeachment. 

In that document, Kavanaugh argued for a comically broad theory of what constituted obstruction of justice and impeachable offenses. He suggested that Clinton’s efforts to delay being interviewed by the Independent Counsel amounted to obstruction of justice and that lying to his staff and the American people were impeachable offenses. Needless to say, by this standard, President Trump commits numerous impeachable offenses every single day. 

Many commentators are now arguing that the youthful Kavanaugh had one view while the more seasoned District Court Judge saw the matter differently a decade later. Please. Kavanaugh showed a judicious flexibility to allow his views to evolve as they were applied to either Democrats or Republicans, to political foes or friends. There is nothing more pressing and relevant in this political moment than the President’s subservience to the rule of law. Kavanaugh has been all over the map on that question, depending on whether the President was a Republican or Democrat. That all needs to be sorted out before he becomes the deciding vote on whether President needs to answer to the law.

Oh, but it gets worse, as Politico is reporting today.  The fix for Kavanaugh was in from the beginning.

After Justice Anthony Kennedy told President Donald Trump he would relinquish his seat on the Supreme Court, the president emerged from his private meeting with the retiring jurist focused on one candidate to name as his successor: Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Kennedy’s former law clerk. 

Trump, according to confidants and aides close to the White House, has become increasingly convinced that “the judges,” as he puts it, or his administration’s remaking of the federal judiciary in its conservative image, is central to his legacy as president. And he credits Kennedy, who spent more than a decade at the center of power on the court, for helping give him the opportunity.

So even as Trump dispatched his top lawyers to comb though Kavanaugh’s rulings and quizzed allies about whether he was too close to the Bush family, potentially a fatal flaw, the president was always leaning toward accepting Kennedy’s partiality for Kavanaugh while preserving the secret until his formal announcement, sources with knowledge of his thinking told POLITICO. 

Trump, who spent more time with Kavanaugh than the other finalists, was impressed with the judge’s credentials, long judicial record and fidelity to the Constitution, according to administration officials. What was listed as a deal-breaker to some on the right — his long paper trail — was actually the thing that drew Trump to Kavanaugh. 

Administration officials said Trump was taken with Kavanaugh even before his conversation with Kennedy. But Kennedy, in leaving the impression with Trump that Kavanaugh would be a great candidate for the job, helped the president make up his mind.

It's looking more and more like Kennedy made a deal with Trump to name his own successor to the Supreme Court.

Source familiar tells NBC that Justice Kennedy had been in negotiations with the Trump team for months over Kennedy’s replacement. Once Kennedy received assurances that it would be Kavanaugh (his former law clerk) Kennedy felt comfortable retiring - @LACaldwellDC & @frankthorp

— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) July 10, 2018

Under these circumstances, with Trump under investigation, and with this evidence that there may have been a deal months in the making for Kennedy to retire and name his law clerk as a successor, there is no way Democrats should allow Kavanaugh to be confirmed. 

We'll see what happens.  Dems may not be able to do much of anything, frankly.

But dear God, they have to try.

The Economic Anxiety Experiment

If the key to winning back disaffected Obama voters is to address economic anxiety through Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren-style populism, then the test case is Ohio's Richard Cordray, the Democratic candidate for Governor.  Whether or not he can win in a state Trump won by eight points is another thing entirely.

In early May, Richard Cordray was wrapping up a two-day campaign sprint during which he spoke to crowds of plumbers, pipefitters, ironworkers, teachers, firefighters, furniture workers, and now, as dusk settled over a low-slung Cleveland union hall, a hundred or so food and commercial workers. Cordray, who stepped down as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last December, was making a last-minute pitch to Ohio Democrats to choose him as their nominee for governor. Ostensibly, he was campaigning to defeat liberal gadfly Dennis Kucinich in the next day’s party primary (which he did, handily). But in a larger sense, Cordray was—is—trying to redeem a Democratic Party blindsided by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and searching for a path forward.

Trump’s unexpected strength in Midwest swing states such as Ohio, where he trounced Hillary Clinton by eight points, exposed a deep erosion of Democratic support in swaths of the country you have to carry if you want to win the White House. Ohio has voted for the winner in 14 straight presidential elections. That Clinton’s brand of Wall Street-friendly, establishment Democratic politics wasn’t even competitive in this presidential bellwether underscored the scope of the party’s problem.

“Ohio’s not a right-wing state,” Ted Strickland, the former Democratic governor, insists. “Trump came along and captured the zeitgeist of the moment, but I don’t think that’s a permanent thing.”

What’s indisputable is that Ohio revealed a host of shortcomings Democrats must address. While Obama twice won the state with strong minority support, black voter turnout fell sharply in 2016. So did Democratic support in struggling manufacturing hubs such as the Mahoning Valley in Northeast Ohio, where many union members defected to Trump. Meanwhile, suburban voters didn’t turn out in nearly the numbers Democrats needed.

Clinton’s loss raised a host of thorny questions the party has been debating ever since: Was the problem Clinton, or is it broader than that? Should Democrats make more explicit appeals around race and gender to activate disaffected voters? Or should they embrace the full-throated economic populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?

Cordray’s race will offer some interesting clues—he’s as pure an exponent of Warren-style populism as anyone on this year’s ballot. Because he lacks a Trump-like persona or a desire to litigate the president’s misdeeds, Cordray is embarking on what amounts to a laboratory experiment in the power of progressive economic populism to win back lost voters. Trump showed that hard-right populism can resonate in Ohio; what’s as yet unclear is whether that message can resonate from the left, when shorn of its anti-immigrant, anti-Clinton attacks and dialed back from Trumpian bombast to Cordray’s scout-leader calm.

Recruited by Warren herself to the CFPB after a stint as Ohio’s attorney general, Cordray has turned the agency’s mission of protecting consumers from Wall Street predations into a campaign message. “My job at the CFPB, as President Obama told me when he interviewed me, was to stand on the side of people in the financial marketplace and see that they were treated fairly,” Cordray told a group of Cincinnati firefighters. “We did that—and got back $12 billion for 30 million Americans who had been cheated or mistreated by large financial institutions.” Cordray also touted his role as Ohio’s financial avenger after the 2008 crisis. “We recognized that our pension system had been abused—a pension system that supports our police, firefighters, and public servants,” he continued. “We got back $2 billion from Wall Street that never should have been taken from them and put it back into Ohio taxpayers’ pockets.” 

His Robin Hood record notwithstanding, Cordray, 59, is about the furthest thing from the tub-thumping populists of yore. Tall and sandy-haired, he has a hangdog visage and the soft-spoken demeanor of the late PBS kids’ show host Mr. Rogers. “It makes me mad to see people in government serving themselves at our expense,” Cordray, sounding not the least bit mad, told a union crowd in Lima earlier that day.

While he rarely puts a charge in his audience, Cordray drove Republicans in Washington to fits, quickly emerging as Public Enemy No. 2 (behind Warren) for his aggressiveness in clawing back those billions of dollars for consumers. Conservatives viewed him as the embodiment of rapacious government overreach and made him the target of furious criticism throughout his CFPB tenure. “For conducting unlawful activities, abusing his authority, denying market participants due process, Richard Cordray should be dismissed by our president,” Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, declared last year, as part of an unsuccessful campaign to pressure Trump to fire him.

Cordray’s challenge now is to get Ohio voters half as fired up as Republicans like Hensarling. His backers suggest, somewhat hopefully, that his low-wattage personal style will contrast favorably with Trump’s exhausting, nonstop fusillade. “His personality is not like Elizabeth’s or Bernie’s, but his economic policy chops sure are,” says Sandy Theis, former executive director of the liberal nonprofit ProgressOhio. “If you’re looking for a candidate who’ll give you clickbait and headlines, that’s not Rich,” echoes Matt Alter, president of the Cincinnati Firefighters Union, IAFF Local 48. “But he’ll run the state and get things done.” Cordray is fortunate that his Republican opponent, former U.S. Senator and current Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, is no more endowed with charisma than he is. As one labor official quipped, the race could turn out to be “the Battle of the Blands.”

If the heartland now wants safe, boring, stable white Democrats like Cordray (and Andy Beshear here in neighboring Kentucky) to bring sanity back, he should have no trouble.  DeWine on the other hand has a long list of extremist positions and is second only to Kansas's Kris Kobach in the voter suppression department.

Personally I think Cordray is a pretty solid guy who can get the job done, but whether or not that's enough to get him elected in the era of Trump, I don't know.  We'll see.

I do know that if Cordray loses, Democrats might want to, you know, pay attention to their actual base and who they are rather than who they want that base to be.

Just saying.

StupidiNews!

• A fifth former Ohio State wrestler has come forward to say that Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan knew about sexual abuse going on during the time Jordan was the team's assistant coach.
• A federal judge has rejected the Trump regime's request to allow detention of immigrant children for more than 20 days, calling the request "unconvincing" and "dubious".
• Eleven of the thirteen people trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand have been rescued, officials are hopeful that all thirteen will be rescued by the end of the day.
• Donald Trump's long-time personal driver for more than 25 years is suing Trump over 3,300 hours of unpaid overtime, the latest in a string of employees and contractors suing Trump.
• China is now churning out its own x86 server processor chips as state investment in technology is pushing out American chipmakers amid Trump's trade war with Beijing.

Last Call For Meet The New White Guy...

...same as, well, yeah.

President Trump selected Brett Michael Kavanaugh, a federal appeals court judge in Washington with powerful conservative credentials, on Monday to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court.

Judge Kavanaugh was just 38 when he was first nominated to a federal appeals court in Washington. But he had already participated in an extraordinary number of political controversies, attracting powerful patrons and critics along the way.

He served under Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, examining the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the deputy White House counsel, and drafting parts of the report that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment. He worked on the 2000 Florida recount litigations that ended in a Supreme Court decision handing the presidency to George W. Bush. And he served as a White House lawyer and staff secretary to Mr. Bush, working on the selection of federal judges and legal issues arising from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

He was “the Zelig of young Republican lawyers,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, said at Judge Kavanaugh’s first confirmation hearing, in 2004. “If there has been a partisan political fight that needed a good lawyer in the last decade, Brett Kavanaugh was probably there.”

But Judge Kavanaugh, 53, has also formed lifelong friendships with liberals, many of whom praise his intellect and civility. In his professional life, before he became a judge, he was often a moderating force.

Working for Mr. Starr, Judge Kavanaugh concluded that Mr. Foster had in fact killed himself. He opposed the public release of the narrative portions of Mr. Starr’s report detailing Mr. Clinton’s encounters with a White House intern. As staff secretary to Mr. Bush, he said in 2006, he strived to be “an honest broker for the president.” 

As a judge, though, he has been a conservative powerhouse, issuing around 300 opinions. His dissents have often led to Supreme Court appeals, and the justices have repeatedly embraced the positions set out in Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions.

He has written countless decisions applauded by conservatives on topics including the Second Amendment, religious freedom, the environment and campaign finance. But they have particularly welcomed his vigorous opinions hostile to administrative agencies, a central concern of the modern conservative legal movement.

So yeah.  This guy may be even to the right of Gorsuch.

Again, allowing Trump to pick a justice while under investigation, when the same justice will be the deciding vote on the inevitable Constitutional questions regarding that investigation, is ludicrous.  The Dems can choose to make this as excruciating as possible to boot.

They won't, I fully expect Kavanaugh to be confirmed by Labor Day recess with at minimum 54 votes, if not as many as 57. And while it's imaginable that Kavanaugh's first order of business will be to wreck any hope of affirmative action, voting rights, and/or abortion as health care, I honestly think he'll get to weigh in on Trump and the legality of his inevitable attempt to fire Robert Mueller.

We'll see what happens, but this is the part where the massive damage to the classic liberalism of the last 80 years starts in earnest.

The Be-Return Of the Beshear

As widely expected after his 2016 election as KY Attorney General, Democrat Andy Beshear is throwing his hat in the ring for his dad's old job against KY GOP Gov. Matt Bevin next year.

Attorney General Andy Beshear announced Monday he is running for Kentucky governor with educator Jacqueline Coleman as his running mate.

Beshear, a Democrat, is the first candidate of either party to announce a candidacy for governor in 2019. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin has not yet said whether he will seek re-election. 

“As governor, I will work every day to bring Kentuckians together to tackle our most pressing problems,” Beshear said at a press conference Monday morning at the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage in Louisville.

Beshear, 40, became the state's 50th Attorney General in 2016, where he defeated Republican candidate Whitney Westerfield by a margin of less than 1 percent. His father, Steve Beshear, was governor of Kentucky from 2007 to 2015.

As tensions between teachers and Kentucky lawmakers grow after a tumultuous year filled with protests over pension reform legislation, Beshear's pick of Coleman for running mate sends a message.

"We will make public education a priority," he said Monday. "We will work to fund every single public school and every single public university to give opportunity to every child," he said. 

"... I will continue to fight for our teachers. They will be respected, our state will keep our state promises to them, and they will have a seat at the table. ... Their voice is a critical voice."

Coleman, of Harrodsburg, is an assistant principal at Nelson County High School. In 2014, Coleman ran unsuccessfully to represent Kentucky's 55th House District. Her father, Jack Coleman, was a state representative in that same district — Mercer, Washington and parts of Jessamine County — from 1991 to 2004.

Since nearly the beginning of his term as attorney general, Beshear has repeatedly filed lawsuits challenging the legality of actions of Bevin, his father's successor as governor.
In 2016, Beshear won a lawsuit against Bevin over funding cuts to state universities. The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that the governor violated his executive power by cutting universities' budgets after funding had already been appropriated by the General Assembly.

Bevin's popularity is tanking pretty hard, and he's basically already pissed off everyone he'd need to have in his corner to get re-elected, so believe it or not I think Beshear can win.   The last two years have been Beshear fighting Bevin anyway, so everyone's already used to it around here.

Whether or not people will actually show up in KY's infamous off-year gubernatorial election in 2019 is another thing, but I'm betting Beshear will do a better job of it than Jack Conway did.

Bevin may not run for a second term.  Who the GOP does put up in his place in that situation could make things pretty interesting.

Keep an eye on this race.

Grifting Is Mother's Milk To Trump

America under the Trump regime is such an obvious corporate autocracy that the US went officially on record against breastfeeding because it hurts the bottom line of baby formula makers.

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

Oh, but it gets worse.

The showdown over the issue was recounted by more than a dozen participants from several countries, many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from the United States.

Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.

“We were astonished, appalled and also saddened,” said Patti Rundall, the policy director of the British advocacy group Baby Milk Action, who has attended meetings of the assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, since the late 1980s.

“What happened was tantamount to blackmail, with the U.S. holding the world hostage and trying to overturn nearly 40 years of consensus on the best way to protect infant and young child health,” she said.

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

Corrupt, profit-driven greed is what the Trump regime does best...unless our real masters at the Kremlin say otherwise.

Then our government obeys without question.