The Road To Gilead, Con't

Some excellent news in the case of Marshae Jones, the black woman in Alabama who was charged with manslaughter in the death of her unborn child after she was shot in the stomach by another woman in an altercation at a store.  Jones will not be prosecuted as the county DA has dropped the charges.

One week after her story drew national attention, Marshae Jones, the Alabama woman who faced criminal charges after a shooting caused her to miscarry, will not be prosecuted, the Alabama district attorney announced Wednesday.

“After viewing the facts of this case and the applicable state law I have determined that it is not in the best interest of justice to pursue prosecution of Ms. Jones on the manslaughter charge for which she was indicted by the grand jury,” Jefferson County District Attorney Lynneice Washington said at a press conference. “Therefore, I am dismissing this case and no further legal action will be taken against Ms. Jones in this matter.”

In recent days, Washington’s office faced heavy criticism for Jones’s indictment, and Jones’s lawyers had filed a motion to have the case dismissed.

”There are no winners, only losers in this sad ordeal,” Washington added.

At the end of June, Alabama news outlets reported that Jones, a 27-year-old Birmingham resident, had been taken into police custody after a grand jury indicted her on manslaughter charges for the death of her then-5-month-old fetus. Police argued that Jones had initiated a fight with 23-year-old Ebony Jemison in December and was directly responsible for the fact that Jemison fired a bullet that struck Jones in the stomach.

According to a report from Al.com, police initially charged Jemison with manslaughter over the shooting. But a jury declined to indict her, saying that Jones initiated the altercation and that Jemison was acting in self-defense when she shot at Jones. That same jury later indicted Jones, arguing that she “intentionally caused the death of her unborn baby by initiating a fight knowing she was five months pregnant.”

Local police also blamed Jones for the shooting. “Let’s not lose sight that the unborn baby is the victim here,” Pleasant Grove Police Lt. Danny Reid said shortly after the shooting. “She had no choice in being brought unnecessarily into a fight where she was relying on her mother for protection.”

The indictment was heavily criticized and immediately raised questions about why the woman who was shot was the one charged. Reproductive rights advocates argued that Jones’s story was a troubling example of the ways pregnant women of color are criminalized in states like Alabama, which has prosecuted hundreds of women for things like “chemical endangerment” while pregnant. These groups argued that many more pregnant women in the state might be punished in the wake of a recently passed law that bans most abortions in Alabama. The law is scheduled to go into effect in November.

A definite win for Jones and legal sanity, but I fear there will be far more women punished under state laws like this, and should the Supreme Court open the floodgates for states to regulate abortion out of legal existence, cases like this will become the norm, not the exception.

Tanks For The Memories

Dear Leader Trump wants a military parade with tanks and jets just like the other dictators do, and he's apparently cajoled, whined at, and threatened the Pentagon and DC city officials to the point where they have to put on a show for the orange little prince of darkness.

Tanks for President Donald Trump’s “Salute to America” Fourth of July celebration were seen arriving in Washington on Tuesday morning, just days before the event is scheduled to take place.

NBC News captured video of the tanks — two Bradley and two Abrams tanks — purportedly en route to the National Mall for Thursday’s event. Also in transport are support vehicles, including an M88, used to help recover heavy armored vehicles.
A photographer for the Associated Press also spotted two M1A1 Abrams tanks along with four other military vehicles on a freight train in southeast D.C. on Monday night.

On Monday, Trump told reporters that tanks would be stationed outside of the Fourth of July celebration, but gave no further details.

The Federal Aviation Administration also confirmed that it would suspend operations at the Ronald Reagan National Airport, the closest commercial airport to D.C., from 6:15 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. ET due to the flyovers from Air Force One and other military planes. Operations at the airport will also be impacted from 9:00 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. ET, during the fireworks show.

Trump has spoken about hosting an event here in Washington that would display military prowess since he attended a similar event in Paris in 2017. Previous plans were scratched after concerns were raised about the cost and infrastructure impact, with critics raising similar concerns about his plans for this week's holiday event.

Local officials and residents have pointed to the damage such massive military equipment could cause to area roads. And Democrats in Congress have criticized the president for putting on an unusually large production at taxpayer expense.

But Trump whined and cried until he got his Fourth of July parade with his generals and tanks, and as Steve M says, if you think this is bad, wait until the billions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on this farce in an election year next July.

Believe me, he'll try. A year from now, an election will be four months away. There's a good chance Trump will be trailing in the polls. Of course he'll try. And this time he'll insist that the damn tanks have to roll down Pennsylvania Avenue, no matter how much damage they do to the roads.

As bad as this year's event will be, next year's will be much worse. Every Trump whim will be indulged.

This is 100% a Trump election rally held with taxpayer money, specifically $2.5 million Trump stole from the National Park Service.  The RNC will make sure that only Trump supporters are in the audience, because Republicans got free tickets, and Democrats weren't invited at all. And it will only be worse as we head into the 2020 election season.

That is if we still have elections, and aren't deep into a shooting war with Iran by then, which most likely we will be. This is almost certainly a test run for the coming "If you question what we're doing with our military, you're not a patriot" era of Dubya's post 9/11 excesses, only on a Trumpian scale, complete with Trumpian levels of violence and fear. America was pretty quick to shame people back in 2001, but in 2019, when, and not if we go to war, it's going to get brutal for the concept of dissent and soon.  Next year's Fourth of July Trump Parade will be mandatory, citizen.

Autocrats have military parades.  Autocrats also have bloody crackdowns on critics.

Have A Happy Fourth!

Reduced posting through this weekend, but if Trump does anything particularly stupid, I'll let you all know.

Have a safe holiday long weekend, and I'll be back on a normal schedule Monday.

Last Call For Baked Alaska

If you thought Sarah Palin was the worst governor in the history of Alaska, Republican Mike Dunleavy's line item vetoes are making Palin look like Bernie Sanders by comparison, as he's cut nearly $450 million from the state's budget (a 10% austerity whack on top of steep cuts made by the state's Republican legislature) that targets everything from the University of Alaska to Medicaid funding to a petty move to cut funding for the state's court system after the state's supreme court ruled abortion was protected by the state constitution.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday cut $444 million from Alaska’s state’s operating budget, slashing services beyond the cuts already made by the Alaska Legislature in order to move closer to a balanced budget without raising taxes or reducing the Permanent Fund dividend.

The action drew immediate and impassioned criticism from many Alaskans, including those who rely on those services and those who provide them, and there were calls on lawmakers to override the vetoes. But the governor also drew praise from Alaskans who believe state government is too large.

The University of Alaska is the biggest target of Dunleavy’s line-item veto pen, losing $130 million in state support atop the $5 million cut approved earlier by lawmakers. The resulting reduction is nearly 41% of the state’s support for the university system. University officials said the cuts would be devastating to the UA system.

“I believe they’re going to be able to work through this ... I don’t believe they can be all things to all people, and I think that’s generally speaking, the state of Alaska. We can’t continue to be all things for all people,” the governor said Friday morning in a news conference that was broadcast statewide.

For the fiscal year that starts July 1, Medicaid spending was reduced by $50 million, the state’s senior benefits program was eliminated, a cruise ship pollution inspector program was eliminated, the Village Public Safety Officer program lost $3 million in funding and most state support for public broadcasting was erased.

The Legislature can override those decisions, but only if three-quarters of its 60 members agree. The deadline for an override is the fifth day of the special session that begins July 8.

Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, said the governor’s budget presents an “imminent threat" to Alaskans.

“The fundamental question is now squarely before Alaskans. What’s more important: a healthy economy, our schools, university, and seniors, or doubling the Permanent Fund Dividend at the expense of essential state services? The governor has made his choice clear,” Edgmon wrote.

We'll see if legislators want to overrule the cuts, but I wouldn't hold out too much hope for that.  The list of Dunleavy's cuts are here, and thousands of University of Alaska employees are already being furloughed because the vetoes and the fact that the fiscal year started yesterday means there's no money to pay them.

Welcome to Kansas, Alaska!

It Doesn't Make Census

One of the Trump regime's arguments for telling the Supreme Court two weeks ago to ignore actual law, to simply defer to the government, and to make a summary judgment on the question of citizenship on the 2020 Census was that the government needed to start printing Census questionnaire forms no later than yesterday, July 1.

Of course, now that SCOTUS has ruled that the regime's argument is baloney, suddenly that July 1 deadline has been missed, and now the Trump regime is blaming the courts for the inevitable delay in the Census.

The Trump administration appears to have missed its own deadline Monday to start the printing of paper forms and other mailings that will play a key role in next year's constitutionally mandated head count of every person living in the U.S.

As of Monday evening, the 2020 census materials did not appear to have been officially approved by the White House's Office of Management and Budget for printing, according to a website tracking OMB's review process.

In another sign that production has not begun, Justice Department attorneys told a federal judge in Maryland on Monday that the administration has not reached a final decision on whether it will try to make another case in court for adding a hotly contested citizenship question to census forms.

U.S. District Judge George Hazel, who is presiding over recently reopened lawsuits over the question, has agreed to hold a hearing on the issue Tuesday, plaintiffs' attorneys Denise Hulett of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Shankar Duraiswamy of Covington & Burling tell NPR.

The delay in printing 1.5 billion paper census mailings could throw a wrench into a tightly wound timetable of final preparations for the 2020 census. The count is scheduled to begin officially in January in rural Alaska before rolling out to the rest of the country by April.

On Monday, President Trump said that his administration is continuing to look "very strongly" at delaying the census. Hours after the Supreme Court announced its decision last week to keep the citizenship question temporarily blocked, Trump tweeted that he wants to wait until the court has more time and information to "make a final and decisive decision."

Asked why it's so important to add a citizenship question, Trump said Monday from the Oval Office, "I think it's very important to find out if somebody is a citizen as opposed to an illegal."

Even Chief Justice Roberts said the Trump regime's argument that they were "only enforcing the Voting Rights Act" was totally contrived and dismissed it. It doesn't mean that the Trumpies can't come up with a better argument that he can feel good about, but for now, the scheme is as plain as day.

Besides, the Trump regime is required by law to start the actual Census counting by April 1, so we'll see how that goes.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

I have no clue as to why this is still in doubt, but the Russians helped Donald Trump win the White House with their propaganda and disinformation, and the massive pile of evidence making that point only continues to grow.

President Donald Trump and his allies have long insisted that Russian's 2016 propaganda campaign on social media had no impact on the presidential election.

A new statistical analysis says it may well have.

The study, by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does not prove that Russian interference swung the election to Trump. But it demonstrates that Trump's gains in popularity during the 2016 campaign correlated closely with high levels of social media activity by the Russian trolls and bots of the Internet Research Agency, a key weapon in the Russian attack.

"Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls," wrote Damian Ruck, the study's lead researcher, in an article explaining his findings.

The study found that every 25,000 re-tweets by accounts connected to the IRA predicted a 1 percent increase in opinion polls for Trump.

In an interview with NBC News, Ruck said the research suggests that Russian trolls helped shift U.S public opinion in Trump's favor. As to whether it affected the outcome of the election: "The answer is that we still don't know, but we can't rule it out."

Given that the election turned on 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, "it is a prospect that should be taken seriously," Ruck wrote, adding that more study was needed in those swing states.

He points out that 13 percent of voters didn't make their final choice until the last week before the election.

Ruck said the correlation between troll activity and Trump's popularity remained true even when controlling for Trump's own Twitter activity and other variables.

"It turns out that the activity of Russian Twitter trolls was a better predictor of Donald Trump's polling numbers than his own Twitter activity," he wrote.

Donald Trump won because he effectively got a third of a percentage point total in the right three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all states we now know were heavily targeted by Russia's Internet Research Agency in 2016.

And now we have evidence that Russian social media propaganda was a leading indicator of Trump's perfidious success, not a trailing one.

We've got to get the guy out of office.

StupidiNews!

• Baseball fans are mourning the sudden death of LA Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, the 27-year-old was found dead in a Texas hotel room Monday, foul play and suicide have been ruled out.
• A new lawsuit by environmental groups seeks to block construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, claiming the Trump regime ignored federal law to issue permits in March to proceed.
• Heavy flooding is being blamed for the collapse of a wall in Mumbai, India that killed 13, officials say monsoon rains and soaked ground toppled the retaining wall into a slum neighborhood.
• Hong Kong police are on high alert after protesters vandalized buildings and cars, police fired tear gas and used riot gear to break up demonstrations against a Chinese extradition policy.
• Facebook researchers have shut down a fake Libyan news site that was distributing malware and viruses for over five years along with its false stories.

Last Call For Border Line Psychos

America's law enforcement, military, and other first responders are filled with the kind of people who should never be allowed a trickle of authority, let alone the kind of power that police have in this country.  The Border Patrol is no different, with nearly half of the rank and file belonging to a Facebook group that regularly joked that migrants were vermin in need of extermination, and that Latina lawmakers were whores.

Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.

In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.”

Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.

Responsible for policing the nation’s southern and northern boundaries, the Border Patrol has come under intense scrutiny as the Trump administration takes new, more aggressive measures to halt the influx of undocumented migrants across the United States-Mexico border. The patrol’s approximately 20,000 agents serve under the broader U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which has been faulted for allegedly mistreating children and adults in its custody. The agency’s leadership has been in turmoil, with its most recent acting chief, John Sanders, resigning last week.

ProPublica received images of several recent discussions in the 10-15 Facebook group and was able to link the participants in those online conversations to apparently legitimate Facebook profiles belonging to Border Patrol agents, including a supervisor based in El Paso, Texas, and an agent in Eagle Pass, Texas. ProPublica has so far been unable to reach the group members who made the postings.

ProPublica contacted three spokespeople for CBP in regard to the Facebook group and provided the names of three agents who appear to have participated in the online chats. CBP hasn’t yet responded.

“These comments and memes are extremely troubling,” said Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies the border. “They’re clearly xenophobic and sexist.”

The postings, in his view, reflect what “seems to be a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants within CBP. This isn’t just a few rogue agents or ‘bad apples.’”

The bad apples defense doesn't work when it's nearly a majority of your people, guys.

Look, I understand that border enforcement is a dangerous job.  But joking about violence towards people as if they're less than human isn't acceptable in people we should be holding to a higher standard.

Then again, we could say the same thing about President, so.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

It's July 1, meaning a host of state laws across the country take effect today (or would if they weren't current blocked by courts, hi Alabama's awful abortion ban!) and California's 2016 background check laws now apply to the sales of ammunition as well as firearms.

The bustle inside LAX Ammunition on the Friday before Father’s Day betrayed the gloom of the outside sky.

Employees inside the Los Angeles-area gun shop had their hands full chatting with customers who were looking to replenish their ammo supply before July 1, with some customers spending hundreds of dollars in the process.

Why the hurry? That’s the day a new state law will require almost all buyers to go through background checks before being able to buy bullets, potentially increasing the amount of time and money it takes to make purchases.

“We're probably up by 400% from where we were last year for this past month, and this month, in total sales,” says Daniel Kash, the store’s president.

As it is, California has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation — the state bans most assault weapons and restricts the sale and possession of large capacity magazines. There’s also a 10-day waiting period prior to the sale or transfer of a firearm, among other restrictions.

The passage of Proposition 63, a gun control measure approved, coincidentally, by 63 percent of California voters in 2016, will strengthen those laws by taking aim at the sale of ammo.
“Everybody that has a gun ... knows about the law that's upcoming,” Kash says. “That's why you see the store being as busy as it is this week for the Father's Day Sale. People are stocking up right now, basically.”

The new law — championed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, a longtime advocate of gun control — is meant to protect the public by keeping ammunition from getting into dangerous hands, the state says.

Here’s how:

• Customers will have to receive a background check every time they make an ammunition purchase, paying $1 each time.
• Those who don’t already have their information in the Department of Justice’s system for these point-of-sale screenings will have to pay up to $20 for an initial screening.
• Vendors will have to make sure customers aren’t on a DOJ list that names people who are prohibited from buying guns for various reasons — for example, committing a felony — before selling to them.

All ammo sales will have to take place in person — even online orders will have to be shipped to a licensed vendor’s store before customers can pick them up.

Gun owners and enthusiasts aren’t happy, arguing that the new law will cost extra time and money.

“The biggest question on people's minds is what the process is going to be like, and how burdened someone's going to be, whether it's going to take it a tremendous amount of additional time, or whether it's going to cost them more money,” says Alexander Reyes, a manager at Martin B. Retting, a gun shop in Culver City near Los Angeles.

I don't understand, conservatives sure like to make things cost extra time and money when it inconveniences women trying to have reproductive health care or black or brown people, students, the elderly, and the disabled trying to vote.

Here's the thing though, we make people go through hoops to get a drivers' license or buy a car, and firearms are designed to, you know, cause grievous bodily harm to someone on purpose.  We might actually want to regulate that.

 

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Pentagon and Joint Chiefs are politely pushing back on Donald Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the fact that Trump himself is the largest security risk to the nation right now, and our generals and admirals know it.

The U.S. is ill-equipped to counter the increasingly brazen political warfare Russia is waging to undermine democracies, the Pentagon and independent strategists warn in a detailed assessment that happens to echo much bipartisan criticism of President Donald Trump's approach to Moscow.

The more than 150-page white paper, prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and shared with POLITICO, says the U.S. is still underestimating the scope of Russia's aggression, which includes the use of propaganda and disinformation to sway public opinion across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. The study also points to the dangers of a growing alignment between Russia and China, which share a fear of the United States' international alliances and an affinity for "authoritarian stability."

Its authors contend that disarray at home is hampering U.S. efforts to respond — saying America lacks the kind of compelling “story” it used to win the Cold War.

The study doesn't offer any criticisms of Trump, but it comes amid continued chaffing by security hawks in both parties who have objected to the president's repeated slights at U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia, public affection for authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and his habit of scoffing at the evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. A grinning Trump added to that pattern Friday in Osaka, Japan, where he got a chuckle out of Putin by admonishing him, "Don't meddle in the election, president."

In interviews with POLITICO, other Russia watchers supported the report's warnings that the U.S. needs to up its game.

"Russia is attacking Western institutions in ways more shrewd and strategically discreet than many realize,” said Natalia Arno, president of the Free Russia Foundation, an anti-Putin Washington think tank that recently completed its own study of Russian efforts to undermine the West. “The attacks may seem more subtle and craftier, but they are every bit as destructive as governments are influenced, laws are changed, legal decisions are undermined, law enforcement is thwarted and military intervention is disguised."

The unclassified “Strategic Multilayer Assessment” marks a clear warning from the military establishment to civilian leaders about a national security threat that strategists fear, if left unchecked, could ultimately lead to armed conflict.

"In this environment, economic competition, influence campaigns, paramilitary actions, cyber intrusions, and political warfare will likely become more prevalent," writes Navy Rear Adm. Jeffrey Czerewko, the Joint Chiefs' deputy director for global operations, in the preface to the report. "Such confrontations increase the risk of misperception and miscalculation, between powers with significant military strength, which may then increase the risk of armed conflict."

For the Pentagon to even begin to mention this publicly is a five-alarm fire klaxon. This nation will not survive much longer with Donald Trump at the helm, and even if it does, it will be so weak that military conflict will become inevitable.

Trump is a massive security risk, folks.  Even the Pentagon believes so.

StupidiNews!

• The CDC is warning summer swimmers that the cryptosporidium parasite can live in chlorinated pool water for sup to seven days and for Americans to be careful in public swimming pools.
• After decades of banning the practice, Japan is now allowing commercial whaling for the first time in 30 years, citing strong cultural and economic reasons.
• Hong Kong protesters hit the streets again on Monday at a rally to mark the city's return to Chinese rule as Hong Kong administrator Carrie Lam continues to resist calls for her ouster.
• Sudanese military snipers opened fire on a crowded march in support of civilian rule as a deadly crackdown by the ruling military junta continues into its third month.
• Two physicists have come up with the optimal way to make the humble crepe, using fluid dynamics to banish unwanted lumps and tears.

Last Call For the Death Of The Village

I can't help but notice while the American media continues to cede more and more ground to Trump on facts, on coverage, and on propriety, local newspapers are dying at such a rate that ten years from now they won't be around.  The latest victims: the Youngstown (OH) Vindicator and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, as Philly Inquirer columnist Will Bunch observes.

On Friday night, the Vindicator stunned the journalism world when the family that owns Northeast Ohio’s largest newspaper (having resisted the chain ownership that’s gobbled up many similar news orgs) announced it will stop printing in late August, killing off 144 full-time jobs and also delivering a blow to 250 part-time news carriers. It’s another hit for a region that’s suffered 40 years of industrial job losses and is still reeling from GM’s shutdown of its giant Lordstown assembly line, but there’s a much deeper significance to this news.

Ever since the rise of the internet sped up declines in print newspaper circulation and blew up that business model in the 2000s, media pundits have speculated when and where a significant American city will no longer have a daily newspaper, and now we know the answer: Youngstown, Ohio, in 2019. It’s hard to imagine a worse place or a worse time.

Even sadder, the grim announcement from Youngstown was the exclamation point on a Black Friday for journalism in the United States. On the same afternoon, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of the most iconic nameplates in American journalism history, was absorbed into the rival Advocate, a move that will also shrink the number of journalists covering a city coping with poverty, murder and climate change. But scores of other news orgs -- including the one you now hold in your hands -- are also coping this year with job losses, and this is in the so-called good economy.

But journalism’s problems transcend mere dollars. Friday was also a painful day for American journalists because it marked the one-year anniversary of the newsroom shooting by an angry local resident that claimed five lives at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md. — highlighting the rising threats to a free press in this country. Halfway around the world, President Trump chose this day to joke with Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who’s had more reporters killed than the monster of Annapolis — about “getting rid of” journalists who produce what these two autocrats both call “fake news.”

All of this is a reminder that the closing of Youngstown’s only daily paper is a blow not just to a struggling city that needs information, but to American democracy.

As more and more news sources are lost and replaced by deliberate disinformation, corporate PR and Trump state news, we run the risk of a populace that falls below a critical threshold of being able to maintain anything resembling a democratic state.

Of course, that's the point.

Korean Off The Track

After his G20 Summit checkin with his boss Vladimir, Trump decided to etch his name into the history books with a stunt to visit the DMZ and to become the first US leader to set foot in North Korea, a massive coup for Pyongyang and an embarrassing nadir for America.

With wide grins and a historic handshake, President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un met at the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone on Sunday and agreed to revive talks on the pariah nation’s nuclear program. Trump, pressing his bid for a legacy-defining deal, became the first sitting American leader to step into North Korea.

What was intended to be an impromptu exchange of pleasantries turned into a 50-minute meeting, another historic first in the yearlong rapprochement between the two technically warring nations. It marked a return to face-to-face contact between the leaders after talks broke down during a summit in Vietnam in February. Significant doubts remain, though, about the future of the negotiations and the North’s willingness to give up its stockpile of nuclear weapons .

The border encounter was a made-for television moment. The men strode toward one another from opposite sides of the Joint Security Area and shook hands over the raised patch of concrete at the Military Demarcation Line as cameras clicked and photographers jostled to capture the scene.

After asking if Kim wanted him to cross, Trump took 10 steps into the North with Kim at his side, then escorted Kim back to the South for talks at Freedom House, where they agreed to revive the stalled negotiations.

The spectacle marked the latest milestone in two years of roller-coaster diplomacy between the two nations. Personal taunts of “Little Rocket Man” (by Trump) and “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” (by Kim) and threats to destroy one other have given way to on-again, off-again talks, professions of love and flowery letters.

“I was proud to step over the line,” Trump told Kim as they met in on the South Korean side of the truce village of Panmunjom. “It is a great day for the world.”

Naturally, Minister of Propaganda Tucker Carlson was there to record the event for Trumpsterity.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson was spotted with Donald Trump at the Demilitarized Zone on Sunday during the president’s historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. The American contingent for the trip also included Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, both senior White House advisers. Carlson was present when Trump walked into the pariah nation, and became the first sitting president to set foot into North Korea. The controversial host is reportedly a guest of the White House press pool on the trip, and will interview the president at some point on Sunday for a segment that is scheduled to air Monday night.

FOX News is state television, let's get this out of the way first.  Imagine how fast the impeachment would come if a Democratic president dragged Rachel Maddow around as a "special guest" of the WH press pool and repeatedly gave her interview access.

We accept whatever Trump does as the new normal and shrug.

Sunday Long Read: Labor Pains

Adjunct professors in Florida are paid a pittance, because here in America we believe that actually paying academics to teach only encourages the horrible sin of more academics.  But these ivory tower types got together and applied some history to form a brand new union in today's Sunday Long Read from Splinter's Hamilton Nolan.

“Two half-time adjunct jobs do not make a full-time income. Far from it,” Ximena Barrientos says. “I’m lucky that I have my own apartment. I have no idea how people make it work if they have to pay rent.”

We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.

As Barrientos chatted with another adjunct in the empty classroom, the conversation turned to horror stories: the adjuncts forced to sleep in their cars; the adjunct who was sleeping in classrooms at night; the adjunct who had a full mental breakdown from the stress of not being able to earn a living after all of the time he had put in getting his PhD. Such stories are common, from campus to campus, whispered by adjuncts who know deep down that they themselves are living constantly on the edge of personal, professional, and financial disaster. Other than academic credentials, most adjunct professors don’t have much. But recently, Ximena Barrientos, and her 2,800 colleagues at Miami Dade College, and thousands of others just like them throughout the state of Florida, have acquired, at shocking speed and on a grand scale, something of great value—a union. And they want nothing less than dignity.
When thinking about the struggles of thousands and thousands of people who are both employed as college professors and hardly able to pay their own bills, it is useful to keep in mind the fact that, as a rule, none of these people are supposed to exist. The accepted story of what an “adjunct professor” is—the myth that has drawn so many hopefuls into the world of professional academia—is that adjuncting is not a full-time job at all. It is something that retirees do to keep themselves busy; something that working professionals do on the side to educate people in their field; something that, perhaps, a young PhD might do for a year or two while looking for a full-time professorship, but certainly nothing that would constitute an actual career in itself.

In fact, this is a big lie. The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Floridais no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.

Students at Florida’s enormous community colleges (Miami Dade College alone has more than 165,000 students) may not be conscious of this dynamic, but they sit at its center, and they pay the price—not only in their student loan bills, but by sitting in classes taught by teachers who are overworked, underpaid, given virtually no professional resources or continuity of scheduling, and who are often forced to rush from job to job in order to make ends meet, leaving little time for helping students outside of classroom hours, much less for publishing work in their fields to advance their careers. Now, Florida’s higher education system sits at the center of another trend as well: the unionization of those well educated but miserably compensated adjunct professors.

It has long been common for full time college faculty members to be unionized. Over the past decade, adjuncts (and grad student workers) across America have begun unionizing in earnest as well, as they come to realize that their stories of woe are not unique. In just the past few years, one union has organized close to 10,000 Florida adjuncts, in what is one of the most remarkable and little-noticed large scale labor campaigns in the country.

College professors aren't making six figures to sit around and eat lotuses.  They're paid less than McDonald's managers.  And now they're fighting back.

Village Idocy, Or The Hit Dog Hollers

NY Times columnist Bret Stephens goes full white nationalist in his latest piece, screaming Trumpian dog whistles at rock concert loudness after last week's debates in Miami.

In this week’s Democratic debates, it wasn’t just individual candidates who presented themselves to the public. It was also the party itself. What conclusions should ordinary people draw about what Democrats stand for, other than a thunderous repudiation of Donald Trump, and how they see America, other than as a land of unscrupulous profiteers and hapless victims?

Here’s what: a party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us.

They speak Spanish. We don’t. They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents. We are. They broke the rules to get into this country. We didn’t. They pay few or no taxes. We already pay most of those taxes. They willingly got themselves into debt. We’re asked to write it off. They don’t pay the premiums for private health insurance. We’re supposed to give up ours in exchange for some V.A.-type nightmare. They didn’t start enterprises that create employment and drive innovation. We’re expected to join the candidates in demonizing the job-creators, breaking up their businesses and taxing them to the hilt.

This is full-on Trump rally racism that could have been written by Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon or Sean Hannity.  What prompted this tirade?

Sen. Kamala Harris daring to stand up to former VP Joe Biden.

Throughout the debates, I kept wondering if any of the leading candidates would speak to Americans beyond the Democratic base. But Joe Biden seemed too feeble, oratorically and intellectually, to buck the self-defeating trend. Pete Buttigieg was, as always, fluent, knowledgeable and sincere. But his big moment — a mea culpa for a racially charged policing incident in South Bend — felt like another well-mannered white guy desperate to put his wokeness on display.

Harris, meanwhile, came across as Barack Obama in reverse, especially with her scurrilous attack on Biden for the sin of having had a functional political relationship with two former segregationist senators in the 1970s. This was portrayed as a clever debate move but it will come to haunt her.

Obama’s political genius was to emphasize what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,” have called “common-humanity identity politics”— he made you feel comfortable no matter the color of your skin. Harris’s approach, by contrast, is “common-enemy identity politics.” Making white Americans feel racially on trial for views they may have held in the past on crime, busing and similar subjects is not going to help the Democrats.

None of this means that Democrats can’t win in 2020. The economy could take a bad turn. Or Trump could outdo himself in loathsomeness. But the Democratic Party we saw this week did even less to appeal beyond its base than the president. And at least his message is that he’s on their — make that our — side.

Democrats!  Don't you dare make white voters uncomfortable or they'll vote for Trump so that you suffer!

Of course, that's true.  Stephens's message is clear and he is correct.  White voters will vote for Trump just to hurt those people.

2014 and 2016 showed us that.  Black Lives Matter showed us that.  Barack Obama saying "If I had a son he'd look like Trayvon Martin" infuriated millions of white voters.

We have to turn out more than they do in 2020.  Period.