Last Call For Coming For Your Healthcare, Again, Con't

A three-judge appellate panel heard augments today by several Republican attorneys general that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, and the two GOP-appointed judges on the panel appeared to have heavy skepticism that the law should be allowed to continue.

A federal appeals court panel grilled Democratic attorneys general on Tuesday about whether Obamacare violates the U.S. Constitution, as it weighs whether to uphold a Texas judge’s ruling striking down the landmark healthcare reform law.

The judges focused on whether the 2010 Affordable Care Act lost its justification after Republican President Donald Trump in 2017 signed a law that eliminated a tax penalty used to enforce the ACA’s mandate that all Americans buy health insurance.
Republicans have repeatedly tried and failed to repeal Obamacare since its 2010 passage. The Justice Department would normally defend a federal law, but the Trump administration has declined to take that position against a challenge by 18 Republican-led states.

“If you no longer have a tax, why isn’t it unconstitutional?” Judge Jennifer Elrod, who was appointed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals by Republican President George W. Bush, asked attorneys for the Democratic officials defending the law during a hearing in New Orleans.

A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general led by California’s Xavier Becerra stepped up to defend the law. The U.S. House of Representatives intervened after Democrats won control in November’s elections during which many focused their campaigns on defending Obamacare.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans is not expected to decide on Tuesday whether to overturn or uphold the ruling by a federal judge in Texas last year that the entire ACA was unconstitutional.

An appellate ruling declaring Obamacare unconstitutional could prompt an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, opening the door for the top court to take up the issue in the midst of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 

Republicans have been trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act for nine years now.  Making health care and millions of Trump voters losing health coverage the top issue of 2020 seems like a pretty stupid idea, but Republicans are clearly counting on Democrats to vote to overturn it and surrender to a GOP "replacement" bill rather than risk a loss at SCOTUS, where this will be headed either way.

We'll see what the judges do later this year, and how quickly this case gets to SCOTUS.

It's Time To Ditch Mitch

Amy McGrath is officially entering the 2020 Senate race to unseat Mitch McConnell.

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot who rose to national prominence last year in her failed campaign for Congress against Republican Andy Barr, is turning her sights on a new target: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

In a three-minute video released Tuesday, McGrath said McConnell has "bit by bit, year by year, turned Washington into something we all despise." 

"I'm running for Senate because it shouldn't be like this," McGrath added. 

McGrath's candidacy marks a significant recruiting coup for Democrats. She emerged as an unlikely fundraising juggernaut in her congressional race, bringing in millions of dollars after her campaign released a biographical video that went viral, and becoming a Democratic celebrity in the process. 

McGrath will have her work cut out for her, however. President Donald Trump won Kentucky by nearly 30 points in 2016, and his presence at the top of the ticket in 2020 will likely help drive Republican voters to the polls 

McGrath failed to win her House race in 2018 against Barr, who won by about 3 points, despite being outspent by McGrath by nearly $3 million. 

In the race against McConnell, McGrath appears poised to run as a moderate seeking to break the partisan gridlock in Washington. In an interview Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," McGrath said she had watched the Democratic presidential debate and was concerned that many candidates were positioning themselves too far to the left on issues like health care. 

Meanwhile, McConnell has shown himself to be a canny and ruthless opponent. In 2014, he beat back a much-hyped rival, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, in a 15-point victory. 

McConnell's team welcomed the challenge from McGrath. 

"Amy McGrath lost her only race in a Democratic wave election because she is an extreme liberal who is far out of touch with Kentuckians," said McConnell campaign manager Kevin Golden. "Comparing President Trump's election to 9/11, endorsing a government takeover of healthcare, and calling the wall 'stupid' is a heckuva platform that we will be delighted to discuss over the next sixteen months." 

On "Morning Joe," McGrath conceded that McConnell "has been formidable" after more than three decades in the Senate. But, she added, "this is a different race." 

"The things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done," McGrath said. "He's not able to get it done because of Mitch McConnell."

Here's McGrath's announcement video, and it's a great one.




I don't know if she can win. I don't know if any Kentucky Democrat can beat Mitch McConnell. But we have to try, and McGrath is the best chance we've had in a while.  She still has to get past the primary, but she's got my vote already for that next May.

But Mitch now has 15 months to call her extreme and socialist and weak and to fill voters' heads with the glory of defending Trumpland from the Evil AOC menace, and in a state where Trump won by nearly 30 points, he can all but say "You're not seriously going to elect this bitch over me, right?" and get away with it.

But you want the plan to get rid of Mitch McConnell?  Her name is Amy McGrath.

Help her win.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Why yes, the Russians absolutely created the idiotic and completely false Seth Rich conspiracy theory to hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the corrupt GOP and their FOX media arm gladly made themselves accomplices in helping a foreign power sabotage our elections in order to gain power.

In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

The purported details in the SVR account seemed improbable on their face: that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

Yet in a graphic example of how fake news infects the internet, those precise details popped up the same day on an obscure website, whatdoesitmean.com, that is a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. The website’s article, which attributed its claims to “Russian intelligence,” was the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.

“To me, having a foreign intelligence agency set up one of my decedents with lies and planting false stories, to me that’s pretty outrageous,” said Deborah Sines, the former assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Rich case until her retirement last year. “Maybe other people don’t think it’s that outrageous. I did ... once it became clear to me that this was coming from the SVR, then that triggers a lot of very serious [questions about] ‘What do I do with this?’”

The previously unreported role of Russian intelligence in creating and fostering one of the most insidious conspiracy theories to arise out of the 2016 election is disclosed in “Yahoo News presents: Conspiracyland,” a six-part series by the news organization’s podcast “Skullduggery” that debuts this week on the third anniversary of Rich’s murder.

The Russian effort to exploit Rich’s tragic death didn’t stop with the fake SVR bulletin. Over the course of the next two and a half years, the Russian government-owned media organizations RT and Sputnik repeatedly played up stories that baselessly alleged that Rich, a relatively junior-level staffer, was the source of Democratic Party emails that had been leaked to WikiLeaks. It was an idea first floated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who on Aug. 9, 2016, announced a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder, saying — somewhat cryptically — that “our sources take risks.”

At the same time, online trolls working in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the same shadowy outfit that conducted the Russian social media operation during the 2016 election — aggressively boosted the conspiracy theories. IRA-created fake accounts, masquerading as those of American citizens or political groups, tweeted and retweeted more than 2,000 times about Rich, helping to keep the bogus claims about his death in the social media bloodstream, according to an analysis of a database of Russia troll accounts by Yahoo News.
Speaking publicly about the case for the first time, Sines, the former prosecutor, said that the Russian conspiracy-mongering vastly complicated her efforts to solve the murder by forcing her and the Washington, D.C., police department to investigate a blizzard of false allegations in order to make sure there was nothing to any of them. “To waste your time investigating BS is just horrible,” said Sines.

The Russian-inspired conspiracy theories also have had a devastating effect on the Rich family, especially after the theories migrated to alt-right websites and, ultimately, primetime Fox News shows. As they did so, there were repeated suggestions by alt-right commentators that the DNC staffer’s parents and brother were concealing information about his conduct.

“You’re used, you’re lied to, you’re a pawn in your own son’s death,” said Mary Rich, Seth Rich’s mother, who, along with her husband, Joel, was interviewed for the podcast. “I wish they had the chance to experience the hell we have gone through. Because this is worse than losing my son the first time. This is like losing him all over again.”

The Russians did this to hurt Clinton and to help get their preferred candidate, Donald Trump, into the White House.  The entire Republican Party went along.  And we knew this a year ago.

But oh well, it doesn't matter, right?

Let's not strengthen our election defenses and media against Russian propaganda to help Trump.

Last Call For Trumping The Center

NY Times columnist Jamelle Bouie turns the tables on the whole "Why aren't Democrats moving to the center that Trump is leaving behind" nonsense in the Village press by being just about the first person to ask "Why isn't Donald Trump tacking to the center?"

What is President Trump going to do to win the voters who rejected him in 2016?

It’s a serious question. Roughly 137 million people voted in the last presidential election. Most of them — about 74 million people, or 54 percent of all ballots cast — did not vote for Trump. His self-proclaimed “massive landslide” rests on a thin margin of victory in just three states.

Once in office, Trump abandoned the heterodox Republicanism of his campaign for hard-right policies opposed by most Americans. He fought to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When that failed, he pushed for an unpopular upper-income tax cut. He reveled in cruelty toward immigrants and took the side of racist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va. He governs for his base alone, with no sense or understanding of the collective good.

“I have a base that’s a phenomenal — it’s just a phenomenal base,” Trump said in a recent interview with Time magazine. “It’s a very loyal base and I’m loyal to them also.” When asked if he should reach beyond his supporters, he answered simply, “ I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that.”

As a result, the narrow coalition that put him in office is even narrower. The 2018 backlash that gave Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives was built on major gains in Republican-leaning suburbs throughout the country, as a small but still substantial number of 2016 Trump voters either cast a ballot for Democrats or didn’t vote at all.

Trump’s approval rating is nearly 10 points under water, meaning that over all, people disapprove of his performance as president by a large margin (52.3 to 42.7 percent); in several recent polls he loses hypothetical matchups with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg; and as of April, 52 percent of registered voters said they “definitely” wouldn’t vote for him in 2020. He still has the economy on his side, but if the president doesn’t try to reach out to voters outside of his base — if he doesn’t try to appeal to Democrats and Republicans who rejected him in 2016 — there’s a good chance he’ll lose re-election.

It's a fabulous work, made all the more poignant by the fact that if we had a press actually capable of assigning agency and responsibility for Trump alienating the majority of Americans rather than assigning it solely to Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama.

Our press refuses to treat Trump like an adult, instead making it all the Dems' fault for not handling him.  Glad to see anybody, anybody at all, handling it differently.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Trump regime Attorney General William Barr says the White House can simply ignore last month's Supreme Court ruling stopping the government from adding a citizenship question on to the 2020 Census, and will promptly begin the process of doing so.

Attorney General William Barr said Monday that he believes the Trump administration can legally add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, though the Supreme Court ruled against its inclusion last month.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said he has been in regular contact with President Trump about the question, which the president is determined to see featured on the decennial survey.

“I agree with him that the Supreme Court decision was wrong,” Barr told the AP. The attorney general added that he thinks there is “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem and we might as well take a shot at doing that.”

Barr declined to provide further details to the wire service on how the question will be added to the census.

However, the AP cited a senior official who said President Trump is expected to issue a presidential memorandum to the Commerce Department directing them to include the citizenship question on the 2020 census. Action is expected to be taken in the coming days.

So unless the courts intervene again, we have zero rule of law anymore, and Trump will simply issue executive orders to do whatever he wants.  Even if SCOTUS does get involved, there's a better-than-even chance that Chief Justice Roberts will defer to the executive, and the plan to permanently rig the election in favor of the party of white supremacy will continue.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Yes, the US federal government is using state DMV data to identify you and facial recognition software to track you on a regular basis.

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through hundreds of millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.

Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state Department of Motor Vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure.
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other “biometric data” taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of a vast majority of a state’s residents, most of whom have never been charged with a crime.

Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone surveillance tool.

“Law enforcement’s access of state databases,” particularly DMV databases, is “often done in the shadows with no consent,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) said in a statement to The Post.

Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Republican, seemed particularly incensed during a hearing into the technology last month at the use of driver’s license photos in federal facial-recognition searches without the approval of state legislators or individual license holders.

“They’ve just given access to that to the FBI,” he said. “No individual signed off on that when they renewed their driver’s license, got their driver’s licenses. They didn’t sign any waiver saying, ‘Oh, it’s okay to turn my information, my photo, over to the FBI.’ No elected officials voted for that to happen.”

Despite those doubts, federal investigators have turned facial recognition into a routine investigative tool. Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents logged more than 1,000 facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the records show. Names and other details are hidden, though dozens of the searches are marked as having returned a “possible match.”

San Francisco and Somerville, Mass., have banned their police and public agencies from using facial-recognition software, citing concerns about governmental overreach and a breach of public trust, and the subject is being hotly debated in Washington. On Wednesday, officials with the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection and the Secret Service are expected to testify at a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security about their agencies’ use of the technology.

The records show the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local
contact, the records show.

“It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,” said Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs.”

The good news is that both Republicans and Democrats seem pretty upset with the Big Brother surveillance state, but that's probably the extent of it.  We've been living in the era of facial recognition and tracking for several years now, and that's not going to change.

Expect it in fact to get worse as ICE comes in and uses this tech to track undocumented in real time. New Deportation Commissar Ken Cuccinelli is claiming ICE is now ready to conduct mass arrests and mass deportations in one of the biggest police crackdowns in history.

The Trump administration's top official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said immigration authorities are ready to identify, detain and eventually deport approximately one million undocumented immigrants with pending removal orders.
"They're ready to just perform their mission, which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders," Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) branch charged with removal operations.

Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner who took the helm of the agency last month, said it is within ICE's discretion to determine who among those with final orders of deportation will be targeted in operations, suggesting the full pool of approximately one million immigrants might not face deportation after all.

"They've been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort ... is really just information kept within ICE at this point," he added. "The pool of those with final removal orders is enormous."

I've been warning about this for years now.  Trump got cold feet last month.  Next time he won't, and this country will erupt when he makes his move.

StupidiNews!

Back on track after a holiday weekend, so here we go with the news:

• The US Women's National Team defeated the Netherlands 2-0 in France to win the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, but the players still face an uphill battle for pay equality back home.
• Ten Democratic 2020 presidential hopefuls came to Houston over the weekend to speak to teachers at the National Education Association's first presidential forum of the year.
• The UK Ambassador to the US referred to the Trump regime as "inept" and "dysfunctional" in a series of memos leaked to the British Daily Mail newspaper on Sunday.
• Police in Hong Kong have arrested five as protest marches in the city continue over the now delayed policy to extradite criminals to mainland China.
• International researchers have concluded that a 33,000-year-old fossilized skull found in 1941 belonged to a murder victim, killed by blunt force trauma to the head.

Last Call For Amash-ed Potato

Michigan GOP Rep. Justin Amash has now dropped the pretense of remaining as a Republican as his primary numbers in his district have plummeted to somewhere around "David Duke at the Apollo Theater" levels and as a result, he's leaving the GOP to pursue the tried and true role of helping Republicans as the third party spoiler

Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, the only sitting Republican member of Congress to support impeaching President Trump, announced on Thursday that he was leaving the party after facing fierce attacks from the president and fellow Republicans. 

In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post that did not mention Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Amash wrote: “I’ve become disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions.” 

Three hours after the essay was published, Mr. Trump responded with a personal attack against Mr. Amash, calling him “one of the dumbest and most disloyal men in Congress.”.

Mr. Amash, 39, is known as a libertarian with a contrarian streak and has been one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest critics on the right. He has even considered a run against him in the 2020 election. Mr. Amash’s move on Thursday makes him the only independent member of the House, which has 235 Democrats and, now, 197 Republicans.

In May, he became the first — and so far the only — sitting Republican member of Congress to join Democrats in saying that the president had committed offenses that rose to the level of impeachment.

That assertion was based on his reading of the redacted report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which was released in April. In a series of tweets, Mr. Amash accused Attorney General William P. Barr of deliberately misrepresenting the report’s findings in his summary. Mr. Amash argued that the report had provided multiple examples of conduct that could be labeled obstruction of justice. 

The president immediately struck back, calling Mr. Amash a “loser” and reinforcing the congressman’s isolation within the Republican Party. A conservative state representative in Michigan, Jim Lower, and a National Guard veteran, Tom Norton, quickly suggested that they might mount primary challenges if Mr. Amash runs for a sixth term next year. 

In his essay, published on the morning of Independence Day, Mr. Amash wrote that his father, a Palestinian refugee who moved to the United States at 16, had instilled in him the belief that America is a land of opportunity.

Mr. Amash quoted George Washington on the dangers of partisanship and strongly criticized the two-party system. 

“Modern politics is trapped in a partisan death spiral, but there is an escape,” he wrote. 

He called for Americans to join him “in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.”

If all of those are setting off your Gary Johnson "enough third-party anti-Trump votes to hand him the election" alarm bells, they should be, because that's exactly what's happening here.  Martin "BooMan" Longman saw this coming weeks ago.

The name that has been coming up with increasing frequency lately is Rep. Justin Amash from the Grand Rapids area of Michigan. He’s the only Republican member of Congress to say that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, and now he’s facing a serious primary challenge that he may not survive. He also quit the Freedom Caucus this week, saying that he didn’t want to be a distraction. One advantage of Amash over Romney is that Amash is actually a libertarian, so he wouldn’t be hijacking the party for his own vanity project. Beyond that, though, there’s little to recommend him as a vote-getter. Certainly, Romney would have vastly more potential for splitting votes off from both major party candidates. As a far-right Republican, Amash’s appeal to the left would be limited to a small subset of people who are primarily interested in the surveillance state and privacy issues, and those who agree with Amash’s critiques of America’s bipartisan foreign policy. Many of these people’s first choice will be the Green Party candidate. 

In any case, Rep. Amash is not discouraging this speculation: 

There has also been speculation Amash might challenge Trump in 2020 as a libertarian candidate, something he did not rule out at a recent town hall. 

“I’ve said many times, I don’t rule things like that out,” Amash said. “If you’re fighting to defend the Constitution, if you find a way to do that that’s different and maybe more effective, then you have to think about that.”   

Normally, you’d expect the libertarian candidate to cut more deeply into the Republican candidate’s base than the Democrat’s, but that is not a certainty. It might even cut in different directions depending on the state. A lot will depend on how comfortable the Democrats’ affluent white suburban professional base is with the their nominee. They may seek a middle option to register their disapproval, just as many are suspected to have done in 2016. Romney would be an easier landing place for them than Amash, but he might also soak up #NeverTrump votes that would otherwise go to the Democrat.

Amash may run in his district to keep his current job, but I expect him to seriously consider a 2020 third party bid, one that could be real trouble for the Democrats, and once again it's one man's arrogance that's going to cost the country dearly.

Justice Finally Served, Con't

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein is headed for jail after he was arrested in NYC on charges of child trafficking and conspiracy.

More than a decade after receiving one of the most lenient sentences for a serial sex offender in U.S history, multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested in New York, sources confirmed to the Miami Herald Saturday night.

A passerby said she saw about a dozen agents knock down the door of Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse around 5:30 p.m.

Epstein, 66, is expected to be arraigned in federal court in New York on Monday on charges that he molested dozens of underage girls in New York and in Florida, the sources said. His arrest, first reported by the Daily Beast, comes nearly two weeks after the Justice Department announced that it would not throw out his 2008 non-prosecution agreement, even though a federal judge ruled it was illegal.

Rumors had been circulating for months that Epstein was under investigation on sex charges in the Southern District of New York. It’s not clear what instances those investigations involved, and the Herald had not been able to confirm the status of the New York probe.

Sources said he was arrested by the FBI pursuant to a sealed indictment that will be unsealed on Monday. He is in custody in New York and a bail hearing is set for Monday.

“That bail hearing will be critical because if they grant him bail, he will disappear and they will never get him,’’ a source in New York told the Herald.

Last November, the Miami Herald published a series of stories, titled Perversion of Justice, that described the ways in which the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, worked in conjunction with Epstein’s lawyers to engineer the non-prosecution agreement — and keep it secret from Epstein’s victims. Acosta is now President Donald Trump secretary of labor.

Sources told the Herald that the indictment includes new victims and witnesses who spoke to authorities in New York over the past several months.

“Oh my God. Finally, finally, finally! Justice!’ said Michelle Licata, one of Epstein’s victims who was molested by him when she was 16 years old.

Epstein, who has homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico, Paris and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, sexually abused nearly three dozen girls, mostly 13-16 years old, at his Palm Beach mansion in 1999 to 2006, according to investigators. He used the girls to help recruit other young girls as part of an operation that ran similar to a pyramid scheme. He also had recruiters who helped with his appointments, scheduling as many as three or four girls a day, the FBI probe found.

Acosta met one-on-one with Epstein’s lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, in October 2007, at a West Palm Beach Marriott. Records reviewed by the Herald showed that it was at that meeting that Acosta agreed to a non-prosecution agreement that gave Epstein and others involved in his operation federal immunity.

The Daily Beast story on Epstein posits that the charges against Epstein could net him 45 years in federal prison, and it backs up the Miami Herald story on the SDNY nailing him with new witnesses and testimony.

And yes, if Epstein is granted bail, he will step on a yacht and vanish like a ghost.  Even if he bugs out with only a fraction of his wealth, he'll be comfortable for the rest of his life in some country with no extradition treaty, probably the UAE or Mali or Russia...especially that last one.  Epstein is pretty mobbed up you know and if he does vanish, expect Trump to pardon him on the way out.

As to the fate of the man who Epstein bought last time to avoid spending the rest of life in prison, current Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, well who knows?  He hasn't been forced to resign yet, why would he be now?

We'll see what happens on Monday.  The Miami Herald team is basically responsible for putting Epstein away, so we'll see if they get the credit for it.

I'll Have The Patty Meltdown, Please

Hope everyone had enjoyable cookouts and all that for the 4th no matter what you eat these days, and speaking of cookouts, you know a green product is a real threat to capture American market share when corporate America calls on Republicans to regulate their competition out of existence.

It’s been a good few months for the plant-based meat movement — so good that opponents of the fledgling industry are starting to mobilize.

This week, a new law went into effect in Mississippi. The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like “burger” and “hot dog” would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers — but given that the phrase “veggie burger” hasn’t been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.

“The plant-based meat alternative category is on fire right now, with consumers demanding healthier and more sustainable options,” Michele Simon, the executive director of the Plant-Based Foods Association, said in a statement. “This law, along with similar laws in several other states, is the meat lobby’s response.”
The makers of meat alternatives are suing. In a lawsuit filed on July 2, they argue that since their products are already labeled “vegan,” no consumers are confused. If anything, the requirement that they avoid product descriptions like “veggie burger” makes things more confusing.

“There is no evidence that consumers are confused by plant-based bacon or veggie burger labels, and federal laws are already in place that prohibits consumer deception,” said Jessica Almy, director of policy at the Good Food Institute, an organization that works on expanding access to plant-based foods. “This law is a tremendous overstep of state powers.”

And that’s not the only problem. Food scientists are working right now on cell-based meat products, which are identical to meat from animals but grown from stem cells in a factory. Those products (which aren’t on the market yet) are meat in every relevant sense — most importantly, anyone with an allergy to meat will experience an allergic reaction to the products, and the items must be stored, refrigerated, and handled as meat. But under Mississippi’s current law, it’d be illegal to disclose that on the label.

This legal fight matters. Labeling laws like these have been discussed around the country, and courts will soon debate whether they’re constitutional. At the same time, federal regulators are looking to the states for cues about labeling laws for plant-based meat. Aggressive prohibitions could slow the growth of plant-based alternatives, which are badly needed.

“This bill will protect our cattle farmers from having to compete with products not harvested from an animal,” said Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation president Mike McCormick in January when the bill passed in the Mississippi state House.

Mississippi isn’t the first state to consider this. Missouri passed the first such labeling law last year, and it was challenged in court by groups including the Good Food Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that such a “content-based, overbroad, and vague” restriction on the language companies could use to describe their products was unconstitutional. The lawsuit is now in settlement talks.

Dozens of other states have considered similar laws since then. The laws are popular with farmers and ranchers, who see their business model threatened by the rising popularity of plant-based meat.

Expect this to go to the courts in a losing battle while the Trump FDA issues new "labeling guidelines" that make Mississippi's law a national one, and soon. The rancher and meat processing lobby wants plant burgers and lab-grown meat to go away now, because if Millennials and Gen Z get hooked on Impossible Whoppers from Burger King now, they know they're done in an increasingly greening and sustainable world.

It doesn't have the Tesla problem either, plant burgers are actually cheaper in some places because hey, Trump's stupid trade war and climate change and family farms tanking has made beef pretty pricey these days, it's $4-$5 a pound here in the Cincy area for ground beef and well more than that for steak.  Plant-based products are cheaper.

So yes, I definitely see Trump's FDA moving to hamstring plant burgers like this, and if they don't, GOP legislatures will be lobbyed until they do.

It's Still The Economy, Stupid

Pundits, especially on the right, keep telling us that Trump's re-election is a slam dunk finish because the economic and job numbers are "the best in your lifetime".  Only one problem with that analysis, and that is the analysis is flat out wrong for those left behind by wealth inequality.

Sommer Johnson thought everything was finally coming together for her last year. She was engaged, working full time and doing well in online college classes when her fiance’s mother died a week before their wedding day — triggering a series of large and unexpected expenses that left her struggling to pay her bills and brought her to the verge of bankruptcy.

“I keep hearing this is one of the best economies we’ve ever had and unemployment is down, especially among African Americans, which I am,” said Johnson, 39, who lives in Douglasville, Ga., an Atlanta suburb. “I’m looking around going, ‘Where is this boom?’ From where I sit, this doesn’t look like the best economy ever.”

The economic expansion this week became the longest in U.S. history, surpassing the 1990s boom, which lasted exactly a decade.

The stock market is at record levels, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing at a new high Wednesday ahead of the July 4 holiday, and President Trump has made the economy’s strong performance a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

But this expansion has been weaker and its benefits distributed far more unevenly than in previous growth cycles, leaving many Americans in a vulnerable position.

This is a “two-tier recovery,” said Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at the investment bank UBS. About 60 percent of Americans have benefited financially, he said, while 40 percent have not.

The 40 percent — which Mish calls the “lower tier” — have seen paltry or volatile wage growth, rising expenses for housing, health care and education, and increased levels of personal debt. They tend not to own homes or many stocks.

In discussions with 30 Americans unable to pay all of their bills, a clear pattern emerged: Most were able to eke by until they faced an unexpected crisis such as a job loss, cancer, car trouble or storm damage.

The extra expense caused them to get behind on their bills, and they never fully rebounded.

Economists fear such precarious financial situations put many Americans at risk if there is even a mild setback in the economy, potentially setting up the next recession to be worse than anything in recent history except the Great Recession.

“So many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck,” said Signe-Mary McKernan, vice president of the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute. “We are headed toward a political crisis, if not an economic one.”

It won't take much, either.  I think the catalyst is going to be Trump's trade war with China, spiking consumer prices across the country, and that will hurt the "lower tier" more. 

And again, we're talking 40% of the entire country, which means we're talking about a number of working-class white voters as well as black, Latino, and Asian voters who are going to quickly fall into real trouble and soon.  How many working-class white voters will stick with Trump if they start going under?

Probably a large majority of them.  Will they actually show up and vote?

We'll see.

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!