Friday News Dump: The Big Kitz-Off

And it's official: Oregon Dem Gov. John Kitzhaber is resigning effective Wednesday, February 18th. His resignation statement is a doozy.

I am announcing today that I will resign as Governor of the State of Oregon.

It is not in my nature to walk away from a job I have undertaken – it is to stand and fight for the cause. For that reason I apologize to all those people who gave of their faith, time, energy and resources to elect me to a fourth term last year and who have supported me over the past three decades. I promise you that I will continue to pursue our shared goals and our common cause in another venue. 

I must also say that it is deeply troubling to me to realize that we have come to a place in the history of this great state of ours where a person can be charged, tried, convicted and sentenced by the media with no due process and no independent verification of the allegations involved. But even more troubling – and on a very personal level as someone who has given 35 years of public service to Oregon – is that so many of my former allies in common cause have been willing to simply accept this judgment at its face value. 

It is something that is hard for me to comprehend – something we might expect in Washington, D.C. but surely not in Oregon. I do not know what it means for our shared future but I do know that it is seriously undermining civic engagement in this state and the quality of the public discourse that once made Oregon stand out from the pack. 

Nonetheless, I understand that I have become a liability to the very institutions and policies to which I have dedicated my career and, indeed, my entire adult life. As a former presiding officer I fully understand the reasons for which I have been asked to resign. I wish Speaker Kotek and President Courtney and their colleagues on both sides of the aisle success in this legislative session and beyond. And I hope that they are truly committed to carrying forward the spirit of bipartisanship and collaboration that has marked the last four years in Oregon.

Oregon's Secretary of State, Democrat Kate Brown, will succeed him in the office (Oregon has no Lt. Governor) and she will be the first bisexual governor in US history, but she's not without her political controversies either.

Brown will have almost two years to govern before facing voters for the right to fill out the rest of Kitzhaber’s term, but Republicans are already critical of her record and stumbles during her first term as secretary of state. She angered Republicans when she scheduled an election for state Labor Commissioner in November 2012, rather than in May. 

Republicans said the decision was an overtly political act aimed at saving the Democratic nominee, Brad Avakian, who won. She fired several employees, including her chief of staff and the head of the state’s elections division, amid the criticism. Most major papers in the state endorsed her Republican opponent in 2012, though she won reelection in a favorable Democratic year. 

Brown also took fire for a letter she sent to the Federal Communications Commission in support of Comcast’s bid to take over Time Warner. The tech Web site The Verge reported that Brown’s letter was drafted by a Comcast lobbyist after the company contributed nearly $10,000 to her secretary of state campaigns. Brown has refused to answer questions about the letter.

We'll see how soon-to-be Governor Brown fares.  Meanwhile, if any political crisis consultants are looking for a new client to take on, I'd start in Salem..

Be Careful What You Wish For

There are some in the House GOP Tea Party brigade that want Mitch McConnell to end the filibuster completely in order to take Senate Democrats out of the equation for the next two years, starting with the Republican bill to defund President Obama's immigration actions.

A growing number of House GOP conservatives are pressuring Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday to invoke the "nuclear option" and change the chamber's rules to pass a bill defunding President Obama's executive actions on immigration.

Reps. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho) and Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) said McConnell should change Senate rules, so the House-passed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, which includes language to revoke Obama's immigration-related actions, can bypass a Democratic filibuster in the upper chamber. 

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) also endorsed the idea at a Thursday news conference. He said there’s a “way to change the rules to allow us to move forward” and “take away the ability to filibuster.”

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) was the first House Republican to advocate such a rules change Wednesday evening, arguing that now-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had established a precedent during his time in the majority.

But Senate Republicans don't see the point with Obama sure to veto the bill anyway, and they know that only holding the upper chamber with a four-seat lead means the Dems will someday be back in charge.

“The answer is not to change Senate rules,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said during the same news conference at which Mulvaney spoke. "The answer is for Senate Democrat not to be obstructionists.”

“I don’t think that’s an option we’re looking at right now,” freshman Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) added, arguing that things should move forward according to current Senate rules.

However the House Tea Party is getting pissed.  They see Obama winning and they want to change the game somehow.  Never mind that it's the Senate GOP who has to do the work here.

Labrador suggested Senate Republicans should just "pack up" and go home if they "don't want to fight" on the DHS funding issue.

"If they don't want to fight, if they don't want to work, if they don't want to do the hard work that is necessary to do the will of the American people, then maybe they just need to pack up, and they need to decide that for the next two years, we're just not going to do anything in the Senate," Labrador said.

Otherwise, Labrador argued, Senate Republicans might as well hand the majority back over to the Democrats.

"If we're going to allow seven Democratic senators to decide what the agenda is of the House Republican conference, of the Senate Republican majority, then we might as well just give them the chairmanships, give them the leadership of the Senate," he asserted.

Why, this doesn't look like a united front to me.  It looks like Republicans are in charge of a branch of Congress with approval ratings in the teens, and they are now 100% responsible for the mess.

Be careful what you wish for, folks.

StupidiNews!

• After more than 400 days in jail, two Al Jazeera journalists were freed on bail from an Egyptian prison today pending a retrial on charges of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
• New York Times media columnist David Carr has died at 58 after collapsing Thursday evening in the newsroom and being rushed to a nearby hospital.
• Joint US and Jordanian air strikes in Syria have killed at least 20 Islamic State fighters in the northeastern border area of the country near Iraq, according to human rights monitors.
• News that Germany's economy is on the rise pushed the country's DAX index to a new record as Greek and European Union leaders are getting closer to a compromise.
• A computer researcher has adapted medical imaging diagnosis software to develop an algorithm to identify authentic Jackson Pollock paintings among mimics.

Last Call For Ore-Gone Crazy

I'm beginning to wonder if at this point, there's anything that Oregon Dem Gov. John Kitzhaber can do correctly without looking like a moron.

Gov. John Kitzhaber decided to resign Tuesday but then changed his mind, insisting Wednesday afternoon that he's staying, The Oregonian/OregonLive has learned. 

Events developed as the Democratic governor, now in a historic fourth term and fighting multiple investigations, faced eroding support from other elected officials and even his own advisers. 

The governor decided to pull back from resigning - set for Thursday or Friday -- after meeting with his attorney, Portland lawyer Jim McDermott, and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes. Hayes' role in his administration has been the source of much of his troubles. 

The account of the tumultuous 24 hours was developed from a half-dozen sources with knowledge of the events.

"My lawyer and my crazy fiancee talked me out of resigning" is a really, really good sign you need to resign anyway, man.

To resign, Kitzhaber needed Secretary of State Kate Brown, who would succeed him if he steps down. But Brown, 54, was in Washington, D.C., for a conference of the National Association for Secretaries of State. 

Kitzhaber called Brown on Tuesday afternoon, telling her she needed to return to Portland for a face-to-face meeting as soon as she could. She was on a plane by Wednesday morning. 

The governor's staffers set to work Wednesday morning, planning for a resignation announcement that all understood was imminent. 

But word soon got back to Oregon that Brown had been called back, leaving Washington two days earlier than she planned.

As news reporters began calling for comments from his office, Kitzhaber met with Hayes and McDermott.

Both pushed back against the planned resignation. It's unclear what arguments Hayes and McDermott used to pull Kitzhaber back from the brink. 

The governor decided then against resigning.

I don't honestly know what to say about this, other than this seems to be an almost Rob Ford level of failure here.  You have less than zero credibility after this story.  Dude, just go already.

Take The Money And Run

If you want to get more into the weeds on Obamacare, you should be reading Richard Mayhew's posts over at Balloon Juice frankly, but I wanted to point out a couple of things in the latest Obamacare sign-up numbers.

Signups for ObamaCare are surging in southern states, with increases of nearly 100 percent in some states compared to last year, federal health officials said Wednesday. 

Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi have each seen 80 percent more signups compared to last year, Deputy Administrator Andy Slavitt said. 

The same states are also reporting the fastest rate of growth in the final two weeks of the current enrollment period, which ends Feb. 15. Each of the states has reported 5 percent more signups over the last two weeks compared to last year. 

The trend is particularly significant given that the Republican governors in each of the states have made little or no effort to promote signups, leaving the outreach to state and national healthcare advocacy groups. State leaders, like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, have been some of the law’s harshest critics. 

“Real simply, I think word is spreading. I think word of mouth is spreading really positively as neighbors tell neighbors how easy it’s been to get coverage this year,” Slavitt told reporters in a briefing Wednesday.

And these new signups on federal exchange red states with no Medicaid expansion are exactly the folks who are going to get screwed should King v Burwell go south in June. They are the most likely to be able to get subsidies because of low income (providing they don’t fall into the gap left by refusal to expand Medicaid), and the ones least likely to be able to afford insurance without them, should Scalia and company have their way.

In other words, Jindal and Abbott and Phil Bryant and Nikki Haley are going to have a bunch of rather angry constituents on their hands. The conventional wisdom is that red state governors are somehow going to be the ones pushing for a post-King fix should it come to that.

I doubt they will. They’ll simply blame Obama and walk away from the mess. It’s not like voters give a damn enough to punish these clowns. It’s possible that there may be a critical mass demanding Congress fix subsidies, but even best case scenario on that is Boehner and McConnell going “OK, so what do you want to give us in order to fix this?” and that’s without a full Tea Party revolt at the idea of “fixing” Obamacare.

It’s just depressing to believe that we’re seriously talking about the likely possibility of the Supreme Court wrecking the lives of millions over a goddamn typo, and it’s just obscene to consider the aftermath of a situation.

Popcorn Populists

Ed Kilgore on Republican fake populism playing a role in the 2014 GOP rampage:

The allusion is to the success of Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and even more strikingly (since reproductive rights were central to the messaging of his Democratic opponent Mark Udall) Cory Gardner of Colorado, who used the Bobby-Jindal-suggested gimmick of supporting OTC contraceptives as an anti-government gesture that also superficially rebutted Democratic claims they wanted to restrict access to contraceptives. It was clever, if not especially deep or credible. But what Edsall is suggesting is that if swing voters want to vote Republican, such gestures on economic issues could be effective even if they are shallow and insincere.

That’s something for progressives to keep in mind before mocking Republican “populism” too much. A little bit can go a long way if that’s the way the wind is blowing.

I'll counter with two words:  Sam Brownback.

The Kansas governor's "populism" has been an absolute austerity disaster so far, and if Democrats are smart, they'll keep Kansas's terrible economy in the news as much as possible.  If there's any Republican who wants to take Brownback's austerity program nationally and put America back into a deep recession, it's "budget guru" John Kasich.

Democrats can easily take this approach apart if they move now to head it off.

But Kilgore is right: unchecked, Republican fake populism is going to help them in places where the Obama recovery hasn't helped the middle class much at all.

StupidiNews!

• Talks between Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany have resulted in a ceasefire agreement that will begin Sunday and could finally put an end to the 10-month conflict in Ukraine.
• Veteran CBS 60 Minutes reporter Bob Simon has been killed in a car accident in New York City, while riding as a passenger in a car that struck another vehicle.
• Al Qaeda group Ansar al-Sharia has claimed responsibility for the takeover of a Yemeni army base in the southern part of the country, they say they have Yemeni soldiers as hostages.
• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes America is ready for a national ruling to legalize same-sex marriage, according to a Bloomberg News interview.
• California Congressman Tony Cardenas is the latest lawmaker to have questions about the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, voicing concerns over smaller Spanish language programmers.

Last Call For Yoga Inferno

So one Montana lawmaker wants to ban yoga pants in public because…I have no clue.

The Republican from Missoula said tight-fitting beige clothing could be considered indecent exposure under his proposal. 

“Yoga pants should be illegal in public anyway,” Moore said after the hearing.
Moore said he wouldn’t have a problem with people being arrested for wearing provocative clothing but that he’d trust law enforcement officials to use their discretion. 

He couldn’t be sure whether police would act on that provision or if Montana residents would challenge it. 

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Moore said.

Can we ban stupid Republicans from making laws?

Seriously, "Well the cops might abuse this law but I don't have a crystal ball" is about the worst goddamn excuse I know of for making a law.  Doesn't this suggest your law is at best highly questionable and at worst patently unconstitutional?

Good job, Montana.

To Protect And Sever

Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback continues to be the worst state chief executive in the nation, this week reversing by executive order civil rights protections for LGBTQ Kansans because...well he doesn't really have a good reason, does he?

In a move that shocked progressive advocates in Kansas, the state's Republican governor on Tuesday issued an executive order to remove discrimination protections for gay, lesbian and transgender state employees. 

State employees in Kansas can now legally be fired, harassed or denied a job for being gay or transgender, critics said. 

Gov. Sam Brownback said an 2007 executive order by Kathleen Sebelius, then the state's Democratic governor, went too far by not getting legislative approval to bar job discrimination for sexual orientation and gender identity.

Discrimination for state jobs in Kansas is forbidden for race, color, gender, religion, national origin, ancestry or age. Brownback said any expansion of such laws for LGBT employees should be done by the Legislature "and not through unilateral action." 

"This executive order ensures that state employees enjoy the same civil rights as all Kansans without creating additional ‘protected classes’ as the previous order did," Brownback said in a statement announcing the replacement of Sebelius' executive order with his own.

So no, Republicans are 100% okay with codifying bigotry and discrimination back into law whenever they can.  Speaking of that, why did Brownback not do this on his first day as Kansas governor in 2011?  He waited until his second term in order to reverse Kathleen Sebelius's order.  So for four years, Brownback didn't have a problem with it.

Only now he does.  Only now he feels like Kansas is better served by being able to fire state employees for being gay or trandgender,  Was he just completely unaware of the executive order?  I doubt it.  Sebelius signed the order in 2007, so for 8 years this was fine, including Brownback's entire first term.

Oh wait, maybe Brownback needs a Two-Minute Hate subject in order to distract Kansas Republicans from his incoming new taxes and massive cuts to schools and infrastructure to pay for his continuing scheme to cut taxes for the rich and for corporations.

Funny how that works out, huh.

Like I said, worst governor in the country.

Greek Fire: The Endgame, Con't.

Zee Germans are apparently quite through messing around with the Greek dancing around the issue, and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has all but dropped the hammer on Athens.

Speaking to reporters in Istanbul after a two-day meeting of finance chiefs from the Group of 20, Schaeuble said “it’s over” if Greece doesn’t want the final tranche of the current aid program. Greece’s creditors also “can’t negotiate about something new,” Schaeuble said. 

Greek government bonds had risen today for the first time in five days on optimism there might be room to move toward an agreement that will help ensure the nation isn’t left short of funds. That had come after Greece had offered compromises in a bid to push for a bridge plan to stave off a funding crunch and to buy time for negotiations to ease austerity demands.

Any accord, however, would require an easing of Germany’s stance in the standoff between Greece and its creditors over conditions attached to its 240 billion-euro ($272 billion) lifeline. An impasse risks leaving Greece without funding as of the end of this month, when its current bailout expires, and may put Europe’s most-indebted state’s euro membership in danger. 

Schaeuble damped expectations, saying euro region finance ministers meeting in Brussels tomorrow won’t negotiate a new program for the cash-strapped country as a program is already in place and was arrived at after “arduous” negotiations.

He also said media reports that the European Commission will give Greece six more months to reach an aid deal “has to be wrong” because he’s not aware of such a plan and the commission isn’t in charge of making such decisions. Schaeuble said he had discussed the rules of the aid programs at a meeting with his Greek counterpart Yanis Varoufakis in Berlin last week.

Ouch.

Take it or leave it, new Greek PM Alexey Tsipras.  Ball's in your court now, and Zee Germans have called Athens out to put their cards on the table and take the deal.  How will the Greeks respond?  Is there really a six-month reprieve in the works, or is it time for the Greeks to make a decision?

Austerity or Freedom, boys?

Choose.

StupidiNews!

• 46-year old Craig Stephen Hicks has turned himself into police after the shooting deaths of three Muslim students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams has been suspended without pay for six months as the network continues to investigate his now debunked story about coming under fire in Iraq.
• Senior US officials will meet with their Chinese counterparts in August to discuss repatriating Chinese officials who have fled to the US with billions in possibly embezzled Chinese funds.
• The US is closing its embassy in Yemen's capital of Sanaa as violence and unrest continue after the government collapsed and was taken over by Shiite Houthi rebels last month.
• After 16 years, Jon Stewart will be leaving as host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show at the end of 2015.

Last Call For Russian Into Disaster

Roger Cohen, one of the many liberal voices that were 100% wrong about Iraq, is currently employed by the NY Times and is still 100% wrong, this time about Ukraine.

It’s time to get real over Putin. He has not poured tanks and multiple-launch rocket systems over the Ukrainian border because he is about to settle for anything less than a weak Ukraine, sapped by low-level conflict in the Donetsk region, a country with its very own pro-Russian enclave à la Abkhazia or Transnistria, firmly within the Russian sphere of influence: the symbol of his definitive strategic turn away from closer cooperation with the West toward the confrontation that shores him up as oil prices and the currency plunge. He will not let Ukraine go. 

There is a language Moscow understands: antitank missiles, battlefield radars, reconnaissance drones. Bolster the Ukrainian Army with them and other arms. Change Putin’s cost-benefit analysis. There are risks but no policy is risk-free. Recall that Ukraine gave up more than 1,800 nuclear warheads in exchange for that bogus commitment from Russia back in 1994 to respect its sovereignty and borders. Surely it has thereby earned the right to something more than night-vision goggles. The West’s current Ukraine diplomacy is long on illusion and short on realism. Two plus two equals four, in war and peace.

The same idiots who dragged us into a war in Iraq that we're technically still fighting 13 years later want us to start the same playbook again.  When that fails to work again, I'm sure Cohen will be among the first to call for sending in NATO and US troops.

And in 2028, we'll still be in Ukraine.  And Cohen will still be writing columns.

Foreclosed On A Legacy

David Dayen pulls no punches in this hefty piece on the government's response to the foreclosure crisis, placing the blame for wiping out America's middle class squarely and solely on President Barack Obama.

Politicians, economists, and commentators are debating the causes of the rise in inequality of income and wealth. But one primary cause is beyond debate: the housing collapse, and the government’s failure to remedy the aftermath. According to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the bottom 90 percent of Americans saw one-third of their wealth wiped out between 2007 and 2009, and there has been no recovery since. This makes sense, as a great deal of the wealth held by the middle and working classes, particularly among African Americans and Hispanics, is in home equity, much of which evaporated after the bubble popped. The effects have been most severe in poor and working-class neighborhoods, where waves of foreclosure drove down property values, even on sound, well-financed homes. Absent a change in policy, Saez and Zucman warn, “all the gains in wealth democratization achieved during the New Deal and the postwar decades could be lost.” 

President Obama will carry several legacies into his final two years in office: a long-sought health care reform, a fiscal stimulus that limited the impact of the Great Recession, a rapid civil rights advance for gay and lesbian Americans. But if Obama owns those triumphs, he must also own this tragedy: the dispossession of at least 5.2 million U.S. homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century. Though some policy failures can be blamed on Republican obstruction, it was within Obama’s power to remedy this one—to ensure that a foreclosure crisis now in its eighth year would actually end, with relief for homeowners to rebuild wealth, and to preserve Americans’ faith that their government will aid them in times of economic struggle. 

Faced with numerous options to limit the foreclosure damage, the administration settled on a policy called HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program, which was entirely voluntary. Under HAMP, mortgage companies were given financial inducements to modify loans for at-risk borrowers, but the companies alone, not the government, made the decisions on whom to aid and whom to cast off.

Dayen's reporting on HAMP and the foreclosure crisis, at least the facts on it, are impeccable.  I disagree with the notion that Obama is responsible for destroying middle class wealth, however.  It seems to me that the actual bad guys remain the banks whose greed nearly wiped out the global economy, and still may do so.

Could Obama have done more?  Yes.  And so could Congress.  But they didn't.  After all, the banks had long ago made what they did to be legal, and they did it before Obama was ever in the Oval Office.

But the reality is Dayen is right on a couple of points:  Obama could have done more, should have done more, and chose to triage instead, to save the kids from the fire and let the house burn down.  We did him no favors by bringing in more Republicans who wanted the country destroyed, and given the circumstances, he did what he could.  And HAMP was a goddamn mess that hurt people more than it helped.

But we're going to have to live with this mess, and the fact is whether it's Obama's fault or not, the middle class in this country is a smoking wreck.  For black and Latino families, the devastation is absolute and Dayen makes the very strong case that Obama simply wasn't prepared in order to do it.

Dayen ends with this observation:

Perhaps the worst legacy of the failure to stop the crisis is the impact on trust in government itself. HAMP’s predatory lending schemes reinforced the old Ronald Reagan dictum that the most dangerous words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” How do you tell families who signed up for an aid program that ended up actively harming them to ever believe in government again? 

Particularly for a president like Obama, who entered office on a promise of activist government, with ardent backing from communities of color victimized by the crisis, the decision to protect banks over homeowners was debilitating. A tide of cynicism swept out Democrats in the last midterm elections, with voters more skeptical than ever that government can solve problems, or take the people’s side over the financiers. Two-thirds of voters in exit polls found the economy to be rigged for the wealthy. 

“The consequence of these decisions was the disillusionment of his base in believing that political action is going to work,” says Damon Silvers. “They weakened the Obama presidency in ways he could never recover from.”

And this part?  This part I can't argue with.  We're going to be dealing with the damage from this for a very, very long time, both economically and politically.  I don't like it, but it's time to admit that while Obama did champion a lot of things, primarily the Affordable Care Act, it came at a cost. Whether or not that cost is all on Obama's head, or if there was just too much damage form Bush and Clinton for anyone to clean up, whether the GOP actively sabotaged everything, of it Obama had the tools to fix them and instead surrounded himself with people who actively chose to leave the middle class to twist in the tornado, all that's largely irrelevant.

What's relevant is the magnitude of the damage that still remains after HAMP.  In much of America the housing market is still broken beyond repair.

We'll all be paying that cost for a very long time.

The Protection Money Racket

Seems global number two bank HSBC has been very naughty over the years, going out of its way to providing services in “creative tax avoidance” for those who could afford it.

The private-banking unit of HSBC Holdings Plc made significant profits for years handling secret accounts whose holders included drug cartels, arms dealers, tax evaders and fugitive diamond merchants, according to a report released Sunday by an international news organization. 

HSBC is among a handful of banks to face criminal prosecution in recent years for its role in a Swiss banking system that allowed depositors to conceal their identities, and in many cases dodge taxes or launder ill-gotten cash. The report, prepared by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, revealed for the first time the massive sweep of HSBC’s private-banking arm as of 2007, when it controlled $100 billion in assets and served a swath of wealthy depositors from the elite to the illicit.

A whole hell of a lot of tax money got dodged thanks to these guys, and it may be time to pay the piper very soon.

The report is based on a list of HSBC clients from around that time that a onetime employee took from the bank and turned over to European officials, sparking tax investigations from Argentina to France, Belgium and Greece. While some of the list’s names have emerged before, Sunday’s report drew from a more comprehensive list of accounts associated with more than 100,000 people and legal entities from more than 200 nations, ranging from the legitimate to the illicit. 

“These revelations confirm that banking secrecy has been used to avoid taxation,” Vanessa Mock, a European Union spokeswoman for tax affairs, said Monday. 

Depositors included royal families and convicted cocaine dealers, ambassadors and terror suspects, entertainers and elected officials, corporate executives and athletes. To these and other clients, the bank actively promoted its accounts as an efficient way to hide assets from tax collectors, according to the report.

Bet long on tumbrels, guillotines, and various flavored popcorn. Suddenly these tax loopholes are looking like very tasty sources of government income, at least in Europe.

In America, well, not so much, I’d think. We’ll see.

StupidiNews!

• A previously unknown partial copy of the Magna Carta has been discovered in the British town of Sandwich in a scrapbook of town council archives.
• Research into expulsion rates of girls in NYC schools finds that black girls were expelled at a rate 53 times higher then than of white girls.
• President Obama is expected to ask Congress to vote Wednesday on an authorization of use of military force bill against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria.
• EU leaders are trying to find political support for a 10 billion euro bridge loan to keep the Greek government afloat as Germany wants to impose more austerity conditions in exchange for cash.
• At least one US senator believes that the auto industry hasn't gone nearly far enough to protect internet-enabled new cars from hackers, information theft, and tampering.