Turn The Machines Back On

We apologize for slightly breaking your economy.

The New York Stock Exchange shut down its main market because of a computer malfunction, forcing traders to steer orders elsewhere in the biggest disruption to an American equity venue in almost two years. 

The suspension, announced to securities firms through notices on the NYSE website around 11:32 a.m., dropped the largest U.S. share platform out of the network of trading platforms that make up the American equity market. That network kept running, however, as other exchanges such as the Nasdaq Stock Market and Bats Global Markets Inc. picked up the runoff.

It's good that the NASDAQ basically acted as a giant backup stock exchange for a while while the NYSE gets their crap sorted out, but increasingly in the world of high-speed, high-volume computerized trading, glitches like this will only keep getting more damaging to the economy.

“I don’t think it’s a hacking incident here or anything like that,” Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Chatham, New Jersey-based Themis Trading LLC, said by phone. “Based on what I’ve seen in the past, these type of things are usually some sort of issues related to an upgrade, maybe to handle the excessive traffic that’s constantly coming in with high-speed trading.” 

The stock exchange operator said in a Twitter message the issue is internal and not a “cyber breach.” The Securities and Exchange Commission is closely monitoring the situation, according to an e-mailed statement from Chair Mary Jo White.

You don't suppose it has anything to do with China melting down amidst the Greek debt crisis, right?

Fleecing The Rubios

Sen. Marco Rubio is letting us see his cards, and surprise!  It's a race to the bottom to see which Republican would destroy the nation's public schools and universities first: Rubio or Bush.

On education, Rubio said he would establish a new accreditation process that would “expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition” and create income-based loan repayment programs to make student debt more manageable.

“Our higher education system is controlled by what amounts to a cartel of existing colleges and universities, which use their power over the accreditation process to block innovative, low-cost competitors from entering the market,” he said.

“Within my first 100 days, I will bust this cartel by establishing a new accreditation process that welcomes low-cost, innovative providers. This would expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition, which would prompt a revolution driven by the needs of students — just as the needs of consumers drive the progress of every other industry in our economy,” he said.

He also called for student investment plans and an increase in vocational and apprenticeship programs to encourage high school students to begin careers as mechanics, plumbers or electricians.

It’s a message that could appeal to some of the younger voters Rubio hopes to win over.

The Florida senator focused on taxes, saying he’d cut the corporate tax rate to the 25 percent average for developed nations, establish a territorial tax system that encouraged U.S. companies to bring money they’re holding overseas home, allow companies to claim more expenses for investing in creating jobs, and put a ceiling on the amount U.S. regulations can cost.

On immigration, he said he would push for an overhaul that encourages “skill and merit-based” immigration, rather than family-based immigration.

Pretty much every check box on the Chamber of Commerce corporate bonanza right there: massive business tax cuts, corporatized schools and colleges to turn them into profit centers (and hey, lower tax revenues will mean cuts to education, making for profit schools more "competitive" as public schools are starved) and exploitation of low-cost apprenticeship and immigrant labor.

There's nothing new about Rubio's plan, it's just the business wing of the GOP all day, every day. Think Kansas, only in all 50 states!

Won't that be fun?

StupidiNews!

• Subway spokesman Jared Fogle has been dropped by the company after 15 years after an FBI raid in Fogle's home Tuesday near Indianapolis.
• Baylor University has removed "homosexual acts" from the school's code of misconduct as the world's largest Baptist university calls the change part of "a caring community".
• European Union creditors are giving Greece until Sunday to come up with reforms or risk being ejected from the euro currency at an emergency summit this weekend.
• British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will deliver the first Tory-majority budget to Parliament in nearly two decades in what is expected to be a major swing towards austerity.
• AT&T is reportedly offering a promise to make low-cost internet available to subscribers if lawmakers, the DoJ, and the FCC approve its deal to buy DirecTV.

Last Call For Hungry For More

Twinkies are back from beyond the grave, and two years into the comeback of Hostess, we finally are learning what the cost of putting Ho-Hos and Ding Dongs back on shelves really means: the new Hostess Brands, owned by a billionaire venture capitalist, who has automated more than 90% of the company's bakery jobs out of existence.

In 2012, Hostess, the iconic American bakery giant behind Ding Dongs, Ho Ho's and Twinkies, was bankrupt, with plans to slash more than 18,000 jobs and close its doors for good amid a crippling nationwide strike. 

Then, in 2013, a snack-cake savior appeared. The Missouri-based sweets maker was bought for $410 million by a partnership between private-equity giant Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulos, a billionaire turnaround artist known as "Mr. Shelf Space" for his revival of brands like Vlasic, Hungry-Man and Chef Boyardee. 

Now, the iconic dessert titan is resurgent, selling its golden, cream-filled Twinkies across the world under the name Hostess Brands and turning down $2 billion offers from a pack of hopeful buyers. On Tuesday morning, the company reached its latest peak when Reuters, citing anonymous sources, suggested Hostess would head to Wall Street with an initial public offering that would value the company at around $2.5 billion.

That's a huge turnaround, from Chapter 11 to IPO.  But the true cost has been thousands of jobs.

The Hostess Brands of today, launched in 2013 under an Apollo-Metropoulos holding company, owns sweets and cakes under the Hostess and Dolly Madison brands, including Cupcakes, Donettes, Snoballs and Zingers. 

But it looks and operates very differently than the chain from whence it came. The newer, thinner bakery giant kept only five of the 14 original dessert plants: Of those five, one was sold and another, an eight-decade-old bakery in suburban Chicago with 400 employees, closed in October. 

The investment helped bring the classic American snack food into the 21st century. One 500-worker Kansas bakery outfitted with a $20 million Auto-Bake system, according to Forbes, now spits out more than a million Twinkies a day, doing 80 percent of the work once done by 9,000 workers across 14 plants.

From 9,000 bakery employees at 14 plants to 500 at one plant in Kansas.  That's just the bakery division.  Thousands of more supporting jobs were lost when the plants closed for good. This may be an extreme example of automation in the 21st century, but more of it is coming, and it's going to put a lot of people out of work very quickly.

In fact, we're seeing it now.  How much of the "labor participation rate" being the lowest in 50 years is due to automation as a factor?

Do those Twinkies still taste good to you now?

The Revenge Of Flagging Support

Having somehow missed the cattle call when the rest of the conservative strawmen arguments were being set up on the issue of the Confederate flag,WaPo’s Marc Thiessen instead goes for sheer construct size instead.

Did you know that this newspaper is named for a slaveholder? It’s right there on our masthead, the name of a man who for 56 years held other human beings in bondage on his Virginia plantation — a man, according to the official Mount Vernon Web site, who “frequently utilized harsh punishment against the enslaved population, including whippings.” This dreaded symbol of oppression is delivered to the doorsteps and inboxes of hundreds of thousands of people each morning. 

Sure, George Washington also emancipated his slaves in his will, won our independence and became the father of our country — but no matter. It is an outrage that this paper continues to bear the name of such a man. 

It is time to rename The Washington Post! 

Think that’s stupid? You’re right. But there’s a lot of stupid going around today. The latest example: The TV Land network has pulled the plug on reruns of one of America’s most beloved shows, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” because the car in the show, the General Lee, bears a Confederate flag. There is nothing racist about “The Dukes of Hazzard.” It is a show about moonshine, short shorts and fast cars. What is accomplished by banning “The Dukes of Hazzard”? Nothing. 

Our country is in a miasma of political correctness. So where does it end? Are we going to rename our nation’s capital (and Washington state for that matter)? Should we close the Jefferson Memorial (named for a man who never freed his slaves)? How about renaming Arlington (which is named after Robert E. Lee’s estate) . . . or Washington and Lee University (names for not one, but two slave owners) . . . or Fort Hood (named for Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood) and Fort Bragg (named for Braxton Bragg, military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis). 

This impulse to wipe away history is Stalinist. Just like Joseph Stalin once erased people from photographs, we’re now erasing people from our collective history.

I mean this is a hell of a lot of straw in one place, and it’s covered in manure to boot. Nobody’s demanding we rename anything currently named for George Washington, and nobody demanded the cancellation of the Dukes of Hazzard reruns on cable, either.

Most of all, nobody’s asking to “wipe away history” of white Southerners, either. What people actually wanted was the state government of South Carolina not to fly the Confederate flag on state grounds, especially since the state only started doing that in the 60’s in order to insult and degrade the civil rights movement.

The only thing being wiped away here is the reality that this flag stands for slavery, racism, and hatred. We wiped that history away out of textbooks and social taboo quite some time ago and covered it up with idiotic platitudes like “heritage not hate”. We wiped out that history of why the South went to war in order to preserve the enslavement of human beings with moronic bleatings of “states’ rights” and “economic sabotage of the South”.

Maybe Thiessen knows. Frankly, I don’t give a damn.

Obama Derangement Syndrome Update

Here's the problem with the Republican Party, at residents of Bastrop, Texas are still quite freaked out about Jade Helm '15 exercises.

The office of the Bastrop County Republican Party is in an old lumber mill on Main Street, with peeling brown paint and a sign out front that captures the party’s feelings about the Obama administration: “WISE UP AMERICA!”

Inside, county Chairman Albert Ellison pulled out a yellow legal pad on which he had written page after page of reasons why many Texans distrust President Obama, including the fact that, “in the minds of some, he was raised by communists and mentored by terrorists.”

So it should come as no surprise, Ellison said, that as the U.S. military prepares to launch one of the largest training exercises in history later this month, many Bastrop residents might suspect a secret Obama plot to spy on them, confiscate their guns and ultimately establish martial law in one of America’s proudly free conservative states.

They are not “nuts and wackos. They are concerned citizens, and they are patriots,” Ellison said of his suspicious neighbors. “Obama has really painted a portrait in the minds of many conservatives that he is capable of this sort of thing.”

It's Obama's fault anyway.  Never mind military exercises under the previous president were no problem whatsoever.

Here in the soft, green farmlands east of Austin, some say the answer is simple: “The truth is, this stems a fair amount from the fact that we have a black president,” said Terry Orr, who was Bastrop’s mayor from 2008 to 2014.

Orr said he strongly disagrees with those views, and he supports Jade Helm. But he said a significant number of people in town distrust Obama because they think he is primarily concerned with the welfare of blacks and “illegal aliens.”

“People think the government is just not on the side of the white guy,” Orr said.

Bastrop’s current mayor, Kenneth Kesselus, who also supports Jade Helm, agrees. Kesselus said the distrust is due in part to a sense that “things aren’t as good as they used to be,” especially economically. “The middle class is getting squeezed and they’ve got to take it out on somebody, and Obama is a great target.”

These ideas didn't just magically appear out of a vacuum.  Republican candidates have been saying this publicly about the Obama administration for seven years now, and surprise, people believe it.

Dock Jackson, 62, an African American who has been on the Bastrop City Council for 24 years, grew up when the town was still segregated, literally by railroad tracks. Today, Bastrop is 34 percent Hispanic and 8 percent black, and a wonderful place to live, he said, a place where the races generally get along.

But the Jade Helm backlash has been a “red flag” that our county “still has a lot of things they need to come to terms with,” Jackson said, including the anger and disrespect being directed at the president.

At a recent family reunion at a Bastrop community center, Mark Peterson, who is black, said he has been “shocked” by what he views as racist undertones in much of the objection to Jade Helm.

“What I hate to hear most is, ‘We want to take our country back.’ This is still your country. Where did it go?” said Peterson, 42, a technology manager for a financial firm in Austin. “If it were any other president but Obama, it would not be an issue.”

The politics of racial resentment, that white America is being destroyed by a black President, has been part and parcel of the GOP years now (and several decades in the South).  This is all they have left.

StupidiNews!

• One person was killed and four injured in the collapse of an ice cave in Washington State's Mount Baker National Forest.
• New York City will pay $330,000 to settle lawsuits stemming from a police pepper spray incident during Occupy Wall Street protests in September 2011.
• Greek PM Alexis Tsipras will present proposals today at an emergency eurozone summit in Brussels, in what is largely seen at Greece's last chance to keep the euro currency.
• China has halted trading on a total of nearly 750 stocks to prevent panic selling as the Shanghai Composite Index has dropped 28% since June 12.
• Microsoft has rebranded its Xbox Music service as Groove in order to keep up with Apple Music's introduction this month.

Last Call For The Man We Thought He Was

So yes, turns out Bill Cosby is an admitted sex criminal after all, and really is the person the dozens of women who have come forward to say he's awful say he is.

Comedian Bill Cosby testified in 2005 that he had obtained Quaaludes with the intent of giving the sedatives to young women in order to have sex with them, according to court documents unsealed on Monday.

Cosby, 77, made the admission during testimony in a civil case brought by a former Temple University employee, Andrea Constand, who alleged that Cosby tricked her into taking drugs before he sexually assaulted her.

The case was settled for an undisclosed sum in 2006 but the documents in the case were unsealed on Monday after the Associated Press went to court.

Cosby's lawyers had argued that the documents would cause severe embarrassment to the comedian-actor, who is best known for playing lovable father figure Dr. Cliff Huxtable on the hit TV comedy series "The Cosby Show" in the 1980s and 1990s.

A representative for Cosby did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

More than 40 women have come forward in the past year alleging Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them in incidents dating back decades. His attorneys have consistently denied the allegations.

Can  we stop with the defense of the guy now?  He was, frankly, completely indefensible before, but now under his own admission he's a criminal and a rapist.  Eventually he'll get justice, I'm thinking, but at this point the damage has been done time and time again.

It's infuriating, and yet we know that he's far from the only one.

Darth Nader Strikes Back

It wouldn't be a Democratic presidential primary season without Ralph Nader showing up to depress the vote at best and at worst commit outright sabotage the Democrats in favor of the GOP like he did in 2000.  It seems 2016 will be no different. 

"I have always preferred the ink-and-paper, written letter method of communicating with elected officials,” writes Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, who has been writing letters to American politicians, with some success, for more than 50 years.

But he’s been disappointed with the last two administrations. “Rhetoric by both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama would have you think that these presidents encourage and support citizens sharing their opinions with their commander in chief,” he writes in a new collection of his correspondences, Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015. But “once delivered to the White House, my letters could not penetrate the multi-layered White House bubble.” Perhaps, Nader says, if presidents these days didn’t spending so much time raising money, waging unnecessary wars and taking photo ops with sports stars, they might find more time to engage with a concerned citizenry.

Perhaps if Nader hadn't screwed the country in 2000 and cost Al Gore the state of Florida and the White House, we wouldn't need to have this conversation at all.  Here's just a taste of how much of a condescending asshole Nader has been to President Obama in particular:

Dear President Obama,

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii know, watching you race up and down the basketball court, how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber.”

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of Third World countries, a community organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant warfare state so pleasing to the military-industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, you’re beating the combustible drums to attack Syria—a country that is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of war. Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Never forget that Nader's 97,000 votes in Florida, most taken from Gore, when George W. Bush won the state by just over 500 votes is the reason George W. Bush was elected we ended up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and oh yeah the worst recession in 80 years.

So when this asshole starts running off at the mouth, remember he's why we got Dubya in the first place.

Tyranny Of The Majority Update

A pretty disturbing poll from Rasmussen: in the wake of June's Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, a third of Americans now believe that judicial branch should be able to be ignored. 

Following last week’s controversial U.S. Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and gay marriage, voters believe more strongly that individual states should have the right to turn their backs on the federal courts.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 33% of Likely U.S. Voters now believe that states should have the right to ignore federal court rulings if their elected officials agree with them. That’s up nine points from 24% when we first asked this question in February. Just over half (52%) disagree, down from 58% in the earlier survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Perhaps even more disturbing is that the voters who feel strongest about overriding the federal courts – Republicans and conservatives - are those who traditionally have been the most supportive of the Constitution and separation of powers. During the Obama years, however, these voters have become increasingly suspicious and even hostile toward the federal government.

Fifty percent (50%) of GOP voters now believe states should have the right to ignore federal court rulings, compared to just 22% of Democrats and 30% of voters not affiliated with either major party. Interestingly, this represents a noticeable rise in support among all three groups.

Fifty percent (50%) of conservative voters share this view, but just 27% of moderates and 15% of liberals agree.

Half of Republicans and half of conservatives no longer believe in the federal judicial branch as a check or balance to the other two branches.  I'm betting you'd find even higher numbers among these same groups that the executive branch should be ignored if the mob of WE THE PEOPLE is large enough.

This line of thinking should be terrifying, because we went through it 150 years ago at the cost of hundreds of thousands dead and a war that split the nation.

But we're at the point where tens of millions of Americans no longer believe their government is legitimate simply because they disagree with it.  That's not how a representative democracy is supposed to work. It is however a recipe for another disastrous period in American history and one of our two major political parties is now openly advocating for such conflict.

Increasingly I think we're heading for some dark days ahead.

StupidiNews!

• US Women's National Team midfielder Carli Lloyd racked up a hat trick in America's 5-2 World Cup Soccer final victory over Japan on Sunday in Vancouver.
• Greek finance minister Yanis Varofakis has resigned after Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected austerity measures in Sunday's referendum by a 61-38 margin.
• France and Germany have called for an emergency summit of EU leaders to discuss what to do in the wake of that Greek no vote, with calls to boot Athens from the euro currency rising.
• China's stock market is in turmoil as the Communist government's move to buy bonds has left smaller business stock in a major rout.
• NASA's New Horizons probe of Pluto has locked up after a software glitch a week before entering orbit, but the space agency says the probe should be back online Tuesday.

Last Call For Hillary The Hawk

In the wake of several high-profile hacks of government databases by China in the last several months, Hillary Clinton went after Beijing over the weekend with some pretty hard words.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused China on Saturday of stealing commercial secrets and “huge amounts of government information,” and of trying to “hack into everything that doesn’t move in America.”

Clinton’s language on China appeared to be far stronger than that usually used by President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration.

Speaking at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Clinton said she wanted to see China’s peaceful rise.

“But we also have to be fully vigilant, China’s military is growing very quickly, they’re establishing military installations that again threaten countries we have treaties with, like the Philippines because they are building on contested property,” said Clinton, who was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

“They’re also trying to hack into everything that doesn’t move in America. Stealing commercial secrets … from defense contractors, stealing huge amounts of government information, all looking for an advantage,” she said.

It's not like Clinton lacks details of, experience with, or access to US foreign policy information on China or anything, but this seems very belligerent even for Clinton's normal rhetoric.

On the other hand, China hacking US government databases isn't exactly fluffy rainbow kitten unicorn time, either.  I'm just not sure how much we can (literally) afford to piss of China and its huge market of consumers.

In the same speech, Clinton had some pretty hawkish words about President Obama's Iran deal as well.

Clinton also addressed the current talks over Iran’s nuclear program and had strong words for Tehran.

She said that even if a deal is reached with Iran, Tehran’s “aggressiveness will not end” and it will remain a principal state sponsor of terrorism.

Clinton said she hoped that “a strong verifiable deal” would be reached at talks in Vienna between world powers and Iran.

But she added that even with an agreement, “They will continue to be the principal state sponsor of terrorism. They will continue to destabilize governments in the region and beyond. They will continue to use their proxies like Hezbollah. And they will continue to be an existential threat to Israel.”

OK, if she considers Iran an existential threat to Israel, then 1) I can see why nothing happened via Iran/America while she was at State and 2) I have to ask if Clinton, as President, would even both to honor anything President Obama came up with as a deal.

This is the kind of talk I expect to hear from Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, and it was talk like this on Iraq that assured I didn't vote for her in the primary here in Kentucky in 2008 (not that it made much difference).

You would think the last seven years would have tempered her inner hawk.  If she's still on this hard line, then there will be problems.

Sunday Long Read: On The Trail Of A Fugitive

This week's Sunday Long Read is the story of James T. Hammes, a fugitive from the law who was captured in May after evading the FBI for over six years. Hammes was wanted on charges of embezzling millions from a Pepsi distributor where he worked, and evaded police by living as a hiker on the Appalachian Trail since 2009.  It was Hammes's double life as a hiker named Bismarck that shocked trail aficionados, because it turns out in those six years, he became something of a legend.

Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, those who walk the entire 2,100-mile trail in a single season, beginning in Georgia in spring, knew Bismarck as a smiling Catholic with a Jerry Garcia beard, baker’s belly and fondness for hammocks. They liked him. There is something hikers call “trail magic” that the Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines as “an unexpected act of kindness.” In nearly every story about Bismarck on the Appalachian Trail, or AT as it is commonly called, trail magic appears. He took to people. People took to him. Up and down the length of the trail, he was well known for his gentle, good nature. Beginning in 2010 the name Bismarck began appearing regularly on blogs written by hikers recounting their trips. His picture pops up in their snapshots.

Millions of people step somewhere onto the AT each year. That anyone stands out to the degree he did is astonishing. Yet Bismarck did. Veteran hikers, encountering newbies, sometimes asked, “Have you met Bismarck?” It was a way of gauging just how experienced a hiker was, how long they had been on the trail and how well they fit in with others. If you knew Bismarck, your boots had many worthy miles already worn on their soles. A man who hiked with him last September said the general consensus along the AT was that he was “on his way to becoming a trail legend” - someone whose story hikers share amongst themselves, one with inspirational overtones. Like that of the late Earl Shaffer, who in 1948 became the first person to hike the entire AT in a single season. Like Matt Kirk, who two years ago hiked the trail in 58 days. Such was Bismarck’s reputation that this past spring, David Miller, the author of AWOL on the Appalachian Trail, a popular book about hiking the AT, was on his phone talking with the owner of a North Carolina hostel along the state’s western edge, near Nantahala Lake. In an offhand way, the proprietor mentioned Bismarck was there, similar to the way Grateful Dead followers once mentioned an encounter with Jerry, a measure of his own familiarity of trail culture, a touchstone showing he, too, knew the ways of the wandering tribe.

When the other hikers learned that Bismarck had been taken into custody at Trail Days, shock bloomed through the AT community. Word spread along every step of the trail - hushed tones spoken at campfires from Georgia to Maine - in a matter of days.

“So many people liked him,” Susan Montgomery said. “I feel sorry for him, if he did what they say he did, because he loved the outdoors. He really did. He loved the outdoors so much.”

All I can say is this is going to make a hell of a movie some day.

Think I Found Your Trump Problem

If Donald Trump is curious as to why he manged to lose money on a casino and made a boatload of other bad business decisions, the fact he's shocked by the reaction of single-handedly destroying the Trump brand with his massive racism is everything you need to know as to how terrible it is.

Republican presidential candidate and real estate mogul Donald Trump on Saturday stood by statements he made recently that too many illegal immigrants from Mexico are criminals but said he was surprised by the backlash and that his comments are causing financial concerns.

“The crime is raging and it’s violent. And if you talk about it, it’s racist,” Trump told Fox News, three days after a purported illegal Mexican immigrant deported five previous times allegedly killed a woman in San Francisco.

Trump first made his inflammatory remarks during his non-scripted, June 16 presidential announcement speech.

“When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best,” he said during the announcement. “They're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they're telling us what we're getting."

Since then, a list of businesses have announced plans to cut ties with Trump’s vast business empire, while fellow Republican candidates and others have questioned Trump’s remarks.

NBC and Univision, for example, have decided not to air the Trump-owned Miss Universe Pageant, Macy’s is dropping his signature clothing line, New York Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio has ordered a review of Trump's city contracts and NASCAR is moving an annual banquet from the Trump National Doral resort in Miami.

“I didn’t know it was going to be this severe,” Trump said Saturday, adding that he was surprised by the NASCAR decision, considering he has a good relationship with the group. “I am a whipping post.”

Surprise!  Smart businesses and business leaders don't want to wreck their brand by pissing off the fastest-growing demographic in the US.  Imagine that. No corporation wants to associate with somebody who calls all Mexicans criminals in 2015 America.

And Trump is "surprised" by this.

Here's the kicker though.  Ted Cruz agrees with him.

Sen. Ted Cruz defended Donald Trump on immigration and called out “the Washington cartel” he says is ignoring the issue, in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I salute Donald Trump for focusing on the need to address illegal immigration,” Cruz said of his rival for the 2016 GOP nomination, adding that it “seems the favorite sport of the Washington media is to encourage some Republicans to attack other Republicans.”

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“I’m not interested in Republican on Republican violence,” he told host Chuck Todd, adding that “bold … brash” Trump “has a colorful way of speaking.”

The Texas senator’s comments were similar to his defense of Trump during Fox & Friends on Tuesday.

“When it comes to Donald Trump, I like Donald Trump,” Cruz said on the show. “I think he’s terrific.”

It's almost like Trump is running for Cruz's veep.

Last Call For Pardon Me, Mr. President

A big complaint I hear from the left is that President Obama isn't doing nearly enough to deal with non-violent convicts sent to prison for federal drug crimes with huge mandatory minimum sentences, people who are essentially victims of the War on Drugs.

Lame Duck Obama is best Obama.

Sometime in the next few weeks, aides expect President Obama to issue orders freeing dozens of federal prisoners locked up on nonviolent drug offenses. With the stroke of his pen, he will probably commute more sentences at one time than any president has in nearly half a century.

The expansive use of his clemency power is part of a broader effort by Mr. Obama to correct what he sees as the excesses of the past, when politicians eager to be tough on crime threw away the key even for minor criminals. With many Republicans and Democrats now agreeing that the nation went too far, Mr. Obama holds the power to unlock that prison door, especially for young African-American and Hispanic men disproportionately affected.

But even as he exercises authority more assertively than any of his modern predecessors, Mr. Obama has only begun to tackle the problem he has identified. In the next weeks, the total number of commutations for Mr. Obama’s presidency may surpass 80, but more than 30,000 federal inmates have come forward in response to his administration’s call for clemency applications. A cumbersome review process has advanced only a small fraction of them. And just a small fraction of those have reached the president’s desk for a signature.

“I think they honestly want to address some of the people who have been oversentenced in the last 30 years,” said Julie Stewart, the founder and president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group advocating changes in sentencing. “I’m not sure they envisioned that it would be as complicated as it is, but it has become more complicated, whether it needs to be or not, and that’s what has bogged down the process.”

And I know that it's a fraction, less than one percent.  But it's a start, and it's more than any other US President has done.  Hopefully we'll see this process starting moving over the last 18 months of the Obama presidency and that 80 will become a lot, lot more. The prison pipeline is a massive issue for all of us, and I'm glad to see that the White House is starting to take real steps, to help real people.