StupidiNews, Election Day Edition!

Voters take to the polls today to elect governors in Kentucky and Mississippi, and Ohio will vote on two ballot measures, one legalizing recreational marijuana and establishing 10 growing sites to produce it commercially, and a second ballot measure that would nullify the first and declare the growing site plan an illegal monopoly.

If you're in Ohio or Kentucky, get out there and vote.

Remember, there are most likely local measures on the ballot where you live too.  Go vote!

Last Call For The Austerity Death Star

The practical upshot from the chaos in the House GOP with Orange Julius now gone and Paul Ryan now Speaker of the House is that the Austerity Death Star will soon be fully operational.

The Wisconsin Republican who claimed the gavel last week is one of Congress’ preeminent tax experts, an ardent advocate of rewriting the code with lots of ideas on how to do it. Over the years, he’s gone further than most lawmakers in pushing politically fraught changes that have gone nowhere, such as wiping out a major tax break for employer-provided health plans and making it harder for the wealthy to claim the hugely popular mortgage-interest deduction.

But now Ryan has far more power to put the issue on Washington’s agenda— and the latest budget deal between congressional leaders and the White House should give him ample room to launch his speakership without being distracted by constant battles over funding the government and raising the debt limit. So some advocates are recalibrating the odds of a long-elusive tax overhaul that they say could spur new jobs and bring corporate money back from overseas.

Sweeping tax change won’t happen this year, supporters say, with lawmakers still staring at a stack of unfinished business — or next year, when the 2016 election will loom even larger. But they say it’s suddenly a lot more likely in the early years of the next presidency, especially if the Republicans win the White House.

“It certainly comes as close to guaranteeing it as possible,” said a top Republican staffer. “It’s his No. 1 priority — it’s what he cares about most.”

The sort of ambitious reform Ryan has in mind, which would be the first since 1986, promises to cut both individual and corporate tax rates in exchange for junking scores of credits, deductions and other special provisions. Any rewrite would be hugely controversial, with an array of powerful interest groups sure to line up to defend their favorite provisions, not to mention many Democrats who’ve long complained that Ryan’s plans amount to a giveaway to the rich. 

In a speech to the House just before his swearing-in Thursday, Ryan named tax reform as one of his top priorities.

It was bad enough when the Ryan Austerity Budget was a club used to get sequestration into play in 2013. But as Speaker, Ryan now has significant power as far as bringing his austerity monster to life. If you still had questions as to what’s at stake a year from now, better hope the GOP doesn’t have the keys to both Congress and the White House when Congress gets called into session in January 2017.

Otherwise, the Austerity Death Star is going to do a pretty good job of blowing America up.

That'll Learn 'Em, Texas-Style

The Texas state Supreme Court takes up a case today on homeschooling and religious liberties, and asks if parents who homeschool under Texas law are required to actually teach their children anything practical at all if they claim there's no point, as the Rapture is coming.

Laura McIntyre began educating her nine children more than a decade ago inside a vacant office at an El Paso motorcycle dealership she ran with her husband and other relatives. 

Now the family is embroiled in a legal battle the Texas Supreme Court hears next week that could have broad implications on the nation's booming home-school ranks. The McIntyres are accused of failing to teach their children educational basics because they were waiting to be transported to heaven with the second coming of Jesus Christ. 

At issue: Where do religious liberty and parental rights to educate one's own children stop and obligations to ensure home-schooled students ever actually learn something begin? 

"Parents should be allowed to decide how to educate their children, not whether to educate their children," said Rachel Coleman, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education. 

Like other Texas home-school families, Laura and her husband Michael McIntyre weren't required to register with state or local educational officials. They also didn't have to teach state-approved curriculums or give standardized tests. 

But problems began when the dealership's co-owner and Michael's twin brother, Tracy, reported never seeing the children reading, working on math, using computers or doing much of anything educational except singing and playing instruments. He said he heard one of them say learning was unnecessary since "they were going to be raptured." 

Then, the family's eldest daughter, 17-year-old Tori, ran away from home saying she wanted to return to school. She was placed in ninth grade, since officials weren't sure she could handle higher-level work. 

The El Paso school district eventually asked the McIntyres to provide proof that their children were being properly educated and even filed truancy charges that were later dropped. The family sued and had an appeals court rule against them, but now the case goes Monday to the all-Republican state Supreme Court. 

In court filings, the McIntyres say the district is biased against Christians and accuse its officials of mounting a "startling assertion of sweeping governmental power."

This is a pretty big case if only for the fact that one in six homeschooled children in the US live in Texas, mainly because Texas's homeschooling regulations are extraordinarily lenient. Given where Texas is on homeschooling and where SCOTUS is on religious liberties in a post-Hobby Lobby decision America, I'm not only betting this case goes to SCOTUS, but becomes a major precedent in a few years.

Keep an eye on this one, folks.

Boot To The Head (Of State)

Yeah, reality is a bitch sometimes when you're leader of the free world, huh.

Since 2013, President Obama has repeatedly vowed that there would be no "boots on the ground" in Syria.

But White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president's decision Friday to send up to 50 special forces troops to Syria doesn't change the fundamental strategy: "This is an important thing for the American people to understand. These forces do not have a combat mission."

Earnest said the promises of "no boots on the ground" first came in the context of removing Syrian President Bashar Assad because of his use of chemical weapons. Since then, Syria has become a haven for Islamic State fighters.

USA Today's  Gregory Korte goes on to list 16 times that President Obama said there wouldn't be "boots on the ground" and yet, here we are with at least SOCOM forces in Syria. The right will say we need another 199,950 troops or so, and the left, zero.  There's no distinction here,  "Obama lied!" is what both sides will claim.

To this I say "you were idiotic not to think we'd have special ops troops on the ground in Syria, because that's what they are there for."  Whether or not Josh Ernest should have admitted as such is definitely arguable, but let the screaming about "That Nobel Peace Prize-winning war criminal" continue long enough and just maybe we can elect someone who really will put hundreds of thousands of troops in Syria, Iran, and Yemen while we're at it.

Meanwhile, Russian airliners are mysteriously breaking up over the Sinai. Things are getting weird out there and it's not a good thing. Maybe having a couple of guys out there keeping tabs on Syria isn't a wholly bad idea.

StupidiNews

• Russian Metrojet airline officials believe that Flight 9268 broke up in mid-air Saturday over the southern Sinai peninsula with "an external influence" being responsible. 
• Three people are dead after a car crashed into the front yard of a Bronx home where trick-or-treaters were enjoying Halloween night.
• A few months after losing a majority, Turkey's ruling AKP has regained it in parliamentary elections, giving President Tayyip Erdogan total control of Turkey's government once again.
• After eight years as separate companies, Visa is buying Visa Europe for $23.4 billion in order to unify in the face of competition of MasterCard.
• In a 3-1 vote, the SEC has voted to allow small investors to buy startup company stock online via crowdfunding, putting rules in place called for in the passage of the 2012 JOBS Act.

Last Call For The Trumpkin Patch

WaPo's Marc Fisher profiles The Kind Of People Who Would Vote For Donald Trump and finds out that yes, they are exactly who you think they would be: mostly older white men who want multicultural Millennial "participation trophy" America off their goddamn lawn already (and more than a few white women too.)

The way Joe McCoy sees it, the last time America was great was when Ronald Reagan was president, when people played by the rules. No, it was in the ’70s, Holly Martin says, when you could depend on Americans to work hard. No, to find true American greatness, Steve Trivett contends, you need to go back to before the Vietnam War, “when you could still own a home and have a good job even if you didn’t have a college education.”

Even if they don’t have “Make America Great Again” campaign caps, Donald Trump’s supporters easily recite the signature slogan of the real estate developer’s insurgent presidential bid. And even if they don’t agree on exactly why the country lost its way, they do accept — give or take a few degrees of hyperbole — Trump’s contention that the United States has become, as he has put it, “an economic wasteland” that is “committing cultural suicide.”

The premise behind “Make America Great Again” is that the country is no longer great. It can be great again, and the campaign has a certain can-do billionaire in mind as the guy to make that happen, but at the moment, the leading contender for the nomination of the party that regularly touts the notion of American exceptionalism is arguing that the country ain’t what it used to be.

The Rise Of Trump makes perfect sense if you realize the dog whistle is on the third word of his slogan compared to who is in the White House now.  The Republicans who drove our economy into the ground from Reagan to Dubya somehow weren't the problem, it's the guy right now who's causing it.  There's something different about him, you see.

For some supporters, especially those in the second half of life, Trump’s slogan is a tribute to a simpler time. “He could have said, ‘Make America what it was before’ and I would have voted for him,” said Jane Cimbal, 69, who lives in Winchester and signed up to collect signatures to get Trump on the Virginia ballot. “The last time we had good jobs and respect for the military and law enforcement was, oh, probably during Eisenhower.”

Cimbal doesn’t view Trump as an optimist of the Reagan stripe, but she’s okay with voting for a harsh critic. “He speaks his mind,” she said. “So many of the others are wishy-washy. Mr. Trump isn’t a provocateur to annoy people but to get them thinking.”

Cimbal, a loyal Republican, wants people to think about how to curb illegal immigration and protect Second Amendment gun ownership rights, but she’s mainly drawn to Trump because she thinks his plain talk can get things done. Her goal is to restore a time “when there wasn’t as much animosity toward each other, when everything wasn’t about race and people just got along.”

A nearly 70-year old white woman in Virginia wanting "America what it was before" when "everything wasn't about race" could not be a clearer set of lines to read between, folks. Back to before America had a non-white President.  Back before we had an electorate that would elect a non-white President.

And younger white guys want a piece of that action too.

The crowds at Trump events tend to be older and whiter than the national population, but so is the party whose nomination he seeks, and so are frequent voters generally. If younger supporters don’t have firsthand experience of the Eisenhower, Kennedy or Reagan years, they nonetheless share the older generation’s sense of loss.

Joe McCoy, who is 31, says he started out this campaign season “laughing at this Trump guy like everyone else.”

Still, the more he heard Trump, the more the greatness slogan resonated. “He boasts a lot, he’s got trophy wives, he’s not exactly Mr. Clean, so I was skeptical,” said McCoy, who lives in Norwich, Conn., where he does tech support from home for a multinational company.

“Mitt Romney was more my kind of guy: practical, a nice guy. But you know, people don’t like a nice guy. They like this guy because he’s right about us losing our country. I really don’t think we should be letting kids go into whichever bathroom they want to in school. The Democrats are really reaching too far on the social issues. And there’s no retirement anymore, no pensions.”

McCoy laments the pervasive sense that it no longer pays to play by the rules. That’s where immigration enters the equation: “When my wife came here from the Philippines, she had to go through a health assessment, background checks and interviews to become a citizen. Now, these people come in from Mexico and Central America through some mule, just whoever comes.”

Never mind that illegal immigration is actually sharply down under Obama, and that Reagan, Poppy Bush, and Dubya were huge on looking the other way.  When Joe here was born, Reagan was happily offering amnesty to undocumented people in the country.  Trump's "deport all of those people" nonsense is what Joe wants.  It's time to punish the folks that made America "not great".

When Joe laments the rules, he's talking about the unspoken ones, where guys like Joe ran the country and reaped the benefits.  In 2015, not so much.  I bet Joe hates unions too and can't understand why there's "no retirement anymore, no pensions".  A guy at 31 complaining about no pensions is definitely a big, big clue.

“I’m not a rigid tea partyer,” he continued. “I’m in favor of government paying for roads and the fire department. Social Security is a great thing. But I don’t think Trump is really much of a conservative; he’s definitely more moderate than the others.”

McCoy recognizes that his sense of lost greatness is probably different from that of others who are drawn to Trump, but he says that’s all right. When Trump talks about losing the country, “it’s about whatever you want it to be,” McCoy said. “He lets you fill in the blanks.”

And that's the real draw, those blanks.  That's the definite signal of success of a 100% dog whistle campaign.  The people who like Trump are hearing precisely what they want to hear and nothing else. And in America, that works far more often than not.

Down And Out (Of The Pool) In Beverly Hills

The rich have enough money and power to break the rules, folks, and that certainly applies to Beverly Hills not giving a single damn about being fined for breaking mandatory California drought provisions.

The wealthy Los Angeles area municipality was fined $61,000 on Thursday, making it the only community not located in a desert to be assessed penalties, the California State Water Resources Board said.

"Some urban water suppliers simply have not met the requirements laid before them," said Cris Carrigan, director of the water board's Office of Enforcement. “For these four suppliers, it’s been too little too late."

"For those who aren't (conserving) and who are wasting water, you should be ashamed of yourselves," Carrigan said.

Californians are under orders from the water board and Democratic Governor Jerry Brown to cut usage by 25 percent over the levels used in 2013. As a whole, the state has met that goal for four months running, regulators said on Friday.

From June through August, California residents and businesses have saved 253 billion gallons of water, board Chairwoman Felicia Marcus told reporters.

But the cities of Beverly Hills, Indio and Redlands and the Coachella Valley Water District have not met the standard, and each were fined $61,000, the board said.

Beverly Hills, where some wealthy property owners continue to maintain lush green lawns despite orders to conserve, residents used about 169 gallons of water per person during September, compared with 68 gallons used by residents of Los Angeles.

Beverly Hills residents have wasted 175 million gallons of water since June, Carrigan said on the conference call.

And of course the fine itself is so low by Beverly Hills standards that it's utterly meaningless.

One former Beverly Hills resident, Richard Greene, said the fine was far too small for what he said was possibly the richest city in the country, if not the world.

"Wow, ouch ... It actually seems to minimize the importance of water conservation when you're fining the wealthiest municipality $61,000, which is pocket change for most of the people you see walking up and down this street," Greene said.

Beverly Hills spokeswoman Cheryl Friedling said in a statement that the city is very concerned about not meeting the conservation mandate, and that it has been working aggressively toward that goal, even setting up a program to impose financial penalties on customers who waste water.

But she said the program did not start until this month. The city also plans to hire additional staff to investigate violations of conservation rules and put individual customers on personalized conservation programs if necessary.

Somehow I'm thinking that these "personalized conservation programs" will only be...well...a drop in the bucket.  Wasting 175 million gallons in three months for a population of 35,000, well that's 5,000 gallons wasted per resident in 3 months, or a pretty decent-sized swimming pool's worth for a household of four for the summer (which is probably what it was to be honest.)

But hey, like I said, $61,000?  That's two bucks a person even if they passed every bit of that fine on to residents. Hey Cali, throw a few zeroes on the end of that number and maybe you'll get someone's attention.

Doing Right By Gamers

Looks like South By Southwest got the message and worked out a compromise after Gamergate goofballs threatened two panels on gamer culture and inclusivity and reinstated them after canceling them last week for safety reasons.

South by Southwest (SXSW), the popular Austin, Texas–based annual event for music, film and digital culture and technology, has reinstated the two panels on harassment in the gaming industry originally canceled over safety concerns.

The cancellation of the panels—titled “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games”—prompted a backlash against SXSW, with digital media outlets BuzzFeed and Vox Media threatening to pull out of the conference for its giving in to cyberbullying.

SXSW Director Hugh Forrest wrote in a blog post on October 26 that, since announcing the panels, SXSW has received “multiple threats” of on-site violence.

Four days later, Forrest apologized for the decision in a different post, calling it a “mistake.”

“By canceling two sessions we sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it, and for that we are truly sorry,” wrote Forrest in the company blog post.

In addition to the reinstatement of the panels, SXSW will host a daylong summit on March 12 to examine harassment. SXSW will live-stream the summit for free.

The backtracking by SXSW is the culmination of another chapter in the controversy-laden movement called Gamergate. Gamergate started last August as a movement against feminists and so-called social justice warriors, who adherents believe have undue influence on the video game industry.

I'm glad that's been settled, and I hope the industry can learn a couple things about harassment, silencing, and privilege in general.  Here's hoping.

Sunday Long Read: Clean Sweep

Just another reminder not everything works with the sharing economy, as home cleaning startup Homejoy found out the hard way. Sometimes being first on the scene in order to get to the customer before anyone else falls on its face when the customer finds out what the real cost of the service is.

When Homejoy folded, a slew of media articles pointed to worker classification lawsuits that plagued the company in its final months.

Like Uber, TaskRabbit and other well-known on-demand economy companies, Homejoy treated its cleaners as independent contractors, and not employees, despite how many hours they worked. Some litigators did not agree with this assessment, arguing that Homejoy and its ilk were depriving workers of reimbursements and overtime wages. At the time the company shut down, it was facing four employment suits challenging its workers’ status, and a judge had just handed class action status to a raft of suits brought against Uber by its drivers. The contract-for-hire system — key to the cost structure and profits of the on-demand model as currently conceived — was suddenly teetering.

But was that the reason for Homejoy’s collapse? At the time, Cheung told the technology blog Recode that the lawsuits were the “deciding factor” in Homejoy’s failure to raise additional funding. Others paint a different picture. In interviews with more than a half-dozen former employees who spoke with Backchannel for this story, a more complicated story emerges. The lawsuits were not the primary nor the proximate reason for the company’s demise, these people assert.

In fact, Homejoy was grappling with far more immediate problems that might have deterred potential investors equally or more: mounting losses, poor customer retention, a costly international expansion, run-of-the-mill execution problems, technical glitches and the steady leak of its best workers to direct employment arrangements with its own (now former) clients.

One of its biggest problems was the crippling cost of customer acquisition. By mid-2014, thousands of people were scooping up deeply discounted first time Homejoy cleanings for $19.99 on daily deal sites like Groupon. The company offered these aggressively even though its own internal data showed most of these people never used the service again, according to three ex-employees.

Former West Coast operations manager Anton Zietsman said that Homejoy was all-too aware of the challenges for startups and small businesses to attract repeat customers from Groupon. But he said they were forced to rely on it heavily because of intense competition with their chief rival, Handy, which employed a similar strategy.

A third-party analysis of the company’s financials viewed by Backchannel showed that only about a quarter of its customers continued to use the service after the first month, and less than 10 percent used it after six months. (The source of this report requested anonymity because the data is proprietary and not authorized for public release.)

“The key problem is that we weren’t making enough money on our customers,” recalled Daniel Hung, the second full-time engineer to join the company. “We were spending a lot of money to acquire them, but not really retaining them.”

Last Call For Putting The Smack Down

A funny thing happens when a drug epidemic affects suburban America: suddenly the war on drugs "lock all those people up" voters become "hey these laws are too draconian" and people start asking questions about how white kids from gated subdivisions end up in jail on heroin possession charges.

When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white. 

And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease. 

“Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered,” said Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the nation’s drug czar. “They know how to call a legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company, they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing the conversation.” 

Mr. Botticelli, a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 26 years, speaks to some of these parents regularly. 

Their efforts also include lobbying statehouses, holding rallies in Washington and starting nonprofit organizations, making these mothers and fathers part of a growing backlash against the harsh tactics of traditional drug enforcement. These days, in rare bipartisan or even nonpartisan agreement, punishment is out and compassion is in.

And if you're wondering why all of a sudden criminal justice reform, mandatory sentencing revisions, marijuana legalization, treatment programs and the war on drugs all are major campaign issues in an election year when for 30 years it was "lock them up and throw away the key", then you now know just how bad the nation's heroin epidemic has gotten in white America.

The presidential candidates of both parties are now talking about the drug epidemic, with Hillary Rodham Clinton hosting forums on the issue as Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina tell their own stories of loss while calling for more care and empathy. 

Last week, President Obama traveled to West Virginia, a mostly white state with high levels of overdoses, to discuss his $133 million proposal to expand access for drug treatment and prevention programs. The Justice Department is also preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prisons as part of an effort to roll back the severe penalties issued to nonviolent drug dealers in decades past. 

And in one of the most striking shifts in this new era, some local police departments have stopped punishing many heroin users. In Gloucester, Mass., those who walk into the police station and ask for help, even if they are carrying drugs or needles, are no longer arrested. Instead, they are diverted to treatment, despite questions about the police departments’ unilateral authority to do so. It is an approach being replicated by three dozen other police departments around the country.

Suddenly, the war on drugs is ruining the lives of Tyler, Madison and Hunter and not just Tyrone, Marisha and Hector.  Suddenly, zero tolerance for those people has turned into "Well, we have to have compassion for these sick souls that need help."

Suddenly, lawmakers and cops give a damn about serious criminal justice reform.  It took until the war on drugs finally escaped the battlefields of the inner cities they tried to contain it in and burned out the exurbs and the private schools and the galleria malls.

It took until the lives of the victims actually mattered, you see.  Black lives, well.  Not so much.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that there's finally real steps being taken on the criminal justice reform front and not just empty talk.  I'm glad users are getting real help, and real dollars are being spent to treat the core of addiction and not just the symptoms.  I'm glad we're doing something about non-violent drug offenders and legalization.

But this should have happened 20 years ago.  And one of the major reasons it didn't happen 20 years ago is a guy by the name of Bill Clinton.

And his wife.

Let's not forget that.

Taking The New York Red Line

Anytime I hear claims that institutional, systemic, and economic racism is long gone from blue states and is "only in the South" I have a good long laugh because I know that's absolutely untrue.

The green welcome sign hangs in the front door of the downtown branch of Hudson City Savings Bank, New Jersey’s largest savings bank. But for years, federal regulators said, its executives did what they could to keep certain customers out. 

They steered clear of black and Hispanic neighborhoods as they opened branches across New York and Connecticut, federal officials said. They focused on marketing mortgages in predominantly white sections of suburban New Jersey and Long Island, not here or in Bridgeport, Conn. 

The results were stark. In 2014, Hudson approved 1,886 mortgages in the market that includes New Jersey and sections of New York and Connecticut, federal mortgage data show. Only 25 of those loans went to black borrowers. 

Hudson, while denying wrongdoing, agreed last month to pay nearly $33 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Justice Department. Federal officials said it was the largest settlement in the history of both departments for redlining, the practice in which banks choke off lending to minority communities.

Those of you keeping score at home, 25 out of 1,886 is 1,3%.

Folks, post-Great Recession redlining is rampant all across the country, and one of the main issues I have with the awful lie that anti-redlining measures like the Community Reinvestment Act signed by Clinton into law forced banks to give mortgages to "broke minorities" and caused the housing collapse.  That particular lie I've documented for seven years on this blog as false.

And redlining is exactly why the CRA lie cannot possibly be true: if banks weren't lending to minorities, then how did minorities cause the Great Recession Housing Crash?

Ahh, but that brings us back to redlining going on still today.  And if you want to know why the GOP is so eager to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, this is one major reason why.

The Unbearable Whiteness Of Jonah

After seven years of the Obamas being too ghetto for conservatives to handle, the new charge from professionally compensated idiot Jonah Goldberg is that Ben Carson is what real blackness is, and Obama is not black enough.

But what’s remarkable is that at no point in this conversation did anyone call attention to the fact that Carson is an African-American. Indeed, most analysis of Carson’s popularity from pundits focuses on his likable personality and his sincere Christian faith. But it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.

Meanwhile, Carson grew up in Detroit, the son of a very poor, very hard-working single mother. His tale of rising from poverty to become the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the most inspiring rags-to-riches stories of the last half-century. (Cuba Gooding Jr. played Carson in the movie about his life.) He was a towering figure in the black community in Baltimore and nationally — at least, until he became a Republican politician.

And that probably explains why his race seems to be such a non-issue for the media. The New York Times is even reluctant to refer to him as a doctor. The Federalist reports that Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education, is three times more likely to be referred to as “Dr.” in the Times as brain surgeon Carson. If the Times did that to a black Democrat, charges of racism would be thick in the air.

Goldberg manages to get all his racist hangups in one article here: Carson is One Of The Good Ones(tm), Liberals Are The Real Racists(tm), and Only In My Infinite White Wisdom Can You Judge Blackness(tm).

Expect a lot more of "Hey black voters, since you only voted for Obama because he's black, you'll vote for Ben Carson now, right?" in the future.

Making The Kynect-tion On Tuesday

Heading into the final weekend before Tuesday's gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, just a gentle reminder of what's at stake here should Republican Matt Bevin win and Kynect and Medicaid expansion goes away for 450,000 Kentuckians.

Two years into Obamacare, clear regional patterns are emerging about who has health insurance in America and who still doesn’t. 

The remaining uninsured are primarily in the South and the Southwest. They tend to be poor. They tend to live in Republican-leaning states. The rates of people without insurance in the Northeast and the upper Midwest have fallen into the single digits since the Affordable Care Act’s main provisions kicked in. But in many parts of the country, obtaining health insurance is still a problem for many Americans. 

These trends emerged in an analysis we undertook with the help of two organizations that are closely monitoring the progress of the health law. Last year, we used similar data to show the the substantial effects Obamacare had on reducing the number of Americans without health insurance. This year, the same groups updated their estimates of where America’s uninsured live, and the change is a lot less drastic. States that were late to expand Medicaid, including Pennsylvania and Indiana, showed substantial reductions in their uninsured residents compared with last year. In other places, the changes have been more modest. In a few — like Mississippi — things appear to have gotten worse, with fewer people having health insurance this year than last.

A county-by-county map makes this even more clear:

Now that Indiana and Pennsylvania are on board with Medicaid expansion, it's very clear that the red states in the South  (and Missouri) that are under GOP rule are in real trouble. Arkansas is the lone holdout as GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson hasn't been able to kill it yet after inheriting it from his Democratic predecessor.

But you'd better believe that Matt Bevin will put Kentucky back into the nearly solid purple of the South if he wins in a few days.  He's gone from wanting to scrap it totally to considering Indiana's block grant expansion/private insurance hybrid mess, but that would still kick hundreds of thousands of people off Medicaid, and he still wants to scrap Kynect completely and force Kentucky to go to a federal exchange (again wasting millions of taxpayer dollars in the process).

It's a pretty clear choice on Tuesday, folks.

Last Call For A Capital Mistake

Hillary Clinton is in a rather lonely position on the death penalty among Democrats right now, and it's not a good place for her to be.

Hillary Rodham Clinton had planned to focus her remarks Wednesday at a Politics and Eggs breakfast in Manchester, N.H., in support of the politically fraught, if somewhat arcane, issue of the Export-Import Bank and how it helps small businesses in the United States. 

But a voter’s question about the death penalty pushed Mrs. Clinton to confront the heated issue for the first time in the Democratic nominating contest. 

Asked her position on capital punishment, Mrs. Clinton said she did not support abolishing the death penalty, but she did encourage the federal government to rethink it. 

“We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied, and too often in a discriminatory way,” she said. “So I think we have to take a hard look at it.” 

Mrs. Clinton added, “I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty, but I’d like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed to what we’ve seen in most states.”

O'Malley and Sanders wanting to correctly abolish capital punishment aside, someone really, really needs to tell Hillary's folks the ship on this has already sailed, thanks to President Obama last week.

Amid new scrutiny of American capital punishment practices, President Barack Obama said in an interview released Friday he was disturbed by the practical effects of the death penalty. 

While Obama said he wasn't opposed "in theory" to killing criminals convicted of heinous crimes, he said that data showing racial biases and wrongful convictions have prompted him to wonder whether the death penalty remains a legitimate tool. 

Obama was speaking to former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who now runs The Marshall Project, a news organization focused on criminal justice issues. 

"There are certain crimes that are so beyond the pale that I understand society's need to express its outrage," he said. "So I have not traditionally been opposed to the death penalty in theory. But in practice it's deeply troubling." 

Saying he's "struggled for quite some time" over the death penalty, Obama also said recent botched executions have led him to wonder whether the application of capital punishment is still legal.

"We know that in the application of the death penalty we've had recent cases, by any standard, it has not been swift and painless but rather gruesome and clumsy," he said. 

In the aftermath of one of those executions gone wrong -- an Oklahoma incident that left an accused murderer writhing and convulsing for several minutes -- Obama asked the Justice Department to conduct a review of death penalty practices.

The death penalty is barbaric and we need to abolish it.  President Obama publicly questioning the legality of it is a big, big move.  For Hillary to come along a week later and say that the death penalty is both legal and justified is a bad, bad look for her.  The Democrats have officially moved away from that, and "safe, legal and rare" isn't going to work here.  Right now it's none of those three.

I'm hoping that she'll change her mind on this going forward.

Meanwhile, In Arkham Asylum...

The train wreck that is the Republican presidential primary campaign has now gone from "the inmates running the asylum" to "the inmates forming their own even crazier asylum, now with Taco Tuesday."

Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee.

Not invited to the meeting: Anyone from the RNC, which many candidates have openly criticized in the hours since Wednesday’s CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado — a chaotic, disorganized affair that was widely panned by political observers.

On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks.

The gathering is being organized by advisers to the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. Others who are expected to attend, organizers say, are representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum. The planners are also reaching out to other Republican candidates.

Spokespersons for the RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” said Christian Ferry, Graham’s campaign manager. The objective, Ferry said, was to “find out what works best for us as a group.”

Figuring that out could be contentious as each campaign has a number of different complaints about the process. Some — such as Bush and Paul — have griped about unequal speaking time. Others have complained bitterly about how polling is used to determine who qualifies for the prime-time and undercard debates. Some have insisted on giving opening and closing statements, despite the networks' desire to have the candidates spend as much time as possible clashing with each other on stage.

I imagine the meeting will go something like this.




Anyway, it will be interesting to see what these jokers come up with, as the next debate is less than two weeks away on CNBC's rival channel FOX Business.

And the best part?  It just simply hasn't occurred to any of the Dunning-Kruger Clown Posse that the fact that this debate was a screaming disaster was that the CNBC hosts were asking the candidates real questions about economics, and none of them have an economic plan that isn't entirely based in Laffer Curve tax cut fantasy and the ugly reality of trying to sell massive austerity for 90% of America in order to loot the country for the top 1%.

That next debate is also supposed to be about economics, so don't be surprised if it devolves into a mess too.