Water Under The Bridge

Looks like the FBI is finally getting involved in Flint's water crisis as the Obama administration is bringing major resources to bear, investigating Michigan officials to see if federal laws were broken.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Tuesday it was joining a criminal investigation of lead-contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan, exploring whether laws were broken in a crisis that has captured international attention.

Federal prosecutors in Michigan were working with an investigative team that included the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General and the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit said.

An FBI spokeswoman said the agency was determining whether federal laws were broken, but declined further comment.

Of course, a largely Republican-controlled Congress over the last several decades has made sure that criminal charges for environmental disasters are very, very tough to bring.

The ability to seek criminal charges under U.S. environmental laws is limited, according to Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and a former federal prosecutor. Prosecutors would need to find something egregious like a knowingly false statement.

“You need something that is false to build a case,” he said.Simply failing to recognize the seriousness of the situation would not rise to that level, Henning added.

Actually poisoning the water through gross negligence or incompetence apparently isn't a criminal act when it affects tens of thousands, but lying about it or trying to cover it up is another story.  We'll see what the Feds can find in Flint.

StupidiNews!

• An explosion blew a hole in the side of a passenger jet over Somalia Tuesday, the jet landed safely but authorities believe at least one person fell through the hole and died.
• Residents of Ferguson, Missouri packed a town hall meeting to discuss the Justice Department's police reform plan in the wake of the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown.
• The first Zika virus case has been confirmed in Texas by the CDC, likely transmitted through sexual contact after a mosquito bite.
• A new study finds around 13 million Americans have hidden a bank or credit-card account from their live-in partner, with younger Americans the most likely to do so.
• Higher-density cities offer greater upward mobility for children than larger, sprawling cities according to a new Brookings Institution report.

From Dubuque To Davenport

Nate Cohn makes some very good points about Bernie's "tie" in Iowa.  He should have won big in a state with an electorate made for his strengths, and he didn't.

He fares best among white voters. The electorate was 91 percent white, per the entrance polls. He does well with less affluent voters. The caucus electorate was far less affluent than the national primary electorate in 2008. He’s heavily dependent on turnout from young voters, and he had months to build a robust field operation. As the primaries quickly unfold, he won’t have that luxury.

Iowa is not just a white state, but also a relatively liberal one — one of only a few of states where Barack Obama won white voters in the 2008 primary and in both general elections. It is also a caucus state, which tends to attract committed activists.

In the end, Mr. Sanders made good on all of those strengths. He excelled in college towns. He won an astonishing 84 percent of those aged 17 to 29 — even better than Mr. Obama in the 2008 caucus. He won voters making less than $50,000 a year, again outperforming Mr. Obama by a wide margin. He won “very liberal” voters comfortably, 58 to 39 percent.

But these strengths were neatly canceled by Mrs. Clinton’s strengths. She won older voters, more affluent voters, along with “somewhat liberal” and “moderate” Democrats.

This raises a straightforward challenge for Mr. Sanders. He has nearly no chance to do as well among nonwhite voters as Mr. Obama did in 2008. To win, Mr. Sanders will need to secure white voters by at least a modest margin and probably a large one. In the end, Mr. Sanders failed to score a clear win in a state where Mr. Obama easily defeated Mrs. Clinton among white voters.

Mr. Sanders’s strength wasn’t so great as to suggest that he’s positioned to improve upon national polls once the campaign heats up. National polls show him roughly tied with Mrs. Clinton among white voters, and it was the case here as well. It suggests that additional gains for Mr. Sanders in national polls will require him to do better than he did in Iowa, not that the close race in Iowa augurs a close one nationally.

The bottom line is in a 91% white state, Bernie should have won.  Instead he got a split.  When it comes to states like South Carolina and Nevada, he's going to start losing, and losing handily.

On the Republican side, what does a Cruz win, with The Donald finishing second and Rubio a very, very close third?  It means massive pressure on everyone else to drop out and get behind Rubio, but New Hampshire is making that hard.

Whether Mr. Rubio’s showing will be enough to change the race in New Hampshire is hard to say — there isn’t much precedent for a logjam like the one we have in New Hampshire. Four mainstream conservative candidates — John Kasich, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and Mr. Rubio — have all been clustered near 10 percent of the vote in New Hampshire surveys.

If Mr. Rubio’s performance in Iowa bestows enough media coverage and credibility for him to break the deadlock, it would be a crucial turning point in the race. A strong Rubio showing in New Hampshire could push several mainstream candidates out, freeing up endorsements and fund-raising dollars that have sat on the sidelines. It would also allow him to consolidate the voters who have supported the mainstream candidates.

It would bring about a true three-way race heading into South Carolina.

Rubio's not the establishment lock that people think he is.  He still has to do well in New Hampshire, and if he finishes further back than third, suddenly the picture gets all murky again if he gets edged out by Kasich, Christie or Bush (my money's on Kasich finishing third.)  Should Rubio collapse in Iowa and finish well out of the running, then it becomes Cruz versus Trump and then who knows?

We'll see in a week.

A Grand (Jury) Ol' Time In Kentucky

And in more awesome news for the Kentucky Democratic Party, it looks like the Feds would like to have a little talk with Alison Lundergan Grimes about her campaign finances.

A federal grand jury in Lexington has subpoenaed records of Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes and her father Jerry Lundergan in an investigation that relates to the finances of her political campaigns in 2014 and 2015.

David Guarnieri, an attorney for Grimes, confirmed Monday that she received the subpoena last week. He said Grimes is not a target of the inquiry and said she is fully responding to the subpoena.

“Secretary Grimes has received a request from the U.S. Attorney’s Office to provide certain documents from her Senate and Secretary of State campaigns,” Guarnieri and his associate Jaron Blandford said in a statement. “Secretary Grimes intends to cooperate fully with respect to this request.”

Guarnieri and Blandford said, “This information is being requested of her because she was the candidate in those campaigns.”

Lundergan, reached on his cell phone Monday, said, "I have no comment about any of that stuff, OK."

Guthrie True, his attorney, said Monday that a federal grand jury subpoenaed records of Lundergan and two of his companies. “There’s nothing that would indicate that either he or his companies are in any way the subjects of any inquiry. So we’re intending to provide documents in response to the subpoenas in a timely fashion,” True said. “But no one has shared with me the specifics of whatever inquiry is being conducted or who may be the subject of that inquiry.”

Lundergan was deeply involved in his daughter's 2014 campaign against U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell and used his companies to provide more than $60,000 worth of services to the campaign. After Lundergan was complimented for his daughter's campaign roll-out at a historic home owned by one of his businesses, he said, "That's what daddies do for their little girls."

Kyle Edelen, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Lexington, said, "Per Department of Justice Media Policy - I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.”

Yeah, well, the feds never convene a grand jury unless they think somebody needs to go to prison, and Jerry Lundergan has been playing fast and loose for 25 years.  You can bet that if Jerry's involved, whatever happened is Good Ol' Boy backroom nonsense that the Feds want to know about.

And election was barely 3 months ago.  If the US Attorney's office is moving this quickly on a grand jury, then this has been cooking for a while now.

We'll see how this goes, but man. Can Grimes be any more of a massive disappointment?

StupidiNews!

• Last night's Iowa Caucuses were close affairs, with Hillary Clinton barely edging out Bernie Sanders for the Democrats and Ted Cruz beating Donald Trump and Marco Rubio for the GOP.
• Republican Mike Huckabee is exiting the race after his poor showing in Iowa, a state he won in 2008, along with Martin O'Malley on the Democratic side.
• The World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency over the emergence of the Zika virus in Brazil, where it has been linked to thousands of cases of birth defects.
• Oil giant BP is the latest energy company to announce a massive profit drop from a year ago with crude oil prices at ten-year lows, saying it will also cut 3,000 more jobs in 2017.
• Google parent company Alphabet is now the most valuable company on Earth, surpassing Apple on earnings reports and a market cap of $550 billion.

Last Call For Trolling In The Derp

Adele would really, really like Donald Trump to stop using her music at his campaign rallies, and I can't say I blame her.

Pop star Adele has issued a statement to distance herself from Donald Trump, after he used her music at his rallies. 

The Republican presidential candidate, whose slogan is "Make America great again", has recently been playing Adele's hit Rolling In The Deep as his "warm-up" music. 

"Adele has not given permission for her music to be used for any political campaigning," her spokesman confirmed. 

It is not the first time Trump has been criticised for appropriating pop songs. 

Lawyers for Aerosmith star Steven Tyler sent Trump's campaign a cease-and-desist letter last year, after the politician played the band's hit single Dream On at numerous rallies around the US. 

The letter said Trump's use of the song gave "a false impression" he endorsed Mr Trump's presidential bid. 

Trump responded on Twitter, saying he had the legal right to use the song, but had found "a better one to take its place". 

"Steven Tyler got more publicity on his song request than he's gotten in 10 years. Good for him!" he added.

I know, no publicity like free publicity for a showman like The Donald, but at some point one has to wonder if he's the guy were going to get.  America really does deserve a professional troll for President, frankly.

You know, if it wasn't for the fact he'd burn the country down by 2018.

Groundhog Daze

I'm not sure if Paul Ryan has a sense of humor or not, but House Republicans will take up voting to repeal Obamacare again tomorrow.  You know, February 2.  Groundhog Day.

All eyes will be on the Iowa caucuses on Monday, but Congress is back in session this week for an energy fight in the Senate and yet another vote to repeal the healthcare law.

Groundhog Day references will likely be inevitable when the House votes once again Tuesday, Feb. 2, on legislation to repeal ObamaCare.

The House has voted more than 60 times since Republicans took over the majority in 2011 to undo the healthcare law. Tuesday’s vote, however, will be the first attempt to override President Obama’s veto of a measure to overturn his signature legislative accomplishment.

Consideration of the repeal measure - the first to pass both the House and Senate - is expected to stall after this week’s vote. Republicans are not expected to secure the necessary two-thirds majority to override a presidential veto. And once the veto override attempt fails in the House, the Senate won’t be able to consider it.

So it will fail like the other five dozen times, but that sure hasn't stopped Republican lawmakers from trying.  Oh, and wasting America's time and avoiding doing real work.

But that's the point.

The Bern And The Don

Vox's John Judis argues that the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders shows massive discontent with -- all together now -- both political parties, who are ignoring what Americans want on economic policy.

Sanders and Trump differ dramatically on many issues — from immigration to climate change— but both are critical of how wealthy donors and lobbyists dominate the political process, and both favor some form of campaign finance reform. Both decry corporations moving overseas for cheap wages and to avoid American taxes. Both reject trade treaties that favor multinational corporations over workers. And both want government more, rather than less, involved in the economy.

Sanders is a left-wing populist. He wants to defend the "collapsing middle class" against the "billionaire class" that controls the economy and politics. He is not a liberal who wants to reconcile Wall Street and Main Street, or a socialist who wants the working class to abolish capitalism.

Trump is a right-wing populist who wants to defend the American people from rapacious CEOs and from Hispanic illegal immigrants. He is not a conventional business conservative who thinks government is the problem and who blames America’s ills on unions and Social Security.

Both men are foes of what they describe as their party’s establishment. And both campaigns are also fundamentally about rejecting the way economic policy has been talked about in American presidential politics for decades.

That may be technically true, but Judis spends the rest of his article skating around the obnoxious similarities of Trump voters and Sanders voters.  Yes, there are major economic questions that need to be answer by the next President and real issues of inequality across America.  But the people who are affected the most by inequality in America, people of color and women, aren't being represented by Sanders or Trump, and that's the elephant in the room that Judis won't touch.

We'll see what happens today in Iowa, but I think one of the best things we could do in the future is drop-kick Iowa and New Hampshire from their first-in-the-nation status in politics, when America no longer looks like the voters of either state.

Inexplicably there are a dozen Republicans still left in this mess, and the one thing we do know by next week's New Hampshire primary is that a lot of them are going home after, and it's time to consolidate the fight against Trump and Cruz.  Same with O'Malley, I don't see how he goes on after New Hampshire.

But that still leaves Trump and Sanders, and their voters.

StupidiNews!

• Boko Haram militants attacked a Nigerian village on Sunday, killing 46 people and injuring 35, and burning most of the village to the ground.
• The CDC is expected to announce an end to the E. coli outbreak at Chipotle as soon as today, good news for the now struggling Mexican food chain.
• Two Virginia Tech engineering students have been charged in the kidnapping and murder of a 13-year-old girl, her body found 90 miles away in Surry County, North Carolina.
• After a six-week recess of Brazil's Congress ends Tuesday, President Dilma Rousseff will once again face impeachment as the country's economy struggles. 
• Facebook says it will remove posts involving sales of firearms and stop advertising from firearms makers and sellers in response to President Obama's executive orders last month.

Last Call For Going Backwards

Oh, one last thing for the night:  Turns out Trump wants to appoint Supreme Court justices specifically to overturn Obergfell v Hodges and eliminate same-sex marriage.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sunday that he disagrees with the Supreme Court's decision to legalize same-sex marriage and hopes that it could be changed in the future.

"It has been ruled upon. It has been there. If I’m elected I would be very strong in putting certain judges on the bench that maybe could change thing, but they have a long way to go," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "I disagree with the court in that it should have been a states' rights issue."

The people who wanted to keep slavery said slavery was a "states' rights issue" too.

Republicans are pretty terrible people, you know.  There is a difference between the parties, unlike what a lot of people want you to believe.

The Hawkeye's Revenge

Nate Silver maps out the GOP scenario coming out of tomorrow's Iowa caucuses.

Yes, I know: There’s an incredibly handsome orange-haired man from Queens sitting atop the polls. Donald Trump has a serious chance of winning the Republican nomination — not words I’d have expected myself to be writing six months ago.1 Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, however, still have a shot to knock Trump off his pedestal. Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Chris Christie might have a chance too, although they’ll need a lot of things to break right for them.

The dominoes will begin falling after the Iowa caucuses Monday night. It seems to me there are four basic narratives that could emerge from the state. (By “narratives,” I mean how the media, Republican party elites and the other candidates will interpret the results. Be warned: How the media responds is sometimes way more predictable than how voters do.) They depend, respectively, on whether Trump beats Cruz and on how well Rubio does.

About Rubio: What it means to perform “well” is obviously a little subjective, but how a candidate does relative to his polls is usually a pretty good guide to the spin that eventually emerges. Recent Iowa polls have Rubio in third place, with a vote share in the mid-teens. If Rubio finishes in the low teens or worse, his performance is likely to be regarded as disappointing (he’ll also be at risk of falling behind Ben Carson or another candidate into fourth place). If he’s in the high teens or better, he’ll probably be regarded as having momentum, especially if he slips into second place. Our models also think there’s an outside chance — 7 percent to 10 percent, depending on which version you look at — for Rubio to win Iowa. That’s mostly out of an abundance of caution: Iowa polls aresometimes wildly off the mark.2 The scenarios below contemplate Rubio finishing in second or a strong third place, but not winning. Of course, there could be even crazier outcomes still — our models give Carson around a 1-in-100 chance of winning Iowa, for example — but the four cases we describe below are the ones we take to be most likely.

Nate's scnarios involve whether or not Trump beats Ted Cruz, and whether or not Rubio finishes well enough to remain a contender, which renders four possible outcomes: 1) Trump smashes Cruz and Rubio with a runaway victory and becomes the overwhelming favorite, 2) Trump and Rubio both do well and the establishment rallies behind Rubio to stop Cruz and Trump, 3) Cruz pummels both Trump and Rubio and he becomes the frontrunner, and 4) Cruz and Rubio both beat Trump and The Donald's balloon bursts.

Most people are expecting scenario 2. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

A Bunch Of Upper Class Tweets

Somebody finally got around to asking about Donald Trump's rather lowbrow Twitter feed and whether or not the potential President should be engaging in childish social media fights.

CBS News host John Dickerson asked Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in an interview aired Sunday if he thought his Twitter wars were presidential.


Trump has engaged in multiple Twitter spats throughout the course of his campaign, calling people names and retweeting self-described white supremacists.

"There's a lot of drama around your campaign. Is that presidential?" Dickerson asked Trump, before the candidate cut him off. "Do you think, these Twitter back and forth fights.."

"Well, I'm in Twitter wars before, really, I was a politician. And now I'm carrying it out," Trump said. "But I was being barraged from all different sides. Having Twitter is great. And between Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, I have 12 million people, more than 12 million people. So it is a great way of getting the word out."

Because America needs a leader who can troll people on the internet.  Nothing more American in 2016, right?

Sunday Long Read: Mobile Home, Immobile Racism

Clayton Homes is the largest mobile home manufacturer in America, they absolutely dominate the marketplace. Their mortgage arm is as scummy as it comes, pushing people of color into subprime loans that are meant to bankrupt them and wipe them out.  It's predatory lending at its most awful.

And Clayton Homes is owned by Warren Buffett.

Clayton’s predatory practices have damaged minority communities — from rural black enclaves in the Louisiana Delta, across Spanish-speaking swaths of Texas, to Native American reservations in the Southwest. Many customers end up losing their homes, thousands of dollars in down payments, or even land they’d owned outright. 

Over the 12 years since Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Clayton Homes, the company has grown to dominate virtually every aspect of America’s mobile-home industry. It builds nearly half the new manufactured homes sold in this country every year, making it the most prolific U.S. home builder of any type. It sells them through a network of more than 1,600 dealerships. And it finances more mobile-home loans than any other lender by a factor of more than seven. 

In minority communities, Clayton’s grip on the lending market verges on monopolistic: Last year, according to federal data, Clayton made 72% of the loans to black people who financed mobile homes. 

The company’s in-house lender, Vanderbilt Mortgage, charges minority borrowers substantially higher rates, on average, than their white counterparts. In fact, federal data shows that Vanderbilt typically charges black people who make over $75,000 a year slightly more than white people who make only $35,000. 

Through a spokesperson earlier this month, Buffett declined to discuss racial issues at Clayton Homes, and a reporter who attempted to contact him at his home was turned away by security. 

Clayton and Berkshire Hathaway did not respond to numerous requests for interviews with executives, delivered by phone and email, as well as in person at Berkshire Hathaway’s headquarters in Omaha. The companies did not answer any of 34 detailed questions about Clayton and its practices. Nor did they respond to an extensive summary of this article’s findings, provided along with an invitation to comment.

So yeah, Warren Buffett is one of the good guys?  My ass.  He can rot in the same jail cell as the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson and the rest of the 0.0001% that run this country.

At some point, everyone with wealth of that magnitude got it by crushing people.  I'm tired of it.

Last Call For Mosque Of The Red Derp

President Obama will visit Maryland's Islamic Society of Baltimore next week, something guaranteed to make America's less tolerant folks lose their damn minds.

The president is making the visit “to celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life,” a White House official wrote in an email Saturday. “The President believes that one of our nation’s greatest strengths is our rich diversity and the very idea that Americans of different faiths and backgrounds can thrive together – that we’re all part of the same American family. As the President has said, Muslim Americans are our friends, and neighbors; our co-workers, and sports heroes – and our men and women in uniform defending our country.”

At the Islamic Society, the president will hold a roundtable discussion with community members, the official said.

The visit will be part of the tightrope-walking Obama has done during his presidency around Islam.

For years, Muslim Americans have lobbied him to visit a mosque, citing Islamophobia. At the same time, a segment of Obama’s critics have said since he took office that he is a Muslim pretending to be Christian, and that he plays down the religious aspect of Muslim extremism. Recent polls show that 29 percent of Americans and nearly 45 percent of Republicans think he is a Muslim. The visit comes in the last year of his presidency.

The possibility of a mosque visit came up again a month ago, when several prominent Muslim Americans met with senior White House officials to discuss concerns about rising hostility toward people of their faith. During that session _ which was attended by White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, Domestic Policy Council director Cecilia Muñoz and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes — the Islamic leaders asked for Obama to visit a mosque, ideally with former president George W. Bush.

Presidents rarely visit houses of worship, aside from when they have attended church for their own religious practices. Obama regularly attends religious services on key holidays. In May, he visited a synagogue for the first time as president.

In 2001, Bush visited the Islamic Cultural Center of Washington, six days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where he declared, “Islam is peace,” and “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.”

I'm very glad to see President Obama do this, and for the right reasons. It's a major contrast to the GOP, which apparently has no problem with tracking, interment, and deportation of Muslims for the crime of being Muslim.

And speaking of that, Dubya was one of the loudest voices in 2001 to tamp down Islamophobia after 9/11.  Where is that voice now?

Guess we'll never know.

Meet The Replacements

Kudos to Iowa resident Mike Valde, who has committed more political journalism with a single question than nearly all of America's political pundits this entire campaign season.

His voice quavering with emotion, Mike Valde told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) about his brother-in-law: He was a barber who couldn’t afford health care until the Affordable Care Act, and after getting coverage he went to the doctor for the first time in years, and was diagnosed with multiple tumors. He died soon after.

“Mark never had health care until Obamacare,” Valde told Cruz in a middle school cafeteria here. “What are you going to replace it with?”

Guess.

“Sir, I promise you, I will answer your question. I’m laying out first of all the problems,” Cruz said. He went on to say that the “most pragmatic, the most prudent” thing to do is repeal the law and start over. When that is done, he said that competition in the marketplace should be expanded, people should be able to buy health insurance across state lines and that everyone wants people to have insurance coverage.

“Your father in law, he couldn’t afford it,” Cruz said.

“Brother-in-law,” Valde responded.

“Your brother-in-law couldn’t afford it,” Cruz said.

“Right. But he could afford it, he finally got it under Obama,” Valde told Cruz.

Cruz repeated Valde’s story, that by the time Valde’s brother-in-law went to a doctor, he was already dying.

“He would have gotten it earlier, if he could have afforded it earlier, but because of government regulations, he couldn’t,” Cruz said.

That's Ted Cruz's answer: if we repeal Obamacare, insurance magically becomes affordable.  We're not even bothering with replacing it anymore. No problems with health insurance existed before 2011, you know.  Everyone had health insurance and it was great, and it's all Obama's fault now.

And that's fine with Republicans.