Last Call For Primary Motivations

Over at Reality-Based Community, Mark Kleiman analyzes where the Dems are right now and what Team Bernie has left to fight for as the nomination is all but out of reach right now.

So what are the Sanders people up to? Someone I know who talks to people inside the Sanders campaign is hearing that realists inside the campaign do not see a realistic path to his nomination, yet are committed to staying in the race for the purpose of maximizing leverage by building a large group of delegates, with 1000 being used as a rough target.

For some Sanders supporters, that would be a good enough reason to carry on. But others still sincerely think he can be nominated, and that either (1) he would be a better president than HRC or (2) he has a better chance than HRC to beat Trump or whoever. It’s not at all clear that those folks would keep working and giving for the purpose of building a movement or influencing the platform. And some of them, if they knew that Clinton had a virtual lock on the nomination and that the Sanders campaign understood that, would probably decide that their effort was better given to the task of winning in November. It’s hard to tell a story where Sanders’s continued hammering away at Clinton as a tool of Wall Street makes us safer from Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

It seems to me that second group is, in effect, being cheated out of time and money. I bitterly recall writing what for me at the time was a substantial check to the McGovern campaign in the fall of 1972, in response to a desperate-sounding direct mail appeal and inspired by the idea that I was helping to defeat Richard Nixon. Only later did I learn that McGovern’s advisers, having given up on the Presidency by October, decided to cut back on expenditures to run a surplus, which was then diverted – perfectly legally – to McGovern’s Senate re-election campaign two years later. I felt – still feel – that I’d been flim-flammed.

Now, there’s no reason to think that the Sanders campaign is contemplating a similar gimmick. But the principle seems to me the same: the managers of the campaign getting people to give, and to work, in the false belief that they’re helping to elect a President. Not OK.

Footnote: Surely this is not a secret from the reporters covering the Sanders campaign. But I’ve seen no hint of it in print. Of course as long as the campaign continues, the people writing about it have stories to write, and of course any one of them who reported what was said to me would get the cold shoulder from Sanders and his staff. Still, isn’t it the job of journalists to tell their readers what they know?

It's a very good question, and the answer is that the Bernieswarm as our faithful readers put it aren't going to accept that Sanders doesn't have a way to get to the delegates he needs.  The reality of the night is Clinton's win in Louisiana tonight more than makes up for the delegates that Sanders is getting from winning Kansas and Nebraska, if not increasing her delegate lead.

Tonight I've seen people act like those two Midwestern states are the start of a massive wave of wins that will propel Bernie to the presidency, because "Hillary can't win outside Confederate States."  That's not only incorrect but massively devalues black voters, which has been a hallmark of the Sanders side of things for the entire primary season so far.

I'm still not completely sold on Hillary, and the primary will be long wrapped up by the time I get to vote here in Kentucky in May, but Team Bernie is making me less and less likely to vote for him by the hour and by the time March 15th rolls around and Maine, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio vote, we ought to be at a point where we ought to start asking why Bernie's still in the race.

By the time April 26 comes, and Wisconsin, Wyoming, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania have voted, I'm betting that's going to be answered.

Trump Cards, Con't

The civil war in the GOP, long predicted by yours truly, is now front and center.  The only question now is how bad the damage will be and if the GOP, or America for that matter, survives the conflict.

From Michigan to Louisiana to California on Friday, rank-and-file Republicans expressed mystification, dismissal and contempt regarding the instructions that their party’s most high-profile leaders were urgently handing down to them: Reject and defeat Donald J. Trump. 

Their angry reactions, in the 24 hours since Mitt Romney and John McCainurged millions of voters to cooperate in a grand strategy to undermine Mr. Trump’s candidacy, have captured the seemingly inexorable force of a movement that still puzzles the Republican elite and now threatens to unravel the party they hold dear. 

In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr. Romney four years ago rebelled against his message and plan. “I personally am disgusted by it — I think it’s disgraceful,” said Lola Butler, 71, a retiree from Mandeville, La., who voted for Mr. Romney in 2012. “You’re telling me who to vote for and who not to vote for? Please.” 

“There’s nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren — there is nothing and nobody that’s going to dissuade me from voting for Trump,” Ms. Butler said.

A fellow Louisiana Republican, Mindy Nettles, 33, accused the party of “using Romney as a puppet” to protect itself from Mr. Trump because its leaders could not control him. “He has a mind of his own,” she said. “He can think.” 

The furious campaign now underway to stop Mr. Trump and the equally forceful rebellion against it captured the essence of the party’s breakdown over the past several weeks: Its most prominent guardians, misunderstanding their own voters, antagonize them as they try to reason with them, driving them even more energetically to Mr. Trump’s side. 

As Mr. Romney amplified his pleas on Friday, Mr. Trump snubbed a major meeting of Republican activists and leaders after rumblings that protesters were prepared to demonstrate against him there, in the latest sign of Mr. Trump’s break from the apparatus of the party whose nomination he is marching toward.

And the hard truth is that Republicans have been officially courting the white racist vote since Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

That abstract is dead and gone.  Now Republicans openly support a madman who wants to deport undocumented immigrants and round up Muslims, who happily admits he would order our military to commit war crimes and that he expects the Pentagon to follow those orders. Trump was the inevitable result of decades of hatred and division clashing with the demographics of a truly multicultural America. He has attracted the worst of us, and attracted those who wish to enable them in order to build a coalition based purely on rancor, all white loudly protesting their own role in unleashing the racism in our midst.

There is no doubt that Trump is a racist, and that the people who support him are racists, and that the people who enable him are worse than racists.  And that comprised the majority of the GOP right now.  Disown him? They are him.

But man, are the Powers That Be trying to sell this as "populist anger against government".

Among people likely to vote in the Republican primary, people are 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Donald Trump as the first-choice nominee relative to all the others if they “somewhat” or “strongly agree” that “people like me don't have any say about what the government does.” Using statistical techniques, we can conclude that this increased preference for Trump is over and beyond any preferences based on respondent gender, age, race/ethnicity, employment status, educational attainment, household income, attitudes towards Muslims, attitudes towards illegal immigrants, or attitudes towards Hispanics.

Make no mistake, "people like me don't have any say about what the government does" is the new "states' rights"  And it will only get worse from here.

Your Political Cartoon Of The Moment

Pulitzer Prize-winning Lexington Herald-Leader cartoonist Joel Pett takes on Planned Parenthood's fate in Bevinstan:



The LHL pulled the cartoon before it went to print.  Can't piss off the Gov, even if he has let women in Kentucky have it.  Pett posted it anyway.  And yes, Pett has run afoul of Governor Bevin before.

I wonder if Bevin will lay down any more unconstitutional and open threats against Pett like he did back in November, despite the First Amendment clearly being on Pett's side here.

We'll see.

The Canarinho In The Coal Mine

Brazil's economy is falling apart at this point, President Dilma Rouseff is barely holding on, unemployment is rising quickly along with inflation and the country is now facing its worst recession in a century.

Brazil's economy shrank by 3.8 percent in 2015, the government said Thursday, with the biggest contraction in 25 years set to push the Latin American giant into its worst recession for more than a century.

The latest gloomy news from Brazil was no surprise, but the severity underlined the depth of problems facing President Dilma Rousseff's government as it battles both declining economic output and 10.67 percent inflation.

The state statistics office said 2015 registered the worst single annual fall in GDP since 1990, a year when the economy dipped 4.3 percent.

With the International Monetary Fund predicting a further 3.5 percent shrinkage this year, Brazil appears to be well into a recession that would be worse than any on government record going back to 1901.

The GDP results shove Brazil into the bottom bracket for performance in Latin America, where it is easily the biggest economy. Only Venezuela, with what the IMF estimates was a 10 percent plummet in GDP, is worse off.

Leading Brazil's slide was the industrial sector, which was down 6.2 percent in 2015. In the last quarter of 2015 the all-important mining sector was down 6.6 percent, reflecting the worldwide slump in commodity prices and demand for Brazil's iron ore and other raw materials.

When times were good, Brazil's natural resource bounty was a good source of income for the country as China grabbed everything it could in order to build, build, build. Now that China's economic engine has blown a gasket and is sputtering, Brazil's financial picture has turned very dark.

The slump has made Brazil increasingly toxic on the investor landscape. Last week, Moody's became the third big credit rating agency to downgrade Brazil to junk status, warning of slow recovery and political uncertainty.

A Markit Brazil Services survey of the private sector released Thursday found a record contraction in economic activity in February, as "companies continued to link the adverse operating environment to the ongoing economic, financial and political crises."

"The Brazilian economic downturn took a real turn for the worse in February, as the financial and political difficulties in the country drove down output and led to reduced order intakes," said Rob Dobson, author of the report.

"The domestic market is especially weak" and "the labor market also appears to be in dire straits."

Brazilian economists warn that 2016 could turn out to be worse than the IMF's prediction, with the economy shrinking even more than in 2015.

"Brazil has never had such a high level of uncertainty and this is freezing everything up. There is no consumption or investment or credit with this historic level of uncertainty," Daniel Cunha, an analyst at XP Investimentos in Sao Paulo, said.

Brazil used to be the leader of the BRIC nations, emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China were powering the global economy.  Now?  The BRIC is broke, and Brazil has definitely fallen the hardest.  And most of that can be pinned on Rouseff and Brazil's ruling party, and her predecessor, former President Lula who has just been detained in the state's ongoing national oil company bribery scandal.

Brazil's in real trouble, folks.  It's not going to get better anytime soon.

Last Call For The Cookie Crumbles

Pretty sure we've reached peak Glibertarian Nonsense with the Federalist's Daniel Payne on selling Girl Scout cookies.

It’s that time of year again when the Girl Scouts are going door-to-door and setting up shop outside of supermarkets to sell you those colorful little boxes of reconstituted butter and sugar. It’s Girl Scout cookie season, I mean, which—according to the Girl Scouts of America—is the time of year when the young women of the Girl Scouts learn “goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics.” 

The Girl Scout cookie program, in other words, teaches young girls how to be entrepreneurs; it teaches them how to work. It is, after a fashion, child labor. The great scandal is not that the Girl Scouts are promoting child labor, it’s that there isn’t more child labor in the United States today.

This is amazingly stupid, even for this crew.

When one says the words “child labor,” of course, one immediately thinks of the crushing 14-hour textile-style jobs, pictures of which one usually sees in middle school history textbooks. Surely young children are better off when they are not required to labor under such working conditions. 

Yet the federal government—never to be outdone at overreach—has gone several steps further further and proscribed virtually every meaningful kind of occupation for children younger than 14: “any manufacturing occupation,” “most processing occupations,” “all work requiring the use of ladders, scaffolds or their substitutes,” “outside window washing,” and apparently hundreds of other types of jobs (such as “occupations in connection with…communications and public utilities”).

Remember, this is a group of people that wants safety and wellness regulations eliminated for adults, because it "infantilizes" them.  SO what about the kids?  Eh, free market'll take care of em.

As farmer Joel Salatin points out, labor laws prevent children from using even so simple a tool as a cordless drill in the course of employment, to say nothing of the entire occupations from which children are barred by the Department of Labor. The end result of these laws is ultimately not child protection but prohibiting children from using their innate potential to earn their own money.

All of this is somewhat moot, of course, given the fact that our outdated Prussian-style compulsory education system locks up most children for eight hours each day so they might be subject to a pedagogical model that is extraordinarily efficient at wasting a lot of time. The average homeschooler can often finish his school day at a much faster rate than the average public schooler. There is a strong case to be made for abolishing compulsory education, as well—that more American children might be freed from a system that’s not working for them in favor of something that might.

Yes, because children are really just tiny labor sources.  The real solution to America's stagnant wages? Labor and education policies from 1905.  Look, if you're seriously arguing that we need to get rid of education and child labor laws, you just might be a colossal asshole who shouldn't be writing for a living.

Yeesh.On the other hand, this article certainly seems like it was written by a sixteen-year-old.  Maybe he has a point.

Redefining Stupid In Bevinstan

Whenever I attempt the notion of defending the Bluegrass State and its people against accusations of rampant stupidity, I find that Republicans here invariably do something so moronic that I have to give up for weeks, if not months at a time.

The U.S. Supreme Court ended the debate on whether same-sex couples can marry, but one Kentucky lawmaker has a new plan to circumvent this decision. State Rep. Joseph M. Fischer (R) is happy to let same-sex couples marry, but only different-sex couples will be able to enter “matrimony.”

Fischer has introduced HB 572, the “Matrimonial Freedom Act” — an epic 454-page bill that creates the new status of “matrimony.” Declaring that the Supreme Court has established an “absolute Tyranny over these States,” the bill asserts, “we have full power to define marriage and to establish a new institution of matrimony in this Commonwealth,” adding, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

“Matrimony” is a simple concept. Any couple can marry, and any individual who is married is considered to be part of a “matrimony” if “the married couple is composed of two individuals of the opposite sex.” Conversely, the bill outlines that “if the married couple is composed of two individuals of the same sex,” it is not considered a “matrimony”:

As used and recognized in the law of the Commonwealth, “matrimony” refers only to the civil status, condition, or relation of one male human being (“husband”) and one female human being (“wife”) united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex.

The bill is over 450 pages long because, once it defines “matrimony,” it proceeds to add the term throughout all of Kentucky law. For the statutes that define the basic parameters of marriage, duplicate language is added defining “matrimony” by the exact same parameters. But anywhere that the law outlines a privilege, benefit, or responsibility previously made available to marriage, the word “marriage” is replaced by the word “matrimony.”

Which means the bill literally redefines every single instance of marriage in Kentucky to "matrimony" and defines that as one man and one woman, thus exempting the state from the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage, as well as any and all federal regulations pertaining to marriage, and letting the state define it for all citizens in the Commonwealth.

A more useless and complete waste of time has yet to be invented, I would think.  And yes, he's from right up the road in Ft. Thomas. Embarrassing, stupid, and puerile, good job, Rep. Fischer, of making the state a laughing stock yet again.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Another murder of a young black man by a white cop, this time in Montgomery, Alabama, has led to the officer involved being charged with murder, something that simply would not have happened even a few years ago.

Officer Aaron C. Smith, 23, was arrested Wednesday, and his bond was set at $150,000, Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey said during a Wednesday afternoon press conference.

"SBI and I agreed at the beginning of this investigation that this case would be treated as any other case," Bailey said. "We agreed that if there were probable cause that a crime had been committed then an arrest would be made. After meeting extensively with SBI agents, we have concluded that probable cause exists to make an arrest in this case."

He said the arrest isn't an indictment, and the investigation remains ongoing.

Smith, a Montgomery police officer since 2012, was released on bond shortly after being booked into the Montgomery County Detention Facility on Wednesday afternoon.

Gunn was fatally shot on Feb. 25 at around 3:20 a.m. in the 3200 block of McElvey Street in the west Montgomery neighborhood of Mobile Heights.

Last week, Montgomery Police Chief Ernest Finley said the incident began after an officer stopped to talk to a "suspicious" person, later identified as Gunn, and an altercation ensued. It was initially reported Gunn was armed with a painting pole or stick.

It's unclear now why Gunn was deemed suspicious, or if he was really armed with a stick.

Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange said today that termination proceedings have begun against Smith.

For an Alabama prosecutor to move this quickly to arrest a police officer on charges of murder means there has to be pretty hefty evidence against Smith for Gunn's shooting.  The state police were called in to investigate and they could have easily covered for Smith and the case would have just been one more dead black man on the streets.

But it's not.  And the difference seems to be the body camera.

Strange said he had asked the State Bureau of Investigation to expedite the investigation into the shooting.

"We cooperated fully (with the SBI investigation)," Strange said during today's press conference. "We will continue to cooperate fully as it moves forward."

He said Montgomery police didn't investigate the shooting. The scene was isolated, and the investigation immediately handed over to the State Bureau of Investigation.

No details of the case, including what may or may not be on the officer's body camera were released to Strange, Finley or Montgomery Department of Public Safety Director Chris Murphy, Strange said.

"This is a time of grief for the Gunn family as they prepare to lay a loved one to rest," Strange added later. "It is also a challenging time for MPD ...."

Strange said hopes to speak with Gunn's mother and to offer his condolences.

Gunn was supposedly armed with a stick or painting pole when he was killed.  I'm betting that the body camera shows pretty clearly that Gunn wasn't armed and wasn't threatening Office Smith at all.  There's no way a white police officer in Alabama is charged with murder of a black life after just one week since the shooting without overwhelming evidence, and that evidence almost certainly has to be the body camera footage.

I'll be keeping an eye on this case.  Black lives matter, folks.

StupidiNews!

• Syria's government reported a national power outage on Thursday as the week-old cease-fire between rebel forces and the Syrian military is "close to collapse" according to one negotiator.
• South Dakota's anti-trans "bathroom bill" is officially dead after Republicans were unable to override Gov. Dennis Daugaard's veto of the legislation by one vote.
• The White House will meet with several state and local health officials next month in order to craft a national defense against mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus.
• Warehouse club Costco says it will raise its minimum wage to $13 an hour in order to compete for labor amid low unemployment.
• NASA researchers may have discovered evidence of methane "snow" on Pluto's mountain peaks, condensing out of the thin atmosphere due to elevation.

Last Call For Dissed Christie

What a precipitous fall for New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie. He's run into a massive backlash over his failed presidential campaign and recent endorsement of Donald Trump.  Now papers in his home state are calling for the governor's resignation, the largest of which is the Newark Star-Ledger. Their editorial board is now openly calling for Christie to step down.

Gov. Chris Christie has made it abundantly clear that governing New Jersey is a distant second priority for him, far behind the demands of his personal ambition. 

He has answered every crisis with neglect during his disastrous second term. 

Atlantic City is about to go bankrupt, and yet he sat on a reform package for six months without explanation. The transit system is in disrepair, with our link to New York City vulnerable to a crippling breakdown, and he watches passively as the transit fund drifts toward bankruptcy. New Jersey's fiscal crisis is the nation's second worst, and he has charted no viable path toward a political deal. 

All this is infuriating when you consider that Christie possesses the political talent to steer the state towards safer ground. He made that clear in his first term, when he scored substantial wins on a centrist agenda. 

But if his first term showed that he has the talent, his second term has shown that he lacks the character. 

His craven endorsement of Donald Trump is only the final blow, the moment when he lost any last shred of credibility. His fulsome praise of Trump, after his stinging condemnations only a few weeks ago, is impossible to believe.

New Jersey's paper of record ends with a brutal assessment of Christie's multiple failures:

Our hope is that the calls for his resignation grow into a roar, that it includes Republican voices, and that Christie finds some face-saving way to step aside. 

Failing that, we can only hope that he takes a moral inventory of his own conduct and changes course. If not, it will be time to consider a recall election. 

The best answer for New Jersey would be for the governor to quit on his own. It's time for fresh leadership in this state. Christie has done enough damage.

He won't step down of course, and the editorial makes no mistake in falsely believing Christie possesses the moral character to do so at all.  It's very apparent however that Christie's higher political ambitions are done.

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving pile of garbage.

Flipping The Script On SCOTUS, Con't

So, what is President Obama's plan to get his Supreme Court nominee a hearing?  The first obstacle is Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the current Senate Judiciary Chair. Grassley has vowed that President Obama's nominee won't get consideration at all, letting the rest of the Senate Republicans off the hook.

Only one problem.  Grassley is up for re-election.  And President Obama knows how to play this game.  First the left hook:

President Obama is vetting Jane L. Kelly, a federal appellate judge in Iowa, as a potential nominee for the Supreme Court, weighing a selection that could pose an awkward dilemma for her home-state senator Charles E. Grassley, who has pledged to block the president from filling the vacancy. 

The F.B.I. has been conducting background interviews on Judge Kelly, 51, according to a person with knowledge of the process. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House is closely guarding details about Mr. Obama’s search to fill the opening created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. 

The president is expected to make his selection in the next couple of weeks, a decision that could reshape the court for decades but faces heated opposition from Republicans in Congress. 

Mr. Grassley is at the center of that fight as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a post in which he alone can decide whether to hold confirmation hearings on a nominee. Like the panel’s other Republicans, he has vowed not to take any action until after the November election, arguing that the choice should be left to the next president.

And then when you've got them stunned, you land the right cross.

Former Iowa Lt. Gov. and Secretary of Agriculture Patty Judge will enter Iowa’s U.S. Senate race, multiple sources confirmed to The Des Moines Register Thursday. 

Judge, a Democrat, will challenge long-time incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has been under fire in recent weeks over his refusal to hold confirmation hearings for a successor to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died unexpectedly earlier this month. 

Sources in Washington, D.C., and in Des Moines – including people who have spoken with Judge as recently as this morning – confirmed to the Register that she will announce her candidacy on Friday. 

Judge told the Des Moines Register late last week that she was considering a run, largely because of Grassley’s stance on the court vacancy. 

"I don’t like this deliberate obstruction of the process,” she told the Register last week. “I think Chuck Grassley owes us better. He’s been with us a long time. Maybe he’s been with us too long.”

Boom, baby.  Suddenly Grassley has a formidable challenger to his seat in Patty Judge, and she has an immediate issue to run on, for Jane Kelly is an eminently qualified federal judge whom Grassley himself recommended to the bench.

If you doubted Barack Obama on this, doubt no more.  Do not be surprised if Jane Kelly is his pick.

Debbie Has To Go

I've been calling for DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign for months now.

Schultz has been an unmitigated disaster as DNC chair, with the Democrats losing the House and Senate under her tenure and giving Republicans that largest margin in the House in three generations. Now she sandbags the President on Iran? 

Unacceptable. She's clearly more afraid of AIPAC than Democrats, and that alone is a serious problem. But when that turns into direct action against the President of her own party and his signature foreign policy achievment, she can't be shown the door quickly enough. 

I'm tired of her losing. I'm tired of her running against Barack Obama and losing to Tea Party Republicans. I'm tired of her idiocy. 

She needs to go.

With Super Tuesday out of the way and Clinton on the clear path to the nomination, it's time to clean house so we can clean House, if you know what I mean.  The only way we get what both Hillary and Bernie have been calling for is a Democratic Congress, and nobody has been worse at that since Schultz took over in Obama's first term only to run into the buzzsaw that was 2010 midterm elections.

Enter Chuck Pierce, who reminds us that Schultz is now actively working to create legislation that will help big banks and wreck any wort of financial sector reform.

It is time for her to go. More important, it's time for Hillary Rodham Clinton to insist that she go.

In addition to putting the Congress behind some of the worst predatory bastards in America, this move also gives the lie to anything HRC says about her dedication to reigning in financial crimes. Moreover, this puts the DNC squarely on the other side of the issue from both Bernie Sanders and Senator Professor Warren and, therefore, on the other side of the issue from about 90 percent of some voters she is going to need desperately in the fall. (The payday loan industry always has been something that jumps on SPW's last nerve). This latest move by DWS completely undermines the work of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which already is under siege from a number of different directions and will be one of the prime targets of any Republican president also armed with a Republican Congress. And can I imagine Herr Trump talking shameless ragtime about payday lenders as part of his absurd kabuki financial populism? You bet I can.

Yeah, this is long overdue.  We need somebody in the DNC now with the goal of winning back Congress, and Schultz is not it.  Not even close.

She's got to go.

StupidiNews!

• Astronaut Scott Kelly has returned from his year aboard the ISS as NASA will look at how his body has changed compared to his twin brother and former astronaut Mark Kelly.
• Scientists have discovered ancient fossils of fungus strands thought to be over 440 million years old, making them Earth's oldest-known land organism fossils.
• Ben Carson has effectively suspended his presidential campaign and will not attend tonight's GOP debate in his home state of Michigan.
• Fracking pioneer Anthony McClendon has died in a single-car accident in Oklahoma the morning before he was to face federal grand jury charges of bid rigging in oil drilling leases.
• New federal regulations to authenticate student information for college loans are causing headaches for students, parents, and universities.

Last Call For Going Postal

House Republicans are so hideously awful that they barely even name post offices after people who actually deserve post offices named after them.

The House of Representatives spent its legislative day Tuesday naming nine post offices. Only one generated any opposition: A proposal, from Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), to name a post office in Winston-Salem, N.C., for the late poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. 

The bill honoring Angelou, famed for her autobiographical works and her recital at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, passed overwhelmingly but not unanimously. Nine members, all Republicans, opposed the honor: Mo Brooks (Ala.), Ken Buck (Colo.), Michael Burgess (Texas), Jeff Duncan (S.C.), Glenn Grothman (Wis.), Andy Harris (Md.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Alex Mooney (W.V.) and Steven Palazzo (Ala.). 

Only Grothman discussed his opposition on the House floor: “I think people should investigate Maya Angelou a little bit, and I’ll suggest perhaps if you want to investigate a little bit further that perhaps you Google ‘Maya Angelou’ and look at other articles in places like the American Thinker or the American Spectator.”

Yeah, and that's my Congressman, Thomas Massie, voting against naming a post office for Maya Angelou.  Asshole.

Luckily he has a challenger in November.  Meet Calvin Sidle, folks.  Good luck to him, and if you can donate a few bucks, do so.

I'll find out more about him here in the next few weeks and we'll get something going.  I'm tired of Massie's glibertarian nonsense.

Meanwhile, In Kentucky

It must be real fun for people to pretend that Trump isn't a real threat to people of color.

7. This young student was repeatedly shoved/harassed from every angle by the white supremacists AND others. pic.twitter.com/uRpZr9R7oc

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) March 2, 2016

This is from Trump's rally Tuesday in Louisville, but hey, it's okay.  Trump's not a real threat, and people aren't really gonna vote for him, and they'll get sick of him and go home or something and everything will be fine, right?

Right?

Putting On A Clinic In Texas

Texas's TRAP laws. designed to close most of the state's abortion clinics with increasingly draconian state regulation, now go before the Supreme Court in oral arguments today. ABC News reporter Kate Shaw explains:

First, a little background. In 2013, Texas passed the two laws at issue here: 1) a requirement that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital; and 2) a requirement that abortion facilities comply with the requirements for ambulatory surgical centers.

The plaintiffs in the case are clinics and doctors that provide abortion services, among other things; Whole Woman’s Health is one of those clinics. They have challenged the Texas laws, arguing that there’s no evidence that the laws promote health and that they’re really about impeding women’s access to abortion. If the laws go into effect, they claim, the number of clinics in Texas will drop to 10 or fewer (the laws are largely on hold at the moment, while the Supreme Court considers the case).

Dr. John Hellerstedt, the Commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services -- the agency that enforces the challenged laws -- argues in response that Texas is just trying to ensure patient safety and improve standards of care. He also argues that it’s the job of legislatures, not courts, to decide whether laws like these are medically necessary.

It's important to note that these are the same TRAP laws Gov John Kasich has installed in Ohio, closing half of the state's abortion clinics there in moves that could leave Cincinnati as the largest metropolitan area in the country without a single abortion provider.

This has the potential to be the most important abortion case in nearly 25 years. The two most significant abortion cases the court has decided -- Roe v. Wade, in 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992 -- found that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, at least prior to viability, but also found that states have a legitimate interest in regulating abortion. But the court hasn’t provided much guidance about when state regulation crosses the line, and this case could do that.

There are at least three possible outcomes (and they mostly turn on Justice Kennedy, who holds the key vote in this case). First, if Justice Kennedy thinks the regulations have gone too far, they’ll likely be struck down 5-3, which will make it harder for states to pass abortion regulations that seriously interfere with women’s ability to obtain abortions. If Justice Kennedy concludes that the Texas laws are permissible, the court will likely divide 4-4, affirming the lower court opinion and leaving the regulations in effect, but making no law for the rest of the country. And there is a third possibility -- that the chief justice could hold the case over for re-argument some time next term, when the court may have a ninth justice in place.

The good news is for now, with the passing of Justice Scalia, there won't be five votes to make Texas's TRAP laws viable nationwide.  The bad news is that there will be enormous pressure by Republicans on Chief Justice Roberts to punt until they allow a replacement (which if a Democrat wins in November and the GOP keeps the Senate may be never.)

But Zandar, you say, Republicans can't "pressure" Roberts to do anything, right?

Oh sure, in a perfect world  But Roberts saw how Republicans de-legitimized everything President Obama did over eight years, and Roberts doesn't want to be the same way.  Surely any decisions that the GOP doesn't like would be attacked as illegitimate for only having 8 justices.

But they can't do that when they are the reason no justice can even be considered, right?

Do you think anyone will be able to stop them?  Our media and voters haven't so far.

We'll see.