Last Call For Fighting The Bigotry

As expected, the first of many expected federal lawsuits over North Carolina's sweeping new anti-LGBTQ law has been filed. BuzzFeed's Dominic Holden and Chris Geidner:

Three individuals and two LGBT advocacy groups early Monday morning filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the recently passed North Carolina law that nullified local LGBT rights ordinances and restricted transgender people’s access to restrooms. 

“By singling out LGBT people for disfavored treatment and explicitly writing discrimination against transgender people into state law, H.B. 2 violates the most basic guarantees of equal treatment and the U.S. Constitution,” the lawsuit argues.

The complaint argues the law violates people’s equal protection, privacy, and liberty rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and their civil rights under Title IX of the Education Act of 1972. 

The lawsuit is asking for a declaratory judgment that the law violates the Constitution and Title IX and an injunction against enforcement of the law. 

The case was filed overnight in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina on behalf of Joaquín Carcaño, a transgender man who works at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Payton Grey McGarry, a transgender man who is a student at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro; and Angela Gilmore, a lesbian who is the associate dean for academic affairs at North Carolina Central University. Also named as plaintiffs are the ACLU of North Carolina and Equality North Carolina. 

The defendants include Gov. Pat McCrory, Attorney General Roy Cooper, and the University of North Carolina and several of its senior officials. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of North Carolina, Lambda Legal, and Equality North Carolina are all backing the litigation.

Considering this odious piece of garbage was only crapped into existence last Wednesday in a 10-hour blitz of bigotry, I guess the Easter weekend made things a little slower than usual for filing, but I'm glad to see the ACLU and Lambda Legal are all on the ball with this lawsuit.

I'm hoping for an injunction that keeps the NC law from going into place while the suit works its way up the system.  We'll see what happens.

Oh, and over in Georgia, GOP Gov. Nathan Deal doesn't exactly want to lose the Super Bowl over that state's most recent attempt at "religious liberty" and will veto the bill pending there

The measure “doesn’t reflect the character of our state or the character of its people,” the governor said Monday in prepared remarks. He said state legislators should leave freedom of religion and freedom of speech to the U.S. Constitution. 

“Their efforts to purge this bill of any possibility that it would allow or encourage discrimination illustrates how difficult it is to legislate something that is best left to the broad protections of the First Amendment,” he said. 

The two-term Republican has been besieged by all sides over the controversial measure, and his office has received thousands of emails and hundreds of calls on the debate. The tension was amplified by a steady stream of corporate titans who urged him to veto the bill – and threatened to pull investments from Georgia if it became law. 

The governor’s planned veto will likely infuriate religious conservatives who considered the measure, House Bill 757, their top priority. This is the third legislative session they’ve sought to strengthen legal protections from opponents of gay marriage, but last year’s Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex weddings galvanized their efforts. 

It is also likely to herald a more acrimonious relationship between Deal, who campaigned on a pro-business platform, and the evangelical wing of the Georgia Republican party. Already, prominent conservatives have vowed to revive the measure next year if Deal chooses not to sign it.

Expect this battle to continue in the states and the courts for some time to come.

The Smoking Remains Of Kynect

So one month after the debut of the new state benefits system to replace Kentucky's successful health care exchange Kynect, which Gov. Matt Bevin is calling Benefind, (a "one-stop shop" for all your Kentucky benefit needs, including food stamps, CHIP, unemployment benefits and Medicaid!) and rolling everything into Benefind to save taxpayer money, Kentucky has discovered a bit of an issue with the centerpiece of Bevinstan.  There's only one slight problem: Benefind is an absolute disaster.

A new state computer system meant to help people get public benefits more easily instead is creating turmoil throughout Kentucky, interrupting health coverage, food stamps or other assistance for countless individuals, according to health and social service advocates. 

People seeking help must wait hours or days, repeatedly calling a state helpline only to get a recorded message that advises them to try later and then hangs up, the advocates said. Others visit overcrowded state benefit offices where they must wait for hours - sometimes the entire day - to get help, they said. 

"It's really frustrating," said Emily Pickett, a Louisville mother who learned Feb. 29 two of her three small children had been cut off from Medicaid coverage. 

Further, the new system known as Benefind has disrupted the state's highly successful health insurance exchange, kynect, shutting people out of their online accounts or eliminating their health coverage altogether, they said. 

"Benefind is a disaster," said Emily Beauregard, executive director of Kentucky Voices for Health, a coalition of health advocacy groups. "It's not working."

Of course, the people who warned Bevin that Benefind was a massive failure are no longer in the Bevin administration. Seems Gov. Bevin deals quite swiftly and harshly with those who may expose his administration's many flaws here in Bevinstan.

The top official in charge of complaints at the Cabinet for Health and Family Services was fired one business day after he said he warned his bosses that people were so angry over problems with a new public benefits system that he feared some might become violent, endangering state workers. 

Hundreds of callers have grown increasingly frustrated over the abrupt loss of benefits such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, said Norman "Chip" Ward, the former executive director of the cabinet's ombudsman's office. 

Many are furious they can't reach anyone on a state hotline to handle questions about benefits they said were wrongly canceled under the new system know as Benefind. 

"I expressed my concern that something bad was going to happen," Ward said in an interview Monday, adding he was worried an angry client might visit a local state benefit office and become violent. "It was really reaching a boiling point." 

Among the cabinet officials Ward said he notified of his concerns on March 18 were Secretary Vickie Yates Glisson; Tim Feeley, deputy secretary; Adria Johnson, the commissioner of the Department for Community Based Services, which handles public benefits; and Steve Davis, the cabinet's chief of staff. 

In an interview Friday, Davis declined to elaborate on Ward's dismissal, saying the decision to fire the ombudsman was "a personnel matter." Davis said he is acting as the current ombudsman. 

Ward said that as a political appointee he lacks merit protection and Davis gave him no reason for firing him.

So now, Bevin has taken a state government system that actually worked and has replaced it with a broken system in order to save costs.  And Bevin is blaming everything on his predecessor, former Gov. Steve Beshear.

Bevin blamed the backlogs on former Gov. Steve Beshear’s administration, which created the original version of Benefind but hadn’t opened the program to the public before the end of his term. 

“We were told that it was, it had been double-checked, it was user-ready and it was time to unveil it. You have found out firsthand that it’s not exactly as we expected it to be,” Bevin said in a Youtube video addressed to employees of the Department for Community Based Services, which manages the program. 

“I know it’s frankly been scary in some measure, with just the onslaught of people that have been piling up, the amount of work that is at hand,” Bevin said in the video.

So Bevin is blaming Dinosaur Steve for the mess and firing the whistleblowers who say otherwise. But that's how Gov. Bevin rolls, you see.  Not too much accountability here in Bevinstan. You'd be forgiven for thinking Bevin dismantled Kynect and then replaced it with a mess of a system to make sure that people couldn't get their benefits they were entitled to get.

We can't have government actually working in he Commonwealth, you know.

Sanders And The Superdelegates

Running a pretty big victory lap after this weekend's wins in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington state, Bernie Sanders is confident that Democratic party superdelegates will start jumping from the Clinton ship any time now.

"I think the momentum is with us," Sanders said on CNN's "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper on Sunday. "A lot of these superdelegates may rethink their positions with Secretary Clinton."

The Vermont senator swept Saturday's Democratic contests in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, easily winning the majority of the 142 pledged delegates in those states. The biggest prize of the day was in Washington, which offered 101 delegates to be split up on a proportional basis.

The latest delegate counts still put Sanders behind Clinton, however, with 1,004 pledged delegates to her 1,712.

Of those, 469 are superdelegates who have pledged to Clinton and only 29 have pledged to Sanders.

Sanders on Sunday said those superdelegates may begin to see the "reality" that he's the best candidate to beat GOP front runner Donald Trump.

"I think when they begin to look at reality, and that is that we are beating Donald Trump by much larger margins than Secretary Clinton" Sanders said. "And then you've got superdelegates in states where we win by 40 or 50 points. I think their own constituents are going to say to them, 'Hey, why don't you support the people of our state and vote for Sanders?'"

Bernie Sanders has a long way to go, frankly.  Yes, he's still in the race, and no Clinton hasn't put him away yet.  But I think Sanders is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking here. He needs to make up more than 200 pledged delegates from the remaining primaries, and unless you think he's going to win states like California and New York by the kind of margins he got in Washington's caucus, that's not going to happen.

Sanders knows however that he needs both superdelegates and big primary wins to pull this off, and it's still very much a long shot.  However even if he doesn't win he does have influence, and Clinton is eventually going to have to deal with that. Juan Williams:

Sanders’ “socialist” label is a liability in a general election. The Vermonter will hurt Clinton’s effort to win support from political moderates, especially older voters. Sanders would also be a bridge too far for Republicans disenchanted by their party’s wild primary season and the prospect of either Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as the GOP’s presidential candidate. 

Adding Sanders to the ticket would also create an opening for Republican ad-makers. They would gleefully target his past congressional votes opposing tax cuts, the Patriot Act and new military defenses against a possible Iranian missile attack. 

But if Sanders is not to be made the prospective veep, Democrats will have to find something else to give him. After all, he has exceeded all expectations during the primary season. The depth of his support was underlined by his three strong victories on Saturday in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington. And Democrats live in fear of a him mounting a third-party run along the lines of the populist campaign run by Ralph Nader in 2000 that arguably gave the White House to George W. Bush. 

The heart of this troublesome political puzzle for Democrats is how to get Sanders’s passionate supporters to line up behind Clinton. In early March, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found a third of the people voting for Sanders saying they “cannot see themselves voting for Hillary Clinton in November.” 

The Nation magazine, a leading voice of the left, reported recently that “nearly 60,000 people have signed the ‘Bernie or Bust’ pledge,” vowing to remain loyal to him even if Clinton wins the nomination.

The next battle is April 5 in Wisconsin for both parties, the state has a open primary. We'll see how this all shakes out, but the better Sanders does going forward, the higher a price he can extract come July.

StupidiNews!

• Ash is spewing from the Pavlof Volcano on Alaska's remote Aleutian Islands, aviation alerts in the area remain in effect through today from low visibility.
• California lawmakers have reached a tentative deal with unions and labor activists to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 a hour over the next six years to avoid a ballot initiative battle.
• Pakistani authorities are looking for the Taliban splinter group claiming responsibility for an Easter Sunday suicide blast targeting Christians in the capital Lahore that killed at least 70.
• European union officials have expanded the search for suspects in this month's deadly blasts in Brussels to include arrests in Italy and the Netherlands as well as the Belgian capital.
• A heist worthy of a super villain happened last week in Macon, Georgia as more than $200,000 in vintage comic books were stolen from a comic shop.

Easter Eggs

Hope everyone is having a good Easter Sunday.  I'll be back tomorrow with the usual stuff.

Last Call For Flipping The Script On SCOTUS

The number of Republican senators up for re-election and who do not want to go down with the burning wreck of the USS Donald J Trump is starting to become a nice little crowd now.

Senate Republicans and the White House are signaling a tentative point of agreement on a key part of President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination process: the nominee questionnaire.

The statements regarding the questionnaire are part of the careful maneuvering on the issue by all sides in this tense and unusual Supreme Court nomination process for D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland.

Traditionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee sends a personalized questionnaire for Supreme Court nominees to the White House. This time, the White House has not received one from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democratic member of the committee.

Nonetheless, on Friday evening, Grassley’s spokesperson, Beth Levine, told BuzzFeed News that the Republicans “assume the administration will fill out the standard questionnaire submitted for judicial nominations.”

Levine reiterated, however, the Republican leadership’s position that “a majority of the Senate has made clear that the American people should have an opportunity to weigh in on this vacancy.”

The White House reacted to the statement with cautious optimism.

“It appears that Chairman Grassley is prepared to accept a questionnaire from Judge Garland,” White House spokesperson Brandi Hoffine told BuzzFeed News on Saturday. “We are heartened by this development and look forward to the Committee making this request directly to the nominee as well as to the White House, as is standard practice.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire is a critical part of the process for those nominated for a federal judgeship. The questions focus on the basics, like education and employment history, but also seek detailed information on speeches and writings of the nominee, as well as information about the nominee’s experience as a practicing lawyer and a complete recounting of the decisions of nominees who already are lower-court judges.

Hoffine said Garland “is prepared to provide all relevant information, consistent with standard practice, in short order.”

In front of the cameras, Republicans are screaming about "no hearings" and "let the people decide in November."  Here in reality, the nomination process is going forward.  Slowly, but it's going forward.  Republican senators figure they'll start getting credit for basic courtesy to President Obama, and frankly that bar has been set deep into the floor for years now.  Perhaps the notion that the GOP is expected to lose control of the Senate with a Trump nomination has something to do with it.

But that's how this game works these days, and nobody plays it better than Obama.

Talking Taibbi

So, I've been challenged to "learn something" from this Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone piece on why Hillary is awful and why you are stupid for voting for her and the Millenials get it, man!

But I think they do understand. Young people have repudiated the campaign of Hillary Clinton in overwhelming and historic fashion, with Bernie Sanders winning under-30 voters by consistently absurd margins, as high as 80 to 85 percent in many states. He has done less well with young African-American voters, but even there he's seen some gains as time has gone on. And the energy coming from the pre-middle-aged has little to do with an inability to appreciate political reality.

Instead, the millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary's campaign this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others.

And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.

Hillary not only voted for the Iraq War, but offered a succession of ridiculous excuses for her vote. Remember, this was one of the easiest calls ever. A child could see that the Bush administration's fairy tales about WMDs and Iraqi drones spraying poison over the capital (where were they going to launch from, Martha's Vineyard?) were just that, fairy tales.

Yet Hillary voted for the invasion for the same reason many other mainstream Democrats did: They didn't want to be tagged as McGovernite peaceniks. The new Democratic Party refused to be seen as being too antiwar, even at the cost of supporting a wrong one.

Taibbi's argument is literally "You can't be this stupid to vote for Hillary Clinton, a child could see through her."  That's not convincing me to vote for Clinton, but believing everyone who does vote for her is stupid is not making me want to vote for Sanders, either.  But here's where Taibbi loses me for good:

Is Hillary really doing the most good that she can do, fighting for the best deal that's there to get for ordinary people?

Or is she just doing something that satisfies her own definition of that, while taking tens of millions of dollars from some of the world's biggest jerks? 

I doubt even Hillary Clinton could answer that question. She has been playing the inside game for so long, she seems to have become lost in it. She behaves like a person who often doesn't know what the truth is, but instead merely reaches for what is the best answer in that moment, not realizing the difference.

This is why her shifting explanations and flippant attitude about the email scandal are almost more unnerving than the ostensible offense. She seems confident that just because her detractors are politically motivated, as they always have been, that they must be wrong, as they often were.

But that's faulty thinking. My worry is that Democrats like Hillary have been saying, "The Republicans are worse!" for so long that they've begun to believe it excuses everything. It makes me nervous to see Hillary supporters like law professor Stephen Vladeck arguing in the New York Times that the real problem wasn't anything Hillary did, but that the Espionage Act isn't "practical."

If you're willing to extend the "purity" argument to the Espionage Act, it's only a matter of time before you get in real trouble. And even if it doesn't happen this summer, Democrats may soon wish they'd picked the frumpy senator from Vermont who probably checks his restaurant bills to make sure he hasn't been undercharged.

But in the age of Trump, winning is the only thing that matters, right? In that case, there's plenty of evidence suggesting Sanders would perform better against a reality TV free-coverage machine like Trump than would Hillary Clinton. This would largely be due to the passion and energy of young voters.

Young people don't see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between idealism and incremental progress. The choice they see is between an honest politician, and one who is so profoundly a part of the problem that she can't even see it anymore.

Matt Taibbi, who will defend Edward Snowden regardless of the actions he took, thinks Clinton violated the Espionage Act with her email server because maybe, you know, the Republicans are right and beating Trump shouldn't be what matters, if it was you'd pick Bernie. And again, Taibbi is not the kind of person who would suffer one iota in a Trump presidency, unlike the rest of us.

I'm tired of being treated like I'm stupid, hateful, racist, "low-information", not liberal, uncaring, evil, or a combination of the above for thinking that Bernie Sanders wouldn't represent my interests better than Hillary Clinton would, and that even considering Clinton makes me insufficiently moral.  This is not how you convince people to come around to your side, this is how you convince people to ignore you as a jackass.

Thanks.

The Paranoid Style, 48 Years Later

This is the Republican party in 2016, and it's godawful.

Support has more than quadrupled overnight for a petition to allow firearms at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

The petition, filed by “Americans for Responsible Open Carry,” was filed Monday on Change.org, an online forum. By Wednesday, 630 supporters had signed the request to carry firearms in and around Quicken Loans Arena, which will host the 2016 Republican National Convention from July 18-21.

With a goal of 5,000 signatures, the petition topped 5,300 by 6 p.m. Thursday.

The Ohio Republican Party, which is sending one of 50 state delegations to Cleveland this summer to nominate the party’s next presidential candidate, said it was not aware of the petition.

Nor was the host committee overseeing the convention, although it noted that the Secret Service, in conjunction with Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, state and federal authorities, is handling security for the event.

“They are coordinating and will be continuously refining security plans leading up to the national convention,” said Alee Lockman, a spokesperson for the Republican National Convention.

The Secret Service banned guns at the GOP convention in Florida four years ago.

And this will definitely pick up steam as people realize that Cleveland is decently-sized American city where not everybody is a Republican.

The petitioners, who claim a “God-given” right to carry, suggest that armed, law-abiding citizens will make the event more secure in a city full of crime.

“Cleveland, Ohio is consistently ranked as one of the top ten most dangerous cities in America,” the petition stated, referencing a Forbes story. “By forcing attendees to leave their firearms at home, the RNC and Quicken Loans Arena are putting tens of thousands of people at risk both inside and outside of the convention site.”

Criticism of the effort is split between those fundamentally opposing open carry and a more nuanced attack on the Republican Party for not standing behind its traditional support for an uninhibited right to have and hold firearms.

“Hypocrisy is the death of political parties. Stand by your frothy principles, or shut up about them,” wrote a commentator from California, whose argument that Republicans tend to support unabridged gun rights but do not always hold events at open-carry friendly venues has been made before by progressive organizations.

Note the argument here: these folks are saying that they do not believe the Cleveland PD or Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department, or even the Ohio State Police or US Secret Service can protect the convention, only an armed mob of convention delegates can.  Which is exactly what you want when tensions are high and the party, already marred by acts of violence where dissent is concerned, is facing an unprecedented crackup over Trump's nomination.  This is a great idea, and I'm sure law enforcement is going to love every second of it.

Chicago 1968 might look like a church carnival compared to what's coming to Cleveland this summer.

Last Call For Threading The Space Needle

The bottom line is if Bernie Sanders has any chance left of winning this nomination, he will need massive 25-30 point wins to run the table, starting in Washington state tomorrow.

Without a big win in Washington Saturday, there’s no path forward for Bernie Sanders. And that cold political reality has turned this state into an unlikely battleground between the Vermont senator and Hillary Clinton.

Sanders recognizes Washington is as close to a must-win as it gets after his disappointing loss in Arizona on Tuesday. With 101 delegates at stake, only New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California have more delegates at play after this weekend. If he has any hope of catching Clinton, he’ll have to start here, in a state where progressive-oriented Seattle sets the tone.

“If Senator Sanders is ever going to do well, I think it would be in Washington,” explained Gov. Jay Inslee, a Clinton supporter, acknowledging Sanders’ appeal in his state. “That’s no surprise."

Clinton doesn’t have as much urgency to win. She simply needs to keep it close, to deny Sanders the kind of runaway caucus victory that could dent her 300-plus delegate lead and provide him some desperately-needed momentum going into the April 5 primary in Wisconsin, another state that figures to be receptive to his brand of progressive politics. (Alaska and Hawaii, much smaller delegate contests, also hold caucuses on Saturday.)

But it won’t be easy to hold Sanders back. According to one analysis, Seattle ranks No. 1 among the 50 biggest U.S. cities for per-capita contributions to his campaign. He’s got seven campaign offices in the state and has drawn huge crowds in his visits to the Pacific Northwest. While most of the state's high-profile Democrats are backing Clinton, Sanders has the endorsement of the state’s largest newspaper, the Seattle Times -- by far his biggest endorsement from a daily publication.

Is it possible?  Sure, mathematically Sanders has not been eliminated.  Is it probable?  Again, Washington is a caucus state, not a primary state, something that definitely favors him.  The state has a very low black population (4%) and a larger than average Millennial population.  If there's anywhere that Sanders can shave off a chunk of Clinton's substantial delegate lead, it's tomorrow.

The issue at this point is time and math. Sanders will need to win here by a lot, and he'll have to continue winning all the remaining contests by 30 points, including New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California by those margins, and the numbers just aren't there for him to do more than break even.

And a Clinton win here where she increases her delegate lead?  If that happens here tomorrow, Bernie's done.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Cenk Yourself Before You Get Berned

I can take or leave Cenk Uygur and his Young Turks, but his interview with Bernie Sanders this week was very, very telling.

Uygur: But, you have convinced them that Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate. If you were to lose, and the Democratic Party comes to you and says, "Okay, now take this movement, that is full of energy and is against the establishment, and make sure they vote for the establishment candidate," what do you say? 

Sanders: Well, you know, what I say. Number one, I'm not big into "being a leader". You know, I much prefer to see a lot of leaders, a lot of grassroots activism. Number two, what we do is together, as a nation, as a growing movement, is we say, "All right, if we don't win (and, by the way, we are in this thing to win, please understand that) what is the Democratic establishment gonna do for us?" 

Uygur: Oh, that's interesting... 

Sanders: All right, for example: Right now, you have a Democratic establishment which has written off half the states in this country, you know that? 

Uygur: Mmhmm. 

Sanders: And they've given up on the slate in the South, the Rocky Mountain area—are they gonna create a 50-state party? Are they gonna welcome into the Democratic Party the working class of this country and young people, or is it gonna be a party of the upper middle class and the cocktail crowd and the heavy campaign contributors? Which to a significant degree it is right now. You know, I've talked to Democratic Party leaders and said, "You know what? Instead of going around and raising all kinds of money from wealthy people, why don't you meet in some football stadium and bring out fifty, a hundred thousand people, bring the damn Senate in there, Senate Democrats, and start talking to people, ask them what they want you to do. How about that?" Better? Radical? So, in other words, if I can't make it, and we're gonna try as hard as we can 'til the last vote is cast, we wanna completely revitalize the Democratic Party, and make it a party of the people, rather than just one of large campaign contributors.

There's one very, very large group of Democrats that Sanders is overlooking here because it's been something he's been overlooking his entire campaign: non-white voters in red states. When Sanders says that the Democrats have given up on "the South" and the "Rocky Mountain area" what he means is the Democrats have given up on white voters in those states.  That's true for the most part, but Bernie's efforts to reach out to white voters is coming at the direct expense of black and Latino voters in those states.

Bernie's entire campaign has been "I'm going to bring white hard hat, lunch pail Democrats back into the fold and I'm going to basically ignore non-white voters because what are they going to do, vote for the GOP?"

It's annoying ans obnoxious.  I don't like Clinton's obvious pandering to voters of color like myself, but it's infinitely preferable to being taken for granted by the Sanders campaign. Sanders wants an award for extreme cleverness or something and I'm about to get very tired of him.

Speech Impediment

Trump is winning the public opinion argument against his protesters, and always was going to win it.

Our poll asked respondents whom they would specifically blame for the Chicago protest. Fully 54 percent agreed that protesters were responsible for the violence — "if they wanted to protest peacefully, they should have done so." But among Republicans, support for that position rose to 74 percent; among Democrats, it sank to 37 percent. 

This makes sense: We know that when partisan information is introduced into an example, people’s partisan instincts determine how they answer questions. But with a significant number of Democrats and independents agreeing with blaming protesters for the violence in Chicago, it seems that protest and violence are two different situations in the minds of voters. 

To that end, the electorate is pretty evenly split on the question of whether Trump should bear any blame for violence occurring at his rallies: 30 percent say they pin "a lot" of blame on him, while roughly the same number, 29 percent, say they don’t blame him at all. The split is almost entirely due to differing views among Democrats and Republicans. 

One fact that reflects the deep partisan divide over the importance of this issue: Fully 37 percent of Democrats said they’d heard "a lot" about violence at Trump rallies. By contrast, only 23 percent of Republicans said the same; many more said they’d only heard a little about the controversy or hadn’t heard of it at all. 

That’s probably because the news sources that Democrats are more likely to read — from mainstream publications to liberal blogs – fixated on the bouts of violence as threats to the functioning of democracy. Conservative media outlets tended to write about the violence less; at least one, Breitbart, actively attempted to tamp down on an alleged assault on its own reporter by Trump’s campaign manager. 

And by at least one measure, the media’s attempts to link Trump to violence have failed. Only 14 percent of poll respondents — Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike — think Trump was to blame for his supporter’s attack on a protester; about the same, 16 percent, actually thought it was the protester's fault. (Far more people, 52 percent, blamed the audience member who sucker-punched the protester for causing the violence.)

People aren't buying the notion that Trump's words cause violence at all.



Even one in four African-Americans think the protesters were at fault for Trump's Chicago rally violence, nearly 40% of Democrats do, and more than half overall.

So yes, as long as Trump keeps screaming about how protesters are trying to "silence" him and 35-40% of Democrats keep agreeing with him on that, he's going to keep winning this argument.

Last Call For Killer Nazi Robots From Hell

Good-natured Microsoft engineers put "Tay", their adaptive chatbot experiment, out in the wild to see what it could learn from being online and interacting with people on Twitter. In under 24 hours, the chatbot learned the cold truth about people on the internet: they're mostly abusive, racist assholes.

The aim was to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," with Tay able to learn from "her" conversations and get progressively "smarter." 

But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. 

Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for "upgrades," and it is deleting some of the worst tweets — though many still remain. It's important to note that Tay's racism is not a product of Microsoft or of Tay itself. Tay is simply a piece of software that is trying to learn how humans talk in a conversation. Tay doesn't even know it exists, or what racism is. The reason it spouted garbage is because racist humans on Twitter quickly spotted a vulnerability — that Tay didn't understand what it was talking about — and exploited it. 

Nonetheless, it is hugely embarrassing for the company. 

In one highly publicised tweet, which has since been deleted, Tay said: "bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we've got." In another, responding to a question, she said, "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."

If you ask me, Tay was a near-perfect success of emulating the thought patterns of your average twenty-something Twitter troll spouting racist garbage. Tay performed beautifully, frankly. And of course she likes Trump.

Let me know when the "more liberal than thou" version is out so I can use it to anticipate the outrage of the purity caucus.

House of Cards, Con't

On Monday I showed Cook Political Report case that the US House is in play for Democrats in 2016 if Trump/Cruz wreck the Republican brand enough.  Today I present David Dayen's counterargument, because if there's anyone who has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, it's Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC.

Even experts who give Democrats a chance to flip the House recognize that everything would have to go perfectly. Wasserman notes in his report that, despite the recent alterations, he rates only 31 Republican seats at risk of a loss. (Daily Kos Elections puts it a bit higher, with 36 Republican seats potentially threatened.) This means Democrats would have to win virtually every seat in play, and lose none of their own, just to regain a bare majority.

But it takes years to recruit and train candidates who can raise enough money to win a congressional election; you can’t throw it together in a few months. You can see how unprepared Democrats are for this scenario by looking at how many districts won’t have a Democratic candidate at all. Nineteen states have already closed their filing process for House elections, representing 163 Congressional districts. And as Stephen Wolf points out, in 27 of those 163 seats—about one in six—no Democrat will appear on the ballot.

Most of those seats are hopelessly Republican, but not all of them. Six of the districts have a Cook Partisan Voting Index score (a measure of how much more partisan a district is than the median) of “Republican+10” or less. Democrats held two of them, the 3rd and 10th districts in Pennsylvania, as recently as 2010. Illinois’s 16th district, held by Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, is only R+4, but no Democrat emerged to challenge him. Given their thin margin for error, Democrats need surprises in seats like Kinzinger’s to win the majority. But they cannot get his. 

If this pattern continues, dozens more Republicans (in the states where candidates can still file) will see no general-election opposition from Democrats. To give one glaring example, Virginia’s 2nd district, which Mitt Romney won only narrowly in 2012, has an open seat; incumbent Scott Rigell is retiring. But while two Republicans have announced they’re running, no Democrat has declared yet, and filing closes March 31. There’s also no Democrat currently running in Colorado’s 3rd district, an R+5 seat where incumbent Scott Tipton only won 53 percent of the vote in 2012.

Even if most of the Democrat-free districts are deep red, the lack of candidates on the ballot robs the party of capitalizing on a backlash against Trump, or a scandal involving a GOP incumbent. The lack of competition also allows the Republicans to focus more heavily on seats where they’re strongly challenged, preventing the party from being stretched thin financially.

So there's a very good chance that the massive failure of Schultz and the DNC has already assured that the Republicans keep the House no matter how awful Trump and company destroy the GOP, simply because Democrats have already been decimated at the state level.  In other words, barely taking the House back in November is about as good as Dems could possibly do, as getting crushed in state and local races for six years and losing districts to gerrymandering means the Republicans have a near-permanent advantage until 2022 at the earliest.

Yes, Trump might cost the GOP the House in 2016, but the path to get there is about as narrow for Dems as Trump has of winning the White House.

Trump Cards, Con't

The Republican party of Donald Trump is the party of leftover white resentment, period.  Greg Sargent:

Donald Trump continued stomping towards the GOP nomination with a big win in Arizona last night, which will stir more anxiety among GOP elites who worry that his strategy of courting white backlash could drive away minority voters, helping unleash an electoral bloodbath up and down the ticket. Paul Ryan is set to give a speech today decrying the “tone” in our politics that will likely hint at criticism of Trump along these lines. 

But what if Trump’s efforts to court white backlash constitute one of the essential ingredients of his success among Republican voters? 

A new analysis of Washington Post/ABC News polling strongly suggests this may be the case. A Post/ABC national poll this month asked: “Which of these do you think is a bigger problem in this country — blacks and Hispanics losing out because of preferences for whites, or whites losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics?” 

A large plurality of Republican respondents nationally say that the bigger problem is whites losing out, by 45-19. I asked crack Post polling guru Scott Clement to break these numbers down among supporters of Trump and the other candidates, and it turns out that Trump supporters believe this in far larger percentages:

A majority of Trump supporters — 54 percent — believe the bigger problem is whites are losing out. Meanwhile, 37 percent of Trump’s supporters believe this strongly, again higher than among any other candidate’s supporters. 

To be clear, correlation does not necessarily mean causation, and this is only one of many potential factors explaining Trump’s support. As Clement and Max Ehrenfreund write for Wonkblog, the poll also found that Trump supporters are more likely to say they are struggling economically. But as they explain, when you take these economic findings along with the above views on the racial question, it suggests that Trump supporters tend to believe their “losses are being caused by other group’s gains.”

In other words, Republicans have done such a good job of getting working-class white Americans to vote against their own self interest that the gap between whites and non-whites has narrowed to the point of it being perceived as an unfair advantage to non-white Americans.

"But at least I'm doing better than those people" isn't quite as true as it has been across America's entire history, and Trump's supporters want to put an end to that real damn fast.

Yes, it's always been about race, and yes, it will get a lot uglier going forward.

StupidiNews!

• Captured Paris attack suspect Saleh Abdeslam is now refusing to cooperate with Belgian officials and is demanding extradition to France.
• North Carolina Republicans passed a controversial anti-LGBT "religious freedom" and "bathroom bill" in a total of 10 hours yesterday after a special legislative session.
• US business leaders say that GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's call for steep tariffs on Chinese goods would backfire, causing a trade war that could cost US companies billions.
• New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez says he will retire after the 2017 season, leaving him two seasons to try to catch Barry Bonds's home run record.
• Record companies made $2.4 billion from streaming music services in 2015, overtaking the money made from digital downloads, but the RIAA says that's not enough money for artists.

Last Call For Some Perspective

The indispensable Joe Sonka reminds us that the distance between today and November 7th is a political eternity:

Democrats cheer GOP nominating militaristic paranoid celebrity for president who polls show will be defeated easily pic.twitter.com/w1u4eF77gs

— Joe Sonka (@joesonka) March 23, 2016

Jimmy Carter was cruising to a landslide re-election this time 36 years ago.  Nixon and Ford had driven the GOP brand into the ground with a massive political scandal and a failed war, and the Republicans were on their way to nominate the star of "Bedtime for Bonzo" as their champion.

Then Carter's failed attempt to rescue the Iran hostages happened in April and things went to hell pretty quickly from there, with John Anderson finishing off the deal with his third party run that gave Reagan 44 states.

So much could happen between now and Election Day that puts Trump in the Oval Office with a GOP Congress and puts America straight into a flaming toilet for decades.

Take nothing for granted.

A Load Of Crap In The NC Bathroom Bill

So North Carolina state Republican lawmakers called a special session of the General Assembly to stop Charlotte's LGBTQ anti-discrimination law from going into effect on April 1, and it turns out it's not just Charlotte's ordinance they want to outlaw, but any real progressive change sought by cities and counties in the Tarheel State.

WBTV obtained a copy of the proposed bill, entitled “An Act to Provide for Single Sex Multiple Occupancy Bathroom and Changing Facilities in Schools and Public Agencies and to Create Statewide Consistency in Regulation of Employment and Public Accommodations,” Tuesday night. 

The legislation requires that multi-occupancy bathrooms be limited to just one gender, using anatomy and birth certificates as a guide and applies to executive branch agencies controlled by the Governor as well as Council of State members and the UNC System. 

A provision in the five-page bill allows school districts to use single occupancy bathrooms to make accommodations for students in special circumstances. 

DOCUMENT: Click here to read the full bill 

In addition to the provisions of the bill seeking to repeal the bathroom-related portions of Charlotte’s non discrimination ordinance, the bill also addresses several workplace issues. 

The second part of the bill is referred to as the Wage and Hour Act. Under the act, local governments would be prohibited from setting their own local minimum wage. 

The next section of the bill seeks to declare that the regulation of discriminatory practices in employment is an issue of statewide concern and, as such, must be left to the General Assembly. 

Finally, the last section of the bill is referred to as the Equal Access to Public Accommodations Act, which places issues of public accommodation in the jurisdiction of the General Assembly.

So in addition to killing Charlotte's anti-discrimination law, with this stupid bigoted bathroom bill, the NC GOP is looking to undo all local anti-discrimination, minimum wage, and equal physical access laws. because smaller, more responsive government, right?

Which just proves again that Republicans don't care about government that works, they care about government that punishes those people whenever possible so that they become somebody else's problem.

The best part?  It's a combination of "bathroom bill", home rule elimination, and "religious freedom" bill all rolled into one steaming pile of toxic GOP diarrhea.

By the way, the bill passed the NC General Assembly overwhelmingly, 83-24.  And my home state is well on its way to being the most bigoted state in the nation.

Cruz's Brussels Hustle

oday in the "general reminder that Ted Cruz is actually more dangerous than Donald Trump" category, we have the Texas senator's official response to Tuesday's Islamic State-claimed attacks in Brussels, via MoJo's Pena Levy:

"Today radical Islamic terrorists targeted the men and women of Brussels as they went to work on a spring morning. In a series of coordinated attacks they murdered and maimed dozens of innocent commuters at subway stations and travelers at the airport. For the terrorists, the identities of the victims were irrelevant. They –we—are all part of an intolerable culture that they have vowed to destroy. 

"For years, the west has tried to deny this enemy exists out of a combination of political correctness and fear. We can no longer afford either. Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods. 

"We will do what we can to help them fight this scourge, and redouble our efforts to make sure it does not happen here. We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al Qaida or ISIS presence. We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. 

"We need to secure the southern border to prevent terrorist infiltration. And we need to execute a coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS. The days of the United States voluntarily surrendering to the enemy to show how progressive and enlightened we are are at an end. Our country is at stake."

The part about turning Muslim neighborhoods into de facto internment camps is the new, scary part of Cruz's rhetoric, but it remains that the rest of this awful little polyp's policies will have us in a ground war in Syria by Valentine's Day if he's elected president.

Of course, the part where Cruz assumes all Muslims here are potential criminals who need to be "secured" by "empowered law enforcement" rather than, you know, Americans, is also something of an issue.  That's a dark road we've been down before on more than one occasion.

So yeah, might want to consider voting against these guys in November if you're darker than a paper bag.  Just sayin'.

StupidiNews!

• Police have arrested a third suspect in Tuesday's Brussels airport bombing, Belgian officials believe two brothers killed in the attack were the primary suicide bombers.
• California labor activists have gathered enough signatures to get a voter proposition on November's ballot that will raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour.
• Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won their respective Arizona primaries, but challengers Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders won Utah's caucuses with Sanders taking Idaho.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau's first budget restores cuts made by his predecessor and spends billions on infrastructure and services to foster growth.
• Chevy is on track to roll out the first Bolt electric cars this year as the race with Tesla to get an affordable mass-market electric vehicle to market picks up steam.

Last Call For Return Of The Granny Starver

Chuck Pierce believes House Speaker Paul Ryan's AIPAC speech is a definite indicator that he's running...for...something.

All three of the remaining presidential candidates got the prime speaking slots Monday night at the annual AIPAC policy conference, to which we were not invited, alas, although that seems to have been somewhat epidemic. But any chance we get to hear Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, talk about foreign policy, the area in which Joe Biden literally laughed him out of the campaign in 2012, is one that we never should pass up. (Remember when Ryan explained to us that, in Afghanistan, it snows during the winter? Gravitas!) Of all the barefaced pandering that went on yesterday, and Hillary Rodham Clinton was singing in tuneMonday afternoon, the face of Ryan's pandering was the barest of all, and not just because he's lost the scruff he was cultivating a few months back. This was a guy doing more than rattling the saber. He was swinging it around his head until the air whistled. And, yes, this was a guy who's still thinking about being president, no matter how many non-facts he burbles out on the topic to various interviewers.

There are two outcomes from the GOP Convention in Cleveland: the party knuckles under for Trump and goes on to get crushed in November, or the party tries to steal it from Trump and gets crushed in November.  The latter requires somebody young, telegenic, utterly under the control of Republican orthodoxy, ideally already in the GOP leadership and from a swing state and ambitious to the point of near psychopathy.

Paul Ryan, in other words.  In his words, actually:

"The threats are very different now. North Korea thumbs its nose at the world as it plays with its nuclear weapons. Iran openly backs tyrants and funds terrorist groups as it jockeys for dominance in the Middle East. An emboldened Russia is only too happy to try to reclaim its neighbors as client states. And with the rise of ISIS, an even deadlier strain of Islamist extremism has taken hold. Once again we face an aggressive militant ideology—with an assist from a gang of rogue states. And why is our relationship with Israel so important? Because in the fight against terrorism and proliferation, our interests are one and the same. For the terrorists, Israel is the first target, and we are the ultimate one. That's because we share the same values." 

Yeah, he's running.

I'd say so, yes.  He's so eager to shiv Trump right now he's practically vibrating.