Last Call For Chaka Convict

It's official: Philadelphia Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah has been rung up on all corruption charges that he faced in federal court this afternoon.

Fattah, 59, had been charged with bribery, racketeering, money laundering, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, and filing false statements as part of a years-long criminal scheme that even included Fattah lobbying President Barack Obama for an appointment for one of his co-conspirators. Fattah was found guilty on all charges, as were four co-defendants. 

The guilty verdict brings to a stunning end Fattah's three-decade career in Philadelphia politics, and is a major victory for the Justice Department and Zane David Memeger, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Memeger's office prosecuted the case against Fattah, who was first elected to Congress in 1994. 

“Chaka Fattah Sr. and his co-defendants betrayed the public trust and undermined our faith in government,” Memeger said. “Today’s verdict makes clear that the citizens of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania expect their public officials to act with honesty and integrity, and to not sell their office for personal gain. Hopefully, our elected officials in Philadelphia and elsewhere hear today’s message loud and clear.” 

Fattah is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 4. He could face as long as 20 years behind bars on the bribery charges alone, but it is not yet clear how much prison time prosecutors will seek. Fattah is likely to appeal his conviction.

So what becomes of Fattah's seat?  He had already lost his April primary to Pennsylvania state Rep. Dwight Evans, so should Fattah be forced from his office (and I can't see how he stays now with these convictions) it would be up to Gov. Tom Wolf to set a special election date.

Wolf can set the election date as the next regular election if he wants, he just can't set it any sooner than 60 days from the point where the seat is certified to be open according to state law, so yeah, Wolf can stretch it along if he wants to, but he can't appoint anyone to the office in the interim as state law doesn't allow it.

I would think that neither party would complain too much about the election happening in November as usual, so we'll see if Fattah leaves now or later.

Once again, not all corrupt politicians are Republicans, not by any stretch of the imagination. I've no pity or sympathy for the man ripping off his constituents for years, and hope he serves as an example in a very unpleasant section of substandard federal housing.

Gunmerica The Beautiful

USA Today's editorial board is really disappointed that Senate Republicans (and more than a few Senate Democrats) are in the pocket of the NRA. Guys? Where the hell have you been for the last 15 years?

You'd think that if there was one step both parties in Washington could support in the wake of the nation's worst mass shooting, it would be to close a yawning gap in federal gun background checks — a strategy supported by nearly 90% of Americans. 

Yet in an extraordinary act of cowardice on Monday evening, 56 senators — 53 Republicans joined by three Democrats — threw away yet another opportunity to keep guns out of the hands of more felons, fugitives, the mentally ill or people prone to domestic violence. 

These spineless lawmakers voted against advancing a commonsense measure to expand background checks to virtually all sales of guns, not just those sold by federally licensed dealers. The existing gap allows buyers who purchase from private sellers at gun shows, online or from newspaper ads to simply avoid the federal background check system. 

That system, run by the FBI, is efficient for buyers: More than nine of 10 gun buyers get a yes or no within minutes. And the system is effective for screening out those barred by federal law from buying firearms: It has denied guns to 2.4 millionprospective buyers since it was created in 1994. The largest category is felons and people who've committed serious misdemeanors. 

This was the third time since the fatal shooting of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 that the Senate has derailed similar measures. (Senators also rejected three other gun amendments on Monday.) 

Would expanding background checks be a panacea? Of course not. The Orlando killer, a security guard, was able to purchase his guns legally. But no one should buy into the absurd notion, pushed by the gun lobby, that to be worthwhile a measure must demonstrate that it could have prevented the most recent atrocity or all mass murders.

I'll say this again for the cheap seats: nothing will happen until lawmakers start getting voted out of office for supporting the NRA. Until that happens, nothing will get done on background checks, nothing will pass on smart gun technology, nothing will happen on weapon or clip/magazine restrictions nationally.

Yes, 90% of Americans support background checks.  The 10% who don't have enough power in the Senate from low-population red states to prevent anything from ever being signed into law. Until that changes, nothing will get done, and you can copy and paste this editorial after the next bloody, hideous mass shooting.  And the next. And the one after that.

And all the rest that will come.

Yes, Trump Is Flat Broke, And No, It Won't Matter One Bit

As TPM's Josh Marshall keeps saying, all the sturm und drang over Donald Trump's fired campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and the bad month of June in the polls so far really are symptoms of the fact that the Trump campaign is effectively broke, and that's because Trump himself has been conning the world about his wealth.

So it all comes down to, where's the money? We tend to look at Trump's threadbare campaign as a product of epic disorganization or the candidate's mercurial personality. But as the mammoth TV ad campaigns ramp up unanswered and field operations fail to materialize, those explanations are really no longer sufficient.

Trump may be unwilling to abase himself by dialing for dollars and his digital fundraising may be anemic. But at the scale of Trump's purported wealth, the sums in question are actually paltry. It may take a billion dollars to run a presidential campaign. But at this moment Trump is in dire need of a few million dollars. To go back to cash on hand, Trump currently has $2.4 million and Clinton has just over $30 million. Remember, Trump is allegedly worth $10 billion, which at the risk of stating the obvious means he is worth ten thousand million dollars. Someone in that position might be hard pressed to quickly produce billions of dollars or even hundreds of million in actual cash. But we're talking tens of millions or even just a few million dollars he needs right now.

Trump may be stingy. He may be saying that the RNC should take responsibility for fundraising, which is something it's clearly not capable of doing. (The RNC has massive fundraising capacity but it can't simply take on singlehanded what the candidate was expected to raise.) But as big a disaster as Trump's campaign is at the moment he stands a real shot at being the next president of the United States. It is simply not credible that he is standing on principle in not giving his campaign any more money at such a critical moment when his bid is being so deeply damaged.
The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that's true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash. It's true that he's already loaned his campaign over $40 million, which at least suggests a substantial amount of liquid assets to draw on. But we've never really known where that money came from or whether it needs to be repaid to some other party. Indeed, Trump's unwillingness to give up his right to be repaid, essentially reimbursed for the primary campaign, by GOP high rollers has always been a telling but largely ignored detail.

It's been a subject of endless fascination for many to try to make sense of Trump's business empire and a producer of schadenfreude on an epic scale for those poking holes in his account of his billions. Perhaps later this week he'll prove me totally wrong and announce he's loaning himself another $100 million or $200 million. But I doubt it. If he could, why would he have allowed himself to get into this money crunch? This is now perhaps the critical question in the campaign: what happens if Donald Trump is effectively broke and can't produce critical funds for his campaign at make or break moments let alone self-fund the whole endeavor?

We've seen what happens: he blames other people and will continue to.  This is why Lewandowski was fired, and this is why when things magically fail to improve heading into the GOP convention next month, Paul Manafort will most likely get the axe too.

The reality is that Trump is a broke con man running the most ambitious con in American history, a guy who is running on being a self-sufficient paper billionaire who doesn't have two nickels to rub together when it comes to funding the day-to-day operations of his own campaign.

Here's the dirtiest secret of the 2016 election: Trump is broke but it doesn't matter one bit. Since facts don't matter to his supporters, he'll continue to run with the grift as long as they let him, and he's most likely right that the GOP now has no choice but to play along or be destroyed by the same voters. They will turn on the party so rapidly that the blood won't have time to hit the floor. The rough beast slouching its way towards Cleveland won't be denied.

Since we have empirical evidence that Republicans and their supporters are moral cowards (that they let Trump get this far is all the evidence you need) again, we're somehow counting on Republican establishment donors and major players to show courage here and cut him off?  Hardly. The marks bought into the Ponzi scheme and now they have to keep it going or they get ruined too.

Believe me when I say that while GOP donors with big pocketbooks are supposedly standing up to Trump now (and it's helping that Trump is too lazy to do fundraising, his all-consuming narcissism means that it's beneath him to go begging to anyone who doesn't automatically agree how great Trump is) once Trump becomes the nominee, the donors will fall in line just like the rest of the party, and they will do so out of abject fear.

Yes, Trump is broke, but he'll get the money he needs anyway from the party, or his fanatics will abandon the Republicans and take the GOP's hard-fought power at the state and congressional level with it. The GOP knows it. They talk a big game, but they've already beaten and were beaten on this months ago. They will fold.

At some point next month, Reince Preibus will have a conference call with the Super PACs and say "If you don't support the guy at the top of our ticket, then we'll lose it all. Pay up." And they will. They have no choice.

All Trump has to do right now is get through the convention and whatever money problems he has will vanish, out of necessity. If not, he takes the entire Republican apparatus down with him, and 2016 will become the biggest national landslide in generations...for the Democrats.

It still may.  He's broke, but he still wins.  Trump's a winner, you see. And if the GOP's not going to go along, that makes them losers by default.

And nobody likes a loser. Losers get fed to the rough beast.

StupidiNews!

• The Pentagon is looking into a series of deadly military crashes that have cost lives as well as billions of dollars, citing reduced maintenance budgets and aging vehicles.
• As expected Senate Republicans blocked a series of legislative amendments that would have tightened gun control regulations, mostly along party lines.
• A car bomb in Syria killed six Jordanian border guards and wounded 14 others as the explosion happened just a few hundred meters away from a refugee border camp.
• House Republicans will decide whether or not to begin impeachment proceedings against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over lost e-mails relating to possibly targeting political groups.
• Cadillac's new flagship CT6 sedan comes with multiple cameras for recording scenic moments as well as safety and surveillance.

Last Call For Berned Out, Con't

If Bernie Sanders can't even win over his own Senate caucus members in the Democratic party, it's a hard sell to imagine that he'd be able to influence House Democrats either.  His quixotic antics and habit of stomping on others' toes has now won him the ire of the Congressional Black Caucus over the matter of super-delegates.

In a letter sent to both the Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns, the CBC is expressing its resolute opposition to two key reforms demanded by Sanders in the run-up to the Democratic convention: abolishing the party’s superdelegate system and opening Democratic primaries up to independents and Republicans.

"The Democratic Members of the Congressional Black Caucus recently voted unanimously to oppose any suggestion or idea to eliminate the category of Unpledged Delegate to the Democratic National Convention (aka Super Delegates) and the creation of uniform open primaries in all states," says the letter, which was obtained by POLITICO. "The Democratic Party benefits from the current system of unpledged delegates to the National Convention by virtue of rules that allow members of the House and Senate to be seated as a delegate without the burdensome necessity of competing against constituents for the honor of representing the state during the nominating process." 

The letter — which was also sent to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — follows a Wednesday CBC meeting where members discussed for over an hour the impact of eliminating superdelegates on the African-American community, according to CBC Chairman Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.). 

"We passed a resolution in our caucus that we would vehemently oppose any change in the superdelegate system because members of the CBC might want to participate in the Democratic convention as delegates but if we would have to run for the delegate slot at the county level or state level or district level, we would be running against our constituents and we're not going to do that,” said Butterfield. “But we want to participate as delegates and that's why this superdelegates system was created in the beginning, so members would not have to run against their own constituents." 

The opposition to open primaries is based on the fear that allowing independent or Republican voters to participate in Democratic primaries would dilute minority voting strength in many places.

Now having said that, it's clear that the CBC is protecting its turf the way Bernie Sanders wants to protect his own interests, but it's clear that what Bernie wants to do is going to come at the expense of black voters.  Open primaries that include independents and Republicans are a bad idea, period, and super-delegates do give people in the party more of a voice.

On the gripping hand, the entire Sanders campaign has been one long episode of "We really don't understand why you people aren't voting for him" and the Sanders side hasn't really made any effort at asking, other than saying black voters in the South "don't count" or "are really conservatives" or "aren't informed voters".  It's annoying as hell.

So yes, expect the CBC to now be on the Bernie or Bust "corrupt establishment" list along with anyone else who is too impure to see the light of Saint Bernard.

(Also, good job Bernie, you made me defend the CBC, which actually is mildly obnoxious and only really concerned about its own political power.)

The Thomas Clowned Affair

I'm not buying the rumors that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wants to retire in 2017, and I think it's a load of crap.

Justice Clarence Thomas, a reliable conservative vote on the Supreme Court, is mulling retirement after the presidential election, according to court watchers.

Thomas, appointed by former President George H.W. Bush and approved by the Senate after a bitter confirmation, has been considering retirement for a while and never planned to stay until he died, they said. He likes to spend summers in his RV with his wife.

His retirement would have a substantial impact on control of the court. The next president is expected to immediately replace the seat opened by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, providing a one-vote edge in the court that is currently divided 4-4.

Should Thomas leave, that slight majority would continue if Donald Trump becomes president. If it's Hillary Clinton, then she would get the chance to flip two Republican seats, giving the liberals a 6-3 majority.

I think it's much more likely that Thomas is trying to motivate conservatives to vote for Trump using control of the Supreme Court as a cudgel, or that somebody in DC took Thomas's griping about missing Scalia and wanting to go tool around the country in an RV a lot more seriously than Thomas did, and they're the ones wanting to motivate Republicans to hold their nose and reach into the Trump septic tank in order to pull the lever for the GOP nominee in November.

Sadly, I don't think Thomas is going anywhere soon, but I can certainly see the prospect of Hillary Clinton forging a lasting 6-3 liberal majority (or 7-2 if that includes a replacement for Justice Kennedy) SCOTUS giving Republicans like Jazz Shaw at Hot Air nightmares for months.

This is what passes for GOTV if you're a conservative in 2016  I guess.  Some people figure that the fear of a woman in charge and her lasting legacy will get the Never Trumpers to vote, and they're probably right.

Very Loud Foghorns

The most disturbing aspect of Donald Trump's overtly racist campaign is just that: changing the boundaries of what is "acceptable" racism in America. SPending quite a bit of time screaming about the evils of "political correctness", we now have Trump wallowing directly in the mud in order to connect to the GOP lizard brain that wants those people punished. His latest proposal? America's cops need to be going after Muslims and others with more racial profiling.

Republican Donald Trump said on Sunday the United States should consider more racial profiling in law enforcement, after urging harsher policies following last week's mass shooting in Orlando.

"I think profiling is something that we're going to have to start thinking about as a country," Trump said when asked on CBS whether he supported more profiling of Muslims in America.

"You look at Israel and you look at others, and they do it and they do it successfully. And you know, I hate the concept of profiling, but we have to start using common sense," he added.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has drawn criticism from many in his party for his comments on American Muslims after the Orlando attack, in which a U.S. born Muslim man killed 49 people at a gay nightclub.

Trump also reiterated his support for more scrutiny of mosques, saying that could resemble a controversial New York City surveillance program that has been shut down.

"If you go to France right now, they're doing it in France. In fact, in some instances they're closing down mosques."

I mean the guy's already said he wants to round up and deport Muslims and Latinos, so why not start with racial profiling?  That's what counts as moderation for the guy, his move towards the general election is just constant police harassment of Muslims and shutting down mosques rather than deportation. See? Kinder, gentler racism already!

What a winning strategy.

StupidiNews!

• Record high temperatures in the Southwestern US continue as temperatures hit as high as 120 degrees Sunday in parts of Arizona, Nevada and California.
• LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers prevailed 93-89 over Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors in Sunday's Game 7 to win the NBA Championship.
• Nearly 50 people have been reported dead in landslides on the island of Java, Indonesia, as heavy rain and flash flooding are expected to continue over the next several days.
• The UN's agency on refugees says that in 2015, a record 65 million people were displaced by war, famine, and other disasters, a ten percent increase from 2014.
• A Chinese research team has come up with a method to turn plastic trash into diesel fuel, which could help prevent millions of tons of plastic heading to the world's landfills.

Last Call For Causing Trouble

I'm not surprised at all by this BuzzFeed article on Bernie's supporters planning on both mass disruptions and getting arrested at the Philly convention next month.  If this sounds like Occupy tactics, there's a reason for that, as some of the same people behind those protests 8 years ago were talking the same kind of disruptions while gathered at the People's Summit conference last week.

The People’s Summit conference, sponsored by the National Nurses United — a progressive union that backed Sanders to the hilt during his run for president — is aimed at uniting all elements of progressivism into a single effort that exerts pressure on the Democratic Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Mourning Sanders’ loss and imagining what might have been was one part of the conversation.

Another saw older, established progressive leaders urging Sanders’ youth legion to stick together and try to achieve Bernie’s political revolution through more conventional means like influencing the Democratic Party platform and working in the grassroots for like-minded down-ballot candidates.

In the basement of the Lakeside Center, where the Summit was held, some of those younger Sanders supporters prepared for what they called “direct action” — loud, consistent, and perhaps disruptive protest outside the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Several dozen of them attended a training on how to march, how to follow a chant, how to defy police orders to disperse by sitting and locking arms in what’s called a “human chain,” and how to conduct themselves when the police stepped in and physically removed them.

Trainers wearing fake badges waded among the chanting and human-chained “protesters,” pulling them apart, putting their hands behind their backs, and leading them away.

The simulation was for what training leaders called “a blockade,” but they stressed blocking busy intersections or other disruptions may not be what the final protest plan looks like. “Direct action,” said participants in the training, is non-violent and peaceful.

Thousands of Sanders supporters have already signed a Facebook petition promising to protest the Democratic convention. Many of those gathered at The People’s Summit expected those protests to include police stepping in. Rumors of police efforts to push protests back from the convention site or other efforts by the authorities to quiet the Sanders uprising abounded in the training session.

Here's the thing: as with Occupy, what is this supposed to accomplish, exactly?  Yes, you're upset about Hillary, you wanted Bernie Sanders as the candidate, and you're planning on getting kettled on purpose.  But what will that actually do?

It's not going to make Bernie the candidate.  It's not going to stop Donald Trump.  It's not going to help liberals win local and state races, and it's not going to help get rid of Republican control of the House and Senate.

It's your protest, and lord knows that there are plenty of things on this Earth worth protesting.  But protests have to be followed up by action, and that's what I'm not seeing.

“They’re going to arrest people, period, end of story. So we just want to prepare ourselves,” said Cassidy Turner of San Diego. “We’re not going to be violent, we don’t really have a reason to get arrested but it’s going to happen. So we want to prepare ourselves.”

The Great White Dope

The Village is starting to catch on that "Clinton is really the most hated candidate in history" is only true among white men, and gosh, they're not the total electorate anymore, are they?

The RealClearPolitics poll average now gives Clinton a lead of almost six percentage points over Trump, a marked shift from a month ago. Perhaps even more telling is that every poll on the RCP list that was conducted entirely in June showed Clinton leading. That’s a change from May, when several polls showed Trump leading narrowly.

Given the terrible two weeks Trump has gone through, it is no surprise that the trend line also indicates that Clinton’s lead is widening. The last four polls on the list — all completed in the past week — put her lead at 12, nine, five and six points. Four polls completed earlier in June showed her with leads of three, four, eight and three points.

Clinton is not approaching 50 percent in any of these head-to-head polls. With one exception, she is below 45 percent, hardly impressive. But Trump has not broken 40 percent in any of the past seven polls listed on the RCP average. Overall, the average of the recent polls puts Clinton at 44 percent and Trump at 38 percent. 

So where is this "majority hates Clinton too" narrative coming from?  White guys, of course.

When the electorate is divided into different population groups, it is even clearer how much trouble Trump has created for himself. Trump’s base during the primaries was among white, working-class voters. But it has become apparent that his real base is among white men. Among white men without a college degree, he’s in positive territory. Among white women without a college degree, he’s not.

Overlooked, perhaps, is Clinton’s image deficit among whites, particularly among white men. Just 23 percent of white men view her favorably, compared with 75 percent unfavorable. But she counters with strongly positive numbers among nonwhites, who are 2-to-1 positive about her.

All of this has put Republicans on edge about November. Trump is frustrated that leading Republicans have not all coalesced behind his candidacy, but without some change on his part, he could be an island of his own in November. Fear of a Clinton presidency remains the lone rationale for many Republicans who otherwise recoil from remarks Trump has made lately. 

White men really hate Hillary Clinton.  Everyone else really really really hates Donald Trump.  The two are not equal, which is why Clinton is looking more and more like a runaway winner in November as Republicans are starting to come around to the fact Trump is their Barry Goldwater.

Running For The Hills

Senate Republicans are realizing a bit too late that Donald Trump as their party's presidential nominee is going to cost them control of the Senate in a big, big way.

Senate Republicans are deeply concerned that Donald Trump will cost them their majority, despite private assurances from leaders that voters opposed to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee will split their ballots.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll published last week shows Trump’s unfavorable rating has hit new a high, with 7 out of 10 respondents nationwide viewing him negatively.One Republican senator facing a competitive re-election said he and his colleagues are “very concerned.”

“There’s deep, deep concern,” he added.

Republicans have to defend 24 seats while Democrats only have to protect 10. Six of the vulnerable GOP seats are in states that President Obama won in 2008 and 2012.

Almost every day, Republican senators see new evidence of Trump’s lack of mainstream appeal.

Major companies such as Wells Fargo and UPS, which sponsored the 2012 Republican convention in Tampa, are skipping this summer’s event in Cleveland.

“There’s a lot of anxiety out there,” said a second Senate Republican. “People are trying to figure out what’s going on in the political climate, what it means to us, to me. There’s anxiety.”

Yet there’s a growing sense of resignation that not much can be done to change their presumptive nominee.

At a meeting of Senate Republicans at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters Wednesday, Trump didn’t even come up for discussion, according to two lawmakers who participated.

What profiles in courage. We'll just pretend he doesn't exist.  Maybe Republican voters are dumb enough to go along (they did nominate Trump after all, so there's ample evidence right there to support that theory) but I don't think most of them are going to take the repeated Trump slights very well.

Ticket splitting works both ways, after all.  I'd like to see polling on Republicans who plan to vote for Trump and not their local Senate incumbent as opposed to Republicans who won't vote for Trump, but will back their GOP senator's seat defense.

Odds are that those numbers are relatively equal, I would think.  But there are also Republicans who I think will stay home completely or worse (for the GOP) vote Hillary.

That number I'm betting will be larger.

Sunday Long Read: Two Women And A Subaru

I learned quite a bit from this Priceonomics story about Subaru, a company that very much led the way for LGBTQ equality in the 90's when they discovered their most avid and dependable vehicle owners were lesbians.

How do you advertise a car that journalists describe as “sturdy, if drab”?

That was the question faced by Subaru of America executives in the 1990s. After attempts to reinvigorate the company’s declining sales with a sports car and a hip, young ad agency failed, they turned to their niche marketing strategy.

“That was and still is a unique approach,” says Tim Bennett, who worked as Director of Advertising. “I’m always amazed that no one copied it.” Instead of fighting every other car company over the same demographic of white, 18- to 35-year-olds living in the suburbs, Subaru would target niche groups of people who particularly liked Subarus.

In the 1990s, Subaru’s unique characteristic was that the company increasingly made all-wheel-drive standard on all its cars. When Subaru marketers went searching for people willing to pay a premium for all-wheel-drive, they identified four core groups who were responsible for half of the company’s American sales: teachers and educators, healthcare professionals, IT professionals, and “rugged individualists” (outdoorsy types).

Then they discovered a 5th: lesbians.

“When we did the research, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person—and often a women,” says Bennett. When Subaru marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.

“There was such an alignment of feeling, like [Subaru cars] fit with what they did,” says Paul Poux, who later conducted focus groups for Subaru. The marketers found that lesbian Subaru owners liked that the cars were good for outdoor trips, and that they were good for hauling stuff without being as large as a truck or SUV. (In a line some women may not like as much, marketers also said Subaru’s dependability was a good fit for lesbians since they didn’t have a man who could fix car problems.) “They felt it fit them and wasn’t too flashy,” says Poux.

Many of them even felt an affinity with the name.

‘Subaru’ is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, a six-star constellation. When Kenji Kita, the CEO of Subaru's parent company, Fuji Heavy Industries, chose the name in 1954, he chose it to represent how six Japanese companies had merged to form Fuji Heavy Industries. But in English, the constellation is also known as the Seven Sisters—the same name as a group of American women’s colleges.

And so Subaru went after lesbian car owners with fervor, introduced domestic partner benefits for workers long before that was "cool" and worked to target clever ads to the people who already loved their cars.

In other words, it made social, economic, and business sense, long before the era of social media and targeted advertising.

Imagine that.

Last Call For Locked And Loaded

I've seen a number of stories about this phenomenon, invariably after a mass shooting, people feel the need to protect themselves in this country and gun sales spike.  It's no different after Orlando, where LGBTQ groups are getting armed in the wake of the worst mass shooting in decades.

The Pink Pistols, a national gun club for gays and lesbians, wants their community to take up arms in self defense in the wake of a deadly shooting massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Spokesperson Gwendolyn Patton, who argues that the LGBT community needs to exercise their Second Amendment rights in order to defend themselves, says the group saw membership soar from about 1,500 members before the Orlando shooting on Sunday to 3,500 on Monday.

The spike in interest comes after at least 49 people were killed and at least 53 were wounded when gunman, Omar Mateen opened fire and took hostages at a LGBT-friendly nightclub in Orlando last weekend. The massacre was the worst mass shooting in American history and Patton says the interest in LGBT gun rights is at an all-time high.

The Pink Pistols says they have gained 1,000 more members over the course of the week, putting their total membership at approximately 4,500. The group continues to see dozens of new chapters pop up across the country.

"We've had the greatest response in three areas, our Facebook page, which has tripled in size, our chapters, we have so many requests for information on starting new chapters I've lost count, and the sheer number of people offering services such as training to our members," Patton said.

The group claims 45 active chapters across 33 states in the U.S. and three more in other countries. Patton says that in addition to that there are many inactive chapters that may be reopening soon.

The Pink Pistols describes itself as "an international LGBT self-defense organization" that advocates for gay people to acquire concealed carry permits. Group activities include bringing in NRA-certified instructors to help train members at shooting ranges and engaging in political activism. Pink Pistols is generally made up of gun-loving LGBT individuals, but also includes straight ally members.

This isn't new in America or in history, people forget that the Black Panthers were very much advocates of black men arming themselves under the Second Amendment, and that thought certainly did not sit well with white America in the sixties.  California became one of the first states in the nation to pass gun control legislation specifically to stop them, as Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wanted an armed community watch in Oakland in order to stand as a counter racist police officers.

Fifty years later and frankly, that idea hasn't changed very much, so no, I don't begrudge people going through background checks and getting armed for protection.  I grew up in western NC, I understand people do that for a reason.

But let's be honest, the reason background checks for guns exist is because it was seen as a way to keep guns out of the hands of black men, like many regulations in US history, they were based on race.

You can't separate the two.

Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'

Republicans continue to want to exploit any division they can find between Team Bernie and Team Hillary, and frankly I can't blame them for trying to take the spotlight off Donald Trump's awful candidacy. Plus, Bernie and his supporters are making it awfully easy to do so.

The Republican National Committee is promoting a report that accuses the Democratic Party of conspiring to nominate Hillary Clinton in the early days of the presidential primary.In an email, the RNC sent to reporters a story published by the New York Post about a document that purportedly shows the Democratic National Committee was strategizing to make Hillary Clinton president — and not a generic Democratic candidate — in the spring of 2015.

The story is based on a document posted on the blog of a user named “Guccifer 2.0,” and appears to be part of a trove of documents stolen from the DNC by Russian government hackers.

The alleged memo to the DNC, dated May 26, 2015, says that the party should work to “provide a contrast between the GOP field and HRC.”

HRC is a common abbreviation for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Sanders launched his campaign nearly a month prior to the date of the memo — though according to RealClearPolitics, he was still trailing Clinton by nearly 57 points in the polls.

It’s unclear whether the document that the hacker claims is from the DNC is a real one.

On Thursday night a senior DNC official did tell The Hill that documents were stolen in a breach and suggested they were part of a Russian “disinformation campaign.”

“Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April, and we believe that today’s release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians,” the official said. “We’ve deployed the recommended technology so that today our systems are secure thanks to a swift response to that attack and we will continue to monitor our systems closely.”

Look, guys, the fact that the DNC wanted to go with Hillary Clinton as early as 2015 may have been the worst-kept secret in politics, and I mean that quite literally, the secret was kept so badly that hackers like Guccifer and Russian intelligent services easily stole the information.

I understand the Bernie guys are looking for whatever indignation they can find at this point in order to banish Sanders's inevitable loss, but the fact that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a good friend of Hillary Clinton, wanted to lead her organization to help Clinton win isn't exactly news, guys,  The  folks on the far left have been complaining about her "coronation" for years now.

This is dragging up an argument from 2015, guys.  Do try harder.

Bevin Breaks A Cardinal Rule

So the official story is that on Friday, University of Louisville President James Ramsey resigned at the request of Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin.

Gov. Matt Bevin announced Friday that University of Louisville President James Ramsey is stepping down and that he is reorganizing the Board of Trustees. 

Bevin said he is appointing an interim board that will serve for the next two weeks. Ramsey is willing to step down immediately, Bevin said, but he could remain as president for as long as two weeks. 

Bevin said it has been evident that changes in the oversight at U of L has been needed for some time. He said his intent is to "give a fresh start" to the university. 

The Council on Postsecondary Education will nominate new trustees for Bevin to consider for appointment. He said the new board will have 13 members, 10 of which he will appoint. He said he wants board members who look out for the university's best interests and understand their fiduciary responsibility. 

Bevin said his action is motivated by academic concerns, not athletics.

As also noted, Bevin canned the entire U of L Board of Trustees to boot.  Bevin's stated issue with Ramsey and the U of L Board is that there are "academic problems" with the university and Ramsey was at the heart of them: Men's basketball coach Rick Pitino's issues with obtaining "gifts" for students, possible embezzlement by the university's top health care official, and more.

The unofficial story of why Ramsey and the board had to go: they stood in the way of Bevin's across the board education austerity cuts.

"Tuition will go up. The question is how much," University of Louisville President James Ramsey said on Fox in the Morning on Friday. That's just one of the consequences he says continued state budget cuts will have on the university and its students. 

"We've been through nine cuts in nine years," Ramsey says. The university has made plenty of big cuts in how it manages energy and buys health insurance, he says. Now it's looking for lots of little ways to save money. "It challenges our ability to move forward," he says. 

Ramsey says underfunding education also has consequences for the state. "We do have an undereducated population," he says. Ramsey says more people need to get through high school and into college. A lack of educated workers, he says, holds back economic development in the state.

Ramsey also says the cuts hinder the university's ability to recruit the best faculty members and research teams. He points to U of L's James Graham Brown Cancer Center being granted a full three-year accreditation by the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers. That accreditation is given to centers with the a high level of care and which rigorously review their performance. But such achievements take money to attract the top people, Ramsey says.

Ramsey was more than happy to lay the blame on Bevin.  You see how Bevin responded.  He wants state employees and educators terrified of his wrath.  No wonder he continues to be one of the nation's least popular governors.

Last Call For Influence Peddling

I'm with Matt Yglesias on Bernie's speech Thursday: Bernie Sanders has specifically run against the party of Obama/Clinton and it's pissed people off in profound ways.

It’s one thing to disagree with people about policy substance or political tactics. But something Sanders has done throughout his campaign and very pointedly did here is straightforwardly challenge the good faith of the vast majority of his colleagues in Democratic Party politics. It’s worked pretty well for him on the stump, but it doesn’t win you a lot of friends. And to be honest, it’s simply wrong — you can raise a lot of objections to Obama’s approach to Wall Street or climate change, but the fact is that the financial services industry and the fossil fuel industries have been fighting him every step of the way. 

This is important to understanding why, at the end of the day, Sanders got so very little institutional support for his campaign despite a very long career in Congress that’s involved a lot of working constructively with other members and left-wing interest groups. 

Even labor unions and progressive members of Congress who share important aspects of Sanders’s worldview have also been there in the trenches and seen these things happen. They’ve fought to get the Labor Department fiduciary rule enacted,fought for net neutrality, fought to raise taxes on the rich in 2009 and again in 2013, and fought to expand Medicaid. 

A lot of the people who’ve fought for those things agree with Sanders that they didn’t go far enough in important ways, or even that key people in the party didn’t push hard enough or strong enough for them. But a lot of Sanders’s rhetoric seems to simply erase these battles, as if the whole party were just sitting on its hands until Bernie and his political revolution came to town.

Bernie Sanders, and increasingly over the last 12 months, his followers, have treated the Democratic party not as something that can be improved and reformed, but as something that must be destroyed as the enemy. And in the process of that erasure, Sanders has erased Democratic voters of color most of all. Obama's strongest supporters are seen as the most misguided, most corrupt, and least worthy among Sanders and his followers of conversion to Saint Bernard's teachings.

It's bad enough as a black voter that I hear "Why are you still on the Obama plantation" from the right, but getting it from the left as well is just pissing me off.

The View Of Orlando

In case there were any doubts about an event as awful as the Orlando massacre last Sunday being seen as a political act, Republicans and Democrats have starkly different views of the horrific incident.

Republicans and Democrats have starkly different interpretations of what the recent mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub represents. While 79% of Republicans view it primarily as an act of Islamic terrorism, the majority of Democrats, 60%, see it as an act of domestic gun violence. Given Republicans' more lopsided views, Americans as a whole tilt toward describing it as a terrorist act.

The results are based on a June 14-15 Gallup poll, conducted days after a Muslim U.S. citizen, Omar Mateen, perpetrated the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at an Orlando nightclub. Mateen had been listed on the federal government's terrorism watch list in 2013 and 2014, but was later removed. While both President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton described the incident as an act of terror, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump went further, tying the act to radical Islam. 

Democrats' interpretation of the Orlando shooting may be influenced by Democratic leaders' calls for stricter gun laws in recent days. This was exemplified by a Democratic-led filibuster on the Senate floor Wednesday and Thursday, which ended after Republican leaders agreed to take up proposals on background checks and steps to prevent terrorists from obtaining guns. 

Trump's statements on the event may be contributing to Republicans' views of the Orlando incident as an act of Islamic terrorism, but Republicans' tendency to define it as terrorism may also stem from their greater concern about terrorism in general. 

Independents are evenly divided as to whether the Orlando shooting was an act of Islamic terrorism (44%) or domestic gun violence (42%). 

Whether the Orlando incident was inspired by Islamic terrorism or the actions of a killer able to obtain guns is a debate that cannot be easily settled and, regardless, does nothing to diminish the tragedy of the event. But it is clear that Americans' political views influence how they interpret the tragedy and, by extension, shape their views of the policies leaders should pursue to prevent similar incidents.

By the way, right now the FBI isn't calling this a terror attack, and hasn't been able to substantiate Mateen's connection to ISIS.

That doesn't seem to matter to Republicans, who will be calling this an Islamic terror attack until they day they die.

In other words, this isn't "both sides view the event differently" as much as it is "Democrats are seeing one thing and Republicans are making up another out of whole cloth."  Reality's liberal bias, you see.

The Foggy Bottom Bomb Squad

Like any other workplace, the State Department isn't monolithic, and diplomats disagree on foriegn policy all the time. What is unusual is having such disagreements made glaringly public as an attack on a sitting President and his foreign policy.

More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war. 

The memo, a draft of which was provided to The New York Times by a State Department official, says American policy has been “overwhelmed” by the unrelenting violence in Syria. It calls for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.” 

Such a step would represent a radical shift in the administration’s approach to the civil war in Syria, and there is little evidence thatPresident Obama has plans to change course. Mr. Obama has emphasized the military campaign against the Islamic State over efforts to dislodge Mr. Assad. Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, have all but collapsed. 

But the memo, filed in the State Department’s “dissent channel,” underscores the deep rifts and lingering frustration within the administration over how to deal with a war that has killed more than 400,000 people. 

The State Department set up the channel during the Vietnam War as a way for employees who had disagreements with policies to register their protest with the secretary of state and other top officials, without fear of reprisal. While dissent cables are not that unusual, the number of signatures on this document, 51, is extremely large, if not unprecedented. 

The names on the memo are almost all midlevel officials — many of them careerdiplomats — who have been involved in the administration’s Syria policy over the last five years, at home or abroad. They range from a Syria desk officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to a former deputy to the American ambassador in Damascus.

While there are no widely recognized names, higher-level State Department officials are known to share their concerns. Mr. Kerry himself has pushed for stronger American action against Syria, in part to force a diplomatic solution on Mr. Assad. The president has resisted such pressure, and has been backed up by his military commanders, who have raised questions about what would happen in the event that Mr. Assad was forced from power — a scenario that the draft memo does not address.

This is some pretty heavy stuff  to see from career diplomats, wanting increased conflict and military action (which goes to show you that not everybody in the State Department is against military violence over diplomacy.)

And that leaves us in a quagmire: what's happening in Syria as a result of President Obama's single most enduring policy failure is clearly and not only not working in any fashion, but failing overwhelmingly.  However, nobody seems to have a better idea than what we're doing now that wouldn't turn Syria into a failed state controlled by ISIS.

It's an awful position and President Obama deserves a massive share of the blame for the situation coming to this.  Syria has been a screw-up of Dubya-sized proportions, 400,000 dead and 5 million displaced, in many ways worse than Iraq or Afgnaistan.

"Not making it any worse" will be Hillary Clinton's job in a few months, and I do not envy her. And yet that's exactly what these career State Department diplomats are proposing, to make it far, far worse.

It's depressing.

StupidiNews!

• Jo Cox, a 41-year-old member of Britain's parliament, was shot and stabbed near her office in Birstall, later dying from her injuries, police have a suspect in custody.
• President Obama met with families of the victims of the Orlando massacre yesterday, the president again called for Congress to take action on new firearms regulations.
• The President will head to Carlsbad Caverns and Yosemite national parks this weekend to encourage Americans to respect the environment and help fight climate change.
• Chinese officials have ruled against Apple, saying that the company's iPhone violates patents of a Beijing competitor, which could cost Apple billions in lost sales. 
• Cable TV industry groups want to cut a deal with the FCC over set-top box regulations, but want control over recording shows on third-party devices.

Last Call For Watching Out For Us

I'm glad that Democrats are trying to do something about people on the FBI terror watch list not being able to buy guns, but the fact is that wouldn't have helped in Orlando as the FBI removed Omar Mateen from their watch list two years ago.

Omar Mateen was placed on a terrorist watch list maintained by the FBI when its agents questioned him in 2013 and 2014 about potential ties to terrorism, according to U.S. law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the case. 

He was subsequently removed from that database after the FBI closed its two investigations, one official said. 

In the first investigation, Mateen was questioned by FBI agents after they were told he had made inflammatory comments that co-workers worried were sympathetic to terrorists. 

The FBI agents determined that Mateen had not broken any laws and closed the investigation, a second official said. 

They questioned Mateen again the following year because agents had learned he had contact with an American who later died in a suicide bombing in Syria. 

Agents closed that investigation because they concluded the contacts with the suicide bomber had been minimal, an FBI official said. 

Even if Mateen were still on the terrorist watch list — known as the Terrorist Screening Database — the designation would not have precluded him from buying the semiautomatic pistol and assault-style rifle that he used in Sunday's massacre.

So yeah, in this case the FBI's watch list proved utterly useless.  They closed their investigations, he went on to buy guns, and he slaughtered 49 people with them.

You know what? I have a whole hell of a lot less trust in the FBI and our surveillance regime than I did last week, and I'm thinking it's more than past time to ask some very pointed questions about whether or not Patriot Act powers are still necessary for law enforcment.

Between this and police abuses over the last decade, I've finally gotten around to the idea that we need to roll back this stuff in a major way.

Correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but this has to be yet another department where Obama has utterly failed, and Jesus it's hard to defend the guy sometimes.