StupidiNews!

• Japanese PM Shinzo Abe will be the first Asian leader to officially meet with President-elect Donald Trump, the two are expected to discuss trade and the TPP, largely considered dead.
• New data from Pluto suggests that the distant planetoid may have a vast underground ocean of slushy ice containing as much water as all of Earth's seas combined.
• The Minnesota police officer who killed black motorist Philando Castle during a July traffic stop has been charged with second degree manslaughter.
• Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the UK should consider a second referendum on rejoining the EU after economic reform changes are made to the group of nations.
• A new UK study finds that pigs make the same kinds of bad decisions that humans do when faced with psychological stress and cognitive bias blind spots.

Last Call For Tea-rok, DINO-saur Hunter

At least a few former Sanders supporters have decided that the best way to move forward into the Trump era and the 2018 and 2020 elections is to scour the party and purge those Dems deemed impure.

Leaders of the groups organizing some of the first outbursts of direct action in response to Trump’s surprise election are making plans to take to the streets through January’s Inauguration and beyond. In frantic behind-the-scenes phone calls, text messages and Slack chats, they’re also planning to channel the energy unleashed last week into electoral politics, starting with Democratic primaries, to build what one organizer called a “tea party of the left.”

“Our big goal is to support primary challenges against those Democrats who negotiate with Donald Trump,” said the organizer, Waleed Shahid, a veteran of Bernie Sanders’ campaign who is working for a group called AllofUs, launched in September. The approach mimics that of the tea party, which has used insurgent primary bids to unsettle establishment Republicans and drive the Republican Party rightward. 

“It gave people in the Republican Party who are upset with the establishment an identity,” Shaid said. “You could be a tea party Republican. We think there’s a lot of power in that.” 

Progressive groups are planning to combine that tactic with direct actions like marches and sit-ins to more seamlessly merge an anti-Trump protest movement with electoral politicking. 

Already, AllofUs — which draws organizers from the environmental group 350.org and the Occupy movement — has organized a candlelight vigil at the White House on Saturday and a Monday sit-in at Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office that resulted in 17 arrests. Another organizer for the group, Max Berger, said it was in the process of planning additional mobilizations over the next several months. And in recent days, the group’s leaders have participated in informal talks with unions and other standard-bearers of the progressive left about orienting their efforts toward Democratic primary challenges while maintaining protests. 

Among the groups eyeing a stepped-up role in primaries are 350.org’s political action wing and National Nurses United, which backs Rep. Keith Ellison’s bid for chairman of the Democratic National Committee and is convening its board this week in Washington, where its members will participate in a Thursday afternoon rally with Sanders on the Capitol grounds. “Time for faux progressives to get out of the way,” said the union’s executive director, RoseAnn DeMoro. “Change is the only thing that will save that party.”

I don't think these guys are going to get much traction, or get much action, frankly.  I figure voters will get rid of DINO Dems like Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester and Joe Donnelly pretty quickly in 2018.

Of course they'll be replaced by Republicans, but we haven't gotten that far yet.  I'm sure states like West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana and Indiana will come around to far left Democratic candidates when presented.

You know, just like Russ Feingold in Wisconsin.

Last Call For The Moscow Shuffle

Don't look now, but this week the head of the NSA basically admitted that he believes Russia used WikiLeaks to influence the 2016 elections. Over at Mother Jones, David Corn says that actually is worthy of congressional hearings.

Despite all the news being generated by the change of power under way in Washington, there is one story this week that deserves top priority: Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. On Tuesday, the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, was asked about the WikiLeaks release of hacked information during the campaign, and he said, "This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect." He added, "This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily." 

This was a stunning statement that has echoed other remarks from senior US officials. He was saying that Russia directly intervened in the US election to obtain a desired end: presumably to undermine confidence in US elections or to elect Donald Trump—or both. Rogers was clearly accusing Vladimir Putin of meddling with American democracy. This is news worthy of bold and large front-page headlines—and investigation. Presumably intelligence and law enforcement agencies are robustly probing the hacking of political targets attributed to Russia. But there is another inquiry that is necessary: a full-fledged congressional investigation that holds public hearings and releases its findings to the citizenry. 

If the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies are digging into the Russian effort to affect US politics, there is no guarantee that what they uncover will be shared with the public. Intelligence investigations often remain secret for the obvious reasons: they involve classified information. And law enforcement investigations—which focus on whether crimes have been committed—are supposed to remain secret until they produce indictments. (And then only information pertinent to the prosecution of a case is released, though the feds might have collected much more.) The investigative activities of these agencies are not designed for public enlightenment or assurance. That's the job of Congress.

Unfortunately, the odds of this Congress ever addressing Mike Rogers's statement is approaching zero so quickly that it might throw off tachyons in the process.  Even if you don't believe the NSA (and yeah, there's ample reason to never trust the NSA on anything, ever) Congress should still investigate the Russian connections here on the off chance that this is actually legit (and there's ample evidence to believe it may very well be.)

And they won't, because the chief beneficiaries of the Russian interference were Donald Trump and the GOP Congress.  That's 100% true.

Kobach Chameleon, Con't

Regardless of whether Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach ends up Attorney General or not, he is currently Trump's transition team point man on immigration right now. Just to let you know how truly abysmal the man and his policies are, he's openly talking about bypassing Republicans and Democrats in Congress to build that mythical wall...and to start registering Muslims.

Kobach told Reuters last Friday that the immigration group had discussed drafting executive orders for the president-elect's review "so that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security hit the ground running."

To implement Trump's call for "extreme vetting" of some Muslim immigrants, Kobach said the immigration policy group could recommend the reinstatement of a national registry of immigrants and visitors who enter the United States on visas from countries where extremist organizations are active.

Kobach helped design the program, known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, while serving in Republican President George W. Bush's Department of Justice after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants.

Under NSEERS, people from countries deemed "higher risk" were required to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting on entering the United States. Some non-citizen male U.S. residents over the age of 16 from countries with active militant threats were required to register in person at government offices and periodically check in.

NSEERS was abandoned in 2011 after it was deemed redundant by the Department of Homeland Security and criticized by civil rights groups for unfairly targeting immigrants from Muslim- majority nations.

Kobach said the immigration advisers were also looking at how the Homeland Security Department could move rapidly on border wall construction without approval from Congress by reappropriating existing funds in the current budget. He acknowledged "that future fiscal years will require additional appropriations."

Yeah, on top of everything else this asshole came up with the Bush Administration's unconstitutional profiling of Muslims program, and now he wants to bring it back.  But for ten years, we regularly kept tabs on "high-risk" Muslims until the Obama administration put a stop to it.

Trump has said that he not only wants to bring NSEERS back but expand it to include all Muslims in the US, including US citizens. And yes, he wants to build that wall to keep them out.

Kobach is the most dangerous member of Trump's team that I've seen so far, somebody who can make Trump's dangerous immigration rhetoric into reality.

That's a serious problem.

The King Coal Con, Con't

Congratulations, coal country voters!  Donald Trump is about to play you for the useful idiots you are.  Meet your new Trump administration Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross!

After campaigning as a champion of coal miners, Donald Trump is reportedly close to choosing for Commerce Secretary a New York billionaire who owned a West Virginia mine where a dozen miners were buried alive in 2006. Trump’s favored candidate, Wilbur Ross, also engineered buyouts that cost workers their benefits, and their jobs. It’s a striking choice, considering Trump’s promises to improve the lives of coal miners and other working-class Americans.

Ross made his money collecting “distressed assets”—failing steel and textile mills in the midwest and south, and coal mines in Appalachia. Dubbed the “The King of Bankruptcy,” Ross cut jobs, wages, pensions, and health benefits at the companies he acquired, and reaped the profits. In the early 2000s, Ross’s foray into the steel industry netted him a $267 million personal windfall, but stripped health care benefits from more than 150,000 retired steelworkers. Then he moved on to the coal industry, at one point controlling as much as $1.2 billion in coal assets through his company, the International Coal Group.

That's right, Trump is about to make the guy who took health benefits away from a hundred and fifty thousand steel workers the head of America's business strategy.  And if the name Wilbur Ross sounds familiar, it should.  Especially in West Virginia.

One of ICG’s acquisitions in West Virginia was the Sago Mine, about 100 miles east of Charleston. The mine, a non-union operation, racked up a slew of safety violations from federal inspectors—more than 208 in 2005 alone. That year, the roof of the mine collapsed twenty times. Workers at Sago were injured three times as often as workers in similar mines elsewhere. Though Ross claimed not to be part of operating management at Sago, he admitted later that he was aware of the violations, and waved them away.

Then, early one January morning, methane ignited deep in the mineshaft. The explosion instantly killed one miner and stranded a dozen others about two miles from the mouth of the mine, in a passageway filled with carbon monoxide. It was more than an hour before company managers called for help, and four hours until a rescue team arrived. Nearly two days later, when they finally reached the trapped miners, all but one had died. Ross and ICG set up a $2 million compensation fund for the families of the deceased—an amount, critics pointed out, that paled in comparison to Ross’s immense personal wealth. (Trump contributed $25,000 to that fund.)

So the guy who overlooked safety violations that cause the Sago mine disaster ten years ago is now going to be overseeing the Commerce Department...you know, the guys in charge of, among other bureaus...NOAA.

Coal mine owner in charge of weather and climate science in America.

Nice knowing you.

StupidiNews!

• With wildifres raging across six states in the Southeast, hundreds have been hospitalized due to breathing difficulties from smoke since the beginning of the month.
• House minority leader Nancy Pelosi faces her first real challenge in years as a Democratic leadership vote scheduled for Thursday has now been delayed for several weeks.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel will run for a fourth term, according to lawmakers her in party, but an official announcement will come "at a suitable time".
• The election has bond market analysts nearly assured that the Fed will raise interest rates in December in anticipation of significantly increased government spending by the GOP.
• Volkswagen is nearing a deal to resolve issues with 80,000 US diesel cars and SUVs that could just need software fixes instead of expensive buybacks.

Last Call For Kobach Chameleon

I've talked about Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach a number of times on this blog, and at every juncture he's been on a crusade to disenfranchise as many Democratic party voters as possible in the name of "eliminating voter fraud".  He's the man behind Crosscheck, a compact of red states to compare voter registrations and to toss millions off the voter rolls in 2016. He's been involved in helping to neuter the Federal Election Assistance Commission to keep the federal government from helping to register voters. And in Kansas, he's been behind efforts to misinform Hispanic voters in the state by giving them false information.  Most of all, he's the man behind Arizona's awful SB 1070  "Papers, please!" law that Kobach later tried in Kansas and was struck down by the Supreme Court.

In other words, if the GOP effort to disenfranchise black and Hispanic voters has a face and name, it's Kris Kobach.

So guess whose name just surfaced as Attorney General of the United States in the Trump administration?

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, best known for his very hardline immigration stances, could be President-elect Donald Trump's choice for attorney general. Kobach helped formulate Trump's controversial plan to build a wall along the United States' southern border and crafted an Arizona law that made it a crimeto be in the country illegally and allowed Hispanic people to be asked to "show their papers." 

Phil Kerpen, president of the conservative group American Commitment, tweeted Tuesday that credible sources told him Kobach was the likely choice. But Bryan Lowry, a reporter at Kansas.com, tweeted that a Kobach representative said it was "just chatter" at the moment, signaling nothing was definite just yet.

Kobach is a controversial figure, in large part for his very tough stances on immigration. Kobach has indicated that Trump's immigration stances will immediately shift away from President Barack Obama's efforts to extend rights to undocumented immigrants. Trump has said he would deport between 2 and 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. Kobach suggested this week that Trump would also deport undocumented immigrants who are arrested but not convicted.

Understand that if Kris Kobach becomes Attorney General, the DoJ's Civil Rights and Voting Rights divisions will be used against people of color at every opportunity, and that I fully expect a national, federal effort to institute GOP voter ID laws nationwide, along with, oh yes, the nation's top cop almost certainly instituting national racial, ethnic, and religious profiling and "stop and frisk" policing.

Oh, yeah, and mass deportations.

Kobach cannot be allowed to be Attorney General, guys.

Period.

Burning Bernie Big Time

Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald argues that Bernie Sanders would have been buried by the GOP's opposition research if he had been nominated, and that believing Sanders had any chance was part of the reason why Clinton lost.

So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

My long-time blogging friend Steve M disagrees with Eichenwald, however.

Some of this might have stuck -- the environmental racism attack might have hurt Sanders with Hispanic voters (although, after all, he would have been running against Donald Trump). The vote for the crime bill might have hurt Sanders with African-American voters. Eichenwald says that the section of the GOP's oppo file "calling [Sanders] a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida" -- but Hillary Clinton lost Florida, too, and she wasn't supposed to need it to win.

Eichenwald says that "the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick" -- but we were also told that the Clinton campaign's anti-Trump oppo was pretty awesome, and that didn't work out.

I agree that some of what Eichenwald describes would have cut into Sanders's popularity. But none of it seems devastating enough to have knocked him out.

I continue to believe that Republicans would have just fallen back on the tried-and-true: Sanders believes in big government and will raise your taxes to stratospheric levels. I think that would have hurt him more than any of this oppo. So I still think it's unclear how Sanders would have done in a general election. I'm just surprised at how little the GOP had on him.

I tend to side with Steve on this.  "Socialist Sanders" would have been this year's "Crooked Hillary" in the VFW halls, the high school sports games, the Facebook posts from your relatives. He still hasn't learned to connect with the black community any better than he did 18 months ago, nor did he seem even remotely interested in trying to do so.  Eichenwald's oppo research would have been ignored, it would have been Sanders himself that ran into issues.

Besides, hard to run as an outsider when you've spent 25 years in Congress.

But the Socialist tag would have finished him with older voters, and "massive tax increases on the middle class!" with the heavily implied "To help those people at your expense!" would have done it with just about everyone else.

No, Bernie didn't have a chance either, but not for the reasons Eichewald brought up.  This was the "fact's don't matter LOL" campaign anyway, and Bernie was running on reality.

The Villains Are Ecstatic

The white nationalist movement hasn't had it this good since the days of Jim Crow, and they are more than happy to gloat right now over their man set to be in the White House in January.

"I think that's excellent," former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke told CNN's KFile. "I think that anyone that helps complete the program and the policies that President-elect Trump has developed during the campaign is a very good thing, obviously. So it's good to see that he's sticking to the issues and the ideas that he proposed as a candidate. Now he's president-elect and he's sticking to it and he's reaffirming those issues." 

Duke, who last week lost his longshot bid for the US Senate seat from Louisiana, said he plans on expanding his radio show and is hoping to launch a 24 hour online news show with a similar approach to Comedy Central's Daily Show. He argued Bannon's position was among the most important in the White House. 

"You have an individual, Mr. Bannon, who's basically creating the ideological aspects of where we're going," added Duke. "And ideology ultimately is the most important aspect of any government."

Issues don't matter, facts don't matter, we're all ideologues now.

Peter Brimelow, who runs the white nationalist site VDARE, praised Bannon's hiring, saying it gives Trump a connection to the alt-right movement online. 

"I think it's amazing," Brimelow said of Trump's decision to tap Bannon. "Can you imagine Mitt Romney doing this? It's almost like Trump cares about ideas! Especially amazing because I would bet Trump doesn't read online. Few plutocrats do, they have efficient secretaries." 

Brimelow added his site would continue to focus solely on their hardline position on immigration, saying he expects American whites to vote their interests similar to other minority groups. 

"To the extent that the 'alt-right' articulates that interest, it will continue to grow," Brimelow said. 

Brad Griffin, a blogger who runs the white nationalist website Occidental Dissent using the pseudonym "Hunter Wallace," said he thought Bannon's hiring showed Trump would be held to his campaign promises. 

"It makes sense to me," he said. "Reince [Priebus] can certainly get more done on Capitol Hill. He will be an instrument of Trump's will, not the other way around. Bannon is better suited as chief strategist and looking at the big picture. I think he will hold Trump to the promises he has already made during the campaign. We endorse many of those promises like building the wall, deportations, ending refugee resettlement, preserving the Second Amendment, etc. There's a lot of stuff in there on which almost everyone on the right agrees." 

Griffin added, "We're most excited though about the foreign policy implications of Bannon in the White House. We want to see our counterparts in Europe — starting in Austria and France — win their upcoming elections. We're hearing reports that Breitbart is expanding its operations in continental Europe and that is where our focus will be in 2017."

This was always the plan with the Trump/Bannon axis: a government based on being the new international beacon white supremacy.  They can't wait to get started dismantling the civil rights era.

As I've said before, it was always about punishing the Obama coalition and the people who voted for him, and leaving them politically powerless.  It's revenge, plain and simple, to make sure that America never dares to nominate someone like him again, or like Hillary Clinton.

You know, not a white guy.

But don't take my word for it,

Bannon has goals. One of those goals is maximization of personal power, which is why he spent the last decade and a half glomming onto powerful right-wing personalities (Bachmann, Morris, Palin), kissing their asses, and then moving on up the chain. With Breitbart and Trump, he picked two winners in a row – and that means he’s now at the pinnacle of American power. 

So, what will he do with that power? He’ll target enemies. Bannon is one of the most vicious people in politics, which is why I’ve been joking for months that should Trump win, I’d be expecting my IRS audit any moment. That wasn’t completely a joke. He likes to destroy people.

Granted, Ben Shapiro is a complete asshole who still doesn't think Bannon is a racist anti-Semite, but he does recognize a vindictive bastard when he sees one.  He's coming for his enemies, and he'll have the full power of the White House behind him.

And everyone who didn't openly support Donald Trump is an enemy to Steve Bannon.  Never forget that.

But please tell me again how Clinton was going to be worse because emails.

StupidiNews!

• Award-winning journalist and PBS newscaster Gwen Ifill passed away yesterday at age 61 due to complications from endometrial cancer.
• Lawmakers in New York aren't waiting for Donald Trump to appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, they're moving to guarantee abortion access by law in the state.
• Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump's choice for Secretary of State, also under consideration is former Bush 43 UN Ambassador John Bolton's Mustache.
• Russian Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev has been detained by police on bribery charges, reportedly he solicited $2 million in cash to approve a $5 billion oil deal.
• A Kentucky man is facing second-degree arson charges for allegedly setting a wildfire in order to increase viewership of his YouTube channel.

Last Call For The King Coal Con

Donald Trump's 30-point wins in Kentucky and West Virginia, and wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania were never, ever about "coal jobs".  They were about dismantling the Obama coalition and punishing the people who voted for the current president. But Mitch McConnell gave the game away over the weekend, and nobody will care.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hedged on Friday about when and if Republicans would be able to bring coal mining jobs to Kentucky, saying that is a "private sector activity." 

The issue has been a key campaign tool for Republicans who have accused President Obamaof waging a "war on coal." President-elect Trump promised during the campaign that he could save the coal industry in America. 

"Obama has decimated the coal industry, and we're going to bring the coal industry back,” Trump said at a speech in Louisville in March. “The coal industry is going to make a very big comeback.” 

But asked at a press conference at the University of Louisville if the GOP would be able to restore the industry that has shed jobs here and in other coal-mining states, McConnell demurred. 

"I certainly would like to see the war on coal come to an end," he said in a 20-minute press conference. "As I've said repeatedly over the last few years, the war on coal was not a result of anything Congress passed, there was no legislation. This was all executive orders or regulations that the president was involved in, unilaterally, on his own." 

The industry has been losing jobs for three decades and those losses accelerated under Obama, in part because of new environmental regulations, but more importantly, because of cheap natural gas prices. 

In 1985, there were 173,000 coal mining jobs in the United States, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In October of this year, that number had fallen to 53,000. 

Eastern Kentucky has been especially hard hit because the easily obtained coal is gone and it costs much more to extract it from the ground there. 

"We are going to be presenting to the president a variety of options that could end this assault," McConnell said. "Whether that immediately brings business back, that's hard to tell because this is a private sector activity."

Oh.  Oh well then.  The rest of King Coal's court didn't have much more to add either.

The interim president of the Kentucky Coal Association was more direct about the future of coal mining in Eastern Kentucky. 

“I would not expect to see a lot of growth because of the Trump presidency,” Nick Carter said in an interview. “If there is any growth in Eastern Kentucky, it will be because of an improved economy for coal.” 

Experts agree that environmental regulations placed on the coal industry contributed to a rapid decline of the coal industry over the past few years, but there have been other, more important economic factors at play. 

“The issues, particularly in the eastern part of Kentucky, are more than the increase of regulations,” said Ken Troske, Sturgill Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky. 

One of those issues is a decrease in demand for coal. 

Carter said the low price of natural gas contributes to the lack of demand for coal. As the energy industry builds new power plants, it’s more likely to build plants that run on natural gas because the price isn’t as high. 

“We don’t mind losing to natural gas because it’s the cheapest source,” Carter said.

Nat gas is good for the energy industry, but it's not going to bring back coal jobs.

That's because nothing will bring back coal jobs, and Kentucky made sure it elected people who will make sure those coal jobs will not only disappear for good, but that thos high-=paying union coal mining jobs won't be replaced by any jobs at all.

King Coal conned you, Kentucky.  But keep blaming the black guy while you have President Trump and the Democrats are wiped out in the state and across the Midwest.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article114197923.html#storylink=cpy

Black Lives Still Don't Matter, Con't

Meanwhile with all the election issues that America is neck deep in right now, it was very easy to overlook the fact yet another cop got away with killing a black man, and it happened right here in Cincy as the man accused of murdering Sam DuBose got a hung jury and mistrial last week.

After a judge ordered a mistrial in the Ray Tensing murder trial Saturday, it will be up to Prosecutor Joe Deters to decide whether or not he wants to retry the case. 

Deters said he was disappointed by the mistrial, but noted it's still a better result than a "not guilty" verdict for him and others who believe Tensing was wrong when he fatally shot Sam DuBose during a traffic stop last year.

"I am grateful for what the jury did in terms of the time and energy," Deters said. "I am very disappointed because I think we have put on an incredible case which demonstrated murder."

Tensing faced two charges in DuBose's death: murder and a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. 

"He intentionally shot him in the head," Deters said. "And that is not, in my mind, justifiable." 

Deters has repeatedly said he believes the evidence shows that Tensing is guilty. Whether or not he will retry the case depends on whether he thinks another jury would convict Tensing on one of the charges. He said he would keep the same charges, which were the charges returned by the grand jury. 

"If I think we can win, we'll retry the case," Deters said.

Look around, Mr. Deters.  Ohio is not a state where a jury would ever convict a cop for the execution of a black person.  The voters in this state made that loud and clear on Tuesday.  We're now to the point of questioning whether there should even be a trial.

Sam DuBose's life didn't matter, so like with everything else this week, we'll be told to "get over it" and move on to the next injustice.

When does that finally stop, I wonder?  When do black lives matter?

They haven't so far in this country's long history.  What will it take to change that?

Deportations, Lickety-Split

Donald Trump's first major interview since his election was with 60 Minutes on Sunday, Lesley Stahl spent time lobbing softballs and being shocked at Trump being serious about his alt-right campaign promises.  But his immigration and deportation comments are getting the most play.

Lesley Stahl: They’re talking about a fence in the Republican Congress, would you accept a fence?

Donald Trump: For certain areas I would, but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate. I’m very good at this, it’s called construction.

Lesley Stahl: So part wall, part fence?

Donald Trump: Yeah, it could be – it could be some fencing.

Lesley Stahl: What about the pledge to deport millions and millions of undocumented immigrants?

Donald Trump: What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally. After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that you’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are gonna make a determination at that-- But before we make that determination-- Lesley, it’s very important, we want to secure our border.
[Paul Ryan: We had a fantastic, productive meeting.]

Lesley Stahl: So you were with Paul Ryan, you met with the Republican leadership, what was the-- one thing that you all agreed you want to get done right away?

Donald Trump: Well, I would say there was more than one thing, there were three things, it was healthcare, there was immigration and there was a major tax bill lowering taxes in this country. We’re going to substantially simplify and lower the taxes--

Lesley Stahl: And you’ve got both Houses?

Donald Trump: And I have both Houses and we have the presidency, so we can do things--

Lesley Stahl: You can do things lickety-split.

Donald Trump: It’s been a long time since it’s happened.

So two to three million deported and "then a determination".  Healthcare and tax reform too.  And lickety-split, for you folks playing at home in Red State America.

Things are going to move fast in 2017.

StupidiNews!

• President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping Sunday night in a conversation demonstrating "mutual respect" for each other.
• NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is warning that "going it alone" is not a military option for either Europe or the US as NATO countries met Sunday to discuss Trump's election.
• A major magnitude 7.8 quake rocked New Zealand over the weekend, PM John Key described the scene northeast of Christchurch as "utter devastation".
• 2016 remains on pace to be the hottest year on record as global averages are expected to set a new high mark, dangerously close to the 2 degree Celsius "tipping point".
• Las Vegas is installing solar and kinetic powered streetlights that can store battery power generated by people walking on the tiles near the light's base.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump of course is exactly who we warned America about, and the notion that he would ever "moderate" his course was always a pipe dream, the plan that he would ever get rid of the nastier elements of his campaign team was an outright lie.  Just look at who his new top strategist is.

Less than a week after his election, Donald Trump has begun to fill out the team he plans to bring with him to the White House. The president-elect announced Sunday that he has selected Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to serve as chief of staff in his incoming administration.

In the same announcement, Priebus' appointment shared top billing with the news that Trump campaign CEO Stephen K. Bannon will serve as chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.

"I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country," said Trump said in the emailed statement. "Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory. Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again." 

Yes, that Steve Bannon, editor of Breitbart News, the unapologetically racist and anti-Semitic "alt-right" clown is now the person directing the Trump administration's overall strategy.  15 months ago Bloomberg's Joshua Green called him "The Most Dangerous Political Operative In America" for a reason.

It’s nearing midnight as Steve Bannon pushes past the bluegrass band in his living room and through a crowd of Republican congressmen, political operatives, and a few stray Duck Dynasty cast members. He’s trying to make his way back to the SiriusXM Patriot radio show, broadcasting live from a cramped corner of the 14-room townhouse he occupies a stone’s throw from the Supreme Court. It’s late February, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing, and Bannon, as usual, is the whirlwind at the center of the action.

Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. He’d spent the day at CPAC among the conservative faithful, zipping back and forth between his SiriusXM booth and an unlikely pair of guests he was squiring around: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about “beatniks” and sexually transmitted diseases that upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. “If there’s an explosion or a fire somewhere,” says Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington political editor, “Steve’s probably nearby with some matches.” Afterward, everyone piled into party buses and headed for the townhouse.

And now he runs the Trump administration.  I was wrong about Bannon before and dismissed him as a joke. I guarantee you I am not wrong now.

This is who they are.