Invasion Of The Orangemen, Con't

Public dissent will not be tolerated in the Trump regime, and he hasn't even taken office yet.  The first to be made to fall in line by Trump's goons or face the consequences will be congressional Republicans, particularly in the House.

In early December, Rep. Bill Flores made what seemed like an obvious observation to a roomful of conservatives at a conference in Washington. Some of Donald Trump’s proposals, the Texas Republican cautioned, “are not going to line up very well with our conservative policies," though he quickly added that there was plenty the incoming president and GOP Congress could accomplish together. 

Little did Flores realize the hell that would soon rain down from Trump's throng of enforcers.

Breitbart seized on Flores' remarks a few days later, calling them proof that House Republicans planned to “isolate and block President Donald Trump’s populist campaign promises.” A conservative populist blogger for the site TruthFeed then warned Flores on Twitter to "get ready for a shit storm," and posted a headline that read: “BREAKING: Rep. Bill Flores Has CRAFTED a PLAN to BLOCK Trump’s Immigration Reform.”
Sean Hannity jumped in, too, featuring the Breitbart post on his syndicated radio show. That only further riled the impromptu anti-Flores mob. 

"@RepBillFlores get in @realDonaldTrump way & we will burn your career down until you are reduced to selling life insurance,” tweeted one person. "@RepBillFlores you can go hang yourself!!" another wrote. 

It’s little wonder that Capitol Hill Republicans have papered over their not-insignificant policy differences with Trump, shying away from any statement about the president-elect that might possibly be construed as critical. They’re terrified of arousing the ire of their tempestuous new leader — or being labeled a turncoat by his army of followers.

Again, this is Authoritarian Dictator 101 stuff here: get an official press organ, in this case Breitbart, and use it to brutally punish any politician who remotely looks like they might dissent by drumming up threats and abuse, all made that more effective by the celerity of the digital age.

"Nobody wants to go first," said Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), who received nasty phone calls, letters and tweets after he penned an August op-ed in The New York Times, calling on Trump to release his tax returns. "People are naturally reticent to be the first out of the block for fear of Sean Hannity, for fear of Breitbart, for fear of local folks." 

An editor at Breitbart, formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said that fear is well-founded. 

“If any politician in either party veers from what the voters clearly voted for in a landslide election … we stand at the ready to call them out on it and hold them accountable,” the person said.

Again, basic tyrant stuff here.  Those who speak out will be made an example of.  It will be exponentially worse starting January 21.

Republican Hill staffers have wrestled in recent months with how to respond to inquiries from Breitbart or other pro-Trump bloggers. Engage them or ignore them? One GOP aide told POLITICO members are “damned if you do, damned if you don't." Another said it's having a "chilling effect" on GOP lawmakers. 

The Republican officeholders see Trump’s unabashed use of his Twitter account to shame critics as the most foreboding threat. During campaign season, he regularly took shots at adversaries, including Marco Rubio (“Little Marco”), Ted Cruz (“Lyin’ Ted,”) and Speaker Paul Ryan (a “very weak and ineffective leader”). 

Trump hasn't gone after any lawmakers on Twitter since the election, but some worry it's just a matter of time. Eventually, some Republican will feel compelled to challenge his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, or slap companies that move jobs overseas with massive tariffs. And that’s when things will get ugly, insiders predict.

The 2018 election will be as much of a purge of Trump's GOP enemies list as it will be a test for the Democrats to see if they can muster any resistance to the Trump regime.  I fully expect a number of Republicans to be primaried right out of office, only to be replaced with even more dangerous rabid Trumpian partisans.

It's possible that Trump's regime could collapse under its own incompetence, but in the words of Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, "Fear will keep the local systems in line." Things will move very quickly once Trump has sufficiently consolidated enough power.

History tells that it will not take long to do so once events reach that tipping point.

The Bathroom Bill Blowback Bomb Blast

I have no idea why incoming Democratic NC Gov. Roy Cooper and Charlotte's City Council decided to trust the NC GOP, but it completely blew up in their faces as Republicans in the state legislature laughed and refused to repeal HB2.

The North Carolina Senate voted down a repeal of House Bill 2 Wednesday after a day of increasingly partisan rancor that pitted conservative Republicans against the Charlotte they so distrust. 

The state House adjourned without voting on repeal of the bill that has cost North Carolina millions of dollars in lost jobs, sports events and boycotts. With that, the hope of compromise between legislators and Charlotte, which enacted the ordinance that gave rise to HB2, dissolved. 

Protesters massed outside the Senate chamber rained down shouts of “Shame!”
After a long and frustrating day, the Senate’s top Republican Wednesday lashed out at Gov.-elect Roy Cooper, blaming the Democrat for the legislature’s failure to repeal the bill. 

“I think Roy Cooper tried to do everything he could to sabotage a reasonable compromise,” Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters after a more than nine-hour session. 

Berger said Cooper called Democratic senators and urged them not to support Berger’s bill, which would have coupled HB2’s repeal with a months-long moratorium on city ordinances like the one Charlotte passed and repealed. The Charlotte ordinance allowed transgender people to use the public restrooms of the gender with which they identify. 

Cooper had lobbied Charlotte council members for repeal, which they had twice before rejected, saying that in return Republican leaders had promised to “repeal HB2 in full.”

Charlotte repealed the ordinance that led to HB2 on Monday. It voted again Wednesday morning, wiping away all action taken in February, after legislative Republicans said they hadn’t rescinded it all.

The bottom line is that the NC GOP refused to vote on a repeal of HB2 until Charlotte eliminated the city's protections for LGBTQ community because no Republican considers a gay person to be human anyway, just a bundle of ambulatory oozing sin.  Repealing HB2 without getting rid of the protections would actually consider people with sexual orientations other than "1950's sitcom" to be actual human beings, and Republicans were not going to stand for that nonsense. The Charlotte City Council then happily sold out the LGBTQ community completely in order to get the NC GOP to the table.

Then the NC GOP tacked on an amendment that would prevent Charlotte from reenacting those protections long enough for Republicans to force through a new measure over a Cooper veto that would make the moratorium on local ordinances like that permanent.  The deal disintegrated after that, and the Bathroom Bill remains law into next year.

The reality is that Republicans in my home state are such gay-hating assholes that they're fine with the state continuing to take tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in financial boycotts and tourism damage just to stay true to their barbaric beliefs that they can "cure sexual deviancy" with the power of an invisible sky dude.  It's clinical mass insanity.

Not as insane as Democrats like Charlotte's knuckleheads in city council and Roy Cooper, who really should have known better, to trust the NC GOP for a picosecond however.  That is stupidity bordering on dereliction of duty and gross negligence on their part.

So off we go into 2017 with HB2 still doing the Damocles thing over the state, and Kentucky still being a slightly better place to live than North Carolina.  Who'd have seen that one coming?

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article122145494.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article122145494.html#storylink=cpy

StupidiNews!

• In a special legislative session called specifically for the purpose, North Carolina Republicans reneged on a deal with Charlotte's City Council to repeal the state's HB2 "bathroom bill".
• A former Georgia police officer has been sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murder earlier this month for the taser-inflicted death of a suspect handcuffed at the time.
• German media is reporting at least four people have been arrested in connection with this week's deadly Berlin truck attack, but a manhunt continues for the chief suspect.
• President-elect Trump may have a massive conflict of interest with Germany's Deutsche Bank as he owes the lender $300 million while the Justice Department is investigating the bank.
• Ride-sharing giant Uber says it will take its self-driving test vehicle program to another state following California revoking the cars' registrations for not being properly licensed.

Last Call For A White-In Vote

The white nationalist viewpoint never went anywhere in American history, it just had various times where the country moved away from it a bit, almost always followed by a protracted period of heading right back down that path with often brutal results.  We're at the beginning of such a reversion cycle now, where Trump hasn't even taken office yet and FOX hosts like Bill-O are spouting overt racism on the air.

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly went on a diatribe against calls to abolish the Electoral College Tuesday night, arguing the political left is “all about race” and “wants power taken away from the white establishment.”

Throughout his mind-boggling Talking Points segment, O’Reilly conceded that “Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million,” but insisted the “hidden reason” behind calls to scrap the electoral college is actually the desire to marginalize and disenfranchise white working class men.

The O’Reilly Factor host said without the Electoral College, Democrats could campaign exclusively in “large urban areas and blue states” where “minorities are substantial.”

“Neutralizing the largely white rural areas in the Midwest and South will assure liberal politicians get power and keep it,” O’Reilly said, adding “this is all about race.”

“The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with,” O’Reilly said. “Therefore white working class voters must be marginalized.

“Very few commentators will tell you that the heart of liberalism in America today is based on race,” O’Reilly declared, presumably offering himself up as one of those few brave speakers willing to make such an asinine argument. “It permeates almost every issue: that white men have set up a system of oppression. That system must be destroyed.”

In summation, O’Reilly concluded, “the left wants power taken away from the white establishment. They want a profound change in the way America is run.”

When your FOX show sounds like it was taken from the bullet points on a Stormfront recruitment pamphlet on "white genocide", you might want to reassess things in your life.

But nobody should be shocked or surprised by this. Look at who we elected as president, in response to the man on the way out, and who that new president's closest advisers are.  Trump himself has retweeted this garbage several times during his campaign, that somehow the goal of liberalism and Democrats is to "exterminate" the white race through "breeding".

White nationalism is now the default mode of the federal government.

I look forward to O'Reilly having neo-Nazis on his show on a regular basis.  It'll be educational, I'm sure. 

A Veteran Of The Budget Wars

Next time Republicans scream about how "Obama failed our nation's veterans" and "refused to help our troops" please remember that the Senate GOP just killed a vet benefits bill less than a week before Christmas because "we can't spend that kind of money."

The largest piece of veterans legislation in decades — aimed at expanding health care, education and other benefits — was rejected Thursday by the Senate on a procedural issue after proponents failed to obtain 60 votes to keep the bill alive. 

Wrangling over an issue -- veterans -- that often receives bipartisan support, the legislation died on a vote of 56-41, with only two Republicans voting for it. 

Most Republicans said it was too large, too costly and would burden a Department of Veterans Affairs already struggling to keep up with promised benefits. 

Sen Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee who authored the bill, argued that many provisions in the bill have won bipartisan support in other pieces of pending legislation before Congress. 

Republicans complained about how to pay for it. Sanders' legislation had more than 140 provisions costing $21 billion over 10 years. 

Most of that money was to come from billions of dollars the government projected it would be allowed to spend on wars overseas in the fight against al-Qaeda. 

But Republicans argued that this is "phony" budgeting because U.S. participation in the Iraq War is over and operations in Afghanistan are winding down. 

The legislation would have restored cost-of-living increases for the pensions of future military retirees; expanded VA health care by allowing acquisition of 27 new medical facilities and paid for reproductive services for 2,300 troops wounded in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

It also would have expanded compensation for family caregivers of disabled veterans — something now provided for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan — to families of veterans of all wars. 

The bill was supported by nearly all veterans groups.

And yes, this is where I give Bernie Sanders credit because passing legislation in the Senate is his job, and this is absolutely a worthy piece of legislation.  But hey, $21 billion over ten years is a fraction of the Pentagon budget, literally less than a half a percent of what we spend on our military over that time period, and that was too much for Republicans.

Literally a fraction of one F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's cost.  Oh well.  Can't actually give the Department of Veteran's Affairs money, because screw them, right?

But military voters overwhelmingly voted for Republicans in November.  Congrats, soliders, sailors and airmen, you got what you voted for.

The Bernouts Are Angry

If you thought Bernie Sanders supporters were done trashing Clinton and wrecking the Democratic party, well, no, they magically believe the guy who couldn't beat Clinton would have magically defeated Trump and they will believe that until their dying days.

Ever since election night—when Hillary Clinton tanked and Donald Trump became the next leader of the free world—the most prominent allies and alumni of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have maintained a succinct message for Team Hillary: We. Told. You. So.

In the final months of the brutal and chaotic 2016 campaign, there were plenty of Democratic activists freaking out about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (the three states that ultimately cost the Democrats the White House) and Clinton’s fatal shortcomings there. Many of them were envoys of the Sanders camp who wanted to help fix those problems, including Clinton’s difficulties with the block of the mythical “white-working-class,” economically anxious voters who Sanders had championed during the primaries.

“They fucking ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,” Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee, told The Daily Beast. “We kept saying to each other like, ‘What the fuck, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.’”

According to Konst and multiple other people involved with these discussions, the Clinton campaign agreed to a meeting with a cadre of Sanders surrogates during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July. The purpose of the meeting, which included Clinton’s national political director Amanda Rentería and Team Hillary’s progressive outreach coordinator (and former Sanders senior aide) Nick Carter, was to address the concerns many Sanders camp alums were voicing about Clinton’s strategy going into the general election against Trump. Carter declined to comment on this story.

“Once we were at the convention, Bernie people were on the ground—we could feel it, people were pissed off, there with their pitchforks ready to fight,” Konst recalled. “But before the convention, after the platform committee meeting that I was on, Bernie surrogates were talking constantly, saying, ‘Oh my god, Hillary is going to lose if she doesn’t address TPP and [free] trade and [all these] other issues. We were looking at the polling and thought that if these people stay home, she’ll lose.”

When their meeting finally happened during the Democratic convention, the progressive activists’ fears were only inflamed.

“We were saying we are offering our help—nobody wanted [President] Donald Trump,” Konst continued, noting that the “Bernie world” side was offering Clinton’s team their plans—strategy memos, lists of hardened state organizers, timelines, data, the works—to win over certain voters in areas she ultimately lost but where Sanders had won during the primary.

“We were painting them a dire picture, and I couldn’t help but think they literally looked like they had no idea what was going on here,” she continued. “I remember their faces, it was like they had never fucking heard this stuff before. It’s what we had been screaming for the past 9 months… It’s like [they] forgot the basics of Politics 101.”

It's weird, because back here in reality Bernie's message lost by 15 points in the primaries, and in November Bernie's favored candidates got their asses kicked. Russ Feingold lost in Wisconsin. Zephyr Teachout lost in New York. Katie McGinty lost in Pennsylvania and Ted Strickland was blown out in Ohio.

If Bernie's message of economic populism was so popular, why did Democrats running on that message lose?

Why did Bernie lose?  Oh I know, the evil DNC rigged the election, right?

Nobody wanted President Trump.  Except for the Midwest voters that voted for turning the country over to him and the GOP in the largest margins they've had in the federal government in generations.

So I guess we'll find out the hard way once the Bernie folks get rid of all us darker than a paper bag types, right?

StupidiNews!

• A manhunt continues in Berlin for a young Tunisian man who may have been the driver of the truck in Monday's deadly attack on a traditional Christmas market that killed 12.
• At least 29 people were killed Tuesday and dozens injured when an explosion tore through an open-air fireworks market near Mexico City.
• Moscow says it will retaliate after new US sanctions against Russia imposed Tuesday as measures against Russian corporate interests and individuals were widened.
• IMF head Christine Lagarde has been convicted of negligence charges stemming from her time of French Finance Minister, she will not face jail, it's uncertain if she will remain at the IMF.
• Republican appointees to the FCC say the goal is to gut the commission's net neutrality measures as soon as possible once Donald Trump takes power an appoints a new chair.

Last Call For An Econom-Mick Disaster

The Donald keeps rolling on, staffing the executive branch with dangerous lunatics, bloody-minded fools, and genuine thieves. Sometimes Trump hits the trifecta with one pick and manages to get someone who's all three. Meet America's next budget director, Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.

Mulvaney was first elected to Congress in 2010 as part of the anti-government, tea party wave. A founding member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, he is among Congress’s most committed fiscal hawks. He has repeatedly voted against his own party’s budget proposals because they were insufficiently conservative. 

All this will presumably put him at odds with Trump’s plans to balloon federal deficits through a $7 trillion cut in individual and corporate income taxes, another half-trillion in infrastructure subsidies and other major spending expansions.

It’s unclear how Trump’s fiscally profligate platform meshes with Mulvaney’s preference for penny-pinching. He might push back on Trump’s most expensive ideas. Maybe he’ll employ accounting gimmicks and magic asterisks to force Trump’s numbers to add up. Trump’s campaign advisers have already been doing this, disingenuously claiming that his policies will pay for themselves through unrealistic economic growth.

Or maybe Mulvaney’s job will simply be to convince the rest of the Freedom Caucus to stay mum when deficits explode. 

Whatever their differences on line-item details, though, Mulvaney and the president-elect have at least one major thing in common: an alarming openness to defaulting on the federal debt. 

As you may recall, during the campaign Trump repeatedly flirted with the idea of defaulting on U.S. debt obligations. In a CNBC interview in May, he suggested that his experience in offloading private debt would translate nicely to federal obligations. That is, he’d simply persuade the country’s creditors to accept less than full payment. 

“I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed you could make a deal,” he said.
When the financial press freaked out, he walked back the language — only to revive it a month later. 

Mulvaney has also questioned the need to preserve the country’s sterling reputation as a borrower.

He ran for Congress promising to never raise the country’s debt ceiling, and he has mostly kept to that pledge. Since taking office in January 2011, he has voted against (ultimately successful) legislation to raise this ceiling four times. He also publicly questioned whether failing to raise the ceiling would be such a bad thing, and whether it would necessitate defaulting on our debt. 

To be clear: It would, and it would.

To reiterate, Mulvaney is a Bircher Tea Party nutjob who has no problem with defaulting on America's national debt, something that would immediately trigger an economic crisis far worse than 2007-2008, and believes Paul Ryan hasn't cut spending enough.

This person would be Trump's budget director.

Let that sink in.

We're so utterly screwed.

Pardon Me, Newt?

Whoever thought Republicans ever cared about rule of law once they came to power is in for quite the shock when it comes to "crony capitalism" Trump-style.  And Newt Gingrich is right there cheering them along, saying the GOP should simply change the laws to allow Trump and his kids to do whatever they want. 

Newt Gingrich said Monday that President-elect Donald Trump could simply pardon members of his administration who may break anti-nepotism laws, adding that Trump's business ties require "a whole new approach" to addressing potential conflicts of interest in the presidency.

“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” Gingrich told WAMU’s Diane Rehm on Monday morning. “It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.' Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

Gingrich was referring to a federal anti-nepotism law that could prevent Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, respectively, from serving in his administration. Previously, Gingrich suggested Trump may need a waiver from Congress to have Kushner work in his administration.

On Monday, however, Gingrich said the law was the result of “Lyndon Johnson’s reaction to Bobby Kennedy, and the fact that Johnson hated Kennedy.”

“It was a very narrowly focused bill really in reaction to a particular personality thing,” he said. “I think that we have to look at it in the context of what they were trying to accomplish.”

Although Gingrich acknowledged that Trump’s potential conflicts of interest were “a very real problem,” he argued that the President-elect's massive wealth was “virtually impossible to isolate” and that “traditional rules don’t work."

"We’re going to have to think up a whole new approach,” he said.

We have to change to rules for Trump, because Trump doesn't follow the rules.

Republicans have spent more than two decades screaming about "lawless Democrat thugs" and as soon as they get into power, they simply say "If we change the laws so we can do what we want, we're not lawless, are we?"

Trump just pardons anyone who might break the law ahead of time.  Problem solved, citizen!

Of course the administration that can change the laws to do what they want can also change the laws to make anything their opponents do illegal.  History tells us that part is coming pretty soon as well.

Lemme Hear Ya Go Hotel, Motel, Trump-iday Inn

And if Kuwait starts acting up, then they're not Trump's friend.

The Embassy of Kuwait allegedly cancelled a contract with a Washington, D.C. hotel days after the presidential election, citing political pressure to hold its National Day celebration at the Trump International Hotel instead.

A source tells ThinkProgress that the Kuwaiti embassy, which has regularly held the event at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, abruptly canceled its reservation after members of the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador to hold the event at the hotel owned by the president-elect. The source, who has direct knowledge of the arrangements between the hotels and the embassy, spoke to ThinkProgress on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak publicly. ThinkProgress was also able to review documentary evidence confirming the source’s account.

In the early fall, the Kuwaiti Embassy signed a contract with the Four Seasons. But after the election, members of the Trump Organization contacted the Ambassador of Kuwait, Salem Al-Sabah, and encouraged him to move his event to Trump’s D.C. hotel, the source said.

Kuwait has now signed a contract with the Trump International Hotel, the source said, adding that a representative with the embassy described the decision as political. Invitations to the event are typically sent out in January.

Abdulaziz Alqadfan, First Secretary of the Embassy of Kuwait, told ThinkProgress last week that he couldn’t “confirm or deny” that the National Day event would be held at the Trump Hotel. Reached again Monday afternoon, Alqadfan did not offer any comment. An email sent directly to Ambassador Al-Sabah was not immediately returned.

If you're a foreign national or lobbyist wanting access and want to stay in good graces with the Trump administration, you'd better stay at his hotels. They're now the only game in town in DC, Chicago, New York, SoHo, Miami and Vegas, but especially the DC digs.  President Trump would be disappointed if you didn't accept his offer of hospitality in our nation's capital. You wouldn't want to disappoint President Trump, would you?

This is how things work in America now.  Trump is the President's Brand™.

Gosh, that would make a pretty good tag, huh.

StupidiNews!

• German officials say they are treating a truck driven through a crowded Berlin Christmas market square, killing 12 and injuring dozens, as a terrorist incident.
• A shooter was detained outside the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey hours after the Russian envoy to Ankara was killed in an art gallery by an off-duty police officer.
• China has returned a US Navy underwater drone after seizing it in international waters last week, speculation is that Beijing is now taking a far tougher line in the South China Sea.
• Despite being worth nearly $70 billion on paper, ride-sharing giant Uber may take as much as $3 billion in losses over being drubbed out of China's ride-share market in 2016.
• A South Carolina lawmaker wants to install anti-pornography filters on all new computers and tablets sold in the state to prevent viewing of obscene content without paying the state a fee.

Last Call For The Opioid Option

So, turns out that in the midst of the miserable red state opioid epidemic that has cost thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more in states like West Virginia that there's no better drug pushers than the legal, corporate ones.

Follow the pills and you'll find the overdose deaths. 

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town. 

Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States. 

The trail also weaves through Wyoming County, where shipments of OxyContin have doubled, and the county's overdose death rate leads the nation. One mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drugstore just eight blocks away. 

In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, a Sunday Gazette-Mail investigation found.

Yep, it seems that nearly 20% of all OxyContin, hyrdrocodone, and other painkillers shipped by the nation's three largest drug distribution companies ended up in West Virginia.

Nearly twenty percent. Just to West Virginia.

Let that sink in.

While the death toll climbed, drug wholesalers continued to ship massive quantities of pain pills. 

Mingo, Logan and Boone counties received the most doses of hydrocodone — sold under brand names such as Lortab, Vicodin and Norco — on a per-person basis in West Virginia. Wyoming and Raleigh counties scooped up OxyContin pills by the tens of millions. 

The nation's three largest prescription drug wholesalers — McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen Drug Co. — supplied more than half of all pain pills statewide.

For more than a decade, the same distributors disregarded rules to report suspicious orders for controlled substances in West Virginia to the state Board of Pharmacy, the Gazette-Mail found. And the board failed to enforce the same regulations that were on the books since 2001, while giving spotless inspection reviews to small-town pharmacies in the southern counties that ordered more pills than could possibly be taken by people who really needed medicine for pain. 

As the fatalities mounted — hydrocodone and oxycodone overdose deaths increased 67 percent in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012 — the drug shippers' CEOs collected salaries and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. Their companies made billions. McKesson has grown into the fifth-largest corporation in America. The drug distributor's CEO was the nation's highest-paid executive in 2012, according to Forbes. 

In court cases, the companies have repeatedly denied they played any role in the nation's pain-pill epidemic.

The laws were there.  They were never enforced.  The drug distributors got rich.  Thousands died. This is a massive scandal, period.

Now imagine how bad this will be under the Trump FDA, which wants to eliminate "job-killing regulations" on Big Pharma, and would remain in charge of enforcing what regulations would be left on the books.

And please note, this was a local city newspaper that broke this story wide open, not a national paper, not a online outlet, not a non-profit, but a local hometown paper.

But the problem is still economic anxiety, right?

Invasion Of The Orangemen

Nothing to be alarmed about folks, President Hair Furor is only going to have his own private security force on top of any Secret Service protection, even after he takes office in January, in order to "deal with protesters" at the rallies and events he continues to want to have.

President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans. 

The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.

But Trump — who puts a premium on loyalty and has demonstrated great interest in having forceful security at his events — has opted to maintain an aggressive and unprecedented private security force, led by Keith Schiller, a retired New York City cop and Navy veteran who started working for Trump in 1999 as a part-time bodyguard, eventually rising to become his head of security. 

Security officials warn that employing private security personnel heightens risks for the president-elect and his team, as well as for protesters, dozens of whom have alleged racial profiling, undue force or aggression at the hands Trump’s security, with at least 10 joining a trio of lawsuits now pending against Trump, his campaign or its security. 

“It’s playing with fire,” said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent who worked on President Barack Obama’s protective detail during his 2012 reelection campaign. Having a private security team working events with Secret Service “increases the Service’s liability, it creates greater confusion and it creates greater risk,” Wackrow said. 

“You never want to comingle a police function with a private security function,” he said, adding, “If you talk to the guys on the detail and the guys who are running the rallies, that’s been a little bit difficult because it’s so abnormal.”

The word you need to be using isn't "abnormal" it's "authoritarian".  Private security details without public oversight and answerable only to Trump, "controlling" protesters?  That's what dictators do, guys.  This is the Orange Brigades here, Trump's private army. These are the actions of a man who knows just how much the people hate him and he doesn't care.

If Obama had done this in 2008 or especially 2012, he'd have been impeached the moment one of these guys tried to cash a paycheck.

This is a serious, serious problem and nobody seems to care to try to do anything about it.

Those Nice Klansmen Down The Road

Seems that in the era of Trump "economic anxiety" that cable television seeks to remain relevant by giving us the fuzzy, warm, homey view of your average KKK Imperial Wizard and his family.

The setup is warm and fuzzy. “Girls, I got y’all some gifts,” says Steven Howard, presenting his two young daughters with prettily wrapped packages, which they eagerly rip into. The cameras then reveal what’s inside: the distinctive pointed hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Giving my girls my legacy,” Mr. Howard says as he helps place them on their heads.

It’s a chilling introduction to “Generation KKK,” an eight-part documentary series, beginning Jan. 10 on A&E, that burrows in with high-ranking Klan members and their families. The series also takes A&E, best known for long-running favorites like “Hoarders” and “Intervention,” into programming waters more complicated — and politically charged — than anything it has shown before.

That meant finding a delicate balance between winning the trust of the Klan members and ensuring the show didn’t propagate views the network’s executives abhor. “We certainly didn’t want the show to be seen as a platform for the views of the KKK,” said Rob Sharenow, general manager of A&E. “The only political agenda is that we really do stand against hate.”

I see.  But we really need to hear why they harbor that hate in their own words in order to understand them, I guess. At least, that's what the pundits tell me.

The series follows Mr. Howard, the Imperial Wizard of the North Mississippi White Knights; Chris Buckley, a Grand Knighthawk with the North Georgia White Knights; and Richard Nichols, the Grand Dragon in the Tennessee Knights of the Invisible Empire.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of independent Klan chapters in the United States (there is no national organization) grew from 72 to 190 between 2014 and 2015. The Anti-Defamation League estimates membership at 3,000, while the law center places the figure at between 5,000 and 8,000. And the indoctrination of young people, members say, is crucial to the Klan’s survival.

“We all here for the same reason: we’re here for the preservation of our race and the preservation of our people,” Mr. Howard says on the show, voicing his dream of becoming the next David Duke. “If we don’t fight this battle, our children ain’t gonna have a future.”

The series follows the adventures of these happy warriors as they learn and grow!

As they sought to capture this relatively unseen world, the filmmakers also incorporated the anti-hate activists Daryle Lamont Jenkins, Arno Michaelis and Bryon Widner as they tried to persuade members to leave the Klan — or at least to leave their children out of it.

That meant introducing Mr. Buckley’s wife, Melissa, to Mr. Michaelis, a former white supremacist now with Serve 2 Unite, which works with young people to prevent violent extremism. Mr. Buckley’s Klan involvement had led his wife into a dangerous confrontation with three African-American women at a Walmart, and she wanted to squelch her now-5-year-old son’s mimicry of his father’s racial slurs and “white power” salutes before he started school.

“I hate to say that I was even at the point of leaving him, because he’s my best friend, he’s my kids’ father, he’s everything to me,” she said in a phone interview. “But it got to the point where, if I’m not safe with him, why be with him?”

For Mr. Buckley, an Army veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Klan offered a band of brothers not unlike the military and an outlet for the rage he felt toward those he blamed for his emotional and financial precariousness.

“People involved in hate groups do so because they’re suffering,” Mr. Michaelis said. “I really draw upon that truth to respond to their aggression with compassion, and doing so makes a very powerful first impression.”

While I'm glad to hear that somebody's trying to deprogram these folks and absolutely support their efforts to do so, I have to admit my personal biases of you know, being black in America in 2016 makes me quite leery of how long it's going to take to try to reform the tens of millions of other Trump voters who may be suffering from this particular strain of "economic anxiety" and that I'm not super stoked to watch a series about humanizing the reasons for their hatred towards me.

I don't need to watch the series.  Thanks to November's election I get to live it instead.

That's more than enough for me.  Thanks.

I'll pass.

StupidiNews!

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