StupidiNews!

• California law enforcement officials say they have caught the Golden State Killer, who terrorized and murdered 12 and raped more than 50 women across 10 California counties from 1976 to 1989. 
• As more allegations of misconduct from people under his command grow, WH physician and Trump VA Secretary nominee Dr. Ronny Jackson says he is considering withdrawing his nomination.
• British interior minister Amber Rudd is facing calls for her resignation after a scandal involving labeling Caribbean immigrants who came legally to the country decades ago as undocumented.
• Ford Motors is killing most US passenger car lines in favor of SUVs and pickups by 2020 as the automaker is struggling to compete in the sedan and compact markets.
• Belgian regulators have classified video game "loot boxes" as online gambling, meaning game companies could face stiff fines and prison terms unless they get rid of the practice completely.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter

The NY Times has obtained audio of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's meeting last October with NFL owners and players about blackballed former Niners QB Colin Kaepernick and the national anthem protests in the league, and it is depressing to read about, but should not be shocking in any way.

N.F.L. owners, players and league executives, about 30 in all, convened urgently at the league’s headquarters on Park Avenue in October, nearly a month after President Trump began deriding the league and its players over protests during the national anthem. 

It was an extraordinary summit; rarely do owners and players meet in this manner. But the president’s remarks about players who were kneeling during the anthem had catalyzed a level of public hostility that the N.F.L. had never experienced. In the spirit of partnership at the meeting, the owners decided that they and the players should sit in alternating seats around the large table that featured an N.F.L. logo in the middle. 

“Let’s make sure that we keep this confidential,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said to begin the session. 

The New York Times has obtained an audio recording of the roughly three-hour meeting, and several people in the room corroborated details of the gathering. The unvarnished conversation reveals how the leaders of the most dominant sports league in the country and several of its most outspoken players confronted an unprecedented moment — mostly by talking past one another.

I know it's easy to dismiss this as millionaires whining to billionaires about how unfair life is when most of us are out here trying to make a buck to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads, but follow along here with me.

The players sounded aggrieved. After discussing a proposal to finance nonprofit groups to address player concerns, they wanted to talk about why Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who started the anthem protests to highlight social injustice and police brutality against African-Americans, was, they believed, being blackballed by the owners. The owners sounded panicked about their business under attack, and wanted to focus on damage control.

“If he was on a roster right now, all this negativeness and divisiveness could be turned into a positive,” Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Chris Long said at the meeting.

Long said he did not wish to “lecture any team” on what quarterbacks to sign, but “we all agree in this room as players that he should be on a roster.” The owners’ responses were noncommittal. The Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said that fighting for social justice is not “about one person.” 

The New England Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft pointed to another “elephant in the room.” 

“This kneeling,” he said. 

“The problem we have is, we have a president who will use that as fodder to do his mission that I don’t feel is in the best interests of America,” said Kraft, who is a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump’s. “It’s divisive and it’s horrible.” 

The owners were intent on finding a way to avoid Trump’s continued criticism. The president’s persistent jabs on Twitter had turned many fans against the league. Lurie, who called Trump’s presidency “disastrous,” cautioned against players getting drawn into the president’s tactics. 

“We’ve got to be careful not to be baited by Trump or whomever else,” Lurie said. “We have to find a way to not be divided and not get baited.” 

The Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula sounded anguished over the uncertainty of when Trump would take another shot at the league. “All Donald needs to do is to start to do this again,” Pegula said. “We need some kind of immediate plan because of what’s going on in society. All of us now, we need to put a Band-Aid on what’s going on in the country.” 

The Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan countered that the worst was behind them. “All the damage Trump’s going to do is done,” he said.

The owners kept returning to one bottom-line issue: Large numbers of fans and sponsors had become angry about the protests. Boycotts had been threatened and jerseys burned and — most worrisome — TV ratings were declining. 

Pegula complained that the league was “under assault.” He unloaded a dizzying flurry of nautical metaphors to describe their predicament. “To me, this is like a glacier moving into the ocean,” he said. “We’re getting hit with a tsunami.” He expressed his wish that the league never be “a glacier crawling into the ocean.” 

The Houston Texans owner Bob McNair was more direct. He urged the players to tell their colleagues to, essentially, knock off the kneeling. “You fellas need to ask your compadres, fellas, stop that other business, let’s go out and do something that really produces positive results, and we’ll help you.” 

After the Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross raised the idea of a “march on Washington” by N.F.L. players and owners, Eric Reid, Kaepernick’s former teammate and the first player to kneel alongside him, brought the discussion back to Kaepernick.
Reid, who attended the meeting wearing a Kaepernick T-shirt over his dress shirt and tie, said that his former teammate was being blackballed. 

“I feel like he was hung out to dry,” Reid said of Kaepernick. “Everyone in here is talking about how much they support us.” The room fell quiet. “Nobody stepped up and said we support Colin’s right to do this. We all let him become Public Enemy No. 1 in this country, and he still doesn’t have a job.”

Two things here:  The NFL owners were terrified of Trump attacking them (and still are).  They are, quite frankly, cowards, even Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, arguably among the most progressive of team owners.

It's been six months since this meeting, and nobody's given Kaep a shot still.  And as long as he kneels, they won't.

Because they fear Trump and the hate he commands more than Kaepernick and the players and fans who support him and his free speech.  I skipped the NFL completely last season, but until Kaepernick gets a shot, I'm not going back.

Two, Eric Reid is 100% correct.  Kaepernick is being blackballed.  I hope he wins his case against the NFL and gets tens of millions, and I hope he turns around and gives that money to charity, he's already given so much of his time and his blood and his soul.  But you know what?  Part of me wants Kaep to get $100 million from these guys and keep the cash just to spite the league.

We'll see.  But after this, there's no chance I'm going back to the NFL without Kaep.

And I blame Donald Trump for this too.

The Consumer Financial Extortion Bureau

Trump's head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former Trump budget chief Mick Mulvaney knows he has one job: to keep the CFPB from laying a glove on banks and mortgage lenders while openly shilling for filthy lucre to grease the wheels of commerce.

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.

“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

At the top of the hierarchy, he added, were his constituents. “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions,” said Mr. Mulvaney, who receivednearly $63,000 from payday lenders for his congressional campaigns.

Mr. Mulvaney, who also runs the White House budget office, is a longtime critic of the Obama-era consumer bureau, including while serving in Congress. He was tapped by President Trump in November to temporarily run the bureau, in part because of his promise to sharply curtail it.

Since then, he has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications. He also sharply restricted the bureau’s access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created online security risks. And he has scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable.

But he wants Congress to go further and has urged it to wrest funding of the independent watchdog from the Federal Reserve, a move that would give lawmakers — and those with access to them — more influence on the bureau’s actions. On Tuesday, he implored the financial services industry to help support the legislative changes he has requested.

At least he's being honest.  After all, Trump's tax scam bill got the six largest US banks more than $3 billion in tax savings so far this year alone, and it will be tens of billions more in the future.  Mulvaney's straight up telling the banks to use that money to buy Congress to have them do everything they can to defund the bureau he's been tasked to run.

This is how America works now in the Trump era.  Unless we get rid of the GOP, it will be the way America works forever.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Democratic candidate Dr. Hiral Tipirneni came up a few points short in last night's special election in Arizona's 8th to replace Trent Franks, Republican Debbie Lesko won 52-47.  Nearly three-quarters of votes were early ballots, and they heavily favored Lesko.  On election day however, Tipirneni greatly narrowed the gap.  But there are plenty of reasons for the GOP to be terrified, as this race should have never been close.

The Arizona seat opened up in December, when Republican Representative Trent Franks resigned amid allegations that he offered $5 million to a female employee to be a surrogate mother for him and his wife (she was unclear on how involved he intended to be in the conception process).

The front-runner to replace him is Debbie Lesko, a former Republican state senator. She’s run a typical GOP campaign, voicing her support for President Trump, his tax cuts, and his border wall. Her opponent is Democrat Hiral Tipirneni, a former doctor who has focused largely on health care and Social Security.

That seems like a wise move in a district where 24 percent of residents are 62 or older, but the area’s other characteristics don’t work in Tipirneni’s favor. As FiveThirtyEight notes, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats by 41 to 24 percent among active voters in the Eighth District, and they haven’t sent a Democrat to Congress since 1980. The district includes a large chunk of the Phoenix suburbs, which comprise Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s base of support, and Trump won the district by 21 points in 2016, while his lead over Hillary Clinton in the state overall was only 3.5 points.

Arizona’s early voting also makes the district much harder for Democrats to flip. The state has a permanent early-voting list, so people are automatically mailed a ballot for the election. Of the 150,000 Arizonans who voted by April 20, 48.6 were Republicans, 27.7 were Democrats, and 23.3 were independents. Unless Tipirneni won over a large number of Republicans and independents, her chances aren’t looking good.

Yet, the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee have together pumped $900,000 into the race, and both House Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy have held fundraisers for Lesko. Meanwhile, Democratic groups have mostly stayed out of the race.

In other words, Lesko had every possible advantage. This is a gerrymandered R+13 district that Trump carried by 21 after it was redrawn to keep Democrats out (AZ-08 used to be Gabby Gifford's district), a district where Franks won his three previous House races by 28, 51, and 37 points respectively.  For Lesko to win by only 5 and change is a heart-stopper.  Democrats didn't even bother to put up an opponent after losing in 2012, it was Franks smacking around third-party candidates.

Tipirneni should have been crushed by 20 points plus.  She wasn't.

Republicans should be very, very scared, because once again they have lost support in every special election since Trump took office.

And the next special election is OH-12 in August, a much more competitive district than AZ-08 at R+7.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• New allegations of misconduct involving a female employee are surfacing this week against WH physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, Donald Trump's nominee for Veterans' Secretary.
• A Tennessee judge has revoked a $2 million bond for the Waffle House shooting suspect in Nashville after a massive national public outcry that the suspect could be freed after a manhunt.
• A suspect in Dallas is in custody after two police officers and a civilian were shot and wounded at a Home Depot after a five-hour manhunt and high-speed car chase.
• US cable giant Comcast has made a nearly $31 billion offer for British cable group Sky, Comcast is America's largest cable company and owns NBC Universal.
• The US Supreme Court has upheld a patent process ruling in a 7-2 decision, allowing patent challenges to continue to be reviewed by the US Patent Office and not the courts.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Just in case there's still anyone other than Donald Trump who actually believes there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government in 2016, Mueller basically has everything and has had it since he raided Paul Manafort's home back in July.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and FBI agents seized tens of thousands of items from the home of Paul Manafort last July and have also reviewed testimony that he gave in a civil lawsuit about a protracted business dispute with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, disclosed his review of the Deripaska-related testimony in a court filing Monday that defended an FBI raid on the home of Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager. The disclosure shows the depth of Mueller’s interest in the links between Manafort and Deripaska.

Manafort once worked as a political consultant for Deripaska, who was considered close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Deripaska then invested $18.9 million with Manafort in a cable-television venture in Ukraine, and paid him $7.35 million in management fees. The deal ultimately soured, and Deripaska sued to try to get an accounting of the money.

Deripaska, the billionaire founder and majority shareholder of En+ Group, was among the most prominent tycoons penalized with sanctions this month by the Trump administration. The moved followed passage of a law last year to retaliate against Moscow for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Prosecutors have reviewed the 2015 testimony by Manafort and his former right-hand man, Rick Gates, according to a Dec. 1 letter attached to a filing late Monday in federal court in Washington. The letter broadly listed thousands of items handed over by prosecutors to lawyers for Manafort and Gates in the pre-trial exchange of evidence. 

The testimony, which is sealed, wasn’t disclosed. It came in a lawsuit filed by two KPMG LLP partners, Kris Beighton and Alex Lawson, appointed to wind up a Cayman Islands partnership formed to invest in the Ukrainian venture. Beighton and Lawson asked a federal judge in Virginia for permission to seek documents and testimony from Manafort, Gates and a third man, Richard Davis. The ultimate resolution of the case is unclear from court filings.

It's really hard to know who's in more trouble on the Trump campaign collusion front, Manafort because of Gates and Deripaska, or Michael Flynn because of Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.  But both paths lead right to Donald Trump, and everyone knows it.

And that's all without Cohen's treasure trove from the SDNY's raid earlier this month.

Also, we now know that the release of James Comey's memos by Congressional Republicans have fully backfired, because Comey's memos show that Trump lied to the FBI about his 2013 trip to Moscow.

Late last January, at a private White House dinner attended only by Donald Trump and Jim Comey, the president steered the conversation to a sensitive topic: “the golden showers thing.” 

He wanted the then-FBI director to know, Comey later wrote in a memo, that not only did he not consort with hookers in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, it was an impossibility. Trump “had spoken to people who had been on… the trip with him and they had reminded him that he didn’t stay over night in Russia for that," Comey recalled. 

Trump made the same claim a second time, telling Comey in a later Oval Office meeting "that he hadn’t stayed overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip,” as Comey wrote.

But flight records obtained by POLITICO, as well as congressional testimony from Trump's bodyguard and contemporaneous photographs and social media posts, tell a different story—one that might bring new legal jeopardy for the president, legal experts say. 

In fact, Trump arrived in Moscow, where he attended the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned at the time, on a Friday. He left in the early morning hours the following Sunday—spending one full night and most of a second one in the Russian capital—in contradiction to the recollections of Comey, who wrote about his early 2017 meetings with Trump minutes after they concluded.

Trump lied several times in fact about spending the night in Moscow, the night that the Steele Dossier says that the infamous "pee tape" was made as Trump was allegedly blackmailed by Putin by Russian hookers during his stay for the pageant.

It's a very specific lie that only would serve to damage the allegations of the pee tape existing, as an alibi for Trump.  We've known for a while that Trump lied about his trip to Moscow in 2013, but now we know he lied to Comey about it too.

Mueller of course knows all of this and has for some time.  I'm betting this means the Steele Dossier's most salacious details are in fact true.

Stay tuned.

They Can't Even Get The Basics Right

Colorado GOP Rep. Doug Lamborn's team is so inept, that apparently he forgot to get all the proper signatures he needed to be on the ballot for June, meaning that the six-term Congressman could very well be out of a job come January.

The congressional career of six-term Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado Springs was thrown into jeopardy after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Monday that he should be kept off the primary ballot in June.

While the decision — that Lamborn’s re-election campaign improperly gathered voters’ signatures to land a spot on the ticket — is unlikely to mean his 5th Congressional District seat leaves GOP hands, it injects the very real prospect that a fresh face will take over after years of unsuccessful challenges to Lamborn’s reign.

Reached by phone on Monday, Lamborn said “we’re still digesting the opinion” and then he hung up.

Contacted a second time, Lamborn said “we’re still looking at the language,” urged a reporter to contact his press secretary and then hung up again.

His campaign later issued a statement that indicated he would challenge the ruling in federal court.

So what happened?

Candidates can make the primary ballot in two ways in Colorado: either by gathering signatures from voters in their party or by winning the support of party insiders through a caucus and assembly process.

Lamborn took the former route, needing 1,000 signatures from registered Republicans in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District to make the ballot. He turned in 1,783 signatures to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, 1,269 of which were deemed valid.

Shortly thereafter, a lawsuit was filed by five Republicans from the congressman’s district challenging whether two of the signature gatherers hired by his campaign were Colorado residents as required by state law.

The Denver District Court ruled that one of the gatherers was not a resident, and invalidated 58 signatures he collected. It found that the other — who had gathered more 269 signatures — was.

But the Colorado Supreme Court, which reviewed the case upon appeal, rejected the lower court’s ruling on the residency of the second gatherer, Ryan Tipple, which was based off the legal theory that he intended to move to the state.

“Tipple’s stated intent to live in Colorado in the future is relevant only if he has a fixed habitation in Colorado to which he presently intends to return,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “The record reveals none. … All of the objective record evidence regarding his residency at the time he circulated the petition for the Lamborn Campaign indicated that his primary place of abode was in California.”

The ruling left Lamborn 58 signatures short of 1,000.

And since federal courts are notoriously unwilling to interfere in state election matters, Lamborn's almost certainly done.  It doesn't mean Dems have a shot here, this is still a wildly blood-red district in central Colorado covering Colorado Springs and several ranching, mining, and farming towns to the west of it.  CO-5 has never elected a Democrat in its 46-year history and isn't going to start now.

But Lamborn's done, and good riddance.

School Of Hard Time

Ahead of this week's planned teacher walkout in Colorado (a tactic successful in West Virginia and less so here in Kentucky) Republicans in Denver are quickly pushing legislation that would allow local school districts to immediately ask for court-ordered injunctions to stop teachers and cost them their jobs and six months in jail for contempt if they violate the order and walk off the job

As Colorado teachers prepare to walk out on Thursday and Friday to call for higher wages and increased school funding, some state lawmakers are working to make sure any plans to strike don’t go unpunished by introducing a bill in the Senate that could put teachers in jail for speaking out. 

The bill, SB18-264, would prohibit public school teacher strikes by authorizing school districts to seek an injunction from district court. A failure to comply with the injunction would “constitute contempt of court” and teachers could face not only fines but up to six months in county jail, the bill language reads. 

The bill also directs school districts to fire teachers on the spot without a proper hearing if they’re found in contempt of court and also bans public school teachers from getting paid “for any day which the public school teacher participates in a strike.” 

The bill, which was introduced this past Friday, is sponsored by State Rep. Paul Lundeen and Sen. Bob Gardner, both Republicans. 

Mike Johnston, a Democrat eyeing the gubernatorial seat in 2018, has spoken out against the bill, calling it a “tactic designed to distract from the challenges facing Colorado’s education system rather than solving them.” 

“Teachers across the country, from West Virginia and Oklahoma to Arizona and here in Colorado, are speaking up for themselves and their students. We need to listen to teachers now more than ever. This legislation attempts to silence their voices rather than working to address their concerns. As Governor, I will make sure that teachers are heard, not thrown in jail for exercising their rights,” Johnston said in a statement sent to Denver7.

I mean the bill is obvious strike-breaking 101, I can't see how it would pass in an election year, let alone get Gov. Hickenlooper's signature, but I guess it shows Republicans are willing to throw teachers in jail for the sake of the kids or something.

This is cartoonishly evil nonsense even for Republicans.  They're really willing to take a teacher's career and their freedom if they strike?  How does that help students in any way?  How does that help to alleviate already serious teacher shortages in the state?

No, it's just Republicans using their power to punish those who don't agree with their austerity policies, literally, with actual jail time and job loss.  It's authoritarian garbage, and this is what Republicans will try to do in every state if given the chance.

StupidiNews!

• A suspect is in custody after a rental van plowed through a crowded Toronto sidewalk, killing 10 and injuring 15.
• Kate Middleton and Prince Harry are celebrating the birth of their third child for the British royal couple, the newborn prince is fifth in line to succession of the throne.
• Nashville police have arrested the suspect in Sunday's Waffle House shooting that killed 4, the suspect's father could face prosecution in Illinois for giving his son the rifle allegedly used.
• CIA Director Mike Pompeo has won a narrow 10-9 vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pompeo could get a full Senate vote this week on his State Department nomination.
• An "unpatchable" vulnerability in the Nintendo Switch could allow enthusiasts to homebrew code on any current Switch console, or hackers to completely take over the device.

Last Call For A Claire Winner In Greitens's War

As embattled Missouri GOP Gov. Eric Greitens refuses to resign as Governor, blaming the liberal media for his problems despite felony sexual assault charges for essentially kidnapping his mistress and felony computer tampering charges for stealing his veterans' charity donor list for his own campaign's use, state GOP AG Josh Hawley has his hands full fighting calls for his own resignation for breaking Reagan's 11th Commandment.  The bigger problem for Hawley is that furious Republicans are turning on each other as his race to replace Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is heating up.

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is up for reelection. And, like clockwork, the Republican Party of Missouri is in complete turmoil again. 

McCaskill won a second term term in 2012 when GOP Rep. Todd Akin’s campaign imploded in the wake of his comments about “legitimate rape.” Now, Republicans worry GOP Gov. Eric Greitens’ mounting scandals will inundate McCaskill’s likely Republican opponent, state Attorney General Josh Hawley, and bestow another term on one of the most endangered incumbent senators in the country.

Greitens was indicted in February for allegedly taking a nonconsensual nude photograph of a former lover, and the woman testified under oath that Greitens had a forced sexual encounter with her. As if that weren’t bad enough for the GOP, Greitens is refusing to step down, thrusting two of the most prominent Republican elected officials in the state into open warfare. 

Hawley demanded that Greitens resign and triggered a new investigation into the governor’s fundraising, resulting in a second indictment last week. Greitens has fired back by seeking a restraining order against the attorney general, saying that Hawley’s call for resignation meant he could not conduct an impartial investigation of the governor. 

The scandals are damaging the GOP at the most critical interval of its six-year wait to unseat McCaskill. 

"[Greitens] is jeopardizing the whole Republican Party of Missouri," said Rob Jesmer, a top Republican consultant who was executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Akin made his infamous comments about rape and abortion during McCaskill’s last campaign.

It's funny here that the victim is the Missouri GOP and not, you know, the woman Grietens allegedly assaulted or the donor list to the vets' charity the Greitens founded whose data Greitens allegedly stole.  We're supposed to feel sorry for the Republicans because they are losing the opportunity to beat Claire McCaskill.

There's an easy solution if the problem is Greitens: impeach and remove him from office.  Republicans control nearly three-quarters of both the state House and Senate and could basically get rid of him without a Democratic vote, not that the Democrats aren't eager to get rid of the guy.

But Missouri Republicans are dragging their feet on impeachment and want to wait until the legislature's investigation is complete despite the felony charges from Hawley's office.  That could mean that the legislature would have to call a special session themselves (not like Greitens will do it) to impeach, and for that they would need some Democratic votes.  Democrats aren't committing to that because there's not a reason to delay the process until after the current legislative session.

Frankly, I hope the Missouri GOP keeps up with the self-inflicted wounds.  Some of the state's biggest GOP donors do want Greitens gone, but others are making it clear that moving against Greitens will close their checkbooks, and Hawley's senate campaign funding is their leverage.  Pulling the plug on Hawley's war chest, or at least not filling it, is a real possible result from this mess.  Meanwhile, Senate Dems are flush with cash.

And the winner?  Justice, of course.  Claire McCaskill having a much easier time in November is a bonus, but the reality is that Greitens needs to be punished for his crimes regardless of the election result in Missouri.

Trump Cards, Con't

I've long said that Trump's ego and fixation on petty revenge against slights both real and perceived drives every action he does.  Chief among his actions is moving to punish the Obama voting coalition in order to tear it apart, specifically moving against the black, Hispanic, and Asian communities.

But there's another group that is often overlooked in this coalition, Native Americans, who overwhelmingly voted Democratic and for Obama in 2012 and 2016.  It's no surprise that Trump is now choosing to go after them as well.

The Trump administration says Native Americans might need to get a job if they want to keep their health care — a policy that tribal leaders say will threaten access to care and reverse centuries-old protections. 

Tribal leaders want an exemption from new Medicaid work rules being introduced in several states, and they say there are precedents for health care exceptions. Native Americans don’t have to pay penalties for not having health coverage under Obamacare’s individual mandate, for instance.

But the Trump administration contends the tribes are a race rather than separate governments, and exempting them from Medicaid work rules — which have been approved in three states and are being sought by at least 10 others — would be illegal preferential treatment. “HHS believes that such an exemption would raise constitutional and federal civil rights law concerns,” according to a review by administration lawyers. 

The Health and Human Services Department confirmed it rebuffed the tribes’ request on the Medicaid rules several times. Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, conveyed the decision in January, and officials communicated it most recently at a meeting with the tribes this month. HHS’ ruling was driven by political appointees in the general counsel and civil rights offices, say three individuals with knowledge of the decision. 

Senior HHS officials “have made it clear that HHS is open to considering other suggestions that tribes may have with respect to Medicaid community engagement demonstration projects,” spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley said, using the administration’s term for work requirements that can also be fulfilled with job training, education and similar activities. 

The tribes insist that any claim of “racial preference” is moot because they’re constitutionally protected as separate governments, dating back to treaties hammered out by President George Washington and reaffirmed in recent decades under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, including the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. 

“The United States has a legal responsibility to provide health care to Native Americans,” said Mary Smith, who was acting head of the Indian Health Service during the Obama administration and is a member of the Cherokee Nation. “It’s the largest prepaid health system in the world — they’ve paid through land and massacres — and now you’re going to take away health care and add a work requirement?”

Trump won't stop at that.  If the regime's position is that tribes have no separate governmental authority, then that destroys centuries' worth of legal protections, something Republicans have long wanted to accomplish.

It looks like Trump is moving to make that happen, as if the federal government of this country hadn't already caused tribes enough grief and sorrow.

The Bernie Sanders Show

Don't look now, but while people in both parties seem to be too busy screaming at Hillary Clinton to just go away and die or something because nobody likes a political loser while simultaneously running against her in November, it seems that political loser Bernie Sanders is getting accolades for pulling a Trump TV.

The Vermont senator, who’s been comparing corporate television programming to drugs and accusing it of creating a “nation of morons” since at least 1979 — and musing to friends about creating an alternative news outlet for at least as long — has spent the last year and a half building something close to a small network out of his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

He understands, but resents, the comparison to the man who’s described the news media as the “enemy of the people.” His take is different, and he has his own plans. “[Am I concerned] that people might see me and Trump saying the same thing? Yes, I am,” Sanders conceded, leaning back in a leather chair in a conference room in his office on a recent Tuesday, as footage of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony one building over played on TVs throughout his office. Wearing his standard uniform — long tie, jacket in need of a few swipes with a lint roller — he launched into the critique now familiar to anyone who’s watched one of his rallies. “My point of view is a very, very different one. My point of view is the corporate media, by definition, is owned by large multinational corporations: their bottom line is to make as much money as they can. They are part of the Establishment. There are issues, there are conflicts of interest in terms of fossil fuel advertising — how they have been very, very weak, in terms of climate change.” Needless to say, the content he produces is not sponsored by advertisers.

Sanders hosts an interview show (“The Bernie Sanders Show”) that he started streaming over Facebook Live on a semi-regular basis after his staff got the idea in February of 2017 to film the senator chatting with the activist Rev. Dr. William Barber. After they posted that simple clip and it earned hundreds of thousands of views with no promotion, they experimented with more seriously producing Sanders’s conversation days later with Bill Nye.

The chat with the Science Guy ended up with 4.5 million views. Sensing an opportunity, the next day Sanders’s aides turned down multiple network TV requests and took his response to Trump’s first address to Congress directly to his Facebook page.

Things escalated. Audio recordings of his conversations, repackaged as a podcast, have since occasionally reached near the top of iTunes’ list of popular programs. Sanders’s press staff — three aides, including Armand Aviram, a former producer at NowThis News, and three paid interns — published 550 original short, policy-focused videos on Facebook and Twitter in 2017 alone. And, this year, he has begun experimenting with streaming town-hall-style programs on Facebook. Each of those live events has outdrawn CNN on the night it aired.

“The idea that we can do a town meeting which would get a significantly larger viewing audience than CNN at that time is something I would not have dreamed of in a million years, a few years ago,” Sanders says.

The result is a growing venue for Sanders’s legions of backers, and other curious progressives, to take in tightly curated lefty takes on policy news — one that, increasingly, competes directly with more traditional news outlets for eyeballs. There’s little room for minute-by-minute analysis of White House drama or Robert Mueller’s probe — and no panels full of opining “strategists” — but also little room for dissent. The scale is unmatched by any other politician, inviting obvious questions about whether Sanders plans to pivot it into a massive primary campaign-mobilization machine come 2020. But the mainstream media criticism implicit in the venture also invites obvious comparisons — if equally stark contrasts — to the man crying “Fake news” at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

It's weird how Sanders is not only allowed to do this but encouraged to do it, something that if Hillary Clinton had tried would be trashed by approximately 90% of America as "fascist propaganda" and "hate speech" by 60% of America.  If Hillary went online to do this, we'd have GOP legislation regulating political speech on the internet by the end of the month.

And yes, there's the problem where Sanders freely admits that American media should be viewed as the untrustworthy enemy "establishment" and bypassed completely in favor of Sanders getting his "direct message" out to the people. 

There's a fair number of people who want to hear Bernie's message, but it seems that on the Left, only he's allowed to have a message.  Everyone in the Democratic party is already automatically suspect, and that's his real message.  You can't trust the party, you can't trust the media, you can only trust me.

That's also Donald Trump's current message.

I do not care for it.

StupidiNews!

• French President Emmanuel Macron will be the subject of Donald Trump's first hosted state dinner this week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit the US later this week.
• Nashville police continue a manhunt for the 29-year-old white right-wing terrorist who killed four in a Waffle House early Sunday, schools are being searched and on lock-out barring all visitors.
• Trump's travel ban legislation gets its first Supreme Court hearing on Wednesday as Hawaii and other states argue that the ban unfairly targets people of Muslim faith. 
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says CIA Director Mike Pompeo will get a full vote before the Senate even if his nomination for Secretary of State does not pass the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
• The Trump regime now wants to turn to the Defense Production Act of 1950 to bail out coal and nuclear energy companies by increasing production as a national security matter.

Last Call For The Snowiest Of Snowflakes

Silicon Valley techbros are asking "what about us white guys?" and want safe spaces away from all that horrible non-whiteness and vagina-having where they can finally feel included in America.

Paul Mann wants to create a safe space for white men.

Mann, a white man who has spent years in the education industry, has begun leading workshops in San Francisco that encourage people in his demographic to explore feelings about race and gender and think about how to better assist women and nonwhites in their workplaces.

Most diversity training is inclusive of all races and genders. But Stepping Up, Mann’s program that began in January, is unusual because the workshops are designed for white men and led by a white man.

It’s an approach that has inevitably stirred controversy. It’s not something that Starbucks, for example, will pursue when it closes its stores in Mayfor a half-day diversity training in the wake of the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia coffee shop. And creating a “safe space,” a stated goal of Stepping Up, is a concept traditionally associated with people who feel marginalized or victimized.

But Mann says some white men are afraid of saying the wrong thing or worry they’ll be put on the defensive — and Stepping Up allows them to express themselves openly and practice language without hurting anyone.

“All this attention has been paid to tech companies not having enough women and not being racially diverse,” Mann said. “It just seems obvious to me that we are ignoring the whole half of the equation, which is white people and men.”

Kim Scott, a former Google executive and author of the leadership book, “Radical Candor,” strongly disagrees with the approach, saying it’s important to learn from people with different backgrounds and perspectives.

“I am glad they care enough to discuss the issue,” Scott said. “I’m very sorry to hear that white men feel so fearful that they feel they have to have this conversation without inviting women and minorities to join.”

I have to say, if you feel the need to have a diversity workshop without any actual diversity in your diversity workshop, it's not a diversity workshop.  Sure, asking white men to think about gender and race is definitely needed, but when your first criteria is "needing to limit the space for the discussion on diversity to white men" you're not just missing the point, you're butchering it.

On purpose.
 

Mitt-igating Circumstances

Mitt Romney finished second in yesterday's Utah GOP primary caucus yesterday, meaning he now faces a June runoff primary against state Rep. Mike Kennedy for Sen. Orrin Hatch's seat.

After a wild and raucous day of voting at the Utah GOP convention, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee was unable to win the 60% that he needed to head to the November ballot unopposed. When none of the 12 candidates were able to cross that threshold, the party continued with successive rounds of caucus voting until one candidate reached 40%. 

On the second round of voting, Utah state representative Mike Kennedy emerged in the lead with 50.88%. Romney came in a close second with 49.12%. 

Romney and Kennedy will now compete in a primary set for June 26. 

After the vote, Romney said he was looking forward to a primary race. 

"This is terrific for the people of Utah, and I really want to thank the delegates who stayed so late to give me the kind of boost that I got here today," Romney said, standing on the convention floor after the proceedings were adjourned. "We're going to have a good primary." 

Kennedy, who had framed the race as David vs. Goliath, said when asked why he had edged out Romney in the vote that he wasn't sure. 

"I don't know," Kennedy said when asked why he thought his message appealed more to delegates than Romney's. "I don't know -- it's just my message."

Or it could be that nobody actually likes the guy.  Still, Romney was able to navigate Utah's byzantine GOP primary rules and if he does win the primary would have to be considered a frontrunner for Hatch's seat.  Hatch is retiring after his 7th term, a whopping 42 years in the US Senate.

Then again, Sen. Mike Lee won the other Utah Senate seat by driving Sen. Bob Bennett out of the party in 2010 as not conservative enough.  Utah Republicans can be weird.

What I do know is that the leading Democratic candidate, Salt Lake City Councilwoman Jenny Wilson, doesn't have much of a chance.  We could be stuck with Mittens in the US Senate for a while if he wins the primary as he's 71, but if Kennedy wins, well, he could be in there for 42 years too.

No real good news here for Dems unless Utah goes through a major demographic change towards purple/blue like the rest of the US Southwest.  It may happen, but not soon enough to help this time around.