Dot Connection (Video)

The Trump/Russia connection.

Schooled

The National Congress of American Indians kindly offered Steve Bannon a history lesson Monday after he blamed “leftists” for the notion that Native Americans were the first Americans.
The largest Native American advocacy group in the country said in a statement to TheWrap that indigenous people not only occupied the land that is now the United States of America long before Europeans, but also deserved much of the credit for the U.S. Constitution.
“‘America,’ a term Mr. Bannon uses to refer to the United States of America, owes its founding, its place, and its very survival to the original, Indigenous inhabitants of this land – the ‘First Americans,'” a spokeswoman for the organizations said. “America as a democratic society and government was modeled after the Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy.”

Somebody had to do it.  If he graduated from a reputable university/college, the institution should be ashamed.

The Nineteenth Century Called. It Wants Its Resident Back.

So. Let's revisit the 1800s to remember why we don't want to do that for real, aside from the disrespect for the dignity of every human being. Ahem.

• Cross-country travel takes much longer than a week.  Much longer.
• Your personal computer is an abacus.  The Difference Engine is not mass-produced.  The telephone is in its early stages.  Not pocket-sized at all.
• Indoor plumbing is making inroads but isn't ubiquitous.
• The streets are dotted with horse excreta.  (Buggy whip manufacturers make good money.)
• Financial panics occur and take down the entire economy.
• 19th Century medicine.
• All suits have to be custom-made, and many tailors were immigrants.
• No air-conditioning.
• No credit cards.
• Vaudeville as mass entertainment.  No TV or radio.
• Very little football.  ( A plus for me, but hey!)
• Little variety in cuisine.

Reincarnated member of the American Know-Nothing Party speaks. As usual, spewing profound ignorance and toxic stupidity insensitivity.

"I Did Warn You Not to Trust Me."

• Sessions’ entire speech was shot through with falsehoods and distortions, each one playing directly off ugly racist stereotypes and assumptions that have nothing to do with the facts on hand.
  
  None of this should be a surprise, however.

  Amanda Marcotte, Salon, in AlterNet.
  
• Two from Yastreblyansky:
• Dream a Little Dream
• The Pretzel of Power
• M. Bouffant reprinting a letter appearing in the Salt Lake Tribune.
• Chauncey DeVega (Indomitable) podcast.  History lesson.

The Day before Yesterday is Too Far in the Past

• 40 years of difference in the prospects of janitorial work.
• Megachurch response.
• Evan Robinson at Group News Blog [Warning: Loads slowly] is running a series documenting the Confederacy:  Part 0; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.
• Not disgracing the hat.
• Wonkette.  Why weren't we told?

Bridges, Not Walls

• Oh?

  President Donald Trump is promising billions to help Texas rebuild from Harvey, but his Republican allies in the House are looking at cutting almost $1 billion from disaster accounts to help finance the president's border wall.
  The pending reduction to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief account is part of a spending bill that the House is scheduled to consider next week when Congress returns from its August recess. The $876 million cut, part of the 1,305-page measure's homeland security section, pays for roughly half the cost of Trump's down payment on a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
  It seems sure that GOP leaders will move to reverse the disaster aid cut next week. The optics are politically bad and there's only $2.3 billion remaining in disaster coffers.

  Can we run this past the Texas delegation? (I love that "the optics are politically bad."  No fooling?)  Emphasis added.
  
  Also,news about the floods (these paragraphs are part of the updated reports on Houston's situation
• 
  

Infestation of the alt-Wrong

It may be time to join the underground.

• The Rude One is nasty.  Rude hateful words.

  The most pathetic thing here is how shocked they pretend to be that their views are attacked, as if no one ever told them that slavery and genocide [...] are bad things to support. And maybe that's on all of us.
  
  It's certainly on the media. Every time there was an article or CNN investigation on whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States, the media made it seem like it was a legitimate story. Led by the nose by right-wing bullshit websites and commentators, the mainstream media gave the spittle-strewn glow of credence to it all, whether it's ACORN or the New Black Panther Party or the thuggish images of black victims of violence, like Trayvon Martin.

• Theodore Roosevelt on criticism of the President and he would know (via Lance Mannion)
  
• Chauncey DeVega:

  Over the last few weeks Trump has played an arena-scale concert where the unifying themes of his music are racism, bigotry, nativism and prejudice.
  
  He has threatened to end civil rights protections for gays and lesbians, announced that transgender soldiers would be kicked out of the United States military, directed his surrogates to launch a full-on effort to end “affirmative action” programs in higher education because they “discriminate” against white people, told America’s police to brutalize suspects (i.e., black and brown people), offered macabre tales about young white women being tortured and killed by Mexican gang members, promised to change America’s immigration policy to give preference to English-speaking immigrants (white people), and continues his efforts to ban Muslims from the United States.
  
  Trump knows his crowd.

• "Blessed Are the Hypocrites" by Wired Sister, Noli Irritare Leones.

  45’s supporters claim to like him because he says what he thinks, and isn’t “politically correct.” The belief that he says what he thinks, of course, rests on the presumption that he does think, about which nothing further need be said right now. They like him because he is willing to call a spade a spade, you should pardon the expression. But the political correctness they decry is the only thing that keeps him from calling the white working-class voters ignorant unwashed hillbilly trailer trash. If he drops that mask (that’s what the word “hypocrite” originally meant), they’re fair game as much as their non-white neighbors. The only thing that keeps him from doing that is that they vote for him.

• Naming your poison.
• From The Daily Banter:  subhead:  It probably sounded better in the original German.
• ETA:  Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars  Guess who spoke.  (with video)
• Another corner heard from (John Amato, Crooks and Liars):

  [Star] Parker quickly turned into an alternate reality person, using alternative facts and full on homophobe.
  
  Parker said, "But you know what's really interesting and really incredible irony here is the same people that are demanding that the Confederate flag comes down are the same people that are insisting that the Rainbow flag goes up. These two flags represent the exact same thing."
  
  I mean, WTF? I'll say it again: WTF?
  
  The Confederate flag represents slave owners who refused to give up their slaves and became traitors to the country, which resulted in a long and bloody civil war which cost the lives of around 620,000 soldiers, on both sides.
  
  The Rainbow flag represents the LGBT community and the pride they have in each other. Gays in America and in many countries have been subjected to violence, imprisonment and death for centuries.
  
  In Charlottesville, the Confederate flag and their southern heroes were being worshiped by white supremacists, who are anti-Semitic in nature, loved slavery and were celebrating their superiority over the black community, as well as all other minorities in America.
  
  Then Parker became an outright Nazi defender.
  
  She continued, "That certain people, groups are not welcome here. So if Nancy Pelosi wants to say that we're going to start shutting down First Amendment rights of a certain group of people, then what what happens next time that the homosexuals want to walk through an American city and protest and counter protesters come out?"

  Emphases added.
  

Finally

• Finally.
• Steve M, Crooks and Liars:

  The right-wing media has now been forced to acknowledge what's going on in Charlottesville ... and the response at Breitbart is: Waaaah! You're being unfair to Trump!

• When you declare "moral victory," shouldn't you have morals?  Or at least not be evil?  (I have mentioned that I prefer ethics to morals, right?)

Continuing to Call Out Evil

• Not evil, only a little bit bad--

  KTVN-TV interviewed 20-year-old [I'm redacting the idiot's name--it's in the article] after he was identified online in a photo showing white nationalists marching through the University of Virginia campus carrying torches Friday.
  [...]
  [Idiot] says he didn't expect the photo to spread but that he's a white nationalist who cares for all people and wants to "preserve what we have."

• Calls it out.

  "With the moral authority of the presidency, you have to call that stuff out," Scaramucci said...

• Analysis of why Trump either can't or won't condemn white "supremacists," neo-Nazism, far-"rightists."
• Evil.

  The organizer of a white nationalist rally in Virginia was chased away from a news conference Sunday, a day after the event erupted in violence and left three people dead.
  Blogger [different idiot] had to be escorted by law enforcement into a police station to avoid protesters.

  Video
  

Calling Evil By Its Name

• Calling evil by its name.
• Calling evil by its name.
• Calling evil by its name.
• ETA:  Calling evil by its name.

  And more than that. White supremacy is evil. Nazism is evil. The racism and hate we saw in Charlottesville yesterday is evil. The domestic terrorism that happened there yesterday — a man, motivated by racial hate, mowing down innocents — is evil. And none of what happened yesterday just happened. It happened because the Nazis and the KKK and the violent white supremacists felt emboldened. They felt emboldened because they believe that one of their own is in the White House, or at least, feel like he’s surrounded himself with enough of their own (or enough fellow travelers) that it’s all the same from a practical point of view. They believe their time has come round at last, and they believe no one is going to stop them, because one of their own has his hand on the levers of power.

• Calling (or not calling) evil by its name.  Not calling evil by its name.
• Mysterious helicopter crash.

A "right"-wing group is using the logo of the Detroit Red Wings (hockey teams have left and right wings).

Hate groups --Evil.

Bouillabaise

• Second threat to liberty.  Lance Mannion.  Some things don't change.
• Unions and the "new" realities and Lee Saunders.  Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns and Money
• Analysis of the campaign strategy.  Booman Tribune, who will be taking some time off.
• Things that Both Sides Don't Do.  Crooks and Liars, Frances Langum, (aka BlueGal)
• Someone who still supports the current President.
• Lawsuit re: Seth Rich conspiracy story.  Aaron Rupar, ThinkProgress
• One from Balloon Juice.
• And a thwacking of Mr. David Brooks by Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog.   Driftglass administers a set-down.

.

Not-Niceness

• It’s hard for those of us outside the bubble of right-wing nationalist Christianity to understand or even imagine what this administration looks like from the perspective of many white evangelicals. This article gives us a hint. They really believe that this administration is full of godly people trying to restore Christian values to America.

  Jesse Curtis, Colorblind Christians
• Minor hypocrisy.

• ...it’s probable that most of the white members of Father Babiuch’s congregation voted for Trump. Which is to say they voted to have their fellow parishioners deported. That doesn’t mean that’s what they wanted. But they have no excuse for not knowing it would happen. And they were told by the Pope that good Catholics invite strangers in. Actually, he came as close as he dared to telling them good Catholics shouldn’t vote for Trump. But this is how he’s winning. Turning Americans against their neighbors.

  Lance Mannion
• Völkische Beobachter

This May Become a Rant

Yastreblyansky mentioned Rod Dreher (understudy "conservative" columnist at the New York Times) who seems to believe that "American Christianity" requires saving by something analogous similar to St. Benedict's Rule.

There is a reason that I tend not to subject myself to the mumblings of "conservatives."  Entirely aside from their lack of respect for me (and I am everything that fascists hate, including intelligent), their "arguments" tend to be baseless.  Unfortunately, because Yastreblyansky did not directly quote Mr. Dreher, I actually had to read that thing.

(No, I'm not going to do a line-by-line fisking; that's more effort than the thing is worth.)

Let's begin with the headline: "Trump Can't Save American Christianity"  I have not gotten the impression from any of Trump's pronouncements that he ever intended to save "American Christianity." Frankly, most of the Republican legislators have spent the last ten years giving the impression that they have never read nor understood the Gospels. They do get rude language, though.

But four days after Anthony Scaramucci's filthy tirade went public, Team Trump's evangelical all-stars – pastors and prominent laity who hustle noisily around the Oval Office trying to find an amen corner –- still had not figured out what to say.

Meanwhile,

the Christian Broadcasting Network ran a puff piece proclaiming that a 'spiritual awakening is underway at hte White House,' thanks to a Bible study with what 'has been called the most evangelical cabinet in history.'

I know that "Oh, really!!" is at the back of your throat.  And then Mr. D. says:

The truth is, Christianity is declining in the United States. As a theologically conservative believer,I take no pleasure in saying that. ... the waning of Christianity will be not only a catastrophe for the church but also a calamity for civil society in ways secular Americans do not appreciate.

He cites a 2014 Pew study (link in original article) concluding that about one in 3 millenials "refuse to identify with a religious tradition."  He believes Americans are becoming more like Europeans or *gasp* Canadians, embracing what a sociologist at Notre Dame (Christian Smith) calls "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."  He believes this is a bad thing.

(I of course don't think that conservative moralism is anything to embrace, but I am so much not a conservative.)

And then he brings up St. Benedict of Nursia, who fouded the Benedictine order (link in original).

I always suspect that what "conservatives" really want is to slot everyone into a monastery or convent.

Know why millenials are avoiding "traditional religion?"  Because they can see that a fair number of those moral mouthpieces are, ahem, speaking out of both sides of their mouths (I am not the only one with an expectation that virulent homophobic leaders have simply not been caught with the live boy in bed).  So-called "pro-lifers" have no objection to sending the born off to "wars of opportunity;" to denying poor (but born) children food,  medical services, schooling;  to trying to return women to the 1940s.  Good morning.

Conservatism remains the ideology of death if you're not a conservative.

No, actually, Trump is probably driving people away from "American Christianity."

(Yes, I am aware that this is not a coherent or cogent argument, either.  But this writer ignited peevishness.  Feh.)

Edited to add:  Echidne of the Snakes on the subject of "right-wing" Christianity.

Dungeness and Draggings

• Damn.  Another rebuilding year.
• Arpaio convicted.  There's a slight chance he'd actually have to do time.

  Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted of a criminal charge Monday for refusing to stop traffic patrols that targeted immigrants, marking a final rebuke for a politician who once drew strong popularity from such crackdowns but was ultimately booted from office as voters became frustrated over his headline-grabbing tactics and deepening legal troubles.

• Scaramucci is Out.  Jurassicpork points at the nonexistent chaos at the White House.

  So now we have no:
  Secretary of the Army
  Secretary of the Navy
  Surgeon General
  Deputy Secretary of State
  [...]
  No strategy for defeating ISIS but a great one for combating a street gang and now no
  Communications Director or
  Director of Homeland Security.
  You know, Donnie Dumbo, I'm not as experienced as you in this presidenting business, but I do know one thing: When you're playing Musical Chairs, the idea is to have more people than open seats, not the other way around.

• Let's hope this isn't true.  (Trita Parsi, AlterNet)

  President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October—the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisors have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this.

  There were no WMDs in Iraq. Anyone remember that?
  

• Tomi Lahren, conservative firebrand, bashes Obamacare while benefiting from it

  It's the headline.
  
• Driftglass.
• Zandar.
• Zandar on hacking the vote.
• ETA:  Shakesville.
• Not The Onion.

I'm trying to imagine all this as a Mel Brooks movie.

Go On, Guess

When I am reading the national news in the New York Times, I should not be muttering "Put on your Big Boy Pants."

Sliding Toward The Downspout of the Slippery Slope

• I thought I'd linked to this article in March; I certainly read it in March, but I just checked March, and no, I did not link it in March.  As it happens, I was looking at Mike's Blog Round Up this morning (instead of getting myself ready to Face the World) and one of the featured articles was one I'd earlier cited, but more eyeballs are more eyeballs, so

  In deep-red America, the white Christian god is king, figuratively and literally. Religious fundamentalism has shaped most of their belief systems. Systems built on a fundamentalist framework are not conducive to introspection, questioning, learning, or change. When you have a belief system built on fundamentalism, it isn’t open to outside criticism, especially by anyone not a member of your tribe and in a position of power. The problem isn’t that coastal elites don’t understand rural Americans. The problem is that rural America doesn’t understand itself and will never listen to anyone outside its bubble. It doesn’t matter how “understanding” you are, how well you listen, what language you use…if you are viewed as an outsider, your views will be automatically discounted. I’ve had hundreds of discussions with rural white Americans and whenever I present them any information that contradicts their entrenched beliefs, no matter how sound, how unquestionable, how obvious, they will not even entertain the possibility that it might be true. Their refusal is a result of the nature of their fundamentalist belief system and the fact that I’m the enemy because I’m an educated liberal.
  
  At some point during the discussion, they will say, “That’s your education talking,” derogatorily, as a general dismissal of everything I said. They truly believe this is a legitimate response, because to them education is not to be trusted. Education is the enemy of fundamentalism because fundamentalism, by its very nature, is not built on facts. 

  (Forsetti's Justice, AlterNet) Emphasis added.
• Also via Mike's Blog Round Up, Vixen Strangely follows the money behavior of the dramatis personae of this re-boot of The West Wing (paging Aaron Sorkin) and throws out a suggestion of slight skulduggery.  Angry Bear has some musing on the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, who does not seem to understand that:

  Social Security has nothing to do with funding for any of these programs. Social Security is paid for entirely by the workers who will get the benefits. It subtracts not one dime from the federal budget. Except, of course, when the Congress is obligated to REPAY the money it BORROWED FROM Social Security.

• Leaks, firing, optics:  Joy Reid, video.  (Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars)

Glass Egos

Men who cannot bear to be mocked or laughed at.  (Guess.  Go on, guess.)

That fear of being laughed at lives right at the existential core of toxic masculinity. In his excellent 2004 book, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, psychologist Stephen Ducat showed that conservative masculinity is rooted in the idea that penetration—having your body, property, resources, sense of control, or dignity taken against your will—is for women, gay men, and other people who don’t have what it “takes” to secure their own boundaries, and therefore exist to be dominated by those who do. A “real man” is, by definition, one who can and will defend his personal boundaries against all threats at all times—and also has the power, if he wishes, to violate the boundaries of others if he chooses.

Sara Robinson (yes!!!), Rewired.  (Book title links to Amazon in original.) (Just close the pop-up; I do agree, but I've given out my email address too often.)(via Shakesville.)

Dessert.

Yes, I know.

Heather Digby Parton at Salon about the "voter fraud" commission. (Hullabaloo.)

That’s an outrageous assertion. It is completely impossible that 3 million votes were cast illegally in 2016. In a world that makes sense he would have been fired immediately for casting such a shadow over the electoral results. There have been more than nine major investigations into alleged “voter fraud” and it just does not exist on even a small systematic scale much less something like what he’s suggesting.

[...]

But Trump needn’t worry. Kobach is a conservative extremist whose life’s work is preventing people from voting. That’s what this is about. Trump’s victory will never be questioned by him.

There is one slight mystery about all this, however. With all this talk of our electoral system being vulnerable to fraud the commission isn’t the least bit interested in the subject of Russian interference in the election. That seems odd.

Potpourri

I'd like to say this is a themed collection of links.  Unfortunately, it isn't.  Much.

• Via supergee, 10 easily-disproved falsehoods.  (Close the poll. )
• Clouding their minds.

  Meanwhile Trump, his family and his closest associates are using the presidency to personally enrich themselves. They view it as a personal ATM and not as a means of serving the public good and the general welfare. Except for what he can force by fiat, Trump has accomplished none of his major campaign promises — and in the case of building his “amazing” wall and “draining the swamp” he has all but admitted such promises were snake oil and outright lies to con the rubes.
  
  Nevertheless, Trump’s voters still enthusiastically support him.

   (Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable)
• You know, it is completely unnecessary to twist the words of "right-wing" politicians to cause them to sound off.

  [Caltech geochemist Kenneth] Farley was testifying in his capacity as the project scientist for the 2020 Mars rover, and at the end of Rohrabacher's allotted time, the congressman asked for one extra question.
  "You have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago," he told the panel. "Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?"
  "So the evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago, not thousands of years ago," Farley replied. "And there would be ... there's no evidence that I'm aware of..."
  Rohrabacher persisted: "Would you rule that out? See, there's some people ... well, anyway..."
  "I would say that is extremely unlikely," Farley said.

• Lance Mannion on David (the Biblical one) and "conservative Christian" cognitive dissonance.

The point is that even a man as flawed and sinful as David can find favor in God's eyes as long as he acknowledges God's greatness and answers to His will. God has been long in the habit of using sinners for His purposes. And as we are all sinners and we are all tools for him to use according to His needs, it's not for us to judge when He decides to use someone as flawed and sinful as Donald Trump. It's all part of the plan. It would seem then that God's plan includes spreading fear and loathing of Muslims and Mexicans, turning away war refugees, deporting people by the millions, breaking up countless families in the process, taking health care away from many millions more, leaving children, old people, the poor, and unfortunate to suffer and die, and in short, having us as a Christian nation ignoring Matthew 25.

• The Smiths -- not Morrissey's former group.  Why Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is trying to buy Tribune Media, is a threat.

  The local TV news giant has been pushing a right-wing slant on local television stations across the country for years. Owned by the Smiths, a family of longtime Republican donors who have all the ambition of News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch but a much lower profile, Sinclair has mostly flown under the radar. But following the election of President Donald Trump, the network has begun adopting the playbook Roger Ailes used to turn Fox News into a conservative media goliath.
  
  Over the last few months, Sinclair has been requiring its stations to run more commentaries from pro-Trump personalities and expanding its reach to greater numbers of unassuming viewers in new local media markets. Now it's defending these clear moves to mimic the aspiring state media over at Fox with warped, brainwash-y logic: The conservative propaganda it pushes on its viewers is necessary because the rest of the media is biased.

  (Pam Vogel, Media Matters, via AlterNet)
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer's religious education.

  That is “what made it possible for him to see the character of the regime Hitler represented when so many others did not.”

  (Fred Clark, The Slacktivist, at Patheos, which I need to add to the blogroll.)
  
• Conscienceless.  (Undercover Blue, Hullabaloo)

  After decades of accusations from conservatives that the American left advances reprehensible moral relativism, this week we saw that the real sin was having morals of any kind. What the Trump family modeled for the world this week is what it looks like to have none. Watergate veteran John Dean warned during the Bush II administration of the rise of "Conservatives Without Conscience."

• AlterNet:

  I wanted to remind my fellow Americans that intelligent people, not so different from ourselves, have experienced the collapse of a republic before. It is one example among many. Republics, like other forms of government, exist in history and can rise and fall...A quarter century ago, after the collapse of communism, we declared that history was over—and in an amazing way we forgot everything we once knew about communism, fascism and National Socialism...

• Booman Tribune looks askance (three-fer!) (Walls and Bridges Interviews) 

  1. It is not going to be hard for Democrats to oppose Trump’s wall, and it doesn’t matter if it is a “bollard” wall or a solar energy plant that can power the entire southwest. There will be no votes for Trump’s stupid wall. Perhaps nowhere does President Trump more clearly demonstrate that he’s insane than when he talks about this subject. He wants windows on the wall so people will be able to see the drug dealers on the other side before they hoist 60 lb. sacks of dope over the top and onto their necks. In case you are in doubt about the lunacy of this talk, a typical bowling ball is 15 lbs. Could you throw four bowling balls all at once fifty feet into the air?

  2. Everything in the interview is like this. It’s all funhouse mirrors and mostly false assertions that are as incriminating as they are intended to be exculpatory. If the New York Times were to interview Trump tomorrow and ask all the same questions, all the details would be different but the overall impression would be the same. The president lies so much and has such a distorted idea of what’s happening around him that he literally doesn’t know or care what is true and what is not.
     
     What shines through it all, though, is his unapologetic intention to obstruct justice. He didn’t want Sessions to bow out of his appointment because he was compromised. He didn’t want Sessions to testify truthfully. He wanted Sessions to kill the investigation and he recused himself instead. For that, he cannot be forgiven.

  3. I believe, although cannot prove, that they had sent Manafort to Trump with a hard offer to refuse. Manafort would work on his delegate count for no pay. Michael Flynn was already compromised because he hadn’t notified the Pentagon that he was taking tens of thousands of dollars from the Kremlin to make appearances on the Russian Today (RT) network and badmouth the Obama administration. The Trump campaign was therefore compromised six ways to Sunday by the time the summer had begun.
     
     [...]
     
     The overall picture is clear. Russia wanted Trump to win and Trump wanted Russia’s help. The collusion was explicit, some of it is well-documented, and the defense is now that anybody would have done the same.

• Maneuverings that need watching.
• The People's Filibuster (Red Painter, Crooks and Liars)
• Working conditions of California port truckers.  

  Those willing to answer questions said they have never used truck leases as a way to mistreat drivers. Several insisted that truckers’ allegations have been manufactured as part of a union organizing campaign by the Teamsters. The union has for years helped drivers file labor complaints and lawsuits.

  Dunno. The Teamsters would be making a lot more noise.
• Echidne of the Snakes somewhat agreeing with Jennifer Rubin.
• And it's only Thursday.

And Incidentally...

• Via Zandar Versus the Stupid:
• Caitlin Owens, Axios, notes that Ted Cruz has proposed health insurance deregulation such that:

  The bottom line: That would give Republicans a better idea of the impact of his proposal, which would let insurers sell health plans that don't meet Affordable Care Act standards — including, potentially, waiving the pre-existing condition rules — as long as they also sell plans that comply with all of the ACA insurance regulations.

• Jack Moore at GQ's take:

  Anyway, Cruz, in his typical pompous ass way, believes he has solved the Senate's health care bill. His proposal is designed to allow moderate Republicans who are still on the fence to claim they saved the Obamacare protections that are popular with voters while simultaneously allowing insurers to offer plans that don't include such protections, thus costing the government less and pleasing hard-line right-wingers like Cruz. If you're thinking to yourself, how the hell would that work? The short answer is that it wouldn't.

• Robert Reich minces no words.
• Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky Secretary of State, bluntly dismissed "voter fraud" commission.

  Lundergan Grimes was well prepared to discuss Trump's phony voter fraud commission at length and replied, "If Donald Trump asked for not only your address but date of birth, political affiliation and entire voting history along with last four digits of your social security number, would you give it to him?"
  
  She continued, "The answer from Kentucky and states around the United States is a resounding no. There is no state fully complying with what has been a request from a sham commission that the president set up to try to create and find evidence to back up a lie that has simply been disputed..."

  (John Amato, Crooks and Liars)
• Ilana Novak at AlterNet summarizes Paul Krugman's Monday New York Times column, which suggests that Trump is trying to start a trade war.  Not good.
• Real headline at the SF Gate.com:  Trump accuses Clinton of colluding with Democrats to defeat 'Crazy Bernie Sanders'
• Zandar, citing New York magazine, says Justice Anthony Kennedy may be retiring next year, and why that is bad.
• More Zandar:  Lowered rates of unemployment and disparate electoral results.
• Jesse Curtis:  "On Taking Action For Black Lives"  Read this or stop pretending to be an activist.
• Annoying Anti-Feminists.  (Alas, A Blog)