Daily Kos

A provision in the fast-trade authority bill Congress passed in June prohibits including any countries on the Tier 3 of the State Department's human trafficking list. That's the bottom-of-the-barrel category applying to Syria, North Korea and ... Malaysia. The latter nation is one of the 12 nations negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

George Zornick at The Nation writes—Obama Won’t Let Some Mass Graves Stop the TPP:

Malaysia is home to many “outsourcing companies” that are, in reality, professional slaving operations: foreign workers, often refugees fleeing desperate situations in nearby countries like Burma, are recruited to the country with the promise of legitimate work but then subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking.

Senator Robert Menendez inserted language into the Senate version of fast-track prohibiting the use of fast-track for a trade deal with a Tier 3 country, presumably with an eye on Malaysia. The Obama administration and Republican leaders in the House tried to have the language removed but were unable to excise it due to the complicated path the fast-track bill took through Congress.

Observers were then unsure what would happen next. Would Malaysia be thrown out of the deal? Would the United States lean hard on the Malaysian government to crack down on human traffickers so it could sign the trade deal? Was there any chance fast track would be disengaged for the TPP?

Instead, the Obama administration appears to have chosen another path that has shocked the human-rights community: It will simply reclassify Malaysia. Reuters has reported that when the Trafficking in Persons report comes out next week, Malaysia will no longer be a Tier 3 country.

There is essentially zero evidence Malaysia has done anything to earn this reclassification.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Live from New York! It's Brian Keeler Blograising Night!:

Our own netroots hero, Brian Keeler (NYBri), set on taking the New York State Senate back from the Republicans, is hosting a fundraising/summer party/cool meetup at Prey in New York City, ready to kick off in a few minutes.

And now, due to the miracle of blogs, you too can be virtually there!
For the next three hours, we will attempt to break down the space/time continuum here at Daily Kos ... with live accounts and interviews and pictures of the Prey event, as the East Coasters belly up to the bar on Brian's behalf while the West Coasters are still—depressingly—stuck at work.

Endorsed by Eliot Spitzer, Brian's campaign for the 41st State Senate seat has been designated a top tier race by the New York DSCC, and tonight we want to raise a boatload of money before the July 11 filing deadline so he can fulfill the prediction that early money makes money. Let's take care of the netroots' own!

Remember: Taking back the NY State Senate has national implications for all of us as well; if the Dems take back the State Senate, a 2007 redistricting could deliver four more congressional seats in Washington in 2008.

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Tweet of the Day

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show, we're back on the air! Could it be same culprit that took down NYSE, UA, WSJ & KITM? Connect the dots! Follow the money! Actually, the money can come from you. Help support that which benefits you the most! Will Bernie or Hillary benefit you the most? Can David persuade you to pick your politicians pragmatically? The confederate flag comes down - Yay! (But not everyone is happy.) About this third person stuff: thanks to Scott Anderson for his help in crafting these summaries, and also for clips of guest appearances on the show that you'll be seeing more of soon! Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!

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High Impact Posts Top Comments • The Evening Blues

This is completely unacceptable. If we removed the word "police" from this story and replaced it with "gang members," those gang members would be in jail right now and would be the national face for the mistreatment of autistic children.

A developmentally disabled Bronx teen was punched in the face and body slammed by three cops for no valid reason — even as his mother cried he’s autistic, a lawsuit charges.

Troy Canales, 18, says his trust in the NYPD was shattered by the “hostile” 2014 encounter in front of his Bedford Park home.

“I feel terrified of cops now,” Canales told the Daily News on Wednesday.

A lawsuit seeking unspecified damages was filed in Manhattan Federal Court, charging Canales was wrongfully assaulted, falsely imprisoned and had his constitutional rights violated.

Simply hanging outside of his Bedford Park home, three NYPD officers confronted Troy and asked him what he was doing. When he told them that he was "chilling," they immediately, according to the lawsuit, grabbed him, slammed his face on concrete and punched him with their fists. With his mother screaming that Troy has autism, the police handcuffed Troy anyway, and hauled him off to the police station.

Head below the fold for more on this story.

Oh, how we wish this were The Onion. Alas, noted crazy person Pat Buchanan is making the case for civil disobedience among the right-wing crowd to overturn the Supreme Court's marriage equality decision. And you won't believe some of the examples he cited as justification for "rebellion":

New England abolitionists backed the anti-slavery fanatic John Brown, who conducted the raid on Harpers Ferry that got him hanged but helped to precipitate a Civil War. That war was fought over whether 11 Southern states had the same right to break free of Mr. Lincoln’s Union as the 13 colonies did to break free of George III’s England.

"Mr. Lincoln's Union." Okay. Get the impression he might've been writing this in his favorite pair of Confederate flag shorts? He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans after all.

Rosa Parks is a heroine because she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, despite the laws segregating public transit that relegated blacks to the “back of the bus.”

In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King, defending civil disobedience, cited Augustine – “an unjust law is no law at all” – and Aquinas who defined an unjust law as “a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

Said King, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Oh, Pat. Nevermind that all those named in your op-ed were people fighting to gain liberty and equal rights under the law. All those bakers and county clerks do have freedom. The freedom to find another job more suited to their religious beliefs. For instance, working for the Christian Broadcasting Network. Their rights aren't being denied. Their ability to discriminate based on their own personal religious beliefs are being stunted, as they should be, particularly when it comes to elected positions responsible for overseeing ALL the people.

In the end, we'll see if this civil disobedience appears or not. Emphasis on civil, something right-wing protests are not generally known for. Comments from other right-wing preachers aren't exactly encouraging:

Wiles claimed that the U.S. has reached the point where federal agents will soon move to arrest pastors and seize church buildings, sparking a violent confrontation: “You’re going to see gunfire.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Shines said. He added that while “we’ll continue to utilize as much as even though it is trampled on, and that is, working within the confines of the law, but if we are forced to deal with these issues, make no mistake about it, America was born out of this idea where pastors left their pulpits to fight back a tyranny from England. I don’t believe that we’re just a few hundred years away from it that we could not see, unfortunately, things like that again, but if it needs be, I think people that have strong religious convictions as I and others do, we will be more than up for that task.”

Republican presidential candidates, notably Donald Trump as well as Jeb! Bush and Rand Paul, are politicizing the killing of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco last week in a random attack allegedly by an immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez. They are calling for an end to "sanctuary cities," blaming that policy for Steinle's death. These cities have a policy of not honoring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, but evidence suggests that this policy seems to be making cities safer, not more dangerous.

If the GOP candidates are to be believed, then we should have seen a rise in San Francisco's murder rate in the 26 years since it enacted its sanctuary law, and a further spike since 2013, when the city amended the law to cover even repeat felons such as Lopez-Sanchez. Instead, the city's murder rate has fallen to its lowest level in decades. […]

We're seeing a similar phenomenon throughout California. According to a Department of Justice report released last week, the number of homicides in the state fell to to 1,691 last year, the lowest since 1971. Meanwhile, the state legislature and all but a few counties have enacted sanctuary laws, though they vary in the sorts of protections offered.

It's worth noting that crime has fallen nationwide in recent years, but San Francisco's murder rate is also low compared to that of comparable cities that don't have sanctuary policies.

Yep. Those are two similar-sized cities in Texas where the crime rate is significantly higher than in San Francisco. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's all about San Francisco's sanctuary status—it might have as much to do with Texas's firearm obsession. But what we do know, according to studies from the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Police Foundation reported in this story, is that legal and undocumented immigrant populations are less likely to want to cooperate with police when police are involved in immigration enforcement. That means less reporting of crime and cooperation with police investigations. Additional data from the census analyzed by the Immigration Policy Center suggests that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born here, at least in terms of incarceration rates.

This isn't definitive proof that sanctuary cities are safer than other cities, but it's a pretty strong argument. It's certainly enough to refute the latest attacks by Republicans—following Donald Trump's lead—on the nation's immigrants.

A couple interesting pieces from Dan Balz and Jonathan Martin lend some insight into Scott Walker's political world—and he and his aides think he's hot stuff.

First takeaway, Walker's aides believe he's got his finger on the pulse of social conservatives, tea partiers, and GOP "moderates."

They consider Walker uniquely equipped among the candidates to appeal across the spectrum of the Republican Party. “There are three legs of the stool,” campaign manager Rick Wiley said in an interview. “We play in all three. Who else does?”

Second, he's placing all his bets on winning Iowa (where he's actually losing steam in the polls despite being in first place there).

Iowa is the key: Walker is leading the polls there and, as a neighboring governor, he has easy access to the state. His advisers expect him to win the Iowa caucuses early next year, and they say he can follow that with top-three finishes in New Hampshire and South Carolina. They also think he can score an early victory in Nevada’s caucuses.

Third, he's quite literally a career politician.

He has spent his entire adult life in politics, first running for state representative at 22. He has held elected office continuously since 1993; the presidential contest will be his 14th campaign.

Fourth (and my personal fav), he doesn't hire strategists because he's too smart—he's his own personal strategist.

Another Republican recalled a fund-raiser for the Republican Governors Association last summer in which Mr. Walker, locked in an expensive re-election fight, described the Democratic attacks against him and boasted of already having crafted his response to one on abortion. Indeed, he went on to write and design the commercial himself, in which he faced the camera and, in solemn tones, said he had signed legislation leaving “the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”

So yeah, he totally lied in that ad, and he did so at his own behest. Other candidates might flip-flop based on what their consultants tell them to do.

But not Scott Walker. He's his own man—a self-made flip-flopper. Bravo, Scott, bravo.

This is not science fiction. The NYPD and the Miami police department have now contracted out a company named HunchLab to help them institute what they call "predictive policing intelligence." On the HunchLab website, they describe their service like this:

HunchLab is a web-based predictive policing system. Advanced statistical models automatically include concepts such as aoristic temporal analysis, seasonality, risk terrain modeling, near repeats, and collective efficacy to best forecast when and where crimes are likely to emerge. This all lets you focus on one thing: responding.

In other words, using their pre-existing data on arrests and crime, the technology is going to predict new locations for crime so that police can be there to respond before it happens.

I only have one question, and of course it's rhetorical, and we all know the answer: does this system account for widespread racism in policing? If the data that HunchLab is given by the NYPD and the Miami police department to predict future crimes is skewed by wrongful arrests and illegal detentions, which, accounting for the reality that racism in policing has never been properly detailed on any massive scale, then we can reasonably ensure that the predictive policing technology will simply predict more racist police interventions. This is wrong and unethical on a hundred different levels.

How will it account for the reality that this NYPD detective testified under oath that he and others fabricated charges against innocent people to meet quotas? Will it account for the racist reality than in some places far more white people that are pulled over by police are found with drugs and contraband, but a higher percentage of African Americans end up arrested by those same police? If the data the system uses is based on arrests, which it likely does, and not the presence of drugs that should in fact warrant an arrest, we can already determine that this system will do nothing but advance more racist policing.

Will it count arrests like that of Kalief Browder, in which he spent three years in prison and was then released without ever being charged with a crime? Will it account for incidents like what we saw in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a 53-year-old white security guard with illegal marijuana in his bag shot an unarmed young man in his own neighborhood, but wasn't arrested for the shooting or the marijuana?

Will it predict crimes by police like when Bill "Robocop" Melendez illegally beat a man and planted drugs on him? Will it predict sexual assaults like when NYPD Sergeant Michael Iscenko tossed his own semen on an administrative assistant in the office? Will it predict moments like when this Charleston, South Carolina, officer murdered Walter Scott? This is bogus.

Andrew Ferguson, Law Professor at UDC, raised a series of ethical questions about this predictive policing system over a year ago as he saw it coming for New York when "stop and frisk" policies were being outlawed. Free to create new systems and policies without any true level of public input, police are given a ridiculous amount of freedom to do what's right in their own eyes, but we must stand against these systems and advocate for greater public input and oversight with all matters of public safety.

Even though Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former Attorney General Eric Holder have each called the Charleston massacre of nine members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston clear cases of "domestic terrorism," FBI Director James Comey, for the second time, continues to express his hesitancy to label it as anything other than a hate crime.

Mind you, when a black man walked into a conservative charity with a gun and some chicken sandwiches and was stopped at the door by security, the FBI called him a terrorist and the Justice Department charged and helped convict him for terrorism. He never fired a single bullet.

Speaking Thursday to Ryan Reilly of Huffington Post, FBI Director Comey continued to express hesitancy in calling the shooting terrorism.

Before the manifesto surfaced online, Comey said he was unsure whether the shooting was a "political act.” An FBI spokesman said Comey's comments were made while the situation was "still fluid." But now that Roof's motivations are more clear, Comey said he's still not sure.

"I don't know yet," Comey said Thursday, when The Huffington Post asked him whether the Charleston shooting was an act of terrorism. "I was asked about that a day or so after and said that, based on what I knew at that point, I didn't see it fitting the definition. Since then, we're found the so-called manifesto online, so I know the investigators and prosecutors are looking at it through the lens of hate crime, through the lens, potentially, of terrorism."

Could a cultural gap exist here such that two African-American attorney generals clearly and unmistakably see this shooting as terrorism while the white FBI director appears to be truly struggling to accept it as such?

It's preposterous at this point. Not only did Dylann Roof leave behind a racist manifesto clearly expressing his intentions, he deliberately left a living witness to do the same. He fully and completely intended to cause harm and strike terror in a community—and was successful with his goals, but Director Comey refuses to see it.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Late Night Snark: Winners, Wankers and Tokers edition

Clip of news reporter: A North Carolina activist made it her personal mission to remove the confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State House. Thirty-year-old Bree Newsome scaled the thirty-foot pole and descended with the flag in hand.
Larry Wilmore: That is awesome. It's kind of like that old saying: If you want something done, wait around and do nothing until a kick-ass black woman does that shit for you.
---The Nightly Show

Stephen Colbert posted this "bunker selfie" with to-do
list: 1) Abandon all hope. 2) Hoard urine. 3) Pick mug
for studio desk. The new Late Show debuts in 59 days.

"New Jersey Governor Chris Christie surveyed an overstuffed field of mediocre candidates and thought, eh, I'm as shitty as any one of those guys."
---Jon Stewart

"Today Donald Trump reaffirmed his stance against gay marriage. Trump said marriage is between a rich guy and his much younger third wife."
---Conan O'Brien

"Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal announced that he’s running for president, which makes him the 13th Republican to enter the race so far. Yeah, 13 Republican candidates.  
Or as that’s also called: a banker’s dozen."
---Jimmy Fallon

"The state of Oregon today became the fourth state to legalize recreational marijuana. At long last the people of Oregon can do exactly what they've been doing all along anyway."
---Jimmy Kimmel

And three years ago:

"In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled President Obama's healthcare mandate is constitutional. This is a major victory for President Obama, who spent three years promoting it, and a major setback for Mitt Romney, who spent three years creating it."
---Jay Leno

C'mon down below the fold. We're firing off lawn darts at ISIS from our new surplus U.S. Army intercontinental ballistic missile launcher and it is freakin' awesome. Your west coast-friendly edition of  Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Citing diplomatic sources, Reuters reports that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif have engaged in shouting matches behind closed doors during the past 10 days of negotiation in Vienna over Iran's nuclear program.

But that hasn't stopped any of the seven parties in the talks from continuing to say progress is being made. Negotiations will, in fact, continue until at least Monday, the third extension of negotiations since a June 30 deadline for coming up with an agreement failed to be met.

Although no wise person would bet the rent money on it, an agreement could be announced this time. Or they could continue for weeks. The Obama administration has said it will not continue the talks forever, it's also made clear that it won't be rushed by deadlines. Kerry said: "We can’t wait forever. If the tough decisions don’t get made, we are absolutely prepared to call an end to this."

The negotiations to end a 12-year standoff—over what Iran's leaders call a peaceful nuclear program and what the United States and other nations say is Tehran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon or put itself in a position to build one—have been going on intensively since November 2013 but were initiated soon after centrist Hassan Rouhani was elected president of Iran in June of that year.

Both sides have recently accused the other of moving the goal posts in the talks. The BBC cites an unnamed senior Iranian official as lamenting that instead of facing a unified stance on some issues, Iran has to engage in bilateral negotiations with the six other nations involved in the talks because each has different "red lines." While those nations are hard-nosed on their own red lines, they are flexible on those of their negotiating partners, the official said.

A key difference that is now stalling further progress is Iran's demand that, as part of a final agreement, the U.N. must end its embargo on conventional arms and missiles to Iran.
Russia, which, with the United States is one of six nations negotiating with Iran, is strongly in support of Tehran's position in the matter. The United States and France have always taken the view that the arms embargo should not be part of the nuclear agreement. Disputes over the timing of the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran appear to have been resolved.

Among remaining disputes is how much access U.N. inspectors will have to Iran's military sites and how much Iran will disclose about its possible militarily related nuclear activities in the past.

The latest missed deadline means that Congress will get 60 days instead of 30 to review any final agreement that is delivered before September 9. After that, the review period reverts to 30 days. For some in Congress, despite endlessly repeating that it's better to have no deal than a bad deal, a good deal in their view is one in which Iran totally capitulates. Several of these critics are not shy about noting their favored solution in the matter: bombing Iran's nuclear facilities.

In a move certain to irk right wingers who have made no secret of their opposition to the federal protection of more public land, the Obama administration announced Friday that it has designated more than a million acres in Nevada, California and Texas as national monuments:

Using his authority under the Antiquities Act, the president created a protected area spanning roughly 704,000 acres in central Nevada’s Basin and Range, as well as smaller ones in California’s Berryessa Snow Mountain and Texas’ Waco Mammoth.

With the new designations, Obama has established or expanded 19 national monuments for a total of more than 260 million acres of public lands and waters, more than any previous president. The Basin and Range monument alone, at more than 1,000 square miles, is nearly the size of Rhode Island.

The move pleased environmental advocates. “By creating these three new national monuments, President Obama is continuing his commitment to preserving America’s treasured places and cementing his well-deserved place in conservation history,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters.

After two decades of congressional inaction against the looting and desecration of American Indian sites in the Southwest, the Act for the Preservation of Antiquities was signed into law in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. It gave the president broad authority to set aside public land as a national monument, protecting historic or ecologically significant sites without congressional approval from new development like mining, oil wells and grazing. Roosevelt wasn't stingy in that department. By the time his second term of office ended in 1909, he had designated 18 sites as national monuments. These included Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Muir Woods in California, Natural Bridges in Utah and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, which was named a national park in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson.

Since Roosevelt, 16 other presidents have designated public land as national monuments.

Below the orange hiking-trail loop are some details about the three new designations.

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

Click to enlarge.

I’m not going to San Diego Comic Con, but I’m hosting my own panel online, previewing a whole slate of new characters that may or may not appear in future comics. Hopefully Marvel buys the rights and beats these franchises into the ground so I can retire and not have to listen to anything Donald Trump says ever again.

Donald Trump may be pushing the GOP establishment to the brink, but two high-profile conservative Americans are totally on board with him: Arizona's own Sherriff Joe Arpaio and former Gov. Jan Brewer.

“I believe that Mr. Trump is kind of telling it like it really, truly is,” Brewer told CNN Wednesday. “You know, being the Governor, the gateway of illegal immigration for six years, we had to deal with a lot of things.”

Meanwhile Arpaio has been running damage control for Trump.

“There’s no lie about the drugs coming from Mexico.”

“Everybody knows that,” he said. “I talk about it all the time. The majority of the drugs coming into my county, they are from Mexico. So that’s a true statement.”

Arpaio further asserted his belief that Trump did not mean “to say anything derogatory about all the great people from Mexico.”

Well, that was easy. Arpaio really took the sting out of it, don't ya think?

Trump's going to be building on the work of his two goodwill ambassadors in Arizona this weekend. He's got it on good authority that he's super popular there.

“Somebody said I’m the most popular person in Arizona because of my stance, and I’m going to be there this weekend.”

Expect fireworks.

Just in from Trump's office: "Due to the overwhelming response for Saturday's rally in Phoenix, Arizona the venue has been changed..."

— Robert Costa (@costareports) July 10, 2015