”Secrecy continues to shield the NSA from uncomfortable questions about the growing role of the agency and its contractors in data mining and the burgeoning field of cybersecurity. The only way the American public ever learns what the NSA is doing to them is from whistleblowers, including, most recently, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents about the rise of the NSA’s massive data-mining operations during the Obama administration. To keep the war on terror going, the government has tried to make sure that whistleblowers are isolated and ostracized.”
                    —James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, 2014

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—The death of the Republican dog whistle:

In the idealized version of the GOP primary, establishment Republicans would curry favor with their Wall Street pals while sending coded dog whistles to their foot soldiers—on race, immigration, reproductive freedoms, etc. Those dog whistles would motivate the GOP base without revealing their true radical nature to the American mainstream. It was a genius system while it worked, one that saw no parallel on the progressive side.

But the days of the dog whistle are over. The election of President Barack Obama created an entire cottage industry trying to prove how un-American and Kenyan he supposedly is, while Republicans like Rep. Pete Hoekstra run blatantly anti-Asian ads. Republicans laugh about electrocuting immigrants who will cut off your head in the desert if they're not stopped, while passing laws openly hostile to brown people. Attacks on homosexuals have escalated to new hysterical highs as society becomes more tolerant and open to equality.

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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin, Joan McCarter, and Armando join host David Waldman in surveying the burning Landscape o’ Lunacy. Republicans circle the wagons, but must be wondering if they can survive it. Or at least survive longer than we do in Crazytown.

The Lone Star state just loves women. Actually, it just loves trying to control women; specifically their access to health care and abortion—so much so that last year, Texas lawmakers tried to force women who have miscarriages and abortions to bury their fetal tissue. Their obsession with women and our lady parts is the stuff of legend. But outside of regulating a woman’s right to choice, they tend to have very little concern with actually improving the lives of women and girls.

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise then that while the state claims to be on the forefront of combatting sex trafficking, they have spent more money on catching pimps than working to rehabilitate the victims of trafficking. 

They've devoted hardly any resources to the victims whose testimony is essential to putting sex traffickers behind bars. They have also failed to confront the role the child welfare system plays in providing a supply of vulnerable kids to criminals waiting to exploit them.

Eighty-six percent of missing children suspected of being forced into sex work came from the child welfare system, national data show, and a state-funded study estimated that the vast majority of young victims in Texas had some contact with Child Protective Services. 

Apparently, the state has lots of use for you if you can testify against the person who has forced you into sex work and help them get a conviction.

They've made it easier to prosecute men and women who exploit minors, as well as the buyers who seek to purchase sex with them. They've established a special team inside the attorney general's office to help unravel sex-trafficking rings. 

But reforming the foster care system or paying for victim’s services?  That’s out of the question.

Well, this is a bit of a problem for House Speaker Paul Ryan.

 Trump's "yes" man has a very serious problem here in making those kinds of promises. That's because Republicans are now in all-out warfare over how they're going to do repeal. Not "replace," mind you. They haven’t gotten that far. They’re still stuck on the one part they all agree on: repeal.

The more centrist wing of the party wants to slow the entire process down. They say Republicans need to act deliberately to avoid public panic over millions potentially losing their insurance. The party, they argue, needs to put forward a replacement plan—or at least as much of one that can pass using a special, majority-vote mechanism—before it ditches the law. Forget the 2015 repeal bill that Barack Obama vetoed, they add: It's not relevant now that Republicans own the problem.

“It’s not realistic,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) of the 2015 bill. “The imperative is to do it right and I don’t think that does it right. I don’t think you’ll find much currency for that approach in the Senate.”

Conservatives are in a different place entirely.

Sen. John Tune (R-SD) doesn't want to wait around for the new FCC to kill net neutrality, or perhaps it’s that his big telecom overlords don't want to wait. So he's moving forward with trying to craft legislation.

“Sen. Thune is open to immediately working with his colleagues on legislation if there is a serious readiness on the other side of the aisle to come to the table,” Commerce Committee spokesman Frederick Hill said Friday in an email to Morning Consult. “To date, Democrats haven’t been quite ready to sit down.”

At the same time, Hill added that action from the FCC action could lead to “new engagement” from Democrats in a legislative effort, and Thune (R-S.D.) is “all for that.” […]

Many Senate Democrats have been steadfast in their desire to preserve the net neutrality rules and the enforcement power given to the FCC. But with little leverage in Congress and at the agency, those senators have said constituents should flood lawmakers’ offices with calls and the FCC with comments to voice their support for the Open Internet order.

Thune wants to pretend like he's supporting net neutrality by pushing legislation that "would codify certain principles that base the idea of net neutrality into law, such as the prohibition of paid prioritization and blocking and throttling online content." But he would stop short of the open internet order that's still in effect, essentially reclassifying broadband as a utility and giving the FCC the power to actually enforce the rules.

Senate Democrats are absolutely right—they can refuse to work with Thune, and they can filibuster bad legislation. But they need us. They need the millions of people who worked to get the open internet rules in the first place to demand that the FCC preserves them.

So let's give FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the FCC a reminder of what getting 6 million comments on an issue is like. Call or write the FCC and tell them they can't sneak our open internet away.

So a funny thing happened on Tuesday night in Minnesota, which held a special election for a vacant seat in the state House. This district, known as 32B and located in the Minneapolis exurbs, voted for Donald Trump by an overwhelming 61-32 margin, but Republican Anne Neu beat Democrat Laurie Wagner just 53-47. Put another way, the GOP did 23 points worse on Tuesday than Trump did in November—and it’s hard to see how that’s a positive sign for them.

Now, a win’s still a win, and yeah, we lost. But this isn’t about “moral victories” or “narratives” or anything so gossamer. Rather, the results are interesting because they have us wondering whether we’ll see this kind of turn against Trump in other districts in the near future. Needless to say, if a seat that Trump won by, say, 10 points were to also shift against Republicans by 23 points, they’d be screwed.

This, though, is where the cautious analyst steps in notes that this is just a single data point, and it may not mean much. But as it happens, we actually have more than one data point we can look at. So far, since Trump’s Electoral College win on Nov. 8, there have been five legislative special elections around the country that have featured candidates from both major parties on the ballot (two in Iowa, two in Virginia, and the one in Minnesota). We’ve assembled them all here.

In four of those races, Democrats ran ahead of the 2016 presidential margin—by double digits in three cases. This is still a small sample size, but you’d rather be the party beating your benchmarks than the one falling behind them.

Add Sen. Rand Paul to the list of Republicans who don't see any reason at all they might want to investigate what now-resigned Trump adviser Michael Flynn discussed with Russia. His reason is particularly blunt.

“I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party,” he said.

“We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do like repealing ObamaCare if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense."

Indeed, investigating wrongdoing by fellow Republicans would be so divisive. So distracting. Maybe people have been breaking laws, maybe not, but what's truly important here is that the party remain protected. Party over country—that's how that goes, right?

Rand Paul had, and probably still has, dreams of being president himself. He was supposed to be one of those "serious" Republicans pundits like to drone on about, the ones who might at some point in some small way do the right thing if, ya know, you really backed them into a corner on it.

Nope. Turns out he’s just a hack.

Women generally know that there are very few places where we are safe in public. Just leaving our homes makes us targets for sexual harassment and our work lives are no exception. In the “old boys’ club” known as politics, where women are grossly underrepresented in positions of power, we are particularly at risk. And recent incidents with lawmakers who can’t seem to stop themselves from preying on the women they work with, shows we have good reason to worry. 

Sexual harassment isn't uncommon in state legislatures, although the number of complaints has never been compiled. Men hold, on average, more than 75 percent of the seats, along with most of the positions of power, while women compose a high percentage of staff members, office employees, interns and lobbyists.

In the last month, legislators in Oklahoma and South Dakota have resigned after complaints of sexual harassment and other inappropriate contact with female employees. Last year, one lawmaker in Tennessee was expelled after having reportedly made advancements toward more than 20 women. And in recent years, there have been sex scandals in at least eight other statehouses. And those are only the ones which are documented.

Yet, there are few procedures in place to address sexual harassment and to keep women safe in state legislatures.

Despite persistent incidents, many legislatures lack formal procedures for dealing with sexual harassment. While corporate America, colleges and government agencies have established processes for investigating complaints, state legislatures remain an often murky domain in which top leaders have broad latitude over how or whether to pursue allegations and can sidetrack them if they choose.

...State legislatures are an ideal environment for covering up sexual improprieties, so women are reluctant to report incidents, said Maya Raghu, a Washington, D.C., attorney specializing in women's issues who has conducted research on workplace sexual harassment.

Here's something for House Speaker Paul Ryan to chew on as he battles futilely to unite Republicans behind and Obamacare repeal and replace plan. Obamacare is doing pretty well at the moment, thank you very much.

If graphs aren’t your thing, here’s the story.

The uninsured rate remains at a record low, according to brand new data from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. In the first nine months of 2016, 28.2 million, or less than 9 percent, of adults were uninsured, more than 20 million fewer persons than in 2010.

Beat that, Ryan.

While we wait for the next bombshell revelation about the popular vote loser’s ties to Russia—and for congressional Republicans to put country over party—let’s take a moment to revisit a laughable moment from Tuesday’s White House press briefing by Sean Spicer, where he said:

The irony of this entire situation is that the president has been incredibly tough on Russia.

Uh-huh. Roll the tape … 

Yes, incredibly tough. (Meanwhile, Vlad leans back and lights up a cigarette.)

We keep hearing that Donald Trump is continuing to use his original, unsecured Android smartphone while in the White House. Now Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill and Tom Carper have written a letter to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis asking him to explain what the hell is up with that.

McCaskill and Carper say that the recent reports suggesting that the president may still be using his old device were “troubling” — in part because it doesn’t leave a record of what he’s been saying. “While it is important for the President to have the ability to communicate electronically,” the letter reads, “it is equally important that he does so in a manner that is secure and that ensures the preservation of presidential records.”

The even more obvious problem with using the unsecured phone is, of course, security. Images of Trump staffers holding up smartphones to examine documents about a North Korean missile launch immediately caused consternation among those who wondered whether holding up devices with attached digital cameras and pointing them directly at presumably sensitive paperwork was, well, stupid. With the ease with which unsecured phones can be hacked by competent non-state hackers, if Donald Trump is walking around the Oval Office with an unsecured phone on his desk or in his pocket it's essentially acting as a microphone. The White House might not be keeping track of Trump's conversations—but somebody else might be.

Here we are, less than a month into Donald Trump’s presidency, and he and his merry band of misfits are busy actively working to dismantle our rights and our democracy. And if they get their way and finally control women’s bodies the way they want to, there will be several states that take the lead in banning abortion.

Apparently, 10 states across the country have just been itching since 1973 to have their say (again!) on a woman’s uterus, hoping for a Supreme Court reversal on Roe v. Wade. And under Trump, they may actually get their chance.

They are often referred to as "trigger laws," because even though each state's provision works a bit differently, the measures are "triggered" by the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Should that occur, these states commit to making abortion illegal in all cases, except to protect a mother's life, just as it was before the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling. (In four states, the trigger law makes the switch back to illegal abortion automatic.)

Remember when Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn the court’s ruling that abortion is a constitutionally protected right? Yeah, that seemed pretty outrageous when he was a candidate. But now that he’s president, its not so far-fetched.

And that’s not all. Many of these trigger laws not only impact a woman’s right to an abortion, but can also limit her access to birth control.

In Maryland, the General Assembly has just taken an intriguing new step in the efforts to resist Donald Trump's most ridiculous orders. By a party line vote, they've authorized the state's (Democratic) attorney general to sue the federal government over immigration or other policies—whether (Republican) Gov. Larry Hogan wants him to or not.

Until Wednesday, Maryland reserved the power to sue the federal government to the governor and the General Assembly — one of only eight states that do not grants that autonomy to attorney generals.

The joint resolution allows [Attorney General] Frosh to initiate a lawsuit against the government for a long list of action or inaction that the attorney general judges an infringement of Marylanders' rights.

Republicans are, of course, nonplussed by this, with Republican Del. Pat McDonough expressing worry that the move will result in retaliation by Trump: "if you keep poking him in the eye ... are [we] going to get anything?"

The resistance keeps resisting. America isn't going to devolve into Trump's preferred brand of nationalism and stupidity without a fight.