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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My co-host is Andrew Ferguson.

Listen live on the radio, or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]:

“What we’re discovering is that the Constitution is not a mechanism that runs by itself. Ultimately, we are a government of men and not law. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it. The ball is now squarely in the court of the Republican Party, and particularly Senate Republicans. Will they ever be prepared to say enough is enough?” ~ William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution who graduated from college just before Watergate.

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MAIN TOPICS: TOPIC: Voting Info;IRS Announces New July 15 Tax Deadline For Expats, Trusts, Estates And Corporations, Our Generation-defining event – 1918 Flu and Great Depression rolled into one, , Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims, Black-Owned Businesses Could Face Hurdles in Federal Aid Program, US Postal Service warns Congress it could become insolvent amid coronavirus, Trump’s poll numbers dip over handling of coronavirus pandemic, Delta Tells Its Staff Not To Share Results Of Virus Tests, Boeing delivers 3D-printed face shields and other supplies to combat coronavirus, DMVs Are Selling Your Data to Private Investigators, MORE.

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Voting and election info are items 1 thru 4. Show information begins after Item 4.)

1. This program was recorded on Monday morning, APRIL 13. If you call in, you will NOT be able to get on the air, so please do not call the call-in number. We love our callers, but unfortunately live call-in is one of the casualties of COVID-19.
2. Next Harris County election is a runoff, originally scheduled for May, and is now scheduled for July 14, 2020 – Primary Runoff Elections (at HarrisVotes.com)
3. PRESS RELEASE (In Part): “(Houston, Texas) – The Harris County Clerk will close its main office and annexes to the public on the advice of county leadership as a measure to help contain and mitigate the spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) … and continue until further notice…. Employees will continue serving the public by email and phone, but residents are reminded that they can access most services online. Among these, electronic filing in real property, electronic filing in the courts (county, civil and probate) and personal records. Electronic filing for campaign and personal finance is also available online. … The Harris County Clerk’s Office is currently working on a plan to continue to make voting accessible for the upcoming elections.”
   1. General business for county Clerk: https://www.cclerk.hctx.net/
   2. The city of Friendswood Updated at 12:34 p.m. March 27: At the board of trustees special meeting on March 23, the board voted to postpone the district bond election to November.
      1. https://communityimpact.com/houston/pearland-friendswood/government/2020/03/19/city-of-friendswood-friendswood-isd-elections-postponed/
4. Make sure you are registered to vote!
   1. For a personalized, nonpartisan voter guide visit vote411.org (DO NOT!! go to 411Vote!!
   2. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
   3. HarrisVotes.com  (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   4. VoteTexas.gov
   5. HarrisVotes.com – Countywide Voting Centers
      1. HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: Do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
      2. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
      3. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
      4. Current utility bill
      5. Bank statement
      6. Government check
      7. Paycheck
      8. (a) A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
   6. You may vote early by-mail if
      1. you are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
      2. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
      3. you are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
         1. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
         2. Sick or disabled;
         3. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
         4. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
         5. Make sure you are registered:
   7. Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
      1. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
         1. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
      2. POLL LOCATIONS & BALLOTS: Find your ballots with simple information entries
   8. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
5. IRS Announces New July 15 Tax Deadline For Expats, Trusts, Estates And Corporations, Includes June 15 Estimated Payments Fix, By Ashlea Ebeling, Senior Contributor | FORBES.COM| Apr 9, 2020,06:54pm EDT
   1. … Notice 2020-23 confirms that all individuals, trusts, estates, corporations and other non-corporate tax filers, including Americans living abroad, get extra time until July 15 to file and pay federal income taxes. …
6. Our Generation-defining event. 1918 Flu and Great Depression rolled into one.
7. Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims, By Alicia Lee | CNN BUSINESS | Updated 4:00 PM ET, Wed April 8, 2020
   1. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy has put out a call for volunteers who know how to code the decades-old computer programming language called COBOL because many of the state’s systems still run on older mainframes.
   2. In Kansas, Laura Kelly said the state’s Departments of Labor was in the process of modernizing from COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), but then the virus interfered. “So they’re operating on really old stuff,” she said.
   3. Connecticut has also admitted that it’s struggling to process the large volume of unemployment claims with its “40-year-old system comprised of a COBOL mainframe and four other separate systems.” The state is working to develop a new benefits system with Maine, Rhode Island, Mississippi and Oklahoma. But the system won’t be finished before next year.
   4. “Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old,” New Jersey Gov. Murphy said over the weekend. “There’ll be lots of postmortems and one of them on our list will be how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?” …
   5. … COBOL, which stands for Common Business Oriented Language, is a computer programming language that was developed back in 1959, according to the National Museum of American History.
   6. “It’s a programming language that was used to create a very significant percentage of business systems over the period of the 60s, 70s and even into the 80s,” Joseph Steinberg, an expert on cybersecurity, told CNN.
   7. But over time, coders have moved away from the aging language.
   8. “The general population of COBOL programmers is generally much older than the average age of a coder,” Steinberg said. “Many American universities have not taught COBOL in their computer science programs since the 1980s.”
   9. Yet, the program persists in systems – Despite a dwindling number of COBOL programmers, a 2017 report by Reuters found that there are still 220 billion lines of COBOL in use today. 43% of banking systems are built on COBOL and 95% percent of ATM swipes rely on COBOL code.
   10. Even in the federal government, COBOL is being used in agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Justice and Social Security Administration, according to a 2016 report by the Government Accountability Office.
   11. A 2018 report by the inspector general for the Social Security Administration found that the administration maintained more than “60 million lines of COBOL” with “millions more lines of other legacy programming languages.” The inspector general urged the administration to modernize its systems.
   12. With more than 44,000 Covid-19 cases in New Jersey, the last thing the governor should have to worry about are computer systems, Steinberg, the cybersecurity expert, said. …
   13. MIKE: The government is not alone. In commercial applications, new Windows apps often are often accessing old DOS databases because conversion to new database apps is expensive or impossible. But businesses have tax incentives to upgrade periodically. Government and their agencies do not. Government needs different incentives – and money – to do periodic upgrades. Covid-19 appears to be one of those periodic incentives.
8. Black-Owned Businesses Could Face Hurdles in Federal Aid Program – Minority business owners have always struggled to secure bank loans. Now, many banks want to deal only with existing customers when making loans through the government’s $349 billion aid package. By Emily Flitter | nytimes | April 10, 2020
   1. Four years ago, Yasmine Young walked down the street from Diaspora Salon, the business she owns in Baltimore, to the Bank of America branch where she has a business checking account. She was thinking of getting a credit card, but when a banker there described the requirements she would have to meet to qualify for one, Ms. Young says she left feeling too discouraged to apply.
   2. She eventually got a card from Capital One, never thinking that the decision would one day bring her to the brink of disaster.
   3. After she was forced to temporarily close Diaspora because of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Young tried to get an emergency loan under the federal government’s $349 billion relief program for small businesses. But Bank of America, one of the biggest banks participating in the program, refused to consider her application. Because Ms. Young had a credit card from Capital One, Bank of America said, Capital One was her primary bank. And Capital One was not yet accepting emergency relief loan applications. As of Friday, a week after the program was started, Capital One’s website still advised borrowers to keep checking back for updates and said its online application would be available “shortly.”
   4. Young is among the thousands of small-business owners at risk of being shut out of the government effort, known as the Paycheck Protection Program, because of limits set by lenders grappling with overwhelming demand. These loans, which do not have to be repaid if the money is used for payroll, rent or mortgage expenses, could be a lifeline for struggling businesses — if they can get them.
   5. And for small-business owners like Ms. Young, who is black, the hurdles could be much higher. That’s because minority-owned businesses often have weaker banking relationships than their white-owned counterparts — one legacy of the practice of redlining, or refusing to lend to people in communities of color. Research shows that black and Latino business owners are denied loans at higher rates. …
   6. … A 2016 study by economists at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that only 1 percent of black business owners get a bank loan during their first year of business compared with 7 percent of white owners. Twice as many white business owners — 30 percent of the total — use business credit cards during their inaugural year, compared with black owners, among whom only 15 percent rely on a credit card. Black businesses also start out with far less capital — whether from investments or bank loans — than white businesses, the study found.
   7. … [M]embers of the Congressional Black Caucus expressed concern that funds from the program were not reaching black business owners, according to Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, Democrat of Missouri and a caucus member who was briefed on the call after it took place. Mr. Pence said that the program had gotten off to a shaky start in general, Mr. Cleaver said.
   8. “He did admit that they had had some difficulty,” Mr. Cleaver said. “The fear now is that if we don’t act quickly, by the time we get the help for minority businesses by way of having advisers through minority chambers, the fear is the money will be exhausted.”
   9. Racial discrimination in banking is outlawed on paper, but it continues in practice … . In 2018, … the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit organization that works with banks to increase the flow of private capital into poor and underserved communities, sent “mystery shoppers” to 32 different banks in Los Angeles. It found that potential borrowers with identical financial profiles were treated differently by bankers based on their race. Black and Latino borrowers were asked for more detailed financial documents and were given less information about many banks’ available products than white borrowers.
   10. Some minority business owners have avoided dealing with banks entirely. When Carlos Swepson, a chef in New York, wanted to start a restaurant, he borrowed $240,000 from his parents, who mortgaged their house to lend him the money. Later, when he wanted to expand, Mr. Swepson raised $400,000 from friends, one of whom also took out a mortgage. Another borrowed against a retirement account to fund him.
   11. “I never had a loan from a bank,” Mr. Swepson said, adding that he does not feel comfortable dealing with banks. “The big ones, I was getting lost with them,” Mr. Swepson said.
   12. MIKE: I have assisted, or tried to assist, people of color in building credit. Sometimes, they just haven’t tried because they and their families don’t have a tradition of credit; therefore, they have no credit history, and thus and find it hard to get. (I have helped someone succeed.) Sometimes, they don’t want to try. Sometimes they can’t qualify for reasons that are non-race specific. Building credit takes a lifetime, and folks need to start young. Being educated on how to get credit and how to build it is critical. It goes back to last week’s show, when Andrew and I discussed that information today isn’t just power: It’s survival.

9. IN OTHER NEWS:

   1. Trump’s poll numbers dip over handling of coronavirus pandemic – Republican allies and advisers said to be concerned, Biden leads in head-to-head match-up, CNN poll finds. By Adam Gabbatt (@adamgabbatt) | COM | Published on Fri 10 Apr 2020
      1. Support for Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus has plunged over the past week, polls show…
      2. Trump experienced an upturn in public support as the virus hit the US… As concerns over the government’s response have grown, however, the number of people who believe the president is doing a good job appears to be settling back to pre-coronavirus levels.
      3. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week found approval of Trump’s handling of Covid-19 had dipped to 42%, down from 48% the week before. Trump’s overall approval rating was at 40%, close to where it has been for much of his presidency. According to a survey by CNN, 45% of Americans approve of Trump’s coronavirus response.
      4. MIKE: When figuring in margin of error, IMHO, Trump’s approval ratings have hardly budged since he was “elected”. Solid in the low-to-mid 40’s.
   2. US Postal Service warns Congress it could become insolvent amid coronavirus, By Lauren Fox and  Jeremy Herb, CNN | Updated 5:42 PM ET, Fri April 10, 2020
      1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress “To establish Post Offices and Post Roads“.^[1] – “The Postal Clause was added to the Constitution to facilitate interstate communication as well as to create a source of revenue for the early United States.^[2][3]” – WIKIPEDIA
      2. The US Postal Service is giving Congress a dire warning, telling lawmakers in a video briefing this week that the agency will “run out of cash” by the end of September if Congress does not step in with financial assistance.
      3. According to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, Postmaster General Megan Brennan warned lawmakers Thursday that in light of the global pandemic, the Postal Service believes they will see a “$13 billion revenue loss” this year with projections that coronavirus could cost the agency another $54 billion over the next decade.
      4. “The Postal Service was technically insolvent to begin with, but the pandemic has completely changed the environment here. The mail volume drop is catastrophic,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat and the chairman of the oversight subcommittee that oversees the USPS. …
      5. … The US Postal Service, unlike private mail carriers, is required to deliver goods to every corner of the country including rural communities where the profit margins are slim. Without it, Democrats warn some vulnerable populations wouldn’t be able to get prescriptions or essential goods, which have become crucial during the escalation of coronavirus.
      6. MIKE: Republicans have been trying to kill USPS for literally decades in order to move mail to commercial carriers like FedEx and UPS. The technical insolvency till now has been a function of Republican Congress forcing early funding of retirement benefits. Also, the Post Office is the only department stipulated in the Constitution. It might be subject to court challenge before dissolution.
   3. Delta Tells Its Staff Not To Share Results Of Virus Tests – US carrier Delta Air Lines has asked its flight attendants to refrain from public notification about positive coronavirus tests or symptoms. The advisory was sent to flight attendants via an email on April 9th. byJay Singh | COM | April 11, 2020
      1. The email to flight attendants – HuffPostpublished that Delta had directed its flight attendants to avoid notifying fellow crew or else otherwise post about health on social media per an email sent out to over 25,000 flight attendants on Thursday. Instead, the Atlanta-based carrier has asked that staff work with management to report positive tests so that Delta can manage notifying any other employees who are at risk of also having contracted the coronavirus.
      2. The airline has a procedure in place for flight attendants to notify management and receive leave due to a positive coronavirus test, or else, from the onset of symptoms associated with the virus.
      3. Some people are claiming that this is an attempt from the airline that seeks to silence flight attendants about their health. Although, perhaps, that allegation is taking it a step too far. The primary motive for this seems to be aimed at reducing panic among Delta’s staff members. …
   4. Boeing delivers 3D-printed face shields and other supplies to combat coronavirus – Boeing is using its engineering prowess to create personal protective gear for healthcare workers as the dominant aerospace and defense company’s troubled production lines remain dormant and a majority of its workforce remains at home. By Alexis Keenan, Reporter | YAHOO FINANCE | April 10, 2020
      1. On Friday, Boeing (BA) announced it had delivered its first set of reusable 3D-printed face shields to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the fight against the novel coronavirus.
      2. “The Department of Health and Human Services accepted the initial shipment of 2,300 face shields this morning,” the company said in a press release. The shields are slated to aid workers at Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, which has been converted to treat patients with COVID-19. …
10. Supreme Court will decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act sometime next term, presumably after the election, By Ariane de Vogue and Devan Cole | CNN | Updated 10:26 AM ET, Mon March 2, 2020
    1. The Supreme Court announced Monday it will decide the fate of the Affordable Care Act sometime next term, presumably after the presidential election.
    2. The court’s move ensures another major shift in the political landscape during the election season on an issue that has dominated American politics for the last decade. It will be the third time the court has heard a significant challenge to a law that impacts millions of Americans.
    3. The dispute pits Democratic-led states led by California against the Trump administration and red states led by Texas.
    4. The Affordable Care Act remains in effect in the meantime.
    5. The court’s decision to step in comes as somewhat of a surprise. Earlier in the term, the justices had turned down a request to expedite the case so that it could be heard this term before the election.
    6. Conventional wisdom was that the court would decide to allow proceedings to continue in the courts below, and only step in after a final judgment. That could have taken months if not years, so but instead, the justices agreed to place the case on the docket for next term, which begins in October. That means the decision will only happen after the next election.
    7. It’s a victory for supporters of the law. They wanted the case to be heard this term, but their secondary argument was for next. …
11. ‘On the brink’ – Trump’s push for Medicaid transparency could worsen rural hospital crisis – Small rural hospital administrators are concerned that if the changes go through, they may have to close, one expert said. By Phil McCausland | COM | Feb. 15, 2020, 4:30 AM CST
    1. In an effort to increase transparency, the administration’s rule will require hospitals and states to share more data about the funds they receive through Medicaid, but at the same time it will lead to a decrease in Medicaid’s federal matching dollars by redefining what is considered to be public funds.
    2. The federal government typically matches what those hospitals generate in public funds — including money from state, city and county taxes — as part of its agreement with states, but this rule would reduce hospital supplemental payments and limit state Medicaid financing by creating standards that critics say are vague and go beyond the agency’s authority.
    3. Ultimately, the shift could reduce national Medicaid funding by between $37 billion to $49 billion annually and cause hospitals to lose $23 billion to $31 billion in annual Medicaid payments, according to the American Hospital Association.
    4. For Kansas, which is considering expanding Medicaid to help bolster financially vulnerable rural hospitals, while also providing health care coverage to as many as 150,000 people, the proposed changes could make an already bad health care situation worse.
    5. A study released this month by the Chartis Center for Rural Health found that 30 percent of the state’s 105 rural hospitals are economically compromised and in danger of closing
12. These 3 articles, looked at together, could provide an opportunity for much better understanding of elections, apportionment, and politics generally.
    1. “Here’s how the Supreme Court could decide whether your vote will count” (Updated Oct. 4, 2017)
    2. “Study uses physics to explain democratic elections”
       https://phys.org/…/2020-01-physics-democratic-elections.html via phy.org
       1. WIKIPEDIA: Contributors’ discussions on this topic. I recommend it for folks who really want to think about this concept. This is a high-quality discussion among editors and contributors.
    3. Brennan Center For Justice: How the Efficiency Gap Works

Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity – More and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits. By Dave Philipps and Tim Arango | COM | Jan. 10, 2020

1. Soldiers … are increasingly making the United States military a family business. The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is deeply ingrained.
2. More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military.
3. For years, military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable, particularly now amid escalating tensions with Iran.
4. “A widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively recruit and sustain the force,” Anthony M. Kurta, acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service last year. “This disconnect is characterized by misperceptions, a lack of knowledge and an inability to identify with those who serve. It threatens our ability to recruit the number of quality youth with the needed skill sets to maintain our advantage.”
5. … [T]he idea of joining the military has lost much of its luster in nearly two decades of grinding war. The patriotic rush to enlist after the terrorist attacks of 2001 has faded. For a generation, enlisting has produced reliable hardship for troops and families, but nothing that resembles victory. But the military families who have borne nearly all of the burden, and are the most cleareyed about the risks of war, are still the Americans who are most likely to encourage their sons and daughters to join.
6. The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.
7. “Those who understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting Command.
8. That distinction has created glaring disparities across the country. In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though Manhattan has eight times as many people. Many of the new contracts in Fayetteville were soldiers signing up for second and third enlistments.
9. This was not always the case. Military service was once spread fairly evenly — at least geographically — throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon line. The military’s decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited training only hastened the trend.
10. Today, students growing up in military communities are constantly exposed to the people who serve. Moms pick up their sons from day care in flight suits. Dads attend the fourth-grade holiday party in camouflage. High schools often have Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in which students wear uniforms to class once a week and can earn credit for learning about science, leadership and fitness through a military framework. …

Mother Of Marine Claimed Son Told Her Fox News Plays On Every TV On Base, Not Allowed To Change The Channel – This is horrifying. by Andrew Simpson | politicaltribune.org 11 JAN 2020

1. After multiple reports emerged recently showing Donald Trump’s popularity among members of the military falling precipitously, it was only a matter of time before we found out that someone would take drastic measures to try and remedy that situation.
2. Usually something like that comes in the form of a directive from the top that makes its way down through the ranks, and this appears to be no different — ailing support for the Commander in Chief could cause massive morale issues among not just the rank and file, but officers and even top brass, as each level of the military has its own reason for the way they feel about the President, from lying about being the first to give them a raise in decades to ignoring actionable intelligence or information counter to Trump policies.
3. So what could, say, a general friendly to the President do to fix Trump’s battered image among soldiers and officers? Well, he could make sure that they’re not exposed to any more information that would further taint their perceptions of Trump — and that means no real reporting on anything bad about the President.
4. And if you want nothing but good news about Donald Trump, there’s only one station you can turn to: Fox News.
5. In fact, that’s what one Marine mom says is exactly the case where her son is stationed …

1.  

DMVs Are Selling Your Data to Private Investigators – You gave them your data in exchange for a driver’s license. DMVs are making tens of millions of dollars selling it, documents obtained by Motherboard show. by Joseph Cox | VICE.COM | Sep 6 2019, 8:09am

1. Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country are taking drivers’ personal information and selling it to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit, Motherboard has learned. DMVs sell the data for an array of approved purposes, such as to insurance or tow companies, but some of them have sold to more nefarious businesses as well. Multiple states have made tens of millions of dollars a year selling data. …
2. … Multiple DMVs stressed to Motherboard that they do not sell the photographs from citizens’ driver licenses or social security numbers. …
3. … The data sold varies from state to state, but it typically includes a citizen’s name and address. In others, it can also include their nine-digit ZIP code, date of birth, phone number, and email address. …
4. … The data selling is not limited to private investigators, however. … Consumer credit reporting company Experian features heavily in the documents obtained by Motherboard, which stretch from 2014 to this year, as does research company LexisNexis. The Delaware DMV has direct access agreements with around 300 different entities, according to one spreadsheet. The Wisconsin DMV has current agreements with over 3100 entities, another shows. Local media outlets in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere have also reported on DMVs selling data to third parties.
5. Valerie McGilvrey, a skiptracer who uses various tools and techniques to track down vehicles that need to be repossessed, told Motherboard “with Texas having no repo license and minimum standards, convicted felons can and do access professional databases.” …

By gutting Obamacare, Judge Reed O’Connor handed Texas a win. It wasn’t the first time – The Texas Attorney General’s Office has made a habit of filing lawsuits against the federal government that land in O’Connor’s court. by Emma Platoff | ORG | Dec. 19, 20182 PM

1. In 2015, it was an Obama administration effort to extend family leave benefits to gay couples. In 2016, it was an Obama administration guideline allowing transgender children to use school bathrooms that align with their gender identity. And on Friday, it was the entirety of Obamacare that U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor struck down as unconstitutional after a Texas-led coalition of 20 states sued this year to kill it.
2. Over the past four years, O’Connor has handed Texas major wins in several high-profile Texas v. United States lawsuits. And it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that those cases landed in his court. The North Texas judge has emerged as something of a favorite for the Texas Attorney General’s Office, a notoriously litigious legal battalion known for challenging the federal government in cases and controversies across the country.
3. Since 2015, almost half of challenges to the federal government that Texas filed in district courts here landed in O’Connor’s courtroom, attorney general’s office records show. He is one of several dozen federal judges of his rank in the state.
4. Active in the conservative Federalist Society, O’Connor is a former aide to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and a former federal prosecutor in North Texas who has been rumored to be on the short list for a promotion to a federal appeals court. O’Connor, a 2007 appointee of President George W. Bush, worked in relative obscurity until 2015, when Texas’ litigation force began to frequent his courtroom. Since then, he’s earned a reputation as a no-nonsense conservative darling.
5. This October, a year after Texas filed suit, it was O’Connor who struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act, a decades-old federal law that gives Native American families placement preference over white families for adopting Native children.
6. O’Connor has also ruled for Texas in health care cases. In December 2016, he ruled that an Obama administration rule aimed at preventing discrimination against transgender patients could force doctors to violate their religious beliefs. Weeks before he heard oral arguments in this Obamacare case, O’Connor had awarded Texas some $300 million in a separate lawsuit over a fee associated with the law.
7. Last week’s ruling on Obamacare was a particularly stunning victory for Texas. O’Connor ruled the entire landmark law unconstitutional based on a December 2017 change to federal tax law that gutted one of its major provisions. Many legal experts predict it will be reversed on appeal, at least in part.
8. If Texas is trying to land cases before O’Connor, the state has geography on its side.
9. You can’t always choose your judge, but you can often choose your courthouse. That’s especially true for a coalition of 20 states challenging a law that touches practically every person in the country — dozens of courtrooms in many of those states would have been plausible places to file the lawsuit, giving the Texas coalition many feasible options. O’Connor happens to have served in small judicial districts where a savvy plaintiff has a good chance of landing in his court.
10. For some years, O’Connor was the only district judge hearing cases in the state’s tiny Wichita Falls division. Texas filed five challenges to the federal government there in 2015 and 2016; O’Connor heard all five. Then the Northern District of Texas’ chief judge, Barbara Lynn, announced that starting in December 2016 she would hear 15 percent of cases filed at the courthouse near the Oklahoma border. After that, the Texas Attorney General’s Office filed two federal challenges in Fort Worth, where O’Connor is one of three judges who hears cases and is currently the only active judge — meaning cases filed there are likely to fall to him as well. Both cases were heard in his courtroom.
11. “The reason he has a higher proportion of high-profile cases is because [former Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott] and [Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton] have chosen to file there — I don’t think O’Connor is any more or less conservative than other judges in Texas. He gets these cases because there’s a greater chance of drawing him,” said Josh Blackman, a conservative legal scholar who has written two books on Obamacare litigation. “It’s not just that they know he’s conservative — it’s that they’ll get a conservative judge.”
12. The attorney general’s office did not respond to questions about why it files a disproportionate number of cases before O’Connor. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, which allied itself with Texas on the lawsuit, joined after it was already filed and didn’t play a role in deciding where to bring it, a spokeswoman said.
13. What lawyers call “forum shopping” is, of course, a bipartisan strategy. Liberal-leaning groups in Texas tend to bring federal lawsuits in the friendlier courthouses of Austin and San Antonio; on a national level, progressive litigators aim for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the country’s most liberal circuit court.
14. But if the strategy isn’t at all novel, perhaps the outcome was. O’Connor’s Obamacare decision has been panned by legal scholars across the political spectrum. Experts, including many leading conservatives, have assailed the opinion as misguided and even politically motivated.
15. “No one opposes ObamaCare more than we do,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. “But a federal judge’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional is likely to be overturned on appeal and may boomerang politically on Republicans.”
16. The Journal editorial criticizes O’Connor’s legal reasoning as akin to “a liberal Ninth Circuit appeals judge handling a Donald Trump appeal” — a stinging insult from a leading conservative voice.
17. The conservative National Review “deplores” the decision. A Washington Post columnist wrote that “Even the right dislikes the new Obamacare ruling.” The influential blog Above the Law published a round-up of criticisms from a long list of legal experts, headline: “Legal Commentators Nearly Pull A Muscle Condemning Judge’s Affordable Care Act Decision.”
18. The conservative legal scholar Jonathan Adler and the liberal legal scholar Abbe Gluck came together to write in The New York Times that the decision “makes a mockery of the rule of law and basic principles of democracy.”
19. The Federalist Society Says It’s Not an Advocacy Organization. These Documents Show Otherwise. By AMANDA HOLLIS-BRUSKY and CALVIN TERBEEK | com | August 31, 2019 (Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Calvin TerBeek is a Ph.D. candidate in political science)
    1. MIKE NOTE: The Federalist Society  – The Federalist Society is a tax–exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax identification number is 36-3235550.
20. This past March, when the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies held its 37th annual national gathering for conservative law students, the lineup of speakers and panelists included an impressive number of Republican Party and conservative movement stars. …
21. Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party “or engage in other forms of political advocacy,” as its website says. The society does not deny an ideology—it calls itself a “group of conservatives and libertarians”—but it maintains that it is simply “about ideas,” not legislation, politicians or policy positions.
22. Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward. The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.
23. The question of whether the Federalist Society is properly characterized as a “society of ideas” or a political organization has significant ramifications. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of guidelines administered by the federal judiciary’s Judicial Conference, was revised earlier this year to bar sitting federal judges from participating in conferences and seminars sponsored by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.” (The Code does not “explicitly” apply to Supreme Court justices, though they have looked to it in the past.) One former federal judge argued that under the new ethics opinion, the Federalist Society is now a “no-go zone for federal judges.” The Society’s president, Eugene Meyer, responded, calling the former jurist’s argument an “absurd and ludicrous” interpretation of the rule, adding that the Federalist Society has said “time and again” that it is nonpartisan and does not take official policy positions.
24. But the newly unearthed documents—a 1984 grant proposal and cover letter, written by Meyer on the Federalist Society’s behalf and now housed in the late Judge Robert Bork’s papers at the Library of Congress—provide evidence that the Federalist Society, in contravention of what the new Code states, in fact “advocates for specific outcomes on legal or political issues.” This suggests that federal judges, by attending Federalist Society events, are transgressing the Code’s new guidelines. Given the importance of active federal judges to the Federalist Society’s long-term goal of reshaping the law, barring them from the society’s events could hamper its continued ability to exert the political influence it has impressively built over decades. …
25. …The Federalist Society’s founders and conservative patrons understood early on that the battle for control of the law would not be won on campuses alone. In the January 1984 grant proposal, Meyer, then the Federalist Society’s executive director, asked the conservative-leaning Smith Richardson Foundation for “seed money” to fund a new entity, a “Lawyers Division.” The central goal, Meyer wrote, was “to build an effective national conservative lawyers organization.” Meyer began the proposal by asserting that an alternative to “an increasingly radicalized bar,” exemplified by the American Bar Association, was now necessary because “lawyers continue to fill key positions in the modern instrumentalities of the welfare state.”
26. SHORTER VERSION OF ARTICLE ABOVE- REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission — and could blow up on sitting judges, By Matthew Chapman | COM | Published on August 31, 2019
    1. On Saturday, political science academics Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Calvin TerBeek wrote an exposé in Politico revealing that the Federalist Society, an association of conservative and libertarian lawyers infamous for forming a semi-official pipeline of right-wing academics into the federal court system, have deliberately misled the public about the purpose of their organization’s existence for years.
    2. “Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party ‘or engage in other forms of political advocacy,’ as its website says,” they wrote. “The society does not deny an ideology — it calls itself a ‘group of conservatives and libertarians’ — but it maintains that it is simply ‘about ideas,’ not legislation, politicians or policy positions.”
    3. “Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward,” they continued. “The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.”
    4. The newly discovered papers resided in the Library of Congress with the records of the late Judge Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan’s failed Supreme Court nominee. In one private grant proposal to a prospective conservative donor in 1984, for example, Federalist Society President Eugene Meyer promised that the Federalist Society would promote “the formation of groups of conservative lawyers in the major centers for the practice of law, who feel comfortable believing in, and advocating, conservative positions.” He also suggested the group would advocate against environmental, banking, and employment regulation, and recommend judges for appointments.
    5. All of this could have significant consequences. Earlier this year, the Code of Conduct for United States Judges was modified to prohibit judges from participating in conferences held by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.”
    6. In light of these documents explicitly revealing the political goals of the Federalist Society, that means that sitting judges may be in violation of the Code if they attend Federalist Society seminars — something conservative judges at all levels of the court system do routinely to exchange ideas and proposals. (The Code is not binding on the Supreme Court, but is on appeals and district court judges.)
    7. For his part, Meyer disputes all of this, calling this interpretation of the Code “absurd,” and stating that it is “silly” to treat these documents “as a serious source for what the Society is and does today.”
    8. “If the new advisory opinion is enforced, one can imagine the society or a federal judge suing on the grounds of free speech and freedom of association,” concluded Hollis-Brusky TerBeek. “And, as a testament to its success, the Federalist Society might get a sympathetic hearing from the very same judiciary it helped build.”

Astronomers present a concept for the next NASA flagship mission, by Laura Arenschield, The Ohio State University |org | December 16, 2019

1. The mission, nicknamed “HabEx” for “The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory,” would use a telescope with a mirror larger than Hubble’s, and would employ origami techniques to utilize an external “starshade,” which would block the light from the parent star and enable the search for and characterization of dim planets orbiting that star, according to a presentation today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
2. “Our goal is to see if we can find a planet that is similar to Earth—one that can support life,” said Scott Gaudi, one of the project’s co-chairs. “While we’ve identified a number of planets outside our solar system, so far, none have conclusively been shown to have the elements necessary for habitability.” …

Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party – The president demands complete fealty, and as the impeachment hearings showed, he has largely attained it. To cross him is to risk losing a future in the Republican Party. By Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman |NYTIMES.com | Published Dec. 21, 2019, Updated Dec. 22, 2019, 3:25 p.m. ET

1. By the summer of 2017, Dave Trott, a two-term Republican congressman, was worried enough about President Trump’s erratic behavior and his flailing attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act that he criticized the president in a closed-door meeting with fellow G.O.P. lawmakers.
2. The response was instantaneous — but had nothing to do with the substance of Mr. Trott’s concerns. “Dave, you need to know somebody has already told the White House what you said,” he recalled a colleague telling him. “Be ready for a barrage of tweets.”
3. Trott got the message: To defy Mr. Trump is to invite the president’s wrath, ostracism within the party and a premature end to a career in Republican politics. Mr. Trott decided not to seek re-election in his suburban Detroit district, concluding that running as a Trump skeptic was untenable, and joining a wave of Republican departures from Congress that has left those who remain more devoted to the president than ever. …
4. … Just under four years after he began his takeover of a party to which he had little connection, Mr. Trump enters 2020 burdened with the ignominy of being the first sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached.
5. But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P. activists and their representatives in Congress. If he does not enjoy the broad admiration Republicans afforded Ronald Reagan, he is more feared by his party’s lawmakers than any occupant of the Oval Office since at least Lyndon Johnson.
6. His iron grip was never firmer than over the last two months, during the House inquiry that concluded Wednesday with Mr. Trump’s impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress. No House Republican supported either article, or even authorized the investigation in September, and in hearing after hearing into the president’s dealings with Ukraine, they defended him as a victim of partisan fervor. One Republican even said that Jesus had received fairer treatment before his crucifixion than Mr. Trump did during his impeachment. …
7. …This fealty hardly guarantees Mr. Trump re-election: He has never garnered a 50 percent approval rating as president and over half of voters tell pollsters they will oppose him no matter who the Democrats nominate. …
8. … “He has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him political power here,” said Representative Patrick McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, adding: “Trump has touched the nerve of my conservative base like no person in my lifetime.”
9. Interviews with current and former Republican lawmakers as well as party strategists, many of whom requested anonymity so as not to publicly cross the president, suggest that many elected officials are effectively faced with two choices. They can vote with their feet by retiring — and a remarkable 40 percent of Republican members of Congress have done so or have been defeated at the ballot box since Mr. Trump took office.
10. Or they can mute their criticism of him. All the incentives that shape political behavior — with voters, donors and the news media — compel Republicans to bow to Mr. Trump if they want to survive. …
11. … Divergence from Trumpism will never be good enough for Democrats; Mr. Trump will target you among Republicans, Mr. Trott added, and the vanishing voters from the political middle will never have a chance to reward you because you would not make it through a primary. That will be ensured in part by the megaphone the president wields with the conservative news media.
12. “Trump is emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unfit for office, and I’m sure a lot of Republicans feel the same way,” Mr. Trott said. “But if they say that, the social media barrage will be overwhelming.” He added that he would be open to the presidential candidacy of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.
13. On the other hand, Mr. Trump dangles rewards to those who show loyalty — a favorable tweet, or a presidential visit to their state — and his heavy hand has assured victory for a number of Republican candidates in their primaries. That includes Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who did as many Fox News appearances as possible to draw the president’s attention.
14. “The greatest fear any member of Congress has these days is losing a primary,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who lost his general election last year in a heavily Hispanic Miami-area district. “That’s the foremost motivator.”
15. The larger challenge with Mr. Trump is that all politics is personal with him, and he carefully tracks who on television is praising him or denouncing his latest rhetorical excess. “He is the White House political director,” Scott Reed, a longtime Republican consultant, said.
16. More conventional presidents may be more understanding of lawmakers who are pulled in a different direction by the political demands of their districts — but Mr. Trump has shown little tolerance for such dissent. …
17. The incentive to show fealty to Mr. Trump has become evident to the Club for Growth, a fiscal conservative group that was made famous for its willingness to fund primaries against Republican leaders and was hostile to Mr. Trump in 2016.
18. The group’s president, David McIntosh, said conservative voters had lost interest in punishing ideological heresies and were motivated by one overarching factor unrelated to policy.
19. “Poll after poll showed us that Republican primary voters wanted their nominees to support President Trump,” he said, “so in order to make sure they were viable and would get re-elected, they ended up being supporters of his.” …
20. … “If you go to any Republican event, you’re going to find more people at that event than ever before,” Mr. Trott said, “and every single one of them to a person will be all in for President Trump. They’ll all have ‘Make America Great Again’ hats on and they’ll be saying what a tremendous president he is.”
21. Trott recounted one of his most vivid memories of his time serving with Mr. Trump. It was the day in 2017 when House Republicans voted to repeal the A.C.A. and celebrated afterward at the White House.
22. Trott was one of the first lawmakers to enter the Oval Office after the “““““““““`Rose Garden celebration and he stood behind the president’s desk when Mr. Trump pulled out a sheet of paper.
23. “He already had a list of 20 people who had voted against him two hours earlier,” he recalled.

 

Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows, By Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle | COM |Oct. 29, 2019

1. Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.
2. The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury. …
3. Southern Vietnam could all but disappear. … More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated. …
4. In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it. The findings don’t have to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line …
5. The new projections suggest that much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and one of the largest cities in the world, is at risk of being wiped out. Built on what was once a series of islands, the city’s historic downtown core is particularly vulnerable.
6. Over all, the research shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development.
7. The hidden hunger affecting billions, By Michael Marshall | BBC.COM | 7-JULY-2019
   1. Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.
   2. New kinds of crops could help to create better, more nutritious foods to beat these deficiencies.
   3. When children do not get enough iron in their food, the results are heartbreaking. They are slower to acquire language, struggle with short-term memory, have poor attention spans and ultimately do less well at school.
   4. “They can never live up to their full physical and mental potential,” says Wolfgang Pfeiffer, director of research and development at HarvestPlus, an organisation that develops nutritionally improved crops in Washington DC. “If they are deficient in their childhood, they learn 20% less as adults.”
   5. In the poorest parts of India and China, millions of children have their lives stunted through lack of iron. In South Asia, an estimated50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency, and it is also prevalent in South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
   6. But iron is only one small part of the story. There are several dozen other “micronutrients” – substances that we need to consume, in small quantities but regularly, to remain healthy. They include zinc, copper, vitamins and folates such as folic acid and vitamin B9.
   7. The traditional solution to micronutrient deficiencies has been to add more micronutrients to common foods, or to supply pills … But these strategies have limits. If people can’t afford pills or don’t have access to a pharmacy, they may still not get enough micronutrients. What’s more, adding micronutrients to food is a constant process: every batch of breakfast cereal has to be artificially dosed with iron and vitamins.
   8. A much simpler approach would be to go back to the crop plant from which the cereal is made, and ensure that it packs itself full of the micronutrient in the first place.
   9. This is the thinking behind “biofortification”, the process of creating crops that have unusually high levels of micronutrients like iron. HarvestPlus was founded in 2003 by economist Howarth Bouis, after a decade of lobbying and raising moneyto create biofortified crops and make them available where they are needed. Today HarvestPlus has members in more than 20 countries and has biofortified over a dozen crops, from rice to sweet potatoes.
8. India’s blowout election is a lesson for US Democrats, By Annalisa Merelli | COM/ | May 24, 2019
   1. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, defied expectations when he won his second election in an even bigger landslide than the first one. He did so at the expense of India’s Congress party, which campaigned on a secular and pluralist platform.
   2. Turns out the nationalist message of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hugely popular with voters. It was a massive defeat—the second in a row—for India’s more liberal Congress party. It’s a bitter loss that came with many lessons, ones that Democrats in the United States would be wise to heed. …
   3. … Politics in India have traditionally been about the economy. This time, however, Modi and the BJP’s support of Hindu nationalism took a more prominent position than it had in past campaigns, exploiting tension with Pakistan to redirect the debate toward national security and anti-Muslim sectarianism. As Modi’s message grew stronger, [the once-dominant Congress Party] failed to really fight for India’s long-established secular ideals. …
   4. … The Congress isn’t known for its ability to learn lessons, but there are some more to note. And given that a left-leaning party promoting pluralism just lost to a right-leaning party promoting nationalism, the Democratic Party in the United States should probably read a long as it prepares for its own election season.
   5. Don’t make it about the candidate: Modi’s leadership of the BJP is strong, and there is no separating his party or government’s success and work from his own. His party capitalized on this, turning the election into a referendum on him—rather than his government’s record. Polarizing figures like Modi tend to benefit from these kinds of politics. His party understood this. His adversaries did not.
   6. Turning the campaign into a vote for or against Modi prevented the opposition from asserting its own ideas. Even when the Congress proposed policies that could have appealed to a broad electorate — for instance, guaranteed minimum income … — they received little attention. As George Lakoff explained in his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, obsessing over a candidate’s flaws only makes him or her more popular.
   7. Democrats in the United States made this mistake in the 2016 election, running a campaign against Donald Trump instead of for their own policies.
   8. Dare to be different: … For many voters, the Congress party is associated with old-school elitist politics, corruption, and a perceived inability to bring change to India. Gandhi’s candidacy didn’t do much to change anyone’s minds.
   9. Make friends: Congress also failed to make strong alliances with other, smaller political parties…. Progressives seem to make this mistake a lot. While conservatives often stick together (the Republican Party’s support of Trump during the campaign is a textbook example), liberals often fail to find common ground. In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic primaries went on long after Trump was the presumed nominee. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent more time tearing each other apart than focusing on the bigger fight. The extremely crowded field of potential democratic candidates suggests the same thing could happen again.
   10. Focus the narrative: Modi’s narrative of a new, strong, corruption-free India—one with international power, credibility and gravitas—appealed to many voters. It delivered a clear vision of what he was promising, and one that Indians were fast to embrace. Congress never presented a clear vision of its own.
   11. [The Congress Party] decried the threat to secular values [Modi’s Party] posed, and held itself up as its defender. But rather than communicating how those values could help India succeed, the party focused more on what would happen if protections further deteriorated.
   12. This is not unlike what happened during the 2016 election in the United States. Just look at the campaign slogans: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had a clear if suspect mission. Clinton’s “Stronger Together” described a status, not an intention. Democrats could face the same problem they did in 2016—and the same problem India’s Congress party faced this week—unless they forget about the opposition, stop playing defense, and promote their own, clear vision.