The case arose from statements made during jury deliberations in a 2010 sexual assault trial. "I think he did it because he's Mexican, and Mexican men take whatever they want," a juror said of the defendant, according to sworn statements from other jurors submitted by defense lawyers after the trial was over.

The juror, identified in court papers as H.C., was a former law enforcement officer. After the trial was over, two other jurors submitted sworn statements describing what he had said during deliberations.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that courts must make an exception to the usual rule that jury deliberations are secret when evidence emerges that those discussions were marred by racial or ethnic bias.

NYT Link

Foreign Policy | March 7, 2017
From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump's America - "They don't teach about it in school anymore, but in the late summer of 1921, 10,000 coal miners in the southern fields of West Virginia took up arms and waged war against their masters. The fighting lasted for five days. The miners had numbers but no other advantage, arming themselves with their own rifles and marching uphill against 2,000 entrenched strikebreakers who fired down on them with heavy guns and flew private airplanes overhead, dropping homemade bombs and poison gas on the incipient union. The two sides fired 1 million rounds between them, killing 10 strikebreakers and 100 miners. On Sept. 2, President Warren Harding ordered in the army. The union retreated. Over the following days, law enforcement arrested nearly 1,000 miners, indicting them for conspiracy, murder, and treason against the state of West Virginia. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest and most violent political uprising the United States had seen since the Civil War. It still is.

"Nothing in the age of Donald Trump is truly unprecedented, except this: There is no longer any such thing as American subtext. We deal exclusively in text now. Before, the mainstream of our discourse confined questions of political violence to code and circumspection. In a country that ordinarily presumes itself too civilized for such things, the routine outbreak of bloodshed and arson was regularly and necessarily transformed into a distant sociological matter, a curious pathology of black and poor people or otherwise into a purely theoretical possibility entertained by fringe political actors. Now, the New York Times strokes its chin and asks if it's OK to punch Nazis. You can hear Trump's predecessor intoning, 'That's not who we are.' It isn't yet. But after decades of superficial peace, even the mainstream wonders if it's who we are becoming once again."

 But, the Republican's repeal and replacement of the ACA was really uncomplicated: repeal ACA and replace it with nothing. The repeal and replace did get more complicated with Trump's plan to repeal and replace with "something terrific."

What a quandary, finding something between nothing and terrific.  Ryan/Trump have found the answer: neither nothing nor terrific--a Republican remodel job. And, a con job to sell it, right up the alley of both Ryan and Trump.

 Ryan achieved his main goal of eliminating the ACA's taxes on high income earners. The 0.9% additional Medicare tax on incomes over $250,000 (married/jointly or $200,000 single) and the 3.8% tax on income, that includes investment income over the stated limits, is eliminated.

With income being earned income plus investment income, and investment income broadly inclusive as dividends, rents, royalties, capital gains on sales of homes over the $500,000 exclusion for couples or $250,000 singe, and insurance annuity payouts, higher income earners are likely to save no small sum in taxes.

 And, all  these taxes are just going to "those people,"  and  various stereotypic lay-a-bouts. Besides saving a lot in taxes, this help to others was resented by some.

Trump finds data and facts all too complicated, but his political instincts for his base are uncomplicated--he wants something, and something fast.  This legislation is his definition of "something terrific". A check off of his campaign promise.  The original demonizing of ACA as "Obamacare" (that boomeranged) will now become Trumpcare. That is also terrific.

"Do you remember the Phoenix Program in Vietnam? I remember the Phoenix Program. I supported the Phoenix Program. We murdered hundreds of local officials. How about Allende? How about Diem? How about any number of people during the Cold War that we assassinated? That's wrong, it's wrong to do that, but please do not say that Russia is the only country that commits these kinds of crimes."

Everyone has their theories, I don't know. As I stand here today I can't tell you one way or another.  The last time I saw my daughter I believed she was alive and was going to be OK, and that's what was told to me.

Anthony speaks defiantly of her pariah status.

"I don't give a s--- about what anyone thinks about me, I never will," she said.  "I'm OK with myself, I sleep pretty good at night."

The Trump administration wants to gut the Coast Guard and make deep cuts in airport and rail security to help pay for its crackdown on illegal immigration, according to internal budget documents reviewed by POLITICO -- a move that lawmakers and security experts say defies logic if the White House is serious about defending against terrorism and keeping out undocumented foreigners.

Overall, DHS would get a 6 percent boost to its budget, to $43.8 billion. But to help pay for that, the administration would slice the budget of the Coast Guard and cut 11 percent in spending from the TSA -- reductions that critics say would weaken safeguards against threats arriving by sea or air.

But not to worry the wall and border agents will surely protect us from natural disasters

OMB also wants to cut 11 percent from the budget of FEMA, which oversees the national response to disasters such as floods and hurricanes.

With a gender bender twist.

Very interesting

Together, they developed Her Opponent, a production featuring actors performing excerpts from each of the three debates exactly as they happened--but with the genders switched. Salvatore cast fellow educational theatre faculty Rachel Whorton to play "Brenda King," a female version of Trump, and Daryl Embry to play "Jonathan Gordon," a male version of Hillary Clinton, and coached them as they learned the candidates' words and gestures. A third actor, Andy Wagner, would play the moderator in all three debates, with the performances livestreamed. Andrew Freiband, a professor in the Department of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design, provided the video design. (Watch footage from a Her Opponent rehearsal below.)

http://tinyurl.com/z3zq4km

Watch his actions, but treat his tweets like messages from your local DMV. Take Trump "seriously but not literally." That's a piece of wisdom coined by reporter Salena Zito, and it's used by Trump's defenders to brush off whatever bout of rhetorical diarrhea has plagued his Twitter account lately. There's truth to it: It's not worth paying attention to every conspiracy theory and wild musing Trump fires off in the wee hours after watching Fox & Friends. Yet the media continue to turn the volume up to eleven over such tweets.

In fact, that's happening on a practical level. Most Americans don't care about Trump's rhetoric any more. He and the media have been shouting at each other so long that it all sounds like white noise now. Instead, many Americans have been treating Trump as a guy to ignore except when he bothers them, an approach that seems pretty reasonable at this point. Trump and the media have been shouting at each other so long that it all sounds like white noise now. Americans are almost instinctively tuning Trump out. His domination of the modern media landscape is making people treat him as background noise. Effectively, that means that his rhetoric makes about as much difference as James Monroe's.