INTEL REPORT--Bestowing vital hope on beleaguered journalists everywhere, Hilde Lysiak, 12-year-old reporter, editor and publisher of the Orange Street News, last week faced down an Arizona cop who threatened to "have you arrested and thrown in juvey" for chasing down a tip on her bike, aka doing her job - or as Lysiak conscientiously reported, "The OSN was working on a story in Patagonia, Arizona when a law enforcement officer threatened the reporter with arrest unless she stopped reporting the news." 

WELL REGULATED MILITIA, UNREGULATED PRESIDENT--A young friend is seriously considering joining her state’s National Guard. She’s a world-class athlete, but also a working-class woman from a rural background competing in a rich person’s sport. Between seasons, she works for a local farm and auctioneer to put together the money for equipment and travel.

Each season, raising the necessary money to compete is a touch-and-go proposition, so she’s now talking to the National Guard. If, after basic training, she joins the Army’s World Class Athletes Program as a reservist, her service will essentially consist of competing in her sport. She’ll get an annual salary, health care, college tuition -- all to do what she loves and wants to do anyway. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, she could end up fighting in one of this country’s forever wars.

INTEL REPORT: During his excruciating State of the Union address, Donald Trump tried to use the plight of women, real and imagined, to promote his rightwing agenda. It was an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak.

As part of his racist attacks on Central American immigrants, Trump erroneously claimed that one in three female caravanista refugees has been sexually assaulted en route to the U.S. border. This notorious sexual harasser intoned about sex traffickers who “smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery.”

Did Trump raise the humane response of opening the borders to survivors of domestic abuse, assault or harassment? Did he call for assistance and care for vulnerable immigrants? Hell, no! His only solutions are to mobilize soldiers and build a border wall. So much for assisting women in need. How cynical to use real-life trauma to sell a solution that will only add to women’s problems. 

INTEL REPORT--The Great Pretender's ongoing hysteria about a wall to keep out his fictional “tremendous onslaught” of brown people is happily, increasingly running into its own wall - knowledgeable people in border areas pushing back and arguing #WallsDontWork.” 

The resistance ranges from officials in the border town of Nogales, Arizona taking down his newly installed, flesh-slicing, maximum-security-prison-flavored coils of razor wire on an existing border fence - WTF on the U.S. side yet - that was universally blasted as “inhuman” to both California's and New Mexico's governors withdrawing most  National Guard troops from the border, condemning Trump's  "fear-mongering." 

New Mexico's new governor even made a wild video in which she hurls herself through multiple flimsy but dusty walls to show what she thinks of the whole ignoring-real-problems-to-build-a-stupid-racist-wall thing. 

INTEL REPORT--In a little-noticed side impact of California’s 2018 law granting drivers the option of listing their gender as nonbinary, California’s Department of Insurance has decreed that auto insurance companies can no longer grant breaks in insurance rates to teen drivers who are female or charge young men more.

Outgoing Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, in one of his final acts in office, issued a regulation last month prohibiting the use of gender in automobile insurance rating, similar to regulations in six other states.

Jones’ replacement, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, supports that policy, saying in a statement: “Gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation are beyond your control, and it is not a fair or even an effective way to predict risk.”

INTEL REPORT--According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 76 percent of registered voters believe that the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. (Photo: Michael Fleshman/Flickr/cc)

Likely 2020 contenders and progressive members of Congress have proposed a variety of plans in recent days to make the rich pay more in taxes and begin reversing soaring inequality—from a wealth tax to a 70 percent top marginal rate to a higher estate tax on the richest families—and a survey published on Monday found that such ideas are extremely popular among the American public.

According to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll, 76 percent of registered voters believe that the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes, and 61 percent back Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) new proposal for an annual tax of two percent on assets over $50 million—which she dubbed the "Ultra-Millionaire Tax." The poll found that even 50 percent of Republican voters support Warren's plan.