I'm busy with other things today and tomorrow, so will just make a short post on El Chapo. I'll also fill in the missing source links in this post tonight.

On El Chapo, I wondered as soon as the Sean Penn connection was revealed whether El Chapo was motivated by a crush on Kate del Castillo. Penn intimated as such in his Rolling Stone article.

... maybe he watched her on TV and developed a crush on her. (Penn seems to intimate infatuation may have been the cause.)

The text messages between El Chapo and Kate published by Milennio also suggest he was infatuated with her. But another piece has now been disclosed in Mexican papers: During the search of the room he occupied at the raided house (the one with the secret switch that opened the way to the tunnel), police found 4 videos of various episodes of La Reina del Sur.

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The gold standard for polling in Iowa is the Selzer Poll for the Des Moines Register. And its latest poll of the Iowa Dem caucus shows a very tight race = it's now 42-40 Clinton. In their previous poll it was 48-39.

A couple of interesting points - (1) the tightening is due to some Clinton supporters moving to undecided. Sanders support has not moved up (up a point which is statistically insignificant with a MOE of 4.4.) (2) Sanders support is very concentrated in college towns and thus may not translate into a delegate win even if he prevails in the popular vote.

Iowa is a very strange state for reporting results. It is actually very hard to get a popular vote read out of Iowa. So watch for how the results in Iowa are reported.

But the reality remains the same - Sanders has to win to have a chance. A split of Iowa and NH (Sanders leads there) leaves an unchanged landscape with the primaries moving to South Carolina and Nevada where Clinton's dominating leads among PoC put Sanders in a very tough spot.

Of course it would be uphill for Sanders even if he sweeps Iowa and NH, but without that I see it as basically ending the race.

I'm honestly surprised to be asking the question in the title - thinking the answer would be "of course it is!" But the structure of ACA, with Medicaid expansion and means tested insurance subsidies makes this not so clear according to Austan Goolsbee:

2) Sanders is right that we shouldn't just think of his single-payer health plan as a $15 trillion tax increase. We should ask whether people would be better or worse off in total. But even by that measure, lots of low and middle income workers would, in fact, be worse off and paying higher taxes.

More . . .

Ruta 35: The Escape Valve is finally airing on Unimas (with English captioning.) It's about the snitches recruited by the DEA and ICE to rat out the drug cartels in exchange for leniency for their own misdeeds, and is based on the career of long time ICE agent Dylan Wilkins .

This dramatic series is the story of Dylan Wilkins and the criminals he recruits to assist him in his relentless pursuit of drug lords and other wanted felons. These criminals become informants for ICE and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in exchange for reducing their charges and avoiding prosecutions.

However, Wilkins’ informants are not your typical criminals- he introduces an array of men and women who, all driven by different motives such as fear and revenge, risk their lives everyday on a dark and risky mission. Among his informants are a 75-year-old grandmother who transports drugs, an IT engineer who has close ties and unparalleled access to a Mexican cartel, a “professional” informant who has been living a perilous double life for years, and the cousin of a ruthless mafia king, thirsty for the reward over her cousin's head.

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I just tuned into the State of the Union. How's Obama doing? Does he have anything new to say?

Here's a new open thread, all topics welcome.

David Bowie has died after a long bout with cancer. He was 69.

My favorite David Bowie song:

R.I.P.

If I were going to write another post today, undoubtedly it would be on El Chapo. Rather than do that, I'll put up a new open thread.

All topics welcome.

Update: Penn was not present during the interview. He met with El Chapo in Mexico, and they agreed to do the interview in the future, but circumstances prevented it. So Penn sent the questions by Blackberry Messenger and El Chapo filmed and sent his replies.

Orignal Post

Rolling Stone has just published a two minute video clip from a recent video interview of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman by Sean Penn at a secret location. RS says the interview was submitted to El Chapo and he had no changes.

The producer of the video is none other than Kate del Castillo, the terrific Mexican actress who starred in La Reina Del Sur and more recently, Duenos del Paraiso(See my post here.) She's also in the new film The 33 about the trapped Chilean miners. She's my favorite Mexican actress, by miles. [More...]

I don't know why the media keeps saying Mexico has refused until now to consider extraditing Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman-Loera to the U.S. It issued two arrest warrants for his extradition, one in July and one in September, 2015. One was for his San Diego case involving the 1993 Otay Mesa tunnel, and the other was for his 2012 Indictment in the Western District of Texas.

Mexico's Attorney General confirmed this today in a statement.

The statement also describes the various time periods relevant to an extradition proceeding. The defense has the right to challenge extradition, and the process likely will take several months or longer. His lawyer says he has six writs of Amparo pending or granted, and plans to file another, as he was denied access to El Chapo this weekend at Altiplano. One of the writs was dismissed on legal grounds.[More...]

At a press conference held at the government's airplane hangar in Mexico City around 10 pm MT last night(available here), both Osorio Chong and Attorney General Arely Gomez spoke. Gomez said El Chapo was being sent back to Altiplano, the prison from which he escaped. (He has since arrived there.)

As for extradition, I don't expect it to happen anytime soon. Last July, he was granted a Writ of Amparo prohibiting his extradition to the U.S. without first being provided a hearing and due process. In October, another court granted his writ. (News article in Spanish here.) [More...]

Multiple news sources are reporting that ISIS militant Ali Saqr al Qasem, on orders from ISIS, publicly shot and killed his mother outside the post office where she worked in Raqqa.

The reason: Al-Qasem had reported his mother for apostasy -- she had encouraged him to leave Raqqa with her. ISIS then ordered him to kill her.

True? I'm dubious, but I suppose it's possible. The source is the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights.