Year: 2016

They Went There

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In the “Bridgegate” trial, prosecutors are saying that Chris Christie knew about the traffic tie up as it happened, and why it happened:

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey knew that three of his top officials were involved in a plan to shut down lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge as it was happening and that the closings were intended to punish a local mayor for declining to support him, federal prosecutors said on Monday.

The assertion was an unexpected and startling beginning to the trial of two former Christie administration officials charged with closing the lanes in 2013 and then covering it up. And it was a surprising claim because of the side of the courtroom it came from, as lawyers made opening statements.

Defense lawyers have long argued that Mr. Christie, a Republican, and his top advisers were well aware of the lane closings and that they directed the cover-up as they tried to protect the governor’s political aspirations — saying their clients were “thrown under the presidential bus,” as one lawyer argued on Monday.

But this was the first time a prosecutor had pointed a finger at Mr. Christie. And it directly contradicts the governor’s statements in the three years since the lanes were mysteriously closed, paralyzing the borough of Fort Lee, N.J.

Mr. Christie, a former top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, has consistently denied that he knew about the lane closings as they unfolded, and argued that the United States attorney’s office had “exonerated” him when it declined to indict him along with the defendants now standing trial.

The prosecutor, speaking for the United States attorney’s office, said that two of the alleged co-conspirators in the case, David Wildstein and Bill Baroni, had “bragged” to the governor about the lane closings at a memorial service for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, on the third day of the closings, and that they had been done to “mess” with Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee, a Democrat, because he had declined entreaties to endorse the governor’s re-election. Mr. Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, who were close allies of Mr. Christie, are the two defendants in the trial.

Mr. Wildstein and Mr. Baroni boasted to Mr. Christie that panicked phone calls from Mr. Sokolich, pleading that the lane closings were a “public safety emergency,” were deliberately being ignored, the prosecutor said.

Wildstein has copped a plea and is testifying for the state, so my guess is that we will see some very interesting testimony.

I am not unsure whether or not the intent her is to finger Christie, or if it is a ploy to set the defense attorneys back on their heels.

Still, pass the popcorn.

I was Hoping for Stealthy McStealthface

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The USAF has named its new bomber, the B-21, the “Raider” as an homage to the Jimmy Doolittle raids on Japan:

Almost seven months after designating Northrop Grumman’s next-generation stealth aircraft the B-21, U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah James announced on Sept. 19 that it will be called the Raider, in honor of the Doolittle Raiders who took on the Japanese during World War II.

The name came about through a poll of airmen that ran from March to May, with the winnowing down of potential names to a handful of top submissions. From more than 4,600 entries, the winning name “Raider” was revealed by Lt. Col. (ret.) Richard Cole at the opening of the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland. Cole is one of the last surviving Doolittle Raiders; he was co-pilot in aircraft No. 1.

………

There had been speculation that the Air Force’s B-21 name would honor a World War II aerial bombardment type, such as the B-17 Flying Fortress, B-29 Superfortress, Consolidated B-24 Liberator, North American B-25 Mitchell or Martin B-26 Marauder.
In choosing Raider, the air branch has rejected ghoulish suggestions like “Wraith” or “Spectre” as well as tongue-in-cheek nods to the aircraft’s low-observable profile such as “Stealthy McSteathface” and “Dr. Stealthlove.”

It should have been “Stealthy McStealthface”.

Also, why the B-21?  What are the 18 aircraft between the B-2 and this?

Huh, It Appears That I Got It Wrong Yesterday

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Police have arrested a suspect, one Ahmad Khan Rahami, an immigrant from Afghanistan whose
family came to the United States in 1995 when he was 7:

The man who the police said sowed terror across two states, setting off bombs in Manhattan and on the Jersey Shore and touching off a furious manhunt, was tracked down on Monday morning sleeping in the dank doorway of a neighborhood bar and taken into custody after being wounded in a gun battle with officers.

………

Even as the remarkably swift arrest eased fears across the region, investigators were still in the earliest stages of trying to determine what provoked the attacks, why a street in Chelsea was one of the targets and whether the bomber was aided by others. While investigators have been focused on Mr. Rahami’s actions immediately before and after the bombings, they were also working on Monday to trace his activities and travel in both recent months and years.

One law enforcement official said that the bomb technicians involved in the investigation believed that Mr. Rahami constructed all the devices and that his handiwork raised the possibility that he had received training from someone with experience building improvised explosive devices.

“If you’re working off the premise that the guy made all these devices,” the official said, “then the guy is a pretty good bombmaker. And you don’t get that good on the internet.”

………

Mr. Rahami and his family had traveled periodically to Pakistan, and on one trip, he stayed for nearly a year. A senior law enforcement official said that no evidence had yet been uncovered that he had received military training abroad.

I was figuring a white supremacist/Christian dominionist.

It appears that my first guess was wrong.

Seriously? There is an Opioid Lobby?

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Seriously. Pharma has lobbyists whose job is to make sure that over-prescription and addiction continue.

Ka-Ching!

The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity teamed up to investigate the influence of pharmaceutical companies on state and federal policies regarding opioids, the powerful painkillers that have claimed the lives of 165,000 people in the U.S. since 2000.

The news agencies tracked proposed laws on the subject and analyzed data on how the companies and their allies deployed lobbyists and contributed to political campaigns.

$880 million in lobbying, over a thousand lobbyists, AstroTurf groups, the whole megilla.

Not enough bullets.

Linkage

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How to deactivate a cat:

This mimics how mamma cat carries her kittens. I knew that this worked on kittens, but I had no clue that it worked on adult cats.

Boeing Cannot Design Planes Anymore

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As a result of years of layoffs and retirements of staff, Boeing lacked the technical resources to make a credible bid for the new Air Force Trainer:

It seemed so all-American: a U.S. aviation giant unveiling its newest military jet to flashing lights and thumping heavy-metal music. But the sleek twin-tailed T-X — Boeing’s candidate to become the U.S. Air Force’s next pilot trainer — couldn’t have made it to the dolled-up St. Louis hangar without a good deal of international help.

For all its deep aviation heritage, the Chicago company needed a partner on the T-X bid. A decade of engineering layoffs had left the venerable American firm without the workers needed to add the trainer competition to its existing workload, particularly with the Air Force requiring demonstration aircraft with a relatively quick turnaround. It also needed a way to do it more cheaply than past endeavors.

So the maker of the F-15 Eagle and F/A-18 Super Hornet teamed up with Saab — builder of the Gripen 4.5-generation fighter jet — to develop a T-X candidate. And less than three years after the two firms announced their partnership, they have now unveiled their first two aircraft, which are expected to fly by year’s end. That’s pretty fast for an American defense firm.

While officials from neither company would say just what parts of the plane were developed in Europe, Saab is believed to be manufacturing large portions of it. In June, a large Russian cargo plane believed to be carrying sections of the new aircraft flew from Sweden to the U.S.

………

“I’m not saying this thing is doomed. It’s just that I’m uncomfortable with a big disconnect between engineering and design and manufacturing,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at the Virginia-based Teal Group consulting firm. “It adds risk, it gets rid of a core company advantage, and frankly, there are just huge advantages of having designers and manufacturers co-located.”

Aboulafia cited Boeing’s need to lean on its partner for engineering.

“Outsourcing design — that appears to have a lot more complications than benefits,” he said. “It adds risk and it gets rid of a core capability, a core differentiator.”

I would note here that Boeing has outsourced technical expertise on the civil side as well, with many of the stumbles in 787 development coming from the fact that critical engineering expertise was outsourced to, “risk sharing partners.”

It is a clear indictment of the McDonnell Douglas MBA style management that Boeing has had for the past few decades.

Boeing can no longer design and build new aircraft.

The Democrats Don’t Deserve to Win

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It appears that a significant portion of the Democrats in Congress want Hillary Clinton to appoint aged conservatives to the courts.

This appears simply to be an exercise in rank cowardice:

Senate Democrats say Hillary Clinton should ignore pressure from liberals who want her to make a younger, more progressive pick for the Supreme Court than Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee.

Democrats facing tough races in the next cycle don’t want Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, to spend her political capital on a messy fight over the court — and the hot-button social issues under its jurisdiction — during her first 100 days in office.

They also don’t want to have to defend a more liberal pick ahead of a tough reelection cycle in 2018.

Democrats will be defending 25 seats, compared to just eight for Republicans that year, including in states such as North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and Missouri. All are tough places for the party to win in presidential, let alone midterm, elections.

The Democrats would prefer that Clinton, if she is elected, focus her time and attention on passing legislation they can run on as a major accomplishment, such as an infrastructure investment package.

A senior Senate Democratic aide whose boss faces a competitive reelection in 2018 said, “Not one of those vulnerable Democrats is going to run on the Supreme Court; they can run on an infrastructure bill.”

This is the sort of crap that leads makes voting 3rd party or staying home a lot more attractive.

They want the next Supreme Court justice to be a guy who would be the oldest justice appointed in 44 years, and someone who is to the right of Scalia on criminal due process.

F%$# these guys.

The Washington Post just Became the Most Repulsive OP/ED Page in the US

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When considering the fact that the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page is a competitor, this is no small mark of ignominy, but since they just called for the prosecution of their own source in an Pulitzer Award winning study, they have clearly jumped the proverbial shark:

Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

 But not the Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

 In doing so, the Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source — one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against the paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.

 ………

 The editorial page is separate from the news organization and does not speak for the latter; I seriously doubt the journalists or editors at the Post who worked on these news stories would agree with any of that editorial. But still, if the Post editorial page editors now want to denounce these revelations, and even call for the imprisonment of their paper’s own source on this ground, then they should at least have the courage to acknowledge that it was the Washington Post — not Edward Snowden — who made the editorial and institutional choice to expose those programs to the public. They might want to denounce their own paper and even possibly call for its prosecution for revealing top-secret programs they now are bizarrely claiming should never have been revealed to the public in the first place.

(emphasis mine)

Jeff Bezos: You didn’t hire him, but you can fire Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Post, tomorrow.

He is a cancer on journalism.

Quote of the Day

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I’m as worried as anyone else about the possibility of Trump getting elected. But if it happens, it’s not going to be because The New York Times allowed a few reporters to investigate the Clinton Foundation. It’ll be because we’re a nation of idiots, who vote the same way we choose channels: without thinking.

—Matt Taibbi

I agree: The idiots who are insisting that any investigation of Clinton is akin to treason are full of crap.

Speaking of Looters

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In response to outrage over price gouging (sound familiar?), Mylan Pharmaceuticals is lobbying for an additional subsidy for their EpiPen:

Against a growing outcry over the surging price of EpiPens, a chorus of prominent voices has emerged with a smart-sounding solution: Add the EpiPen, the lifesaving allergy treatment, to a federal list of preventive medical services, a move that would eliminate the out-of-pocket costs of the product for millions of families — and mute the protests.

Dr. Leonard Fromer, an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, just promoted the idea in the prestigious American Journal of Medicine. A handful of groups are preparing a formal request to the government. And Tonya Winders, who runs a patient advocacy nonprofit organization, reached out late last month to crucial lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“We can save lives by ensuring access to these medications,” said Ms. Winders, chief executive of the Allergy and Asthma Network.

A point not mentioned by these advocates is that a big potential beneficiary of the campaign is Mylan, the pharmaceutical giant behind EpiPens. The company would be able to continue charging high prices for the product without patients complaining about the cost.

An examination of the campaign by The New York Times, including a review of documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, shows that Mylan is well aware of that benefit and, in fact, has been helping orchestrate and pay for the effort.

………

The journal article says it was “drafted and revised” by a medical writing consulting firm paid by Mylan, in consultation with Dr. Fromer. And Dr. Fromer himself has served in the last year as a paid Mylan consultant — which he discloses as part of the journal article. The company has also contributed money to many other groups behind the effort, and it has met with them — and Ms. Winders’s organization in particular — to coordinate its strategy, the participants said.

………

The idea being advanced is simple: If the EpiPen makes the federal preventive list, most Americans would have no insurance co-pay when getting the product. That means they could obtain the medication with no direct cost, regardless of its retail price. Mylan could keep the EpiPen at the current price, or perhaps raise it more, while keeping patient anger at a minimum.

………

But a review of Mylan’s lobbying history makes clear that the company has an exceptional track record at influencing government policies, both in Washington and in state capitals. Heather Bresch, Mylan’s chief executive, called the effort “our unconventional approach to growing this franchise” in remarks to Wall Street analysts last year.

Her “unconventional approach” is based largely on the fact that her father Joe Manchin (D-WV) is a US Senator.

………

Mylan gives money to Ms. Winders’s organization to help expand treatment for severe allergies. She would not say how much the company has given, or the exact terms, citing a confidentiality agreement. But part of that money is related to this push, Ms. Winders acknowledged.

“I am being compensated to ensure access to epinephrine,” Ms. Winders said in an interview last week.

Manchin is facing reelection in 2010.  He needs to be seriously primaried.

What’s more, if there is a way to take Mylan, down, and better yet put its management in jail, that should be pursued as well.

Of Course, It Wouldn’t Be an Emergency without Uber Profiteering………

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#NYCExplosion causes residents to attempt to get home. #Uber taking total advantage of chaos and surcharging passengers 1.4 to 1.8 times.

— Michael Cohen (@MichaelCohen212) September 18, 2016

So, of course, within moments of the bomb going off, the surge pricing kicked in:

Passengers attempting to hail Uber cars during New York City’s explosion on Saturday night hammered the ride sharing service for its pricing policies, accusing the company of gouging customers during a dangerous incident.

As news broke that a device had detonated in the city’s Chelsea section, scared passengers attempted to use their Uber apps to hail a ride home—only to be hit with notifications that demand was “off the charts.”

Furious users took to Twitter to vent their frustration, which was first reported by The Sun UK. Shortly after the blast, Uber announced on the social network that it had suspended its “surge pricing,” a system that has been criticized in the past by some riders.

They announced that “surge pricing” was suspended, but reports from Twitter indicate otherwise.

This is what happens when you allow Ayn Rand worshiping psychopaths to blithely ignore regulations.

Just Lovely

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It looks like some whack job set off a bomb in Manhattan. Thankfully, there are no fatalities:

A powerful explosion caused by what the authorities believe was a homemade bomb injured at least 29 people on a crowded sidewalk in the bustling Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan on Saturday night.

A few hours later, the authorities found and removed what they described as a second explosive device four blocks away, raising the possibility that two bombs had been planted in the heart of the city.

Mayor Bill de Blasio called the explosion — which occurred about 8:30 p.m. on West 23rd Street — “an intentional act” but initially said there was no connection to terrorism and no immediate claim of responsibility.

Police officers swarmed Chelsea’s streets after the blast, which reverberated across a city scarred by terrorism and vigilant about threats, just days after the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Whatever the cause,” Mr. de Blasio said, “New Yorkers will not be intimidated.”

As the authorities sought to identify what had caused the explosion, they described the second device as a pressure cooker resembling the one used in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, according to a police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation.

No word on who yet, but seeing as authorities have not yet tried to finger ISIS or al Qaeda, which makes me wonder if this might have been a Timothy McVeigh type, rather than Islamist terrorism.

And Syria Becomes Even More of a Clusterf%$3

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As you may be aware, Russia and Syria have hammered out a deal for a cease fire.

Russia wanted security council approval this, but the US refused because they do not want to reveal the content of the documents:

UN Security Council members had been due to meet in New York on Friday afternoon for a hastily called meeting on the fragile Syrian ceasefire, billed as the “last chance” to end the five-year war.

 But Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, said the meeting was canceled at the last minute as the US was unwilling to disclose exactly what was in the documents outlining the deal hammered out last week by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

 “This briefing is not going to happen and mostly likely we’re not going to have a resolution of the Security Council because the US does not want to share those documents with the members of the Security Council and we believe that we cannot ask them to support a document which they haven’t seen,” Churkin said.

 In Washington, a US official said the session was canceled because the Russians were trying to force the US to make the ceasefire deal public.

 “The United States will not compromise operational security,” the official said.

Call me a cynic, but my guess that neither State nor the Pentagon want these agreements to be public so that they can violate the terms with impunity.

The last time the US got a security council ruling, they used civilian protection as a cloak for regime change. (Libya)

When you consider the fact that US special operations forces are supporting the Turkish invasion of Syria, and that the US just bombed Syrian troops, allegedly by accident, it makes one even more suspicious:

U.S.-led coalition forces bombed Syrian troops near Deir al-Zor airport on Saturday, the Syrian army said, allowing Islamic State fighters to briefly overrun their position and putting new strains on a ceasefire in effect elsewhere in the country.

 The United States military said it had ceased air strikes against what it had believed to be Islamic State positions after Russia informed it that Syrian military personnel and vehicles may have been hit.

 The ceasefire, which took effect on Monday, is the most significant peacemaking effort in Syria for months but has been undermined by repeated accusations of violations on both sides and by a failure to bring humanitarian aid to besieged areas.

 ………

 U.S.-led coalition forces bombed Syrian troops near Deir al-Zor airport on Saturday, the Syrian army said, allowing Islamic State fighters to briefly overrun their position and putting new strains on a ceasefire in effect elsewhere in the country.

 ………

 Saturday’s air strikes were reported by Russia and a war monitor to have killed dozens of Syrian soldiers, and were said by Moscow to be evidence of what it called Washington’s “stubborn refusal” to coordinate strikes with Damascus.

 Islamic State said via its Amaq news channel it had taken complete control of Jebel Tharda, where the bombed position was located, which would have allowed it to overlook government-held areas of Deir al-Zor.

As a result of this, the UN Security Council will be meeting to handle this development:

The United Nations security council has called an emergency meeting to discuss air strikes by the US-led coalition in Syria, diplomats said, after Russia said coalition warplanes had bombed and killed Syrian government forces.

The 15-member council was due to meet behind closed doors on Saturday evening in New York, diplomats told Reuters.

The US envoy to the United nations, Samantha Power, said she regretted loss of life in the Syria airstrike, but said the Russian call for the security council meeting was “a stunt”.

Earlier on Saturday Russia’s ministry of defense said coalition planes had killed 62 Syrian soldiers, wounded 100 more and allowed Islamic State militants to gain an advantage through the strike.

The Pentagon did not outright admit that coalition planes had hit Syrian forces, but said that pilots had “believed they were striking a Daesh [Isis] fighting position” and may have struck Syrian government forces instead.

………

In a statement, the ministry echoed questions from President Vladimir Putin about US commitment to a shaky ceasefire deal brokered by the two countries, and said the airstrikes could be evidence that American officials had not consulted with their counterparts in Moscow.

“If this airstrike was the result of a targeting error,” Russian major general Igor Konashenkov said in a statement, “it is a direct consequence of the US side’s stubborn unwillingness to coordinate its action against terrorist groups on Syrian territory with Russia.”

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, was subsequently quoted by Ria Novosti saying the Kremlin would demand an explanation at the UN.

“We are reaching a really terrifying conclusion for the whole world,” she said, according to the state-owned news agency. “The White House is defending Islamic State. Now there can be no doubts about that.

“We demand a full and detailed explanation from Washington. That explanation must be given at the UN Security Council.”

I find the assertion of it being an accident, at least one not involving deliberate recklessness, not particularly credible.

Both the State Department and the the military still have a large number of senior officials (including SecDef Ashton Carter) who want regime change in Syria, so I think that any consideration of potentially hitting Syrian troops by US forces is (at best) perfunctory.

There is no meaningful moderate opposition to the Assad regime, what isn’t led by ISIS is led by al Nusra, which (despite its recent rebranding) is still a local chapter of al Qaeda, and our continued support for the desires of the Turks and the Gulf tyrants to overthrow him is going to crate negative backlash for decades.

This Pretty Much is the End of a Political Career

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Richard Milne lost the Republican New York state assembly primary to Bill Nojay who is both indicted and DEAD:

………

In the state’s Republican-leaning state district, which covers parts of suburban Rochester and the Finger Lakes region, crooked State Assemblyman Republican Bill Nojay beat his primary rival Richard Milne on Tuesday – four days after his death. The 59-year old Nojay took his life Friday at family’s cemetery plot in Rochester, shooting himself near his brother’s grave as a police offer was arriving.

Only in New York, folks, only in New York.

“I really believe we would have fared better with Mr. Nojay still alive,” said Richard Milne, his party rival. “They really did some things in the past few days that were in poor taste in my opinion to sway the vote.”

Milne was referring to the onslaught of GOP “robocalls” and other efforts to boost the Nojay vote after his death.

“Despite the unexpected and tragic loss of our Assemblyman, the endorsement still stands,” Republicans from the town of Hornell wrote, encouraging voters to back the dead candidate.

………

Milne posted a statement on his Facebook page3 that read: “I appreciate all the incredible support we’ve received,” adding that he was “proud that we have run this election campaign fairly and professionally even when others that oppose us have not and are not.”

Nojay, who was embroiled in legal troubles, was facing trial in Cambodia on fraud charges and was reportedly under FBI scrutiny.

In July it was announced that Nojay and three other American businessmen including Sichan Siv, a George W. Bush-appointed envoy to the United Nations, would be tried in absentia for an alleged fraud scheme in Cambodia, accused of running a rice-importing grift, allegedly swindling a prominent Cambodian dentist for $1 million.

Nojay denied fraud was committed.

“All the people I’ve worked with have been honorable people, but again, some of them have done well, and some of them have stumbled. That’s just the nature of small business work,” Nojay told Rochester’s WHAM radio the day before he died.

Nojay’s legal woes were growing stateside, as well. One of his New York-based companies was the subject of a federal investigation for a questionable contract with Rochester schools. Then, two weeks ago, FBI officials told Nojay’s business partner that the assemblyman was under investigation for allegedly embezzling from a fund that held $1.8 million, the Democrat and Chronicle reported.

A strong NRA supporter, Nojay was a foe of Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had pushed stricter gun control laws through the legislature after the Sandy Hook massacre. He was also a big fan of Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Why the hell did the party establishment continue to support this guy, particularly after he shot himself?

This buggers the mind.

California’s Drought Could Last for Centuries

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Clues from prehistoric droughts and arid periods in California show that today’s increasing greenhouse gas levels could lock the state into drought for centuries, according to a study led by UCLA professor Glen MacDonald.


The study, published today in the Nature.com journal Scientific Reports, looked at how natural climatic forces contributed to centuries-long and even millennia-long periods of dryness in California during the past 10,000 years. These phenomena—sun spots, a slightly different earth orbit, a decrease in volcanic activity—intermittently warmed the region through a process called radiative forcing, and recently have been joined by a new force: greenhouse gases.

As long as warming forces like greenhouse gases are present, the resulting radiative forcing can extend drought-like conditions more or less indefinitely, said MacDonald, a distinguished professor of geography and of ecology and evolutionary biology.

“Radiative forcing in the past appears to have had catastrophic effects in extending droughts,” said MacDonald, an international authority on drought and climate change. “When you have arid periods that persist for 60 years, as we did in the 12th century, or for millennia, as we did from 6,000 to 1,000 B.C., that’s not really a ‘drought.’ That aridity is the new normal.”

Researchers tracked California’s historic and prehistoric climate and water conditions by taking a sediment core in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They pulled a 2-inch-wide, 10-foot-deep cylinder of sediment from the bottom of Kirman Lake and analyzed it in third-of-an­-inch sections, creating the most detailed and continuous paleoenvironmental record of California.

The team correlated their findings with other studies of California climate history, and for the first time, united all the studies and cross-referenced them with histories of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature taken from marine sediment cores and other sources.

What they found was not only that periods of increased radiative forcing could produce drought-like conditions that extended indefinitely, but that these conditions were closely tied to prolonged changes in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures.

While the urban areas of California may find a way to deal with this, but the agriculture sector of the state is completely f%$#ed.

Can We Please Give them Back to Mexico? (Part CCCXLIV)

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Texas is at it again. It is now arbitrarily denying special ed services to meet a quota set by state regulators:

During the first week of school at Shadow Forest Elementary, a frail kindergartner named Roanin Walker had a meltdown at recess. Overwhelmed by the shrieking and giggling, he hid by the swings and then tried to escape the playground, hitting a classmate and biting a teacher before being restrained.

The principal called Roanin’s mother.

“There’s been an incident.”

Heidi Walker was frightened, but as she hurried to the Humble school that day in 2014, she felt strangely relieved.

She had warned school administrators months earlier that her 5-year-old had been diagnosed with a disability similar to autism. Now they would understand, she thought. Surely they would give him the therapy and counseling he needed.

Walker knew the law was on her side. Since 1975, Congress has required public schools in the United States to provide specialized education services to all eligible children with any type of disability.

But what she didn’t know is that in Texas, unelected state officials have quietly devised a system that has kept thousands of disabled kids like Roanin out of special education.

………

More than a dozen teachers and administrators from across the state told the Chronicle they have delayed or denied special education to disabled students in order to stay below the 8.5 percent benchmark. They revealed a variety of methods, from putting kids into a cheaper alternative program known as “Section 504” to persuading parents to pull their children out of public school altogether.

“We were basically told in a staff meeting that we needed to lower the number of kids in special ed at all costs,” said Jamie Womack Williams, who taught in the Tyler Independent School District until 2010. “It was all a numbers game.”

………

“It’s extremely disturbing,” said longtime education advocate Jonathan Kozol, who described the policy as a cap on special education meant to save money.

“It’s completely incompatible with federal law,” Kozol said. “It looks as if they’re actually punishing districts that meet the needs of kids.”

In a statement, Texas Education Agency officials denied they had kept disabled students out of special education and said their guideline calling for enrollments of 8.5 percent was not a cap or a target but an “indicator” of performance by school districts. They said state-by-state comparisons were inappropriate and attributed the state’s dramatic declines in special educations enrollments to new teaching techniques that have lowered the number of children with “learning disabilities,” such as dyslexia.

In fact, despite the number of children affected, no one has studied Texas’ 32 percent drop in special education enrollment.

………

There is no agreed-upon number for what percentage of kids have a disability that requires special education services.

The best approximation may be 15.4 percent. That’s how many U.S. kids ages 2-8 whom doctors have diagnosed with a mental, behavioral or developmental disorder, according to a March 2016 study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s a long read, and it is infuriating.

H/t Diane Ravitch.