Nothing for a quarter, and now we have a bank and a credit union in the past week and a half.
Still the pace is ahead of 2016.
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far:
And here are the credit union closings:
Here is the Full NCUA list.
So, here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
Seriously, this Russian meddling with the election crap has taken a left turn into the Twilight Zone.
We now have claims that the Russian government used Pokemon Go to influence the election.
I have no doubt that there are Russian trolls out there, and I am even more certain that there elements in the Russian internet community who generate a living through click bait, but the idea that the Russian state security apparatus would use Pokemon f%$#ing Go to subvert our election is simply insane.
This, “A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin,” mishugas needs to stop.
It’s not just Facebook, Twitter and Google.
Even Pokemon Go, the mega-popular smartphone game that became a phenomenon last year, was the target of Russian agents trying to meddle with the 2016 US election, according to a report Thursday by CNN.
The effort was allegedly centered on a campaign called “Don’t Shoot Us,” an apparent reference “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” a mantra in widespread use after the shooting of Michael Brown.
The campaign is said to be tied to agents in Russia, and it reportedly used social media services like Facebook and Twitter to try to exploit racial tensions in the US. But there was one surprise target: Pokemon Go.
In playing Pokemon Go, people go to real-world locations to find and train digital monsters, which appear on their phone screens against the landscape picked up by the phones’ cameras.According to the CNN report, the Don’t Shoot Us campaign announced a contest on its Tumblr page in July 2016 for Pokemon Go players. The contest encouraged them to visit locations where alleged cases of police brutality took place. Players were also asked to give their Pokemon critters the names of people shot by police, including Eric Garner. The campaign offered players Amazon gift cards as rewards.
Just shoot me.
*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). So in jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.
This actually makes sense. Sweeney is guaranteed to win regardless of the contributions, but he has also been operating cheek by jowl with Chris Christie in gutting education and worker retirement plans.
In endorsing his opponent in the general election, the NJEA is signalling to other New Jersey Democrats that their support is not to be taken for granted.
It’s not like Sweeney could be any more hostile to the interests of teachers, and putting fear into the hearts of the caucus that he needs to get anything done.
As the song says, “People will always be tempted to wipe their feet, On anything with ‘welcome’ written on it.”
It’s a well justified brush-back pitch:
In an otherwise predictable New Jersey election season, the state’s largest public sector union has come out behind a Trump-supporting Republican facing an incumbent Democrat. The New Jersey Education Association, which is New Jersey’s top political spender, is backing Republican Fran Grenier against Steve Sweeney, the Democratic state Senate president and New Jersey’s second most-powerful elected official. The controversial endorsement has angered liberal allies, but the union remains unapologetic in its message: Democrats cannot take teachers for granted.
It’s a contentious move, but one that is unlikely to change the ultimate outcome of the election. Democrats are expected to control all three branches of government after November, a major turning point for the Garden State. After seven years under Republican Gov. Chris Christie — a man boasting an impressively low 15 percent approval rating — a majority of voters are expected to cast their ballot for Phil Murphy, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate running against the GOP’s Kim Guadagno. And with a state legislature that’s also expected to remain blue, progressives have been eagerly anticipating their chance to start reversing the policies of Christie’s tenure.
That explains why the NJEA has decided to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in what’s shaping up to be the most expensive legislative race in state history to try to unseat Sweeney: The union feels the top Democrat has betrayed it one too many times.
………
Sweeney, who first joined the state Senate in 2002, became majority leader in 2007 and Senate president in 2010. His relationship with the NJEA began to sour in 2011 when he pushed forward a deal with Christie that limited pension and health benefits for public sector workers. The union says Sweeney has continued to cozy up with Christie and has failed to forcefully criticize the governor’s underfunding of public education. The relationship deteriorated even further last year when Sweeney walked back on a promise to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to fully fund pensions, and then accused the NJEA of bribery and extortion.
This past March, the NJEA declared it would try to unseat Sweeney, but there were no Democrats willing to primary him. The union could have chosen to give no endorsement and still run negative ads against Sweeney, but the NJEA instead decided to endorse his Republican challenger along with running attack ads.
— Seth MacFarlane (@SethMacFarlane) October 11, 2017
And then he sang, “I saw your boobs.”
Notice the Slightly Uncomfortable Audience Reaction?
The story about Harvey Weinstein’s long history of harassment and assault of women in Hollywood continues to get more horrifying.
It also gets weirder. Now we have an explanation for a Seth McFarlane joke at the 2013 Oscars, and basically it’s him seizing the moral high ground.
You hear heard that right, “Seth McFarlane seizing the moral high ground.”
Now THERE is a phrase I never expected to write.
He had been told in confidence by a friend what had been done to them, and given those constraints, he went after Weinstein with a joke:
As allegations against disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein pile up, more and more celebrities are coming forward to either confirm or deny their own preexisting knowledge about the situation.
On Wednesday, Seth MacFarlane explained the origins of a 2013 joke he made at Harvey Weinstein’s expense during the announcement of Academy Award nominations.
MacFarlane cracked his joke immediately after he listed the nominees for supporting actress. “Congratulations,” he said. “You five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein,” which got a considerable response from the room.
“In 2011, my friend and colleague Jessica Barth, with whom I worked on the ‘Ted’ films, confided in me regarding her encounter with Harvey Weinstein and his attempted advances,” MacFarlane said in a statement on social media Wednesday. “She has since courageously come forward to speak out. It was with this account in mind that, when I hosted the Oscars in 2013, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a hard swing in his direction.”
I still find it hard to believe that Seth F%$#ing McFarlane is seizing the moral high ground.
We are living in profoundly strange times.
They both have to do with Russia, and the current hysteria that posits that $100,000 in ads on Facebook somehow trumped the $1,000,000,000 that the Clinton campaign spent.
The first is about bus kiosk ads from RT:
While everyone freaks out about Russian ads, RT takes out more Russian ads pic.twitter.com/Z5eW8GS6pg
— Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv) October 10, 2017
The second one, from the Russian ambassador to the UK, hits the British where it hurts, their 52 year drought in the World Cup:
A football team would be a better option pic.twitter.com/4Psj4ZkGy5
— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 10, 2017
Dayyymmmm! That one is going to leave a mark.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
You can now buy CueCats on Amazon Prime (Boing Boing) Daym! This privacy slurping bar code scanner was dead before the turn of the 20th century.I am so seeing Deadpool 2 in the movie theater:
Oh Chris Cillizza, You F%$#ING Sh%$heel
Over at everyone’s source of snark, Mr. Hurst did two things:
Specifically, he was, with an assist from John Cole, talking about Cillizza’s demand that Hillary Clinton issue a statement about the revelations about Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment sexual assault over the past few decades.
I was actually considering doing the same thing, but then I read this:
Make no mistake, this is no “analysis” as he has it labeled. And the thing you need to realize is Cillizza KNOWS that Clinton doesn’t support rape and sexual assault, he just wants make her respond. It’s him using his forum to make her jump- he might as well be saying “Dance, mad bitch, dance,” because we all know that if she does respond, Cillizza’s next piece will be “what took her so long” and “was she sincere” and so on.
They are right, and so I put the kibosh on writing a similar article to Cillizza’s.
I’m now actually feeling a bit ashamed that I was considering doing something like this.
As an aside, Hillary Clinton did condemn Weinstein today, as did the Obamas, but that really none of my f%$#ing business.
Keeping a score card on this sh%$ is lame.
It appears that the Trump administration wants to effectively gut the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), which would be a very good thing:
U.S. ISDS PROPOSAL WOULD CUT TWO KEY PROTECTIONS: Expect USTR to put at least one of those “poison pills” forward at talks this week. The final U.S. proposal on investor-state dispute settlement comes not only with an “opt-in” provisions that effectively makes the whole process voluntary, but also rolls back two key investor protections private companies have been able to use under the mechanism in past U.S. agreements. U.S. business and agriculture groups have already signaled that a radical departure from the current U.S. approach to investor protections would be forcefully opposed by them.
I don’t expect this to actually happen.
Even if Trump wants to do this, and I think that it is likely posturing, I would expect resistance from Congressional Republicans and the non “Alt-Right” personnel in his administration to make this outcome highly unlikely.
Even before this NFL season, which has featured team owners linking arms with players as shows of solidarity amid sharply critical comments from President Trump, some players were noting that the original message of protests during the national anthem had been largely lost. To them, the cause of bringing attention to racial injustice, in particular police brutality against black men, had been overshadowed by a heated national discussion over the merits of taking a knee during the national anthem.
To former NFL coach and ESPN analyst Mike Ditka, however, that cause made no sense to begin with. In a pregame interview before a radio broadcast of Monday night’s game between the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings, he said, “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”
The Germans have a term for this, Fachidiot, (Google Translate) which refers to an expert who is a complete moron outside of his limited area of expertise.
Thus, I add Michael Keller Ditka to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, unless he decides to do something like running for office, (please God no) you will here nothing about him from me
Of course, I haven’t posted about him before, so carry on.
It turns out that Sharon Waxman wrote just such a story, and it was edited to irrelevance by New York Times senior staff in 2004:
A whole lot of fur has been flying since last Thursday, when The New York Times published a game-changing investigative story about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct that in lightning speed brought the mogul to his knees.
He apologized and took an immediate leave of absence from the company he co-founded, but that wasn’t enough. His board members and legal advisers have been resigning en masse. And as new, ugly details emerge of three decades of settlements for sex-related offenses, he’s quickly becoming a national pariah.
I applaud The New York Times and writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for getting the story in print. I’m sure it was a long and difficult road.
But I simply gagged when I read Jim Rutenberg’s sanctimonious piece on Saturday about the “media enablers” who kept this story from the public for decades.
………
The story I reported never ran.
After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.
was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.
But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right?
Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian executive. Who cared?
The only question I have is, “Why Now?”
There has to be some sort of back-story which we have not yet heard.
This has been an open secret for years.
A friend of my father’s has been deep in Oregon politics for years, and she said that it was generally known that Bob Packwood was a sexually abusive drunk for at least a decade before this became public.
Why does this sort of crap stay covered up and then suddenly come out?
I can understand a few years, but why a few decades?
Why does it take so f%$#ing long?
If taxation is theft, then so is profit and property. That’s because private ownership of the means of production is protected by the capitalist state, and we as regular working citizens are coerced into accepting this arrangement under which we are exploited for profit.
There is not a square inch of land on this planet that wasn’t stolen at some point.
Private property is an artificial construct which has not for over 90% of human history.
Bespoke hand binding of a book. It’s almost pornographic.
Splinter magazine has a complete list of, “Every Member of Congress Who Took Money From the NRA and Tweeted ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ to Las Vegas.”
I have a partial list from the article after the break.
I only listed those who took more than $3000 from the NRA in the last election cycle. and then posted, “Thoughts and Prayers”
You will notice that they are all Republicans, and you will notice that Steve Scalise, who nearly died from a shooting is on this list.
These folks next job should involving asking if you want fries with that.
The Conservative Party in Britain has been privatizing the National Health Service (NHS) one bit at at time, and now we are seeing the consequencesn.
Specifically, Virgin Care, a private management company running the NHS is Bath, instructed its staff to cover up health and safety at the institution:
Virgin Care asked staff in the Bath area not to report their safety concerns to the health watchdog.
Registered managers in health and social care have a legal obligation to report issues to the Care Quality Commission if they feel their service is unsafe.
But Virgin Care asked its managers in Bath and North East Somerset to “hold off” from contacting the CQC as they struggled with IT issues affecting community health and social care services.
Patients had appointments cancelled, letters and reports were not sent out, and nurses had problems updating patient records during Virgin Care’s first three months in charge of community care in B&NES.
……
Virgin Care said it had “shared comprehensive details with the CQC and they have not raised any concerns”.
The private company said it had IT issues under control in its first report to the council in July.
But two weeks earlier, a senior manager had emailed service managers asking them to help “manage the situation” by not reporting their concerns to the CQC.
For the Tories, this is not a bug, it is a feature.
Their goal is slowly make the NHS worse and worse until it loses its overwhelming public support, and can then be terminated.
It’s Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine writ slow, and Britain’s conservatives have created a constituency for this policy by allowing the malefactors of great wealth, including Richard Branson (Virgin Care), to profit from this.
Previously I have suggested that if “The Resistance” ever was anything, it was being co-opted by the incompetent Democratic establishment to deflect from any meaningful accountability for their failures.
Now the New York Times, drops an article talking about how “The Resistance” is upending liberal politics.
Their evidence is that big donors are aggressively contributing to the “Grass Roots Movement”.
This is not is actually evidence of the opposite:
It started as a scrappy grass-roots protest movement against President Trump, but now the so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors, posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself.
………
Entrenched Democratic groups are facing growing questions about the return on the hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent over the years. Groups affiliated with Mrs. Clinton “spent so much money based on a bad strategy in this last cycle that they should step aside and let others lead in this moment,” said Quentin James, a founder of a political committee called the Collective PAC that supports African-American candidates.
Mr. James’s committee is among more than three dozen outfits that have started or reconfigured themselves since the election to try to harness the surge in anti-Trump activism. In addition to political committees, grass-roots mobilization nonprofits and legal watchdog groups, there are for-profit companies providing technological help to the new groups — essentially forming a new liberal ecosystem outside the confines of the Democratic Party.
………
“We’re in a disruptive period, and when we get through it, the progressive infrastructure landscape may look different,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberals who donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. “There may be groups that have been around that don’t rise to the challenge, and there may be some new groups that do rise to the challenge, while others fade away.”
The Democracy Alliance has helped shape the institutional left, steering more than $600 million since its inception in 2005 to a portfolio of carefully selected groups, including pillars of the Clinton-aligned establishment like the think tank Center for American Progress and the media watchdog Media Matters.
This is not, “An insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions,” this is a rebranding this is more of the same.
The big donors, the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, want gay marriage, but they don’t want unions or effective progressive taxation, or or fair trade deals, or cheaper drugs, or sensible limits to IP, since that would require real sacrifices on their part.
This is more of the same.
It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) October 8, 2017
I have been waiting for a Republican to completely go postal on Donald Trump, but I would not have bet on Corker.
I would have figured that it would have been John McCain, whose temper was impressive even as an infant, would have been the first one to do this.
Still, this was a masterful burn on “The Donald”.
I am amused.
H/t Wonkette, who puts their approval in somewhat earthier language.
After initiating a hihgly invasive pat-down of every student at a high school, a Georgia sheriff has been indicted on charges of exual battery, false imprisonment, and violation of oath of office.
There was no warrant, no probable cause, and the school had already been subjected to searches by other law enforcement.
All of the students were subjected to aggressive physical searches, including touching of their genitals and breasts.
Here’s hoping that the local prosecutor goes medieval on this guys ass.
Catalan farmers announced plans to block roads with their tractors at the French border.
Police raced to the border so that they could, as is their wont, break some Catalan heads.
They found no one.
The farmers had decoyed the police and established the blocked further south, effectively marooning the police and national guard. (Google translate link)
Even if I were not inclined to support the Catalans, (Rajoy and his PP party are Franco’s heirs, and the King of Spain is, well, the King of Spain, the heir of Ferdinand and Isabella, who I am even less inclined to suppor) I would admire the sheer level of protest craft in this deception.
Well played.
H/T Anti-Fascist News on Facebook, the source of the picture.
Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong If Elon Musk Is Chosen To Rebuild Puerto Rico’s Power Grid
Count me as dubious as the folks at Dealbreaker.
Just ask the Baltimore City fire department and its hazmat teams:
There was an unusual smell Thursday afternoon at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Upper Fells Point. The smell was on the third floor. Students and teachers didn’t know what it was.
“It was a smell that they certainly weren’t used to,” said Bill Heiser, the school’s president, who was off-campus at the time. “It appeared to be getting stronger.”
Several students and teachers reported difficulty breathing, Heiser said.
The school’s principal evacuated the building and the fire department was called. After arriving, the fire department requested a Hazmat team, which ran several tests for hazardous materials. All of them were negative, according to Baltimore fire spokesman Roman Clark.
………
Firefighters began to open all the windows in the building to air it out.
Then, Clark said, they located the source of the smell in a third-floor classroom: an aerosol plugin. Flavor: pumpkin spice.
F%$#ing pumpkin spice strikes again.
Now it’s not just polluting our Starbucks, it’s interfering with the education of our kids.
It must be stop.