Or is it, “Shazbat?”
FIOS is down, so no connectivity at home.
This sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.
Posted via mobile.
Month: June 2019
Tweet of the Day
If you gave a billion dollars to the top 10 news companies, the chance of a dime being spent on news would be pretty slim. You might as well give a pound of hamburger to a shark and hope to get meat loaf.How many billions have passed through their hands in the last decade?
— Steve Yelvington (@yelvington) June 10, 2019
Remember this whenever the big media starts whining about how Google News is so unfair to make money from directing readers to their websites.
These days, these organizations are run by finance types, and finance types don’t care about journalism.
Finance and journalism mix like Ebola and French kissing.
Ineluctable Evil
Just when I thought that Trump and his Evil Minions™ could not get any more evil, they propose charging grocery stores for the privilege of accepting food stamps.
It’s pretty clear what is going on here: They want to push SNAP out of food deserts, so as to reduce enrollment, so that they can eventually force people to starve.
Impeach now:
The White House proposal to overhaul the U.S. food stamp program — and the deep cuts it would make to benefits for the poorest households — has sparked public outrage on both sides of the aisle. But there’s another change tucked into the proposal that businesses say caught them off guard — and could wind up costing them more than $2 billion.
That provision is a new fee that the White House wants to charge retailers that accept food stamps, which is now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
………
Beyond the new fee, the Trump administration is proposing $191 billion in cuts over the next decade to the food stamp program. The U.S. budget office said the reductions would come from tightening the work requirement to qualify for the benefits, but said the details would be left up to individual states. The administration also expects states to make up some of the lost funding.
These folks should have been drowned at birth.
Nope, No Racism Here: Republicans in Maine Are pro Confederacy
The great state of Maine has adopted a new state ballad, which I guess is in addition to the state song.*
It honors the 20th Maine volunteer infantry regiment, which is best known for saving the Union at Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg.
It appears that some Republicans in the state are objecting, because they feel that the song is insufficiently considerate of the sensitive feelings of the traitors on the other side:
With Governor Janet Mills’ signature today, the “The Ballad of the 20th Maine” became Maine’s official state ballad.
The stirring anthem recorded and performed by the band The Ghost of Paul Revere tells the story of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which fought for the Union Army under General Joshua Chamberlain in the American Civil War. The regiment is best known for its brave defense of Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.
………
The bill to enshrine the ballad was sponsored by Rep. Scott Cuddy (D-Winterport) and passed without objection in both chambers. It did see some initial opposition in the legislature’s State and Local Government Committee, however, where two Republicans raised objections that the song’s unabashedly pro-Union message may be unfair to the South.
“I find it a little bit, we are united states, we are not Union, we are united states. And I find it just a little bit – I won’t say offensive but that’s what I mean – to say that we’re any better than the South was,” said Rep. Frances Head (R-Bethel) during a May 1st public hearing on the bill.
“I am a lover of history and especially a lover of the civil war period and regardless of what side people fought on, they were fighting for something they truly believed in,” said Rep. Roger Reed (R-Carmel), who specifically praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee. “Many of them were great Christian men on both sides. They fought hard and they were fighting for states’ rights as they saw them.”
Let me translate: “Great Christain men,” means let’s keep those n*****s from getting uppity.
………
Reed eventually voted in favor of the ballad legislation. Head voted against it.
They may represent a minority position, but the statements of these Republicans show just how far the Myth of the Lost Cause, a systematic effort to rehabilitate the racist legacy of the Confederacy, has spread. These objections were raised in Maine, which contributed a largest number of Union soldiers in proportion to its population of any state.
The American Civil War was fought on the issue of slavery. That’s the “state right” that Confederates were seeking to defend. To ignore or elide that history doesn’t just denigrate the sacrifices of our ancestors, but bolsters the resurgent white supremacist movement we’re seeing across our union today.
This is a feature, and not a bug of the modern Republican party and the myth of the lost cause serves their political agenda, even in Maine, where the 20th saved the Republic.
F%$# their bigoted small minds.
*Which is called, interestingly enough, State of Main Song.
If it Becomes a Wypipo Problem, ALEC Loses
Arkansas is repealing its ban on municipally owned broadband. because they are sick and tired of getting screwed by the cable and telephone companies:
Pat Ulrich can’t make water-cooler talk about The Handmaid’s Tale or Shrill. “I can’t get Hulu or anything like that,” she says. If it’s on a streaming service, she probably hasn’t seen it.
Her home, in Arkansas, has no broadband internet connection. A cable company once quoted her $44,000 to install one, so she and her husband get mediocre Wi-Fi through a satellite provider. “It’s 20 gigabytes” per month, she says, “no different from using your phone.”
Connectivity isn’t just a problem for the state’s sizable rural population. Ulrich lives in a suburb of Little Rock and commutes into the city each day to work as a web developer for the Arkansas Arts Center. Needless to say, she never works from home.
Arkansas is the least connected of the 50 states, according to BroadbandNow, a group that tracks consumer options. Since 2011, the state has banned cities and towns from building their own networks, outlawing a local solution that has been hailed as an effective way for communities to connect themselves when they don’t have internet providers.
This year, however, Arkansas appears to be having a change of heart. Under the weight of constituent complaints about lousy internet—and after years of waiting for subsidies to goad telecom giants into expanding the infrastructure—the state legislature in February passed a bill to repeal its ban. Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson said he will sign it.
That this is happening at all is significant. That it’s happening in a deep-red state is perhaps monumental.
Arkansas outlawed municipal broadband in 2011 as a wave of other states passed similar laws. It was, in part, a factor of the Tea Party movement, which ushered small-government Republicans into state capitols. By 2018, 21 states had some law banning or restricting municipal broadband; many were cut-and-paste “model legislation” from the American Legislative and Exchange Council, backed by telecom giants. They sought to kill municipal broadband under the belief that “such services should not be offered by government in competition with private-sector providers.”
Yes, the cable companies are so awful that they are getting municipal broadband in Arkansas.
These companies got $250 million from the FCC to build out broadband, and didn’t do squat.
They are the most hated businesses in America for a reason, and the ALEC sponsored ban on municipal broadband has become toxic.
A Profound Lack of Intestinal Fortitude
I am referring, of course, to Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats, otherwise known as the worst Nickelback cover band ever.This time, they wimped out on holding Attorney General Barr in contempt.
Don’t worry though, they are still going to file a very strongly worded lawsuit:
After weeks of pledging to hold Attorney General William P. Barr and the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II in contempt for defying subpoenas, House Democrats appear poised to pursue an alternative path to try to force them into sharing information.
A resolution that the House Rules Committee unveiled on Thursday would authorize the House to petition a federal court to enforce its requests for information and testimony related to the report of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, but without mentioning contempt. The committee is expected to consider the proposal on Monday, followed by a full House vote on Tuesday.
The resolution appears to be something of a tactical reversal by Democrats, who did not immediately explain their decision. The Judiciary Committee approved a report last month that formally recommended the House hold Mr. Barr in contempt, and lawmakers continue to use that language to describe next week’s vote.
This sort of bullsh%$ is why people don’t vote for Democrats.
They have no belief that, when push comes to shove, Democrats will fight for them, because they never fight for themselves.
This Plane Does Not Fly, It’s Ugly Enough to Repel the Ground
We are seeing some interesting claims about the performance of the Celera 500L Aircraft, which is expected to make its first flight in the near future.
They are claiming a cruising speed of in excess of 460 mph and a maximum altitude of at least 65,000 feet, all while achieving something on the order of 30 miles per gallon of fuel.
They plan to achieve this with two 500 hp liquid cooled piston engines.
I call bullsh%$. That sort of performance would require some changes to the laws of aerodynamics, if just because the performance that they are claiming would require :
More than two years after The War Zone was first to report on a mysterious bullet-shaped aircraft appearing at the Southern California Logistics Airport near Victorville, a refined version of the plane has conducted taxi tests and looks to be getting close to its first flight. Even though much about its design and purpose remain unclear, we do know now that the aircraft, which is called the Otto Aviation Celera 500L, is definitely focused on potentially game-changing high-efficiency flight that has the potential to disrupt the aerospace marketplace.
………
“Such a transportation system requires a unique aircraft. It must be capable of operation from any current airfield,” one of the patent documents says in its background section. “Preferably, it would have operating costs well below current costs and competitive with commercial airliners, cruise at higher system speed than current commercial aircraft, have a longer range with full passenger and luggage load than most current business aircraft, provide passenger comfort comparable to commercial aircraft, and be capable of all weather operation. The plane should also provide for ease of maintenance and require only a single pilot.”
The patent goes on to describe a notional aircraft that would cruise between 460 and 510 miles per hour at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet, yielding a fuel efficiency rate of between 30 and 42 miles per gallon. To put this in perspective, the Pilatus PC-12, a popular light, single-engine turboprop aircraft has a service ceiling of 30,000 feet, a cruising speed just under 330 miles per hour, and still burns, on average, 66 gallons of jet fuel per hour, for a fuel economy of roughly five miles to the gallon. Even going to a Learjet 70, which has similar speed performance to what’s stated in the Celera patent documents, but still nowhere near as high a ceiling, we are talking about roughly three miles per gallon of gas at cruise. So, Otto Aviation is talking about performance that is at least 10 times more efficient than existing light business jets with similar cruise capabilities.
………
One of Otto Aviation’s patents also says that the intakes and exhausts we mentioned before are supposed to help leverage this engine design to provide even greater efficiency. The exhaust setup is also supposed to include a novel heat exchanger that combines heated cooling air with exhaust gases provide a small additional boost in thrust. It all remains to be seen whether or not the combination of an A03 optimized for the Celera 500L specifically, together with intercoolers and specialized exhausts, will be enough to get the plane anywhere close to the kind of high-altitude performance Otto is clearly aiming for broadly
Just a few notes from my decidedly non-aerodynamicist perspective:
- For the speed and altitude that they are targeting, we are looking at about ¾ Mach, which means that you are going to see transonic effects.
- There are no provisions for area ruling to prevent shock wave formation and the resultant drag rise. (i.e. area ruling)
- The propeller is unswept, and at the speeds that they are talking about, the tips would (again) lose efficiency at high mach numbers.
I can see this as offering similar performance similar to something like the the Piaggio P.180, but that is about 100 mph slower and 20,000 feet lower altitude. (As an FYI, the fuel sipping P.180 gets about 9 mpg)
Reliability would probably be lower, as pistons are less reliable than turbines, and the payload would likely be less too, as piston engines are also heavier.
The claims are so outrageous that I expect someone on the management team to have a last name of Bede.
Linkage
- How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years (Ars Technica) A tale of ineluctable evil.
- Man Restoring a Classic Synthesizer Goes On a 9-Hour Acid Trip After Accidentally Touching LSD-Covered Knob (Gizmodo) Your feel weird story of the day.
- ‘Robots’ Are Not ‘Coming for Your Job’—Management Is (Gizmodo) A truth that needs to be said.
- Nice Bones You Got There, Shame If a Startup Was to Start Renting Out Pogo Sticks (Gizmodo) As near as I can figure it out, this Pogo stick shring startup is real. I still call bullsh%$.
- Researcher Exploits Microsoft’s Notepad to ‘Pop a Shell’ (Threatpost) This is hard core hacking.
- Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth (New York Times) Bean Burrito Night on Mars
Godzilla will never die, except, of course, in his very first movie:
I want some fan to splice in a digital avatar of Raymond Burr.
Important Data Point
The Sunset of the Boomers
It turns out that 2018 was the first election in which the post-boomer generations outvoted the baby-boomers.
One hopes that this is not a one-off.
My generation has had its day, and made a complete dogs breakfast of it.
Look Out Below
We just got the May job numbers, and it’s pretty grim.
Of course, the stock marked soared, because they believe that this will lead the Federal Reserve to cut rates, because investors are psychopaths.
More significantly, it appears increasingly likely that we are at the leading edge of a downturn:
As of 8:29 a.m. Friday, things were shaping up for the Federal Reserve to face a real conundrum at its policy meeting in less than two weeks.
Some financial market indicators, mainly in the bond market, were suggesting that the economy was weakening and that the Fed would need to cut interest rates in the coming months to prevent a recession. But there was little evidence of a major slowdown — only a few soft data points here and there.
In particular, the United States labor market has been booming, not at all suggesting an American economy in need of rescue with interest rate policy.
The good news out of the Labor Department’s May employment report released at 8:30 a.m. Friday is that the Fed no longer faces a conundrum. The bad news is that it showed a job market that was not as robust as it had seemed.
It’s not just that the economy added only 75,000 jobs last month, far less than the 180,000 forecast. That might be chalked up to the statistical randomness that can cause the numbers to bounce around in ways that don’t reflect the underlying reality of the economy.
More worrisome is that the report also revised previous months’ numbers down by 75,000, meaning that the blockbuster spring job creation rates were considerably more modest.
It is now clear that there really is softer job creation in 2019 than there was in 2018 — an average of 164,000 jobs a month so far this year, compared with 223,000 last year.
………
Perhaps most significant, wage growth is also steady or slightly declining, rather than accelerating. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers rose 0.2 percent in May, and are up 3.1 percent over the last year. Wages rose 3.4 percent in the year ended in February.
If this really were a situation of softening job growth because employers were up against the constraints of full employment, you would expect them to have to pay more to find scarce workers. Instead, the wage growth picture is steady as she goes.
………
More worrisome is that the report also revised previous months’ numbers down by 75,000, meaning that the blockbuster spring job creation rates were considerably more modest.
Because They Studiously Stand for Nothing
Over at the Washington Post, Elizabeth Bruenig wonders, “Young voters have Buttigieg and Beto. So why do they prefer old socialists?“
Young voters are not looking for someone like them, they a looking for someone who does the right thing, and all the speaking multiple languages and skateboarding doesn’t matter.
They are going for old farts not named Biden because they are actually addressing long term problems rather than trying to convince people how awesome they are.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
Support Your Local Police
Former Broward County sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson has been criminally charged for his cowardice during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings:
As bullets ricocheted and bodies fell in the hallways and classrooms at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, Deputy Scot Peterson was outside the building. Instead of storming in after the 19-year-old gunman, he retreated to a position of safety.
For more than a year after the February 2018 attack in Parkland, Fla., grieving parents have demanded that Mr. Peterson — along with the gunman who killed 17 and injured 17 — be held accountable in what would prove to be one of the nation’s worst school shootings. On Tuesday, law enforcement responded with a sweeping list of charges that resulted in Mr. Peterson’s arrest. His alleged crime: failing to protect the students.
America’s long history of mass shootings have brought a variety of responses: Calls for tighter gun laws, civil lawsuits against companies that manufacture guns and firearm components, collective mourning. But Tuesday’s charges represented a highly unusual case of a lawman arrested for failing to save lives.
………
“I have no comment except to say rot in hell,” Fred Guttenberg, who emerged as an outspoken gun control activist after his daughter, Jaime, died in the attack, wrote on Twitter. “You could have saved some of the 17,” Mr. Guttenberg added, addressing Mr. Peterson. “You could have saved my daughter. You did not and then you lied about it and you deserve the misery coming your way.”
Mr. Peterson, 56, who had been suspended in the immediate aftermath of the attack and later resigned, faces 11 charges of neglect of a child, culpable negligence and perjury. He was booked into the Broward County jail with a bond of $102,000.
Some police are concerned the charges will open up other coward cops to prosecution.
It’s a good thing that they are worrying about this.
The culture of impunity inside law enforcement is toxic.
But it Doesn’t Mean Anything
Because of Facebook’s multiple classes of shares, most of its shareholders have effectively have no say at all regarding how the business is run.
This means that when over ⅔ of outsider investors voted to fire Mark Zuckerberg, it meant nothing:
The Facebook shareholder revolt just got bloody.
Facebook revealed in a filing on Monday how investors voted on a raft of proposals at its annual shareholder meeting last week — and the results underline the unrest among outside investors.
According to an analysis of the results by Open Mic — an organization that works with activist shareholders to overhaul corporate governance at America’s biggest companies — independent shareholders overwhelmingly backed two proposals to weaken Mark Zuckerberg’s power.
Some 68% of ordinary investors, those who are not part of management or the board, want to oust Zuckerberg as chairman and bring in an independent figure to chair Facebook’s board. This was a significant increase on the 51% who voted in favor of an almost identical proposal last year.
………
Furthermore, 83.2% of outside shareholders also backed a proposal to scrap Facebook’s dual-class share structure. Currently, class A shareholders have one vote for each share, while class B shareholders get 10 votes a share. Management and directors control class B shares.
Furthermore, 83.2% of outside shareholders also backed a proposal to scrap Facebook’s dual-class share structure. Currently, class A shareholders have one vote for each share, while class B shareholders get 10 votes a share. Management and directors control class B shares.
I think that, absent some changes in securities law, the only way that Zuckerberg leaves Facebook is if some enterprising prosecutor throws him in jail.
Our Broken Healthcare System
Remember when I wrote about how the healthcare industry wants to repeal anti-kickback laws?
They claim that it hinders innovation, and I say that they are trying to pick our pocket.
Well, it turns out that the entire kickback issue is far less hypothetical than I had anticipated:
For a hospital that had once labored to break even, Wheeling Hospital displayed abnormally deep pockets when recruiting doctors.
To lure Dr. Adam Tune, an anesthesiologist from nearby Pittsburgh who specialized in pain management, the Catholic hospital built a clinic for him to run on its campus in Wheeling, W.Va. It paid Tune as much as $1.2 million a year — well above the salaries of 90% of pain management physicians across the nation, the federal government charged in a lawsuit filed this spring.
In addition, Wheeling paid an obstetrician-gynecologist a salary as high as $1.3 million a year, so much that her department bled money, according to a related lawsuit by a whistleblowing executive. The hospital paid a cardiothoracic surgeon $770,000 and let him take 12 weeks off each year even though his cardiac team also routinely ran in the red, that lawsuit said.
Despite the losses from these stratospheric salaries and perks, the recruitment efforts had a golden lining for Wheeling, the government asserts. Specialists in fields like labor and delivery, pain management and cardiology reliably referred patients for tests, procedures and other services Wheeling offered, earning the hospital millions of dollars, the lawsuit said.
The problem, according to the government, is that the efforts run counter to federal self-referral bans and anti-kickback laws that are designed to prevent financial considerations from warping physicians’ clinical decisions. The Stark law prohibits a physician from referring patients for services in which the doctor has a financial interest. The federal anti-kickback statute bars hospitals from paying doctors for referrals. Together, these rules are intended to remove financial incentives that can lead doctors to order up extraneous tests and treatments that increase costs to Medicare and other insurers and expose patients to unnecessary risks.
As I’ve previously observed, when an industry wants regulations removed to encourage “innovation”, or for that matter “disruption”, it’s because they want to steal from the rest of us.
Tweet of the Day
If you refuse to call a lie a lie in order to keep one political side happy, you have taken a political side. https://t.co/wcqh0oN1dm— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) June 6, 2019
Tru dat.
Of Course He Did
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, despite his protestations, was the driving force behind the state’s voter purge:
Two top officials at the Department of Public Safety named Gov. Greg Abbott’s office as a driving force in the state’s program to purge nearly 100,000 suspected non-U.S. citizens from Texas’ voter rolls, emails made public Tuesday show.
Abbott’s office, however, on Tuesday denied it had any contact with the agency before the launch of the effort in late January.
The voter purge was scrapped in April after the state settled lawsuits challenging it, and after Secretary of State officials publicly admitted that tens of thousands of naturalized citizens had been wrongly flagged for removal from voter rolls.
The emails were made public Tuesday by the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, which represented plaintiffs who sued the state.
In an August 2018 email, John Crawford, a top official of the driver license division at the Texas Department of Public Safety, told employees that DPS had previously turned over records to compare with state voter rolls, and “we have an urgent request from the governor’s office to do it again.”
That same day, the director of the driver license division, Amanda Arriaga, wrote in a separate email that “the Governor is interested in getting this information as soon as possible.”
………
The emails released Tuesday, however, suggest that those DPS officials were responding to pressure that Abbott’s office applied, said Luis Vera, LULAC’s national general counsel.
“The bottom line is this was the governor’s program,” Vera said. “He threw Whitley and the DPS secretary under the bus. All along it was the governor pushing for (the program.)”
As if it would be anyone else.
Slowing Economy + Rising Food Prices = Civil Unrest
This is a literally recipe for rioting in the streets.
Business is normally bustling at the sprawling Xinfandi produce market in southern Beijing, where stores, restaurants and thrifty shoppers buy their fruits and vegetables in bulk.
But more apple sellers were napping than hustling one recent afternoon. The price of apples had nearly doubled, to roughly $1 per pound, and people were spending their money elsewhere.
………
Already grappling with a slowing economy and President Trump’s trade war, Beijing now has to worry about the rising price of food. It is not just apples. Other fruits and vegetables are more expensive. The price of pork has jumped as the country deals with a devastating swine fever epidemic. Chicken, beef and lamb prices have been creeping up, too.
When juxtaposed with the current tit-for-tat on tariffs, where the Chinese have placed taxes on American agricultural products, this is a heady mix.
Perverse Incentives in Pharma
Pfizer has accumulated some data that strongly implies that its drug Enbrel has potential as a treatment for Alzheimers.
The drug company decided not to pursue further studies because its patent on the drug is about to expire:
A team of researchers inside Pfizer made a startling find in 2015: The company’s blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis therapy Enbrel, a powerful anti-inflammatory drug, appeared to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 64 percent.
The results were from an analysis of hundreds of thousands of insurance claims. Verifying that the drug would actually have that effect in people would require a costly clinical trial — and after several years of internal discussion, Pfizer opted against further investigation and chose not to make the data public, the company confirmed.
Researchers in the company’s division of inflammation and immunology urged Pfizer to conduct a clinical trial on thousands of patients, which they estimated would cost $80 million, to see if the signal contained in the data was real, according to an internal company document obtained by The Washington Post.
………
The company told The Post that it decided during its three years of internal reviews that Enbrel did not show promise for Alzheimer’s prevention because the drug does not directly reach brain tissue. It deemed the likelihood of a successful clinical trial to be low. A synopsis of its statistical findings prepared for outside publication, it says, did not meet its “rigorous scientific standards.’’
………
Some outside scientists disagree with Pfizer’s assessment that studying Enbrel’s potential in Alzheimer’s prevention is a scientific dead end. Rather, they say, it could hold important clues to combating the disease and slowing cognitive decline in its earliest stages.
Some outside scientists disagree with Pfizer’s assessment that studying Enbrel’s potential in Alzheimer’s prevention is a scientific dead end. Rather, they say, it could hold important clues to combating the disease and slowing cognitive decline in its earliest stages.
………
Meanwhile, Enbrel has reached the end of its patent life. Profits are dwindling as generic competition emerges, diminishing financial incentives for further research into Enbrel and other drugs in its class.
Capitalism, you gotta love it.
Any of My Reader(s) in Tennessee, Please File a Complaint with a State Bar
Craig Northcott, the Coffee County, TN District Attorney, has announced that he will not enforce domestic violence laws for same-sex couples.
Not enforcing the law of the land because you are a bigot is evil.
Publicly announcing it is literally criminally stupid.
This guy needs his law license pulled, and some jail time would be nice:
Prosecutorial discretion is one of the greatest tools in a prosecutor’s toolbox. But the chief prosecutor in Tennessee used that power to impose his moral and religious views onto the people his office was tasked with protecting, according to a video released by Nashville television station News Channel 5.
Craig Northcott, the district attorney general of Coffee County, was recorded telling participants at a 2018 Bible conference what happens when voters elect a “good Christian man as DA.”
“Y’all need to know who your DA is,” he reminded the crowd. “You give us a lot of authority. . . . We can choose to prosecute anything. We can choose not to prosecute anything.”
Using what he termed “prosecutorial discretion,” Northcott said, “the social engineers on the Supreme Court now decided we have homosexual marriage. I disagree with them.”
In his jurisdiction, which includes the area that hosts the summer music festival Bonnaroo, Northcott ensured that same-sex partners would not be afforded the protections of domestic violence laws.
In Tennessee, a domestic assault conviction carries enhanced punishments, like permanently forfeiting the right to own a firearm. The prosecutor’s interpretation of the statute was that the sanctions were created to “recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage.”
When reached by phone, Northcott said, “There’s no marriage to protect with homosexual relationships, so I don’t prosecute them as domestic,” and refused to comment further.
………
A group of 200 attorneys permitted to practice in Tennessee wrote the state’s Board of Professional Responsibility on Wednesday, reporting Northcott and calling his “unacceptable” and “unethical” conduct the “highest level of prosecutorial misconduct and abuse of discretion.”
………
Northcott is no stranger to controversy.
Less than two months ago, he was severely criticized for saying that Muslims have “no constitutional rights.”
This guy should not be allowed to practice law, much less be a DA.
Democratic Centrists in a Nutshell
Just weeks after claiming that he is standing with Uber drivers, Pete Buttigieg is fundraising with the executives who are abusing those drivers.
It’s sh%$ like this that get people voting for Republicans.
People would rather vote for someone who says that they will do their best to f%$# you, and are telling the truth, than they would for someone who says that they are here to help, and are lying:
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is set to attend a fundraiser with a top Uber executive just weeks after expressing solidarity for drivers protesting the ridesharing company.
The Indiana Democrat is one of 14 presidential candidates who will descend on San Francisco this weekend for the California Democratic Party State Convention. Between attending an SEIU California Democratic Delegate breakfast on Saturday morning and addressing convention goers later that afternoon, he will headline a fundraiser in Oakland hosted, in part, by Uber executive Chelsea Kohler, the rideshare company’s director of product communications.
It is a dissonant move for a candidate who fewer than three weeks ago voiced his support for striking Uber drivers demanding an end to pay cuts and a drivers’ bill of rights ahead of the ridesharing company’s initial public offering on Wall Street.………
Chris Meagher, Buttigieg’s national press secretary, declined to comment. But an organizer with the Los Angeles-based drivers’ association told The Daily Beast that the candidate’s decision to fundraise with an Uber executive was untenable with his support for the contracted drivers.
When push comes to shove, he’s going to stand with his donors, and former classmates, like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, and not the rest of us.
We’ve seen this before.