Year: 2019

Pity the Persecuted Billionaires

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Pied-a-Terre is a tax on non primary residences, and in this case, and it would apply to purchases greater than $5 million.

Needless to say, real estate developers are completely losing their sh%$ over this:

New York’s pied-a-terre tax, left for dead earlier this year, is back on the table and the real estate industry is gearing up for a fight.

Fresh off imposing an increased “mansion tax” and eliminating privacy protections favored by well-heeled buyers, state lawmakers are reviving efforts to tax second-home purchases of $5 million or more.

There’s a growing desire among Democrats to address wealth inequality, and for them, the idea of slapping an annual tax on the uber rich who scoop up Manhattan apartments is long overdue. But for William Zeckendorf, whose firm built some of the city’s most expensive condo towers, the proposal is the wrong idea at the wrong time.

He and other developers — and the lawyers, appraisers and brokers who cater to millionaire clients — argue that going after pied-a-terre buyers would further dent demand in the already struggling luxury real estate market. Thousands of new high-end condos are on their way, adding to a glut, and takers for them have all but disappeared. New rules that promote a political environment where buyers feel targeted would push even more of them away, Zeckendorf said.

Zeckendorf’s clients use city roads, bridges, and services, but they do not pay city income tax.

F%$# Zeckendorf, and f%$# his clients.

New mansion and transfer tax surcharges, which took effect July 1, will raise an estimated $365 million annually, dedicated to shoring up the city’s crumbling transportation system. But there are more public-spending needs, and it makes sense for people who can afford the most expensive apartments to help foot the tab, said State Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat.

Hoylman has been trying to pass a pied-a-terre tax since the heady condo boom days of 2014, when high-end buyers from other countries thought nothing of sheltering their millions in the safe harbor of Manhattan apartments.

“They use our system of laws to protect their international investment in real estate, and I think there should be a premium on that,” said Hoylman, who hasn’t yet released a revised version of the bill. “This is a way to capture that purchasing power and use it for some common good.”

Indeed.

If this can help stop New York from becoming London, where whole blocks are full of mansions that are empty most of the year.

Tweet of the Year

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Taavi Kotka , former CIO of Estonia, on the low £100m price tag for being the most tech-savvy government in the world: “If you don’t use Accenture or McKinsey, you’d be amazed at what you can get done.”

— Philip Salter (@Philip_Salter) November 4, 2019

The point is a valid one.

The fixation that governments have on outsourcing and consultants serves primarily to increase cost and to reduce effectiveness of government programs.

Just look at the Obamacare website.

A Feature, Not a Bug for the DSCC

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It turns out that former Colorado Governor, and current Colorado Senate Candidate, John Hickenlooper, is under ethics investigation for taking gifts from lobbyists.

This has been the case for some time, well before when the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee endorsed him in the PRIMARY.

Why would they endorse in the primary?

I’m sure that some will claim that this was just an oversight, but I believe that it was deliberate.

Where most of us see this sort of crap, and think, “Corruption,” but I think that Chuck Schumer and his Evil Minions™ see that and think, “He shares our values.”

Between Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown, it makes it hard for Democrats to suck up to Wall Street, payday lenders, and oil companies, and the like, and another liberal in the Senate would make Chuck’s job just too damn hard:

The Colorado Independent Ethics Commission is expected to release an investigative report this week into allegations that John Hickenlooper, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2020, violated state law by receiving free private jet rides and other gifts from corporations when he served as governor. While Hickenlooper has denied any wrongdoing, and last year the Denver Post editorial board said the complaint consisted of “politically motivated lies,” there are fears that the investigation stands to damage Hickenlooper’s chances in Colorado.

………

Some progressives worry that Hickenlooper, the current frontrunner and the Democratic Party’s preferred candidate, could fumble the party’s chances of flipping the seat if he is found guilty of violating the state ethics law. Hickenlooper, who abandoned his lagging presidential campaign in order to run for Senate in August, is one of eight Democrats vying for the chance to take on Sen. Cory Gardner, one of the most vulnerable Republicans heading into 2020. And though he was a popular governor and leads Gardner in head-to-head polls, Hickenlooper’s pro-fracking record could also be a liability in the primary, especially as voters’ anxieties over the climate crisis rise.

………

In August, The Intercept reported that former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, a progressive candidate largely considered to be Hickenlooper’s main competition, called the DSCC’s intervention a “recipe for disaster.” He said that if voters are told that their voice doesn’t matter, “then why would they show up in November?

The original complaint focused on travel including a trip to the Bilderberg Meeting in Italy and related luxury lodging and transportation costs, such as a ride in a chauffeured Maserati limousine; a flight from Dallas, Texas, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to attend the American Enterprise Institute’s Jackson Hole Symposium; and a private jet from New Jersey to Colorado. (In 2006, Colorado voters passed a constitutional amendment that created additional restrictions on gifts to elected officials, including a ban on gifts exceeding $53 per year.)

The complaint is being dismissed as a political hit job, and there is definitely an element of that, but Hickenlooper is literally a guy who literally drank fracking fluid to demonstrate his allegiance to the oil industry, so these allegations are going to stick.

And Chuck Schumer and the DSCC are backing him because  they are worried about a real Democrat hurting the feelings of the K Street lobbyist crowds.

Scooters Break Down and Wear Out? Hoocoodanode?

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It turns out that, much like the Gypsy cab companies Uber and Lyft, e-scooters have no path to profitability.

Scooters break, and they break after only a few months, which makes the plague of rental scooters unsustainable:

E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation. They’re a safe alternative that’s somehow even more dangerous, and they’re incredibly popular despite being despised by every human being on the planet. They also make you look like a spoiled 15-year-old douche. But that’s not what’s hurting the e-scooter brand, which claims it’s close to becoming a billion-dollar industry … if only they could stop burning through scooters at breakneck speed.

I just love the phrase, “E-scooters really are the vaping of public transportation.”

It nails the situation in a nutshell:

………

So what’s causing Lime to leak money faster than the fluid out of one of their scooter’s cut brakes? According to them, it’s a matter of scooter “depreciation” — a shareholder-friendly way of saying that their product gets treated like crap. Rideshare companies have to spend a fortune picking up their scooters from whatever random patch of sidewalk their scootees ditched them like so much spent chewing gum. And then there are the constant repairs. According to Lime, their scooters only survive the mean city streets for five months (which is about four months longer than some other reports), thanks to a corrosive combination of elemental wear and tear, heavy/irresponsible usage, and people getting so mad at douches dropping them in front of their homes that they’ve started sabotaging them.

I’ve increasingly come to believe that Silicon Valley venture capitalists have no interest in the viability of a business, they just want to just hype the company until sufficiently stupid people purchase shares at the IPO.

As strange as it seem, it appears that they have actually begun to start run out of stupid people.

I do not see how this does not meet the legal definition of fraud.

I Did Not Know That He Could Lose His Sh%$ Even More

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Trump, who on a good day is melting down, is having an epic meltdown:

President Trump doesn’t think House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry should get any media coverage.

Meanwhile, he’s ravenously consuming news about the subject — primarily through a friendly lens. From the Oval Office to the White House residence to Air Force One, he’s closely tracking how Republican members of Congress are digesting the latest revelations on his handling of Ukraine, and monitoring their statements for any sign of hesitation or perceived disloyalty.

“We’re getting f%$#ing killed,” Trump often gripes — a complaint about media coverage that is escalating in volume and frequency amid the impeachment probe, according to a Republican close to the White House. “He does make that comment literally every day.”

Trump is especially frustrated that the depositions by current and former officials — which have taken place behind closed doors, but nonetheless have leaked in some detail to reporters — “have to be covered at all,” according to a senior White House official.

“We should have no speculative coverage of what’s going on inside these private briefings, according to the very people who keep it private,” said another White House official. “Either let everybody see what’s happening as it happens or keep your mouth shut.”

Trump tells White House aides in private that he sees no need for leaks from the depositions because everyone can read the transcript of his call with the president of Ukraine, which he has repeatedly called “perfect.” He also is critical of witnesses he accuses of “pretending they know what he meant” on the call.

Seriously, I’m thinking that Mike Pence is aching to invoke the 25th amendment, and he’s just waiting for the right time.

Clearly, the Solution is Not Enough Profit Motive

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We now have a number to attach to the cluster-f%$# that is Pacific Gas & Electric’s malicious prioritization of profit over safety, 1,500 fires over the past 6 years.

They could have done the job right, but there are stock buybacks and dividends to be made:

Over the past week, the Kincade Fire has torn through nearly 78,000 acres of California wine country, forcing about 180,000 people to evacuate. At the same time, millions have gone without electricity, often for days at a time.

Hospitals scrambled to find refrigerators for medications, people bundled their children to keep them warm during cool nights, and seniors were left alone in the dark.

The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., is responsible for these blackouts and possibly for the fire itself.

About the same time the Kincade Fire ignited, a jumper cable broke on a PG&E transmission tower in the area, the company told state regulators on October 24. By the time PG&E personnel arrived, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, had taped the area off and identified the broken cable.

A problem with PG&E equipment was also the cause of the Camp Fire, a California state agency said, which killed at least 85 people last year and razed more than 18,800 structures. It was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history.

In fact, according to The Wall Street Journal, the utility company’s equipment led to more than 1,500 fires from June 2014 to December 2017.

………

PG&E CEO Bill Johnson said Californians should expect these types of preemptive service interruptions for another 10 years.

“We recognize the hardship of not having electric service,” a PG&E representative told Business Insider in an email. “While we recognize that the scope of these events is unsustainable in the long term, it was the correct decision given the large-scale, historic weather events and ensuing equipment damage that unfolded across our service area.”

But many Californians say they should have never been forced into this choice: deadly fires or multiday blackouts. Instead, PG&E’s critics accuse the company of shirking safety precautions to funnel money toward investor dividends.

The Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik suggested PG&E might now be “the most detested, and detestable, corporation in California, if not in the observable solar system.”

Worse than Comcast?

Daym!!!!!

……….

After a PG&E pipeline exploded in 2010, killing eight people, state regulators started investigating the company. They found that PG&E had collected $224 million more than it was authorized to collect in oil and gas revenue in the decade before the explosion. At the same time, it spent millions less than it was supposed to on maintenance and generally fell short of industry safety standards.

“There was very much a focus on the bottom line over everything: ‘What are the earnings we can report this quarter?'” Mike Florio, who was a California utilities commissioner from 2011 to 2016, told The New York Times. “And things really got squeezed on the maintenance side.”

A 2017 report to state regulators highlighted PG&E’s lack of a comprehensive safety strategy, unclear communication about safety between management and field personnel, and tendency to take action only after a major disaster.

Anticipating the cost of billions of dollars in legal claims associated with the Camp Fire and other fires from 2017 and 2018, PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January.

PG&E is completely beyond redemption.

Regulators have the power to liquidate PG&E by refusing to sign off on their bankruptcy, which would wipe out the executives and investors who have benefited from their deliberate negligence.

Break it up, take it over, and throw the executives in jail.

This Is Familiar, and Not in a Comfortable Way

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This is serious, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” stuff:

A wry smile crept across Steffan Stefanov’s face as he scanned the internet, digesting news of England’s now notorious football match against Bulgaria. It wasn’t that he was belittling the racist abuse that was directed against the black English players, but rather the use of two words littering media reports about it.

“Bulgaria and racism,” he proclaimed. “The two go hand-in-hand. It’s our reality, we live it every day. I’m sorry for the England players who were targeted but, in truth, this was pretty minor for us.”

………

The government of prime minister Boyko Borissov is propped up by a grouping of three small rightwing populist parties known collectively as the “United Patriots”. They are made up of the National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria (NFSB), the Bulgarian National Movement and the Attack party.

Krasimir Karakachanov, head of the Bulgarian National Movement, holds three portfolios – deputy prime minister, minister for defence and minister for public order and security. His “Roma integration strategy,” or “concept for the integration of the unsocialised Gypsy (Roma) ethnicity” to give it its formal name, is due to be presented to the Bulgarian parliament and could soon become law.

It defines Roma as “asocial Gypsies,” a term used by the Nazis, and calls for limits on the number of children some Roma women can have; the introduction of compulsory “labour education schools” for Roma children and forced work programmes for sections of the community. It also depicts the Roma as “non-native Europeans” left over from the Ottoman empire.

His party’s manifesto also calls for the creation of “reservations” for Roma based on the model used for Native Americans or Indigenous Australians, claiming that they could become “tourist attractions”.

Earlier this year, following violence between Bulgarian Roma and non-Roma, Karakachanov declared: “The truth is that we need to undertake a complete programme for a solution to the Gypsy problem.”

His predecessor as deputy prime minister Valeri Simeonov described the Roma as “arrogant, presumptuous and ferocious humanoids”. He was also chair of Bulgaria’s National Council for Cooperation on Ethnic and Integration Issues at the time.

Jonathan Lee, spokesman for the European Roma Rights Centre, said: “Unfortunately, racist chanting and offensive gestures from the terraces is not even close to as bad as it gets in Bulgaria. Last Monday night, Europe was confronted with what for most Roma in the country is the everyday. Rising anti-Gypsyism, decline of the rule of law, and increasingly fascist political rhetoric is nothing new – it just rarely gets such a public stage.”

Lee added: “This is an EU member state where violent race mobs are the norm, police violence is sudden and unpredictable, punitive demolitions of people’s homes are the appropriate government response, random murders of Romany citizens only a fleeting headline, and the rights and dignity of Romany citizens are routinely denied on a daily basis.”

So now we have two NATO allies (Turkey and Bulgaria) who have proposed credible attempts at genocide, Turkey against the Kurds, and Bulgaria against the Roma.

And then you have AfD in Germany, the NR in France, the LN in Italy, etc. on the rise.

Obviously, Turkey is not in the EU, but the rest of them are, and the promise of the whole, “European Project,” that it would prevent the horrors of the 20th century, seems increasingly remote.

My Heart Bleeds for These Corrupt Motherf%$#ers

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You know, maybe if your business is dependent on concealing its ownership, you should not have a business at all:

Small businesses are assessing the potential costs of complying with requirements under proposals in both chambers of Congress aimed at limiting the use of anonymous shell companies.

The House in October passed a bill requiring most limited-liability companies, among other firms, to tell the Treasury Department who their primary owners are. A companion measure has been introduced in the Senate. The legislation aims to crack down on entities that are used as vehicles for hiding or moving illicit funds.

The bills would require companies with 20 employees or fewer and no physical office to provide owners’ names and other personally identifiable information. The House measure calls for annual submissions; the Senate bill gives businesses 90 days to report ownership changes and a year to report changes to addresses or other personal information.

Limited-liability companies, often referred to as shell companies, provide owners with protections against lawsuits, among other financial benefits. They are frequently used by real-estate investors and sole proprietors, those who run one-person businesses. Some limited-liability companies are registered in the U.S. under the names of representatives who neither own nor operate them.

Passage of the House bill marked a victory for corporate-transparency advocates, following several failed attempts. Big banks, human-rights advocates, law-enforcement authorities and other groups have expressed their support for creating a registry of “beneficial,” or true, owners.

If you need to conceal the ownership of your business, your business is fundamentally corrupt, and and it needs to be ended.

Kind of Like Your Mother-in-Law Driving off a Cliff in Your Brand New Car

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It appears that in an attempt to forestall impeachment, the Trump administration is going to war against the US State Security Apparatus.

It appears that Trump is leaning on British intelligence agencies to dig up dirt on US intelligence agencies:

As the impeachment hearings get more and more alarming for Donald Trump, with damning new evidence emerging every day, there appears to be increasing urgency in the parallel counteroffensives under way by the president’s team in an attempt to defend him.

There are attacks against the witnesses giving testimony by Trump and his supporters, including attempts to smear Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, Ukraine expert at the National Security Council who this week provided crucial testimony about Trump’s telephone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. And there have been the extraordinary scenes of congress Republicans breaking into the proceedings and disrupting them.

At the same time, overshadowed by the publicity around the impeachment, is the ever-broadening investigation by William Barr, the attorney general, which the White House sees as a game-changer. An investigation which is seeking nothing less than to overturn the conclusion of the US intelligence services and special counsel Robert Mueller that Russia interfered in the last US presidential election.

………

The attorney general is focusing on the theory, aired on far-right conspiracy sites, and raised by Trump and Giuliani, that Ukraine framed Vladimir Putin over the US election in a complex triple-cross operation by impersonating Russian hackers.

Trump and Barr have also been asking other foreign governments for help in investigating the FBI, CIA and Mueller investigators. The US president has called on the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison for assistance, while the attorney general has been on similar missions to the UK and Italy.

And the information being requested has left allies astonished. One British official with knowledge of Barr’s wish list presented to London commented that “it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services”.

“Quite robust terms,” is official Brit speak for, “These motherf%$#ers are nuts, completely bonkers, mad as a hatter.”

I only hope that there is a way for both of them to lose.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!! (On Saturday, Again)

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No bank failures in 2018, a failure in May of this year, and now 3 bank failures in 2 weeks.

The most recent failure, the 4th for the year, is City National Bank of New Jersey of Newark, NJ.

I’m beginning to wonder if regulatory forbearance has begun to come to the end of its string, and now banks that were left to slide are beginning to collapse.

Full FDIC list

So, here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

Buh Bye Beto

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Cue Queen

Beto O’Rourke has ended his Presidential bid.

He was a much better candidate toward the end of the campaign, when he actually showed some outrage following the mass shooting in his hometown.

Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas announced on Friday that he was dropping out of the presidential race, ending a campaign in which he struggled for months to recapture the energy of his insurgent 2018 Senate candidacy on a national stage full of other big personalities and liberal champions.

Mr. O’Rourke made the decision to quit the race in the middle of this week, on the eve of a gathering of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, according to people familiar with his thinking. He is not expected to run for any other office in 2020, despite persistent efforts by party leaders and political donors to coax him into another bid for the Senate.

His campaign has been under extreme financial strain, and Mr. O’Rourke’s advisers concluded that proceeding in the race might have meant making deep cuts to his staff in order to pay for advertising and other measures to compete in the early primary and caucus state.

Mr. O’Rourke confirmed his withdrawal in a post on Medium and in an email message to his supporters. In that message, Mr. O’Rourke said he was proud of championing issues like guns and climate change but conceded that his campaign lacked “the means to move forward successfully.”

Maybe if he hadn’t been a candidate about nothing for the first half of his campaign, he would still be in the race.

Cognitive Dissonance Much?

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NYT poll finds that majorities of Iowa voters want a moderate, common-ground candidate who will use those traits to bring fundamental, systemic change to American society pic.twitter.com/hDY9f87IwK

— dan solomon (@dansolomon) November 1, 2019

So the poll, which appears to be VERY poorly worded, says that people want fundamental systemic change to America, but they want it from a moderate who crosses party lines.

BTW, this response to the Tweet is prize too:

"Look we want someone that will change things but never talk about changing things. Someone who is different but appears to be the same.

Basically we need a Trojan Horse that we can sneak by The Boomers."

— Travis DeCoster (@MyStupidTown) November 1, 2019

Also, speaking as a Boomer (just barely), let me also say F%$# Boomers.

I Missed This Yesterday

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One of the problems with Congressional hearings is that each committee member gets 5 minutes to ask questions, which leads to grand-standing on their part, and filibustering on the part of the witnesses.

It’s one of the reasons that Mueller’s report, which clearly showed obstruction of justice, landed with a wet splat on the public consciousness.

Yesterday’s impeachment investigation resolution makes a serious attempt to fix this:

The House of Representatives voted 232-196 Thursday morning to approve a resolution laying out how public impeachment hearings will be conducted on “whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America.”

………

The most significant provision in the resolution exempts the Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings from a rule that ordinarily limits questioning of witnesses to five minutes per committee member. Though the resolution leaves the five-minute rule in place for most members, it allows Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff to extend his own question time to as much as 45 minutes, so long as he gives equal time to Republican ranking committee member Devin Nunes.

These are important changes because they will allow Schiff and the team of lawyers working for him to focus their time on the impeachment hearings and to spend significant amounts of time asking probing questions during those hearings. The new rules help ensure that the hearing will not be a disjointed process, constantly jumping from one questioner to the next, without giving anyone time to build a coherent narrative.

The resolution provides that “the chair may confer recognition for multiple periods of such questioning,” so Schiff could potentially spend an indefinite amount of time questioning witnesses if circumstances warrant such an extension.

And, in what could prove to be an especially consequential aspect of this provision, Schiff and Nunes may also delegate their questioning time to “a Permanent Select Committee employee.” That means that professional counsel, who have both the skill set to conduct an effective interrogation and the ability to devote all their time to preparing for hearings, will be able to question witnesses.

These inquiry-specific rules appear to be an acknowledgment that the House’s ordinary rules for committee hearings, which often turn hearings into feasts of grandstanding, are inadequate to the awesome task of impeaching a president.

If only this could be done on a more regular basis.

Is Anyone Surprised by This?

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Because I see the news that the Keystone Pipeline just had an oil spill of almost ½ million gallons to be profoundly unsurprising.

Trans Canada (or whatever the f%$# they are called these days) has a long history of spills and poor safety practices:

Approximately 383,000 gallons of crude oil have spilled into a North Dakota wetland this week in the latest leak from the Keystone Pipeline, further fueling long-standing opposition to plans for the pipeline network’s extension.

With about half an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of oil covering roughly half an acre, the leak is among the largest in the state, said Karl Rockeman, who directs the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality’s division of water quality. But the spill does not appear to pose an immediate threat to public health, he added, as people do not live nearby and the wetland is not a source of drinking water.

For environmental groups, though, the leak was further evidence that Canada-based pipeline owner TC Energy should not be allowed to build the controversial Keystone XL addition, which would stretch more than 1,000 miles from Alberta into the United States. The Trump administration approved the plan in 2017 after years of protests, but the project was blocked by a federal judge who called for further study on environmental impacts.

“With each one of these major spills that happens on the Keystone pipeline system, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is not safe,” said Doug Hayes, an attorney leading the Sierra Club’s work on Keystone XL. Critics worry about a similar mishap contaminating one of the hundreds of waterways along Keystone XL’s expected path, he said.

How Dare They Criticize Their Betters

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It turns out that the Silicon Valley social media companies were actively enabling the slave trade in the Persian Gulf principalities:

Drive around the streets of Kuwait and you won’t see these women. They are behind closed doors, deprived of their basic rights, unable to leave and at risk of being sold to the highest bidder.

 But pick up a smartphone and you can scroll through thousands of their pictures, categorised by race, and available to buy for a few thousand dollars.

 An undercover investigation by BBC News Arabic has found that domestic workers are being illegally bought and sold online in a booming black market.

 Some of the trade has been carried out on Facebook-owned Instagram, where posts have been promoted via algorithm-boosted hashtags, and sales negotiated via private messages.

Other listings have been promoted in apps approved and provided by Google Play and Apple’s App Store, as well as the e-commerce platforms’ own websites.

“What they are doing is promoting an online slave market,” said Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery.

“If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable.”

The social media companies still insist that they are engaged in a moral endeavor.

They are not. They are snollygosters engaging in humbug in order to enrich themselves.

It’s On

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The House of Representatives just voted along almost completely partisan lines to formally initiate public impeachment proceedings.

I’m concerned that the impeachment investigation is too narrowly focused, after all, he is mobbed up, obstructed justice, evaded taxes, etc.

If you are going to have public hearings, you don’t want to limit yourself.

One other note: 2 Democrats, Collin Peterson (D-MN) and Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ), voted against the investigation.

I understand that they are from districts that Trump won, but NONE of the people who would be upset about the investigation would EVER vote Democrat.

What’s more, while I can see having a difference of opinion on the actual impeachment vote, the case for an investigation is the proverbial “slam dunk”.

Their careers need to be ended.