Year: 2019

Finally

The government’s position is that they have a list, and it can be used to make your life miserable, and you have no recourse, because the government won’t even admit that you are on the list, and they will refuse to tell you why.

Federal Judge Anthony Trenga response is that Franz Kafka did not write the Constitution:

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that a federal government database that compiles people deemed to be “known or suspected terrorists” violates the rights of American citizens who are on the watchlist, calling into question the constitutionality of a major tool the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security use for screening potential terrorism suspects.

Being on the watchlist can restrict people from traveling or entering the country, subject them to greater scrutiny at airports and by the police, and deny them government benefits and contracts. In a 32-page opinion, Judge Anthony J. Trenga of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said the standard for inclusion in the database was too vague.

“The court concludes that the risk of erroneous deprivation of plaintiffs’ travel-related and reputational liberty interests is high, and the currently existing procedural safeguards are not sufficient to address that risk,” Judge Trenga wrote.

[Read the ruling.]

As of 2017, about 1.2 million people were on the watchlist, which is maintained by the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center. Although a vast majority of them were foreigners abroad, about 4,600 were American citizens who are protected by the Constitution.

………

The judge agreed that the current procedures were inadequate to protect their rights, granting the plaintiffs summary judgment. But he stopped short of saying what should happen next, asking the Justice Department and the lawyers for the plaintiffs to submit briefings on the difficult question of “what kind of remedy can be fashioned to adequately protect a citizen’s constitutional rights while not unduly compromising public safety or national security.”

………

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, declined to comment. But in court, government lawyers had argued that the case should instead be dismissed. Among other things, Justice Department lawyers asserted that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case, and they urged Judge Trenga to defer to the executive branch’s decisions because combating terrorism was a national security matter.

………

Files released by the F.B.I. in 2011 under the Freedom of Information Act showed that the F.B.I. was permitted to include people on the watchlist even if they had been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped.

Judge Trenga was appointed in 2008 by President George W. Bush.

I have no doubt that there will be an appeal, and I REALLY hope that the US loses.

Support Your Local Police

In response to being deprived of their constitutional right to strangle black men to death, the New York Police Department is engaging in a slowdown.

It turns out that in most cases, the the result of this is the opposite of what one would expect: Serious crimes drop.

There are a number of theories as to why this happens, but the most likely one is that police disrupt the community less, and focus more intently on major crimes when they aren’t busy writing traffic tickets and hassling buskers.

This is exactly what has happened in New York City:

While progressives and reformers wax poetic about reducing low-level arrests, one group is making it happen: the NYPD. Not out of some newfound understanding about the moral and practical dangers of bringing the full might of the state down on people suspected of loitering, but rather as part of a coordinated hissy fit borne of a profound misunderstanding about the value New Yorkers place on these low-level arrests.

Last month, after Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner, was fired, the president of the city’s largest police union encouraged his 24,000 rank-and-file members to do less policing. “We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job,” Patrick Lynch, the longtime president of the Police Benevolent Association, said. “We will uphold our oath, but we cannot and will not do so by needlessly jeopardizing our careers or personal safety.” It was a warning to the public as well, criminologists say, but one predicated on the idea that the public wants low-level arrests. The truth is, the slowdown has been pretty good for everyone.

………

The Daily Appeal spoke to Alice Fontier, the managing director of the criminal defense practice at The Bronx Defenders. I asked Fontier about how the slowdown has played out in criminal court in the Bronx, one of the most heavily policed counties in the country. Over the last few months, Fontier said, there had been at least 100 people at any given time who have been arrested and are waiting to be arraigned. During the slowdown, that number dropped to somewhere between 30 and 40 people. “I was in arraignments, and most of the misdemeanors that came through were ones with actual complainants, like assaults or petit larceny from a store, not the police observation ones, like driving on a suspended license and trespassing,” she said. “I haven’t seen a single person arrested for resisting arrest or obstructing government administration.”

Fontier pointed out that during the last slowdown, the PBA urged its members not to make arrests “unless absolutely necessary,” which indicated to many that police were making plenty of unnecessary arrests. “That’s the reality. They really are unnecessary. There are far too many police officers doing far too many things all of the time.” She added, “It’s incredible, because nothing is happening [during this slowdown], things aren’t exploding, there are no waves of violent crime, they just aren’t making so many silly arrests that they shouldn’t be making in the first place.”

………

As Matt Ford wrote in The Atlantic about the 2014 slowdown, “the police union’s phrasing—officers shouldn’t make arrests ‘unless absolutely necessary’—begs the question: How many unnecessary arrests was the NYPD making before now?” Ford posits that the slowdown “challenges the fundamental tenets” of broken-windows policing. “If the NYPD can safely cut arrests by two-thirds, why haven’t they done it before?”

One empirical study published in the journal Nature presented evidence that “proactive policing—which involves systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations—is positively related to reports of major crime.” The authors examined the halt to proactive policing in late 2014 and early 2015, analyzing several years of unique data obtained from the NYPD, and found that “civilian complaints of major crimes (such as burglary, felony assault and grand larceny) decreased during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing. The results challenge prevailing scholarship as well as conventional wisdom on authority and legal compliance, as they imply that aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.”

Data from the latest slowdown seems to indicate a similar result.

There is a downside to all of this, which is that revenues from fines and traffic tickets, but I’ve always felt that turning peace officers into revenue collection agents is a profoundly corrosive thing, so it’s all good for me.

Churchill on Steroids

I’ve always felt that Winston Churchill was overrated.

His life was a string of failures, and he inexplicably failed up. (His mismanagement of the Norway campaign led to his becoming Prime Minister, & Gallipoli, for example)

Boris Johnson sees himself to be a politician in the tradition of Churchill, and I’m inclined to agree.

  • Fired for making sh%$ up at the Times of London.
  • A long history of racist statements.
  • Fired as shadow arts minister for lying about an affair.
  • The zip-line incident.

And now we have a a senior party member quitting as MP and business minister.

By Boris standards, this will normally not amount to a blip, only said MP and business minister is one Jo Johnson, Boris’ little brother:

Jo Johnson, the younger brother of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is resigning as an MP and minister, saying he is “torn between family loyalty and the national interest”.

The business minister and Tory MP for Orpington, south-east London, cited an “unresolvable tension” in his role.

BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said it was “unbelievable timing”.

Mr Johnson voted Remain in the 2016 EU membership referendum, while his brother co-led the Leave campaign.

Mr Johnson’s resignation follows the removal of the Tory whip from 21 MPs this week for supporting moves to prevent a no-deal Brexit.

………

Jo Johnson’s resignation also comes as the government announced it would give MPs another chance to vote for an early election on Monday.

………

A Downing Street spokesman said: “The PM, as both a politician and brother, understands this will not have been an easy matter for Jo. The constituents of Orpington could not have asked for a better representative.”

Former cabinet minister David Gauke, one of the MPs who lost the Conservative whip, tweeted: “Lots of MPs have had to wrestle with conflicting loyalties in recent weeks. None more so than Jo. This is a big loss to Parliament, the government and the Conservative Party.”

Labour’s shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said: “Boris Johnson poses such a threat that even his own brother doesn’t trust him.”

This is truly Churchillian, and not in a good way.

Ron Wyden’s Mouth to God’s Ear

The distinguished gentleman from Oregon is suggesting, convincingly IMNSHO, that Mark Zuckerberg should be criminally prosecuted for his regular and consistent lying (fraud) about the privacy and use of data of his users.

I agree, and his opinion applies to Zuckerberg’s routine and persistent fraud.

Also, I agree with with Wyden that section 230 of the CDA prevents does not prevent this.

Fraud, both of his users and his advertisers, is not protected by section 230:

Mark Zuckerberg has “repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. “I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term.”

Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has “hurt a lot of people.”

Wyden was talking to the Willamette Week about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that gives online platforms like Facebook broad immunity for content posted by their users. Wyden was the co-author of the law and has been one of its most ardent defenders ever since.

………

But in the last decade, the Internet has become pervasive, and the downsides of unfettered online communication have become more obvious. Major online platforms have responded by beefing up their moderation policies. But critics on both the left and the right have criticized their policies, and some have called for rolling back Section 230.

Wyden argues that the solution is more vigorous enforcement of laws that do still apply to online companies—including laws that require companies to be honest with consumers and investors. Wyden pointed to laws that allow executives to be held personally accountable if they lie about their company’s finances. But Wyden didn’t point to any specific law that could allow such harsh penalties over privacy violations.

The Ghost of Judge Julius Hoffman

It does not surprise me that whenever there are protests and there are two sides, the cops will be polite and solicitous to Klansmen, white supremacists, fascists, Nazis, and racist, and hostile and aggressive to their opponents.

I have literally never heard of a demonstration in the United States where the cops do not favor the forces of hate and bigotry.

It’s baked into their culture.

So the abusive police presence at the “straight pride” ralley in Boston is no surprise.

What I would not expect, however, is that we would also find a judge so over the top in favor of the bigots that he denied a request by prosecutors to dismiss charges against some of the people who were arrested, and he threw a defense attorney in jail for contempt of court .

Does it sound like the return of the judge from the Chicago 7 trial yet?

Update: Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins filed an emergency petition with the state Supreme Judicial Court on Wednesday regarding Boston Municipal Court Judge Richard Sinnott’s actions, The Boston Globe reports. In it, her office argues that Sinnott “ignored the clear and unambiguous constraints placed on the judiciary by the separation of powers” in not following through with prosecutors’ intent to drop the charges against the nonviolent protesters.

“The judge’s interference with the district attorney’s constitutional authority cannot stand,” the petition reads.

Rollins filed the petition on behalf of one of the nonviolent defendants, with the intention of it setting a precedent for the other similar cases, according to the newspaper.

“The actions of Judge Richard Sinnott are unprecedented and outrageous,” the district attorney wrote on Twitter, linking to the Globe story on her petition.

………

Original story below:

Following the clash between “Straight Pride Parade” protesters and police in downtown Boston over the weekend, an unusual clash is now unfolding between prosecutors and a local judge handling the cases of those arrested during the event.

Boston Municipal Court Judge Richard Sinnott refused to dismiss charges Tuesday against a number of nonviolent protesters arrested during the parade and ensuing counter-demonstration. Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins says Sinnott is “overstepping” his role.

“By compelling arraignment in every case, the judge punished the exercise of individuals’ First Amendment right to protest,” Rollins said in a statement posted on social media Tuesday night.

………

According to The Boston Globe, the Boston-bred judge, who was appointed by Gov. Charlie Baker in 2017, agreed to drop charges against just two of the nine people for whom prosecutors had asked for the dismissal of nonviolent charges in exchange for community service.

(emphasis mine)

This is why you don’t vote for “moderate” Republicans.

For all their protest that they are the good kind of moderate Republicans, they still have a goal of infesting the judiciary and bureaucracy with hard-line culture warriors.

Yet Another Reason to Hate Uber

They have allied themselves with the Koch Brother(s) to go on a jihad against mass transit.

In fact, it is central to their business plans to drive mass transit out:

At first glance, the rideshare corporation Uber couldn’t appear more different than conservative oil-mogul billionaires Charles G. Koch and his brother, the late David H. Koch. Uber has hired numerous former Democratic Party campaign managers and lobbyists, and the company’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has publicly criticized the Trump administration, including over the travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries. The Kochs, meanwhile, have gained a reputation for bankrolling the Republican Party.

Yet Uber — the Silicon Valley start-up gone public — shares at least one goal with the most prominent funders of modern conservatism: the destruction of America’s public transit.

………

A close look at the growing war on public transit reveals the planks of this corporate consensus.

In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Uber’s executives claim to see a “massive market opportunity” in the estimated 4.4 trillion miles traveled each year by people using public transit across 175 countries. The company continues to heavily subsidize per-ride costs to inflate its value to investors and undercut existing options, despite bleeding billions of dollars. “Uber is effectively a middleman for a money transfer from venture-capital (VC) firms to consumers,” writes James P. Sutton in National Review. Simply put, effectively supplanting the taxi industry wasn’t enough: Uber plans on undercutting public transit to finally turn a profit.

For their part, the Koch brothers have been funneling money to their political action committee (PAC), Americans for Prosperity, to kill proposed public transit projects nationwide. Last year, they led the charge in stopping a popular $5.4 billion transit plan in Nashville, Tennessee, that had even been backed by a coalition of the city’s business community. The Kochs have funded similar anti–public transit efforts in Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, Utah, and other states.

………

Uber has joined the Koch brothers on this libertarian crusade, using a corporate shell game to avoid paying billions in taxes and lobbying against taxes and fees on rides across the globe.

………

Most important, both the Koch brothers and Uber understand that their freedom depends on taking freedom away from working people. Uber has spent generously on fighting to ensure its drivers maintain their precarious status as independent contractors. The company has also invested heavily in technology that would get rid of drivers altogether, including driverless cars. The Koch brothers’ anti-worker views date back much further, all the way to the counterrevolutionary days at the end of the New Deal era. Fred Koch, Charles and David’s father, owned an oil refinery corporation and was active in the archconservative John Birch Society. Through groups like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the Kochs have long led the attack against collective bargaining rights for public employees, including train and bus drivers.

At the end of the day, the Koch brothers and Uber are much like Coke and Pepsi. They may have clashing styles, but their product is largely the same: lower corporate taxes, deregulation, lower wages, and private control over public goods like mass transit.

It’s all about privatizing the public commons.

They want to take what is all of ours, and sell it back to all of us.

I’ll Never Know What Normal Families Do in the Morning


Monsieur Mustache is the One on the Left

I am giving Nat a ride to school today, and Nat is bringing a sock puppet to school for an audition today.

It’s a mustachioed existentialist French sock puppet. (It’s probably also an absurdist playwright and a chain smoker, but I forgot to ask)

I wonder what a normal families morning is like, because having a chat with an irascible French existentialist sock puppet is probably at least 2 sigma from the mean.

I am not sure if this is a parenting success, or a parenting failure..

Posted via mobile

There Hasn’t Been a War Run This Badly since Olaf the Hairy, King of All the Vikings, Ordered 80,000 Battle Helmets with the Horns on the Inside.

In what should surprise no one, HMS Boris Johnson has hit the Brexit shoals, and is taking on water:

British lawmakers on Tuesday rose up against Prime Minister Boris Johnson, moving to prevent him from taking the country out of the European Union without a formal agreement. The epic showdown pushed Britain to the verge of a new election.

After losing his first-ever vote as prime minister, Mr. Johnson stood up in Parliament and said he intended to present a formal request for a snap general election to lawmakers, who would have to approve it.

A little over a month ago, Mr. Johnson, a brash, blustery politician often compared to President Trump, swept into office with a vow to finally wrest Britain from the European Union by whatever means necessary, even if it meant a disorderly, no-deal departure.

Now, Parliament has pulled the rug out from under him, and Mr. Johnson is at risk of falling into the same Brexit quagmire that dragged down his predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May.

The lawmakers forced his hand by voting by 328 to 301 to take control of Parliament away from the government and vote on legislation as soon as Wednesday that would block the prime minister from making good on his threat of a no-deal Brexit.

I think that no-deal Brexit will happen anyway, if just because neither the Lib-Dems nor the Blairites are willing to allow Jeremy Corbyn, who is still in control of the plurality of the sane votes in Parliament, to achieve anything like a success.

It’s the proverbial bucket of crabs.

Woo Hoo!

The North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that the states hyper-partisan redistricting violates the state constitution.

Even if the US Supreme Court has punted on this, it appears that state courts are increasingly ruling against the practice:

A North Carolina court ruled Tuesday that the state’s legislative districts are unconstitutional, in a unanimous decision that won praise from voting-rights advocates and opens a new front in the national battle over partisan gerrymanders.

The three superior court judges in Wake County set a deadline of Sept. 17 by which North Carolina’s Republican-led General Assembly must submit redrawn state House and Senate district maps to be reviewed by a court-appointed referee.

In their ruling, the judges stated that the plaintiffs had proved the effect of the “partisan” maps drawn by the state legislature was that, “in all but the most unusual election scenarios, the Republican party will control a majority of both chambers of the General Assembly.”

“In other words, the Court finds that in many election environments, it is the carefully crafted maps, and not the will of the voters, that dictate the election outcomes in a significant number of legislative districts and, ultimately, the majority control of the General Assembly,” the judges said in their ruling.

2 down, 48 to go.

“Unleash,” Huh?

Obviously, fixing healthcare is not easy, at least not if you are devoted to looting the market.

For the rest of us, Single payer, or better yet a government owned National Health Service, works.

For the Free Market Mousketeers though, they have to come up with a “solution” that will, “Unleash entrepreneurs.”

Yes, the problem with looters infesting our healthcare system is more looters.

Change a few words, and you have the National Rifle Association to everything, “More Guns.”

If you add the word, “Disruption,” you would win bullsh%$ bingo.

The Stupid, It Burns!

No, it’s not a joke:

A private Catholic school in Nashville has removed the Harry Potter books from its library, saying they include “actual curses and spells, which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits”.

Local paper the Tennessean reported that the pastor at St Edward Catholic school, which teaches children of pre-kindergarten age through to 8th grade, had emailed parents about JK Rowling’s series to tell them that he had been in contact with “several” exorcists who had recommended removing the books from the library.

“These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception,” Rev Dan Reehil wrote. “The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text.”

Curses and spells included in the bestselling books, which were published between 1997 and 2007, include “avada kedavra”, the “killing” curse; “crucio”, the torture curse; and “imperio”, which allows the wizards to control others’ actions.

Rebecca Hammel, superintendent of schools for the Catholic diocese of Nashville, told the Tennessean that Reehil had sent the email after an inquiry from a parent. She added that “he’s well within his authority to act in that manner”, because “each pastor has canonical authority to make such decisions for his parish school”.

 I weep for humanity.

Rule 1 of Conservative: They Lie

Rule 2 is: See Rule 1.

Case in point, the claims by the Federalist Society that they are not an advocacy organization.

Newly leaked organizations clearly show otherwise:

This past March, when the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies held its 37th annual national gathering for conservative law students, the lineup of speakers and panelists included an impressive number of Republican Party and conservative movement stars.

………

Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party “or engage in other forms of political advocacy,” as its website says. The society does not deny an ideology—it calls itself a “group of conservatives and libertarians”—but it maintains that it is simply “about ideas,” not legislation, politicians or policy positions.

Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward. The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.

The question of whether the Federalist Society is properly characterized as a “society of ideas” or a political organization has significant ramifications. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of guidelines administered by the federal judiciary’s Judicial Conference, was revised earlier this year to bar sitting federal judges from participating in conferences and seminars sponsored by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.” (The Code does not “explicitly” apply to Supreme Court justices, though they have looked to it in the past.) One former federal judge argued that under the new ethics opinion, the Federalist Society is now a “no-go zone for federal judges.” The Society’s president, Eugene Meyer, responded, calling the former jurist’s argument an “absurd and ludicrous” interpretation of the rule, adding that the Federalist Society has said “time and again” that it is nonpartisan and does not take official policy positions.

But the newly unearthed documents—a 1984 grant proposal and cover letter, written by Meyer on the Federalist Society’s behalf and now housed in the late Judge Robert Bork’s papers at the Library of Congress—provide evidence that the Federalist Society, in contravention of what the new Code states, in fact “advocates for specific outcomes on legal or political issues.” This suggests that federal judges, by attending Federalist Society events, are transgressing the Code’s new guidelines. Given the importance of active federal judges to the Federalist Society’s long-term goal of reshaping the law, barring them from the society’s events could hamper its continued ability to exert the political influence it has impressively built over decades.

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 as a small law student group with the goal of bringing conservative and libertarian speakers, and their ideas, to law school campuses perceived to be dismissive of these intellectual traditions. After the Federalist Society held its first national symposium at Yale Law School that year—featuring recent Reagan-appointed federal appeals court judges Bork and Antonin Scalia—Federalist Society student groups started popping up on law school campuses around the country. The organization now boasts more than 65,000 members, and most federal judgeships, clerkships and executive branch legal jobs in Republican administrations are effectively off-limits to nonmembers.

The Federalist Society’s founders and conservative patrons understood early on that the battle for control of the law would not be won on campuses alone. In the January 1984 grant proposal, Meyer, then the Federalist Society’s executive director, asked the conservative-leaning Smith Richardson Foundation for “seed money” to fund a new entity, a “Lawyers Division.” The central goal, Meyer wrote, was “to build an effective national conservative lawyers organization.” Meyer began the proposal by asserting that an alternative to “an increasingly radicalized bar,” exemplified by the American Bar Association, was now necessary because “lawyers continue to fill key positions in the modern instrumentalities of the welfare state.”

The Federalist Society promised the prospective donor that the Lawyers Division would have a “dual purpose.” First, to “an even greater extent than the activities of the student and faculty divisions,” the new division would “educat[e] lawyers on legal developments with ideological connotations and how to deal with them.” The second purpose was “the formation of groups of conservative lawyers in the major centers for the practice of law, who feel comfortable believing in, and advocating, conservative positions.” The division, Meyer wrote, would mimic the style of workshops and seminars hosted by bar associations: “Unlike those events, however, the panels will also have ideological overtones, picking topics where the developments are especially good and should be encouraged, or especially bad and should be stopped.” The proposal offered examples of these workshops. Seattle might focus on the problems posed by “Environmental Regulation”; in New York, “Banking Regulation”; and in Houston, “Employment Discrimination (including the question of whether reverse discrimination is even constitutional).” The proposal also mentioned the Lawyers Division potentially “making its own recommendation for judicial appointments.”

Simply put, when the Federalist Society was describing its mission in private to a politically sympathetic donor, it let drop the group’s public-facing fiction that it is merely a debating society for the organic development of ideas.

I don’t know if this would put their 501(C)3 tax exempt status at risk, but these documents clearly indicate that it is prohibited for federal judges, who are subject to the Code of Conduct for Federal Judges would be prohibited from participating in the group’s activities, though Supreme Court justices, who are not subject to the Code, could participate.

Damn!

California has a good bill in the legislature which will provide employee protections for the people misclassified as independent contractors by the “Gig-Economy” companyes.

Uber, Lyft and DoorDash are spending almost $100 million to prevent this through the initiative petition process:

Gig-economy giants Uber, Lyft and Doordash have put $30m apiece into a new fund to push a new California ballot measure that would prevent their workers get ordinary benefits like a minimum wage, overtime, workers’ compensation and so on.

The corporations are worried about a new piece of legislation working its way through the legislature in Sacramento that would effectively make their workers employees. The bill, AB5, passed the Assembly in May, has gone through one Senate committee and was cleared by another on Friday, meaning it will now go to the full Senate.

Numerous groups have won exemptions to the provisions in AB5 – doctors, engineers, architects, hair stylists and others – by arguing that that they set their own prices and work directly with their customers. But gig-economy giants have not, meaning that they will be on the hook for employee benefits, which in real terms will increase their cost of labor by 20-30 per cent.

Uber, Lyft and others, including truckers and exotic dancers – have been lobbying fiercely against the new law but seemingly to little avail. With the bill looking increasingly likely to become law, they have struck on a new idea: push a ballot measure that Californian residents will vote on that would undercut the law. 

I would hope that the people of the state of California would vote down what is clearly an attempt to  f%$# their own workers, but there is going to be a lot of money, from some very profoundly unprofitable (not a typo) firms, telling lies in order to keep the VC capital flowing so that their senior management can cash in before their inevitable collapse.

Linkage

My son doing his stand-up routine:

History is Rhyming Again

Once again, the policy of austerity is leading to the rise of right wing nativists throughout Europe, and once again, it’s happening in Germany:

The anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland party made strong gains in two crucial state elections in Germany on Sunday, increasing its support significantly but failing to oust the mainstream parties.

But the sharp shift to the right in Saxony and Brandenburg – AfD came second in both states – is a blow to the ruling coalition of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), both parties having lost thousands of voters to AfD.

The AfD was also able to mobilise several hundred thousand people who had never voted before, initial analysis showed.

Exit polls showed the CDU remaining the strongest party in Saxony but losing more than six points to secure 33%, while AfD reached 28.1% – a gain of 18 percentage points, and a larger share of the vote than pollsters had predicted.

In Brandenburg, the SPD, which has governed there since 1990, narrowly clung to first place, winning 26.6% and losing 5 points, while AfD secured 24.5%, a more than 10-point rise and a larger share than predicted.

AfD’s success in Saxony and Brandenburg, both in the former communist east, reflects the breakdown of support for Germany’s mainstream parties, the centre-right CDU and the left-of-centre SPD and, as elsewhere in Europe, the increasing fragmentation of the political landscape.

When governments adequately provide for their citizens, the fascist right does not rise.

The fascist right is rising.

QED.

The Second Amendment Has Had a Very Busy Day

Less than a day after the Midland-Odessa shootings, Texas loosened its gun laws:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott defended new gun laws that ease restrictions on gun owners in that state Sunday, hours after the laws went into effect and hours after a gunman shot at least 21 people, killing seven, in and around Odessa, Texas.

The new laws loosen restrictions on gun ownership and use in schools, foster homes, apartment buildings, and houses of worship. Proponents of the laws argue that they will offer people the opportunity to defend themselves from threats, while critics say expanding gun access makes people less safe.

Can we give Texas back to Mexico?  Please?