And I still do not get their affection for crab cakes. (Working lunch today)
It’s probably just me though.
I’ve never been a fan of bread based stuffing either, give me the wild rice any time.
Year: 2019
If Speaker Pelosi Does Not Want to Use the House of Representatives, I Would Like to Borrow It for a Time
Yesterday, it was Justin Amash (R-MI), and today it was 3 members of the Demcratic leadership in the House calling for Trump’s impeachment:
House Democratic leaders sparred internally on Monday over whether to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies rejecting the call to move forward for now, according to multiple sources.
Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) — all members of the Democratic leadership — pushed to begin impeachment proceedings during a leadership meeting in Pelosi’s office, said the sources. Pelosi and Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) — some of her key allies — rejected their calls, saying Democrats’ message is being drowned out by the fight over possibly impeaching Trump.
The, “Democrats’ message,” what the hell is that?
According to Cheri Bustos, head of the DCCC, you have to aggressively support an anti-choice Dem in a safe district, (Lipinski) and a right wing darling of the Koch brothers. (Cuellar)
What is your message, besides, “This space for rent”?
She is the George McClellan of Congress.
She has done a creditable job organizing a Democratic Congress, but she seems determined not to do anything it.
The Gig Economy Strikes Back
A group of Uber and Lyft drivers serving Washington National Airport have taken to simultaneously turning off their apps to drive surge pricing to increase their fares:
Drivers for ride-hailing apps Lyft and Uber have organized for better pay through collective action – and not by unionizing.
Here’s how it works: a group of drivers who pick up passengers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, outside the US capital, have been turning off their taxi apps simultaneously to influence the surge pricing algorithms used by the two companies.
A report published last week by local ABC affiliate WJLA-TV recounts how a group of 100-150 drivers all turned off their driver apps in sync – coordinated by an individual using an unidentified app – to create the false impression of a local driver shortage.
With the ride supply down as demand peaks, the taxi apps’ surge pricing algorithms kick in, offering higher rates to entice more drivers to come to the airport. Minutes later, once the price rises anywhere from $10 to $19 or so, the drivers sign back on and accept the fare at a level they find more reasonable.
This is why you should not do business with companies that treat their employees like crap.
Even ignoring the ethical issues, it is likely that those poorly treated employees will find a way to fight back, and you are likely to be the battlefield.
An Appropriate Use of Dairy Products
Yes, that is Nigel Farage, and yes, he has been hit with a milkshake.
It appears that in the UK, hurling milkshakes at right wing rat-f%$#s is a thing.
While I cannot offer my wholehearted support of the abuse of dairy products, I do find this preferable to the US approach, which all to often involves the use of firearms.
Support Your Local Police
Florida National Guardsmen were getting ready to engage in weapons qualification at a shooting range.
They followed the North Miami Beach Police sniper team and discovered that the cops had been using mugshots of black men for target practice, including a phtograph of one of the guardsmen’s brothers:
A South Florida family is outraged at North Miami Beach Police after mug shots of African American men were used as targets at a shooting range for police training.
It was an ordinary Saturday morning last month when Sgt. Valerie Deant arrived at the shooting range in Medley, or so she thought.
Deant, who plays clarinet with the Florida Army National Guard’s 13th Army Band, and her fellow soldiers were at the shooting range for their annual weapons qualifications training.
What the soldiers discovered when they entered the range made them angry: mug shots of African American men apparently used as targets by North Miami Beach Police snipers, who had used the range before the Guardsmen. Even more startling for Deant, one of the images was her brother. It was Woody Deant’s mug shot that taken 15 years ago, after he was arrested in connection to a drag race in 2000 that left two people dead. His mug shot was among the pictures of five minorities used as targets by North Miami Beach police, all of them riddled by bullets.
“I was like ‘why is my brother being used for target practice?’” Deant asked.
Your brother is being used for target practice because he is black, and because the North Miami Beach Police sniper team is a sociopathic and racist organization.
The degree to which racism and brutality are unthinkingly incorporated into law enforcement culture in the United States truly deplorable.
The $100 Million Dollar Cat is Dead
Tardar Sauce, better known as “Grumpy Cat”, has died of a UTI at age 7.
In cat years, she was in the prime of life.
Here permanently peeved expression was due to feline dwarfism, so it could be argued that we are actually seeing is the world’s most extreme case of “resting bitch face” ever seen on a cat.
Over her short life, this cat may have earned as much as $100,000,000.00.
Capitalism is amazing, huh?
A Much Needed Regulation
Gavin Newsom has proposed new regulations to prevent charter schools from cherry picking their students.
This is important, because excluding the disabled, and other students who need extra help, is the “Secret Sauce” of charter schools.
It allows them to create the appearance of exceptional performance on the cheap:
State law already requires that a charter school admit any student who applies. In his May budget revision, Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to tighten the language banning discrimination in charter school enrollment, particularly to protect students with disabilities and students with poor grades who want to attend charter schools.
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In return for receiving public funding, charter schools must have open admissions and hold a lottery when there are more applicants than spaces. School districts have complained that some of the state’s 1,300-plus charter schools have discouraged families with academically struggling students and special education students with high-cost needs from signing up. Others counsel students who are struggling academically to leave school mid-year to boost schoolwide test scores, districts say.
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Charges that charter schools deliberately select top student applicants have been largely anecdotal, which is why Newsom is proposing a uniform complaint policy that allows parents to file a grievance if they believe they were discriminated against. He also wants to explore using state Smarter Balanced testing and other data to identify enrollment disparities “that may warrant inquiry and intervention,” his budget stated.
Three years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates released a report that found that about a fifth of charter schools had admissions policies that improperly excluded students based on grades, pre-enrollment interviews, a parental participation requirement, or that required citizenship documentation and a minimum level of English language proficiency. The report was based on a review of charter schools’ websites and most charter schools responded by removing pages they said were outdated and didn’t reflect their current policies.
Newsom’s proposed statute would specify that charter schools cannot request or require parents to submit student records before enrolling. And it would require that charter schools post parental rights on their websites and make parents aware of them during enrollment and when students are expelled or leave during the year.
………The proposed statute implies there should be no allowances “for any reason” that might discourage any pupil from enrolling in a charter school.
It’s a good start.
A Good Start
The first Republican member of Congress has come out for impeaching Donald Trump:
Republican Congressman Justin Amash has broken with the Republican Party line to declare that President Trump has “engaged in impeachable conduct.” He also accuses Attorney General William Barr of attempting “to mislead the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s analysis and findings.” President Trump has responded calling Amash a “lightweight” and a “loser.”
Amash, who represents a Michigan district anchored by Grand Rapids, leans libertarian in his political orientation. He is the first prominent GOP officeholder to suggest that Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice and undermine the rule of law merit his removal from office. Indeed, Amash’s call for impeachment puts him out ahead of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash writes. The congressman used a Twitter thread Saturday to broadcast his views, “only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely, having read or watched pertinent statements and testimony, and having discussed this matter with my staff.”
Here are my principal conclusions:
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019
In his thread, Amash offered choice criticism for Barr in his execution of his duties as America’s top law enforcement officer.Barr’s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019
Amash spends much of his thread warning America about adherence to party over our constitutional system of checks and balances, while making a subtle jab at fellow conservatives who sought to impeach Bill Clinton for obstruction of justice, but have remained silent in the face of Trump’s lawlessness:In fact, Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 18, 2019
Trump’s response, by Twitter (of course) , is to call Amash a lightweight and a loser.
I do not think that this is pebbles before an avalanche, but it does provide a slight gloss of bipartisanship to the movement toward impeachment.
I Think that This is Intentional
I just noticed that there is a lot of physical similarity between anti-alien bigot Ben Lockwood/Agent Liberty (played by actor Sam Witwer, right) on Supergirl, and Alt-Right bigot Ben Shapiro (played by useless sphincter Ben Shapiro, left).
The story arc of Supergirl, prominently features an anti-alien movement in the United States.
This arc is unequivocally an allegory for the anti-immigrant movement in general, and the Alt Right in particular, in the United States.
I am thinking that this was an deliberate decision by the producers, and I wholeheartedly approve.
Well, This is a Big Old F%$# You
I have been writing for some time about how Turkey’s purchase of the top of the line Russian S-400 surface to air missile (SAM) system has the US military industrial complex freaking out over the loss of sales.
The US claims that Turkey operating the system would allow the Russians unique insights into the characteristics of the F-35, but this is complete crap.
The Russians would be able to determing things like radar cross section from installations in Syria and Russia. (It is an extraordinarily long range system)
In response to threats to cancel F-35 sales to Turkey, Turkey is not in negotiations with Russia to set up a production line for the S-500, the even more capable system due to succeed the S-400:
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that the purchase of S-400 defense systems from Russia was a done deal, adding that Ankara would also jointly produce S-500 defense systems with Moscow.
U.S. officials have called Turkey’s planned purchase of the S-400 missile defense system “deeply problematic,” saying it would risk Ankara’s partnership in the joint strike fighter F-35 program because it would compromise the jets, made by Lockheed Martin Corp.
I don’t speak Turkish, but I’m pretty sure that this is an invitation for the Pentagon, and Lockheed Martin, to go Cheney themselves.
Cue Inspector Renault
I’m shocked! Shocked! To find that gambling is going on this establishment
The “Democratic Party” right wing organization Third Way has admitted that they are bought and paid for by Wall Street:
If Third Way’s attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren make the group sound like a stalking horse for Wall Street executives, there might be a reason for that.
At a demonstration today outside the think tank’s downtown DC office, Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett conceded to Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) co-founder Adam Green that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector.
Well knock me over with a mackerel.
This has been patently obvious since the group has burst on the scene.
Taking Wall Streeter’s money to generate a comfortable life style for the associated lobbyists and political consultants has been it’s raison d’être since its founding.
Yet Again, Bernie is Right
Sanders is calling on a ban for for-profit charter schools and a halt to further charter school expansion.
I wholeheartedly approve.
Charters are unaccountable, and frequently corrupt, as well as being the darlings of Wall Street money:
As president, Bernie Sanders would support a ban on for-profit charter schools and a blanket moratorium on public funding for all new charters, the candidate announced in a speech on Saturday, throwing down a new gauntlet on the left in the Democratic debate over education reform.
The Vermont senator laid out a broad education agenda that seeks to address racial disparities on the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Sanders’s plan is quite ambitious, thought it lacks some important details.
He wants to triple federal Title I funding for schools that serve a large number of low-income students, set a national salary floor for teachers of $60,000, and provide universal school meals: breakfast, lunch, and snacks for every student year-round.
But his proposed prohibition on for-profit charter schools and temporary ban on government spending on new nonprofit charters is a foray into the most divisive piece of the education reform debate. Charter schools have been a source of debate for years between mainstream liberals who see charters as a promising alternative to the traditional public schools and the labor left that considers them an attack on teachers unions because charters are typically unorganized.
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For existing charter schools, Sanders would propose that they be subject to the same oversight requirements as regular schools, that half of a charter school’s board members be parents and teachers, and that charters be required to disclose certain student and funding data.
Charter schools do not in the whole outperform public schools, and we have seen repeated examples of corruption and self-dealing, so ending for-profit chains, and placing a hold on expansion until appropriate oversight can be implemented is just basic good governance.
I would prefer to see them shut down completely, I think that they are primarily an attempt to loot, with a side order of union busting, but this is a good start.
The Return of the AH-56 Apache
Proposed Apache Update
AH-56 Apache
Boeing is proposing a major update to its Apache attack helicopter, that the similarities between it and the 1960s vintage AH-56 apache are striking:
U.S. aerospace manufacturer Boeing has shown footage of high-speed version of Apache attack helicopter during the Vertical Flight Society’s 75th Annual Forum & Technology Display.
Graham Warwick posted images of the Apache gunship concept and photo of a scale model of a new helicopter that was unveiled by the Boeing on social media.
The concept, called the Advanced AH-64 Block 2 Compound, is developing to serve as a gap filler in a U.S. Army Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program.
Jane’s Defense Weekly early reported that the new gunship will feature an enlarged main wing, revised engine exhaust arrangement, large vertical tail fin, and a rear-mounted pusher propeller. The design may also feature a new, rigid rotor system, which is a standard feature on other compound helicopter designs.
Also the Rotor & Wing International said that Boeing already has conducted wind tunnel testing of a scale model of a high-speed Apache gunship.
The similarities between the two helicopters, both in appearance and concept, are striking.
It’s Overyhped? Say it Ain’t So!
There is an increasingl realization that the promised transformative nature of 5G mobile technology is a mirage.
The blistering speeds promised only occur with the higher frequencies, which only extend about a mile from a cell tower, and do not effectively penetrate building walls and the like:
Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That’s not to say that 5G won’t be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.
If you looked past press releases you’d notice that Verizon’s early launches required the use of $200 battery add on mod because we still haven’t really figured out the battery drain issues presented by 5G’s power demands. You’d also notice the growing awareness that the long-hyped millimeter wave spectrum being used for many deployments have notable distance and line of sight issues, meaning that rural and much of suburban America will not likely see the speeds you’ll frequently see bandied about in marketing issues, and many of the same coverage gap issues you see with current-gen broadband are likely to persist.
If you looked past the headlines you’d probably noticed that even Wall Street was concerned that 5G was being over-hyped and wasn’t yet ready for prime time. Those concerns continue to be expressed largely in industry trade magazines, where you’ll often find stock jocks noting that most of the purported promises of 5G remain well over the horizon:
“What of the other fancy features of 5G, like massive IoT and ultra low latency? Specifications for those technologies are scheduled for availability in — wait for it — 2020, when the 3GPP’s Release 16 is scheduled to be finished.
“We believe the current investment opportunity associated with 5G is limited and unlikely to drive meaningful incremental upside for companies involved considering the mature state of the smartphone market,” wrote the analysts at Wall Street research firm Cowen in a recent note to investors.”
What, you mean that out wireless companies are lying to us?
I’m shocked.
Linkage
- How America’s Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery (New York Times) No mystery. Private equity robbed them blind.
- The Team That Scores The Most Points Wins, Even If The Scoring Rules Are Complicated (Eschaton) On how incompetent political consultants in the Democratic Party alibi their failures.
- US Border Patrol Is the Most Brutal Militia of All (Truthout) Sadism and brutality does appear toat the core of their institutional culture, and I am an immigration hardliner saying this.
- Medieval Bunny Rabbits (Open Culture) It appears that murderous bunny rabbits were very much a part of medieval culture, I wonder if Monty Python knew this when they did the movie.
- ‘Cow kiss challenge’: Austria tells people to shun charity dare (The Guardian) The hed says it all.
The Who, The Roots, Jimmy Fallon, and Elementary School musical instruments.
Pete Townshend smashes his ukulele at the end:
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!
We have the 3rd credit union failure of the year, Municipal Credit Union of New York City.
There is a story behind this, it’s the oldest credit union in New York State, and it appears that it may have been done in response to its former CEO’s embezzlement uncovered last year:
The New York State Department of Financial Services on Friday said it took possession of the $3 billion Municipal Credit Union, less than a year after its former President/CEO Kam Wong pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $10 million from one of New York’s largest financial cooperatives.
The state agency named the National Credit Union Administration as conservator.
In 2017, the New York DFS said it had uncovered deficiencies in board oversight that had facilitated the multi-million-dollar embezzlement by Wong. He was charged by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan with embezzlement, and he was banned from the credit union industry by the NCUA in May 2018. He pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $10 million from MCU in November 2018.
DFS removed MCU’s supervisory committee in May 2018, and its board of directors in June 2018 due to what the regulators called severe deficiencies in their oversight of the overall management of the affairs of the credit union and designated an on-premises administrator, Mark Ricca, to oversee the general management of the credit union.
Based on ongoing supervision by DFS and the NCUA, the New York regulator made the decision Friday to appoint NCUA as conservator and terminate the administrator’s engagement.
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A review of the MCU’s financial performance reports filed with the NCUA, however, does not show that the credit union is in any financial distress, although its net worth has declined from 8.76% in 2014 to 7.59% at the end of the first quarter of this year.
What’s more, the credit union has shown no substantial declines in its total loans or loan income though its net income decline from $17.5 million in 2017 to $11.4 million at the end of last year. At the end of the first quarter of this year, MCU recorded a net income of $2.8 million, down from the net income of $4.6 million in March 2018.
The credit union allowance for loan and lease losses jumped from $18.8 million in 2017 to $22.5 million in 2018. At the end of first quarter, its ALLL was $22.6 million, according to NCUA financial performance reports.
Last year, the credit union’s membership increased by 37%.
Walking the Walk
The Sanders campaign just used his mailing list to increase turnout for striking workers in the University of California system:
Thousands of workers from the University of California waged a one-day strike Thursday and found some unexpected allies out on their picket lines.
In an unusual move for a presidential candidate, the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent out targeted text messages and emails to its supporters in California a day ahead of the strike, urging them to join workers as they rallied against the university system in a labor dispute.
“Tens of thousands of workers in the University of California system are standing up this Thursday to stop the outsourcing and privatization of union jobs,” the email said. “We are hoping you can join these workers tomorrow.”
The note included an RSVP link and an address for a local picket.
The move apparently worked, according to John de los Angeles, a spokesperson for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, one of the unions involved in the strike.
“I deployed a press team across the state and was in contact with them,” de los Angeles said. “They were sending me pictures of random supporters out on the line because they had received an email or text from the Bernie campaign. That happened all over the place.”
If you wonder why people are, to quote Steve Rogers, willing, “To make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you,” for Bernie Sanders, it is because he has been laying down on the wire for us for decades.
Yes, I do realize that juxtaposing Captain America and Steve Rogers is a bit bizarre, but I’m a bit bizarre.
Manning Jailed Again
Seeing as how they already have his testimony from his plea, my only conclusion is that the prosecutors are trying to suborn perjury against Assange:
Chelsea Manning was again behind bars on Thursday night after she was jailed for a second time for contempt of court, having refused to cooperate with a grand jury.
A defiant Manning told Judge Anthony Trenga in a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, that she would “rather starve to death” than do what the state insisted and give testimony before the grand jury. Having already served 62 days in jail, 28 of which were spent in solitary confinement, she now faces up to 18 months more in custody.
To quote Anatole France, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
The New Normal is Profoundly Depressing
Donald Trump has pardoned Conrad Black, the former media mogul who owned the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator before being jailed for fraud, shortly after he wrote a book praising the US president.
Black, a Canadian-born British citizen, was once known for his extravagant lifestyle as he ran an international newspaper empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post. But he ended up serving three and a half years in prison after he was convicted in 2007 of siphoning off millions of dollars from the sale of newspapers owned by the company he controlled.
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Black was jailed after being found guilty of conspiring with fellow executives to siphon off funds from the sale of media businesses. Two of Black’s three fraud convictions were later voided, and his sentence was shortened. Black was released from a Florida prison in May 2012 and deported.
He said he thought it was a prank by British tabloid journalists when he received the call from the White House informing him that he was about to be pardoned.
This is so depressing on so many levels and in so many ways.
Not Enough Bullets
Generic drug makers conspired to raise the price of their drugs by over 1000%.
Capitalism, you gotta love it, huh?
Leading drug companies including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan conspired to inflate the prices of generic drugs by as much as 1,000 percent, according to a far-reaching lawsuit filed on Friday by 44 states.
The industrywide scheme affected the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, according to the complaint, including lamivudine-zidovudine, which treats H.I.V.; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which treats high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for A.D.H.D.; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants.
“We all know that prescription drugs can be expensive,” Gurbir S. Grewal, the New Jersey attorney general, said in a statement. “Now we know that high drug prices have been driven in part by an illegal conspiracy among generic drug companies to inflate their prices.”
Can we PLEASE start jailing the executives who do this?
It’s a criminal conspiracy, and should be treated as the crime that it is.