I’ve always felt that of everyone at The Daily Show John Oliver was the best host.
Jon Stewart was always a big subscriber to the view from nowhere, and while Trevor Noah is better, he is still tentative. (The less said of Craig Kilborne the better)
John Oliver is better at addressing the outrages of the day because he actually shows sincere outrage when an outrage occurs:
Amid the depths of a global pandemic and financial downturn, the demand for real estate is unexpectedly rocketing in wealthy regions outside San Francisco, reports Bloomberg. Agents say that demand is soaring in affluent areas around the Bay Area such as Napa, Marin and further afield in Carmel, as people who have the means look to get away from the city. Meanwhile, the market in San Francisco and Alameda County is still well below where it was last year.
Elsewhere, Lake Tahoe has also seen a surge in real estate interest. The prospect of living out of the city on an alpine lake while maintaining a career is appealing for a new generation of young buyers, as many tech companies have signaled that remote work may be the new norm for a long time.
“I’ve never seen the demand higher for Marin County real estate than when COVID-19 hit,” Sotheby’s Josh Burns told Bloomberg this week, as real estate agents see a surprising uptick in wealthy buyers leaving San Francisco.
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Meanwhile, the rental market in San Francisco has dropped significantly, with rates for one-bedroom apartments in the city dropping by 9.2% since June 2019, and hitting a three-year low.
However, buying a new home in an isolated haven in a nearby bucolic county is not an option for lower-income San Francisco residents, and some believe the trend is only exacerbating the wealth divide.
“This is an example of another way the most advantaged, the most affluent have isolated themselves from this latest crisis,” Patrick Sharkey, a sociology professor at Princeton University, told Bloomberg. “It’s a very small segment of the population that has another home that they can go take off to.”
The wealthy have made San Francisco unlivable, and not that it is, they are moving on leaving devastation in their wake.
The wealthy are to community as my cats are to their litter box.
I knew that William Barr was an egregiously corrupt political hack, and I knew that his attempt to drop charges was motivated by a desire to please Donald Trump, but I did not expect this fact to be called out so explicitly in a legal filing authored by a former federal judge:
A retired federal judge accused the Justice Department on Wednesday of a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power” and urged a court to reject its attempt to drop the criminal case against Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser.
The arguments in a 73-page brief by John Gleeson, the retired judge and former mafia prosecutor appointed to argue against the Justice Department’s unusual effort to drop the Flynn case, were the latest turn in a politically charged case that now centers on the question of whether Mr. Flynn should continue to be prosecuted. He said Mr. Flynn should be sentenced.
The Justice Department’s intervention last month, directed by Attorney General William P. Barr, came after a long public campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies and prompted an outcry from former law enforcement officials that the administration was further politicizing the department.
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Mr. Gleeson’s brief amounted to a step-by-step dissection of the factual claims and legal arguments the Justice Department put forward last month to justify withdrawing a charge of making false statements that Mr. Flynn had twice pleaded guilty to. Mr. Gleeson said the department’s intervention was an example of the kind of “corrupt, politically motivated dismissals” that judges have the power to guard against.
“The reasons offered by the government are so irregular, and so obviously pretextual, that they are deficient,” Mr. Gleeson wrote. “Moreover, the facts surrounding the filing of the government’s motion constitute clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse. They reveal an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump.”
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To justify Mr. Barr’s decision to drop the case, the Justice Department has argued that Mr. Flynn’s lies were not “material” to any legitimate investigation — rejecting the department’s own previous position that his lies were relevant to the counterintelligence inquiry into the scope of Russia’s covert operation to tilt the 2016 election in Mr. Trump’s favor and the nature of links to Trump campaign associates.
Mr. Gleeson, who had co-written an op-ed article calling into question the legitimacy of Mr. Barr’s intervention before Judge Sullivan appointed him, offered a blistering critique of that rationale.
“Pursuant to an active investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign officials coordinated activities with the government of Russia, one of those officials lied to the F.B.I. about coordinating activities with the government of Russia,” Mr. Gleeson wrote. “It is hard to conceive of a more material false statement than this one.”
Marching through other issues raised by Mr. Flynn’s defenders and embraced by the Justice Department, Mr. Gleeson portrayed the arguments as “absurd,” “legally unsound,” “misdirection,” “preposterous” and “empty.” He said the department’s request was both “riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact” and departed from its position in other cases — all evidence, he said, that its rationale for dropping the case was just a pretext.
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“The government may not enlist a court in dismissing a case solely because the defendant is a friend and political ally of the president — and where the ostensible reasons advanced for dismissal amount to a thin and unpersuasive disguise,” wrote Mr. Gleeson, who gained fame as the prosecutor who put the Gambino crime boss John Gotti in prison, and went on to serve as a federal judge in Brooklyn from 1994 to 2016.
He added: “If the executive wishes for the judiciary to dismiss criminal charges — as opposed to issuing a pardon or taking other unilateral action — the reasons it offers must be real and credible. Its professed concerns about materiality are neither.”
Damn. That’s gonna leave a mark.
Why there hasn’t been a complaint filed against Barr to the Washington, DC bar for discipline is beyond me.
This makes the entire incident look like a deliberate decision to kill him as a matter of personal animus:
As mourners in Houston honor the life of George Floyd in Minneapolis, CBS News is learning new details from a nightclub coworker about alleged history between Floyd and Derek Chauvin, the former officer who is charged in Floyd’s death. According to a former coworker, not only did they know each other, but they had a history of friction.
Floyd and Chauvin both worked security at a nightclub at the same time. Coworker David Pinney said the two men had a history.
“They bumped heads,” Pinney said.
“How?” CBS News asked.
“It has a lot to do with Derek being extremely aggressive within the club with some of the patrons, which was an issue,” Pinney explained.
The Floyd family says they believe what happened on May 25 was in part personal. Their lawyer has called for Chauvin to be charged with first-degree murder, “because we believe he knew who George Floyd was.”
“Is there any doubt in your mind that Derek Chauvin knew George Floyd?” CBS News asked Pinney.
“No. He knew him,” the coworker said.
“How well did he know him?” CBS News asked.
“I would say pretty well,” Pinney replied.
Maya Santamaria, the owner of the now protest-torched club, described how Chauvin treated black patrons when she talked to CBS News for the upcoming special “Justice for All.”
Santamaria said she had been paying Chauvin, when he was off-duty, to sit in his squad car outside El Nuevo Rodeo for 17 years. She said Floyd worked as a security guard inside the club frequently in the last year. In particular, they both worked on Tuesday nights, when the club had a popular weekly dance competition.
“Do you think Derek had a problem with black people?” CBS News asked.
“I think he was afraid and intimidated,” Santamaria said.
“By black folks?” CBS News clarified.
“Yeah,” Santamaria confirmed.
This is just one report, and the information has not been vetted, but Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has an obligation to fully investigate.
HBO is doing a reboot of the Warner Brothers’ Looney Toons cartoon, and they are ‘taking Elmer Fudd’s gun away.
I get that guns are a problem in today’s society, but we are talking about guns in the context of hunting, and it’s ELMER F%$#ING FUDD!!!!!
It boggles the mind what some people will do to create the APPEARANCE of doing something about a problem while not actually doing anything.
Microsoft’s MSN network is attempting to replace human editors with artificial “Intelligence”.
Microsoft’s decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the tech company’s artificial intelligence software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of the band Little Mix.
A week after the Guardian revealed plans to fire the human editors who run MSN.com and replace them with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence code, an early rollout of the software resulted in a story about the singer Jade Thirlwall’s personal reflections on racism being illustrated with a picture of her fellow band member Leigh-Anne Pinnock.
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Microsoft does not carry out original reporting but employs human editors to select, edit and repurpose articles from news outlets, including the Guardian. Articles are then hosted on Microsoft’s website and the tech company shares advertising revenue with the original publishers. At the end of last month, Microsoft decided to fire hundreds of journalists in the middle of a pandemic and fully replace them with the artificial intelligence software.
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In advance of the publication of this article, staff at MSN were told to expect a negative article in the Guardian about alleged racist bias in the artificial intelligence software that will soon take their jobs.
Because they are unable to stop the new robot editor selecting stories from external news sites such as the Guardian, the remaining human staff have been told to stay alert and delete a version of this article if the robot decides it is of interest and automatically publishes it on MSN.com. They have also been warned that even if they delete it, the robot editor may overrule them and attempt to publish it again.
Staff have already had to delete coverage criticising MSN for running the story about Little Mix with the wrong image after the AI software decided stories about the incident would interest MSN readers.
Epic fail.
Fresh off his statement that he saw no police hitting people with nightsticks, Andrew Cuomo as said that he will sign legislation speeding through the New York State legislature enacting major police reform:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday urged Americans to stay the course in the massive protests which have been held in cities and towns across the U.S. for the past two weeks, pointing to New York State lawmakers passing long-awaited legislation to classify chokeholds as a felony as evidence the pressure is working.
The Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act passed in the New York State Assembly with a vote of 140-3. The bill now heads to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is expected to sign it into law.
“Stay in the streets,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s working.”Stay in the streets. It’s working ⬇️ https://t.co/XoDiQ0dLJK— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 8, 2020
The bill was passed two weeks into a nationwide uprising over police brutality and racial injustice sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other black Americans.
Additionally, the state legislature has passed a bill repealing New York Civil Rights Law section 50-A, which made police disciplinary records secret, makes the state Attorney General a special prosecutor in the event of possible police misconduct, require police departments to report statistics on the ethnicity of people arrested, requiring officers to immediately report when they have discharged their weapons in the line of duty, repealing the requirement that police disciplinary proceedings be run by police, and other reforms.
As I noted in the hed, it’s a good start.
What a surprise. The Trump administration official running the bailout is directing aid to his family’s business:Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have become the public faces of the $3 trillion federal coronavirus bailout. Behind the scenes, however, the Treasury’s responsibilities have fallen largely to the 42-year-old deputy secretary, Justin Muzinich.
A major beneficiary of that bailout so far: Muzinich & Co., the asset manager founded by his father where Justin served as president before joining the administration. He reported owning a stake worth at least $60 million when he entered government in 2017.
Today, Muzinich retains financial ties to the firm through an opaque transaction in which he transferred his shares in the privately held company to his father. Ethics experts say the arrangement is troubling because his father received the shares for no money up front, and it appears possible that Muzinich can simply get his stake back after leaving government.
Corruption in the Treasury Department is nothing new.
Timothy Geithner got a VERY comfortable sinecure (I use this word a lot) as a back-end payoff for his “foaming the runway” for banks on the backs of homeowners.
Still, this does seem to be a bit brazen.
US Wins Second Place in Afghan War
In snark, veritas.
The head of Fidelity International, Anne Richards, is predicting a global insolvency crisis.
The important thing here is that she says that there will be a SOLVENCY crisis, and not a LIQUIDITY crisis.
This is important.
If you are illiquid, you lack the necessary cash to make payments right now, but if you are insolvent, you owe more than your assets.
If you are insolvent, you are broke, bankrupt, or busted.
Absent a bailout or buyout (usually at a discount) an insolvent operation is done.
It is much worse than a liquidity crisis, and it’s what happens when corporations burn through their assets buying up their own stock instead of investing in the business.
If she is right, and I’m inclined to believe that she is, his is going to get ugly, with zombie companies holding back the econom for years.
You will recall that the BPBA claimed that they had quit in solidarity with their fellow officers, who have been charged with assault.
Once again, the police lied:
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Two officers of the Buffalo Police Department’s Emergency Response Team spoke with 7 Eyewitness News under the condition their names not be used.
The officers are part of the 57-person volunteer assignment team that resigned Friday, following an incident involving two of their members Thursday night in Niagara Square. They did not resign from the police department, only from their roles on the team.
The officers we spoke with said the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association’s statement asserting all 57 officers resigned from ERT in a “show of support” with the two officers that were suspended without pay is not true.
“I don’t understand why the union said it’s a thing of solidarity. I think it sends the wrong message that ‘we’re backing our own’ and that’s not the case,” said one officer with whom we spoke.
“We quit because our union said [they] aren’t legally backing us anymore. So why would we stand on a line for the City with no legal backing if something [were to] happen? Has nothing to do with us supporting,” said another.
A representative from the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association told 7 Eyewitness News Reporter Hannah Buehler the officers resigned in “disgust” with how the two officers were treated.
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7 Eyewitness News was not able to reach PBA president John Evans to confirm this information or get a response to several officers shooting down his assertions, but we did obtain an email sent to PBA members by Evans.
It states, in part:
In light of this, in order to maintain the sound financial structure of the PBA it will be my opinion the PBA NOT to pay for any ERT or SWAT members legal defense related to these protests going forward. This Admin in conjunction with DA John Flynn and or JP Kennedy could put a serious dent in the PBA’s funds.
If you get a quote from a police spokesman, fact check it.
If it comes from the PBA, you need to confirm every word, including the “and” and the “the”.
The U.S. officially entered a recession in February, marking the end of the 128-month expansion that was the longest in records reaching back to 1854.
While Monday’s announcement by the National Bureau of Economic Research didn’t come as a surprise to economists, the group typically waits until a recession is well under way before declaring it has started.
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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last week the U.S. economy could take the better part of a decade to fully recover. Gross domestic product will likely be 5.6% smaller in the fourth quarter of 2020 than a year earlier, despite an expected pickup in economic activity in the coming months, and the unemployment rate could still be in double digits by the end of the year, the CBO said.
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The NBER’s recession-dating committee looks at gauges of employment and production, as well as incomes minus government benefits, to determine when a recession has begun. It doesn’t use the rule of thumb common elsewhere in the world: two or more quarters of declining real gross domestic product.
The NBER considers February the peak of the business cycle, when the expansion ends and the recession begins. The month in which the economy reaches its trough and activity stops contracting marks both the end of the recession and the start of a new expansion. The committee doesn’t comment on how long the recession may last.
Even if this is a strong recovery, it’s going to take years, because the average consumer is going to need years to recover.
This is significant because the maneuvers were ordered either by, “The highest echelons of the District of Columbia National Guard,” (NY Times) or directly ordered by Donald Trump. (AP)
So, the military has ordered an investigation, and the implication is that the crew, and people above them in the chain of command, may be facing jeopardy as a result of following orders.
Clearly, this is a push-back against Donald Trump and Evil Minions™, which can be taken two ways:
Actually, both could be correct:
The National Guard helicopter crew that flew low over protesters in the nation’s capital this week has been grounded, the Army secretary told reporters Friday.
The Army initiated an administrative investigation, called a 15-6, after a UH-72 Lakota was seen making low maneuvers in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said. The crew was grounded immediately after the investigation began, he added.
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Videos showed Lakota and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters kicking up debris as officials tried to force demonstrators who’d broken the city’s 7 p.m. curfew off the streets. The Black Hawks were reportedly operated by the FBI.
McCarthy declined to say who ordered the helicopter crews to fly low over the protesters in Washington, citing concerns that he’s in the chain of command and the investigation remains ongoing.
Videos have emerged showing police slashing tires on cars.
Their excuse, that someone might drive the cars in a dangerous manner, is bullsh%$.
It is thuggish retaliation and vandalism, and, dare I say it, swinish.
Clearly this will convince people that there is no need to reform the police:
Update, 6/8/20: The Star Tribune has identified the officers puncturing tires as state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office. The officers strategically deflated the tires to “stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement,” said Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bruce Gordon. The troopers reportedly targeted cars that “contained items used to cause harm during violent protests” such as rocks and concrete. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Lt. Andy Knotz said deputies were following directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center.
After long nights of tear gas and rubber bullets, some protesters, news crews, and medics in Minneapolis last weekend found themselves stranded: The tires of their cars had been slashed.
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The officers appear to be state troopers or county police, though it’s not clear from the videos. Neither the Minnesota State Patrol nor the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office responded to requests from Mother Jones. The Minneapolis Police Department and Minnesota National Guard denied involvement.
Update, 6/8/20: The Star Tribune has identified the officers puncturing tires as state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office. The officers strategically deflated the tires to “stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement,” said Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bruce Gordon. The troopers reportedly targeted cars that “contained items used to cause harm during violent protests” such as rocks and concrete. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Lt. Andy Knotz said deputies were following directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center.
After long nights of tear gas and rubber bullets, some protesters, news crews, and medics in Minneapolis last weekend found themselves stranded: The tires of their cars had been slashed.
In a city upended by protests about police brutality after the death of George Floyd, many assumed protesters were to blame. But videos reveal a different culprit: the police.
In the videos, officers puncture tires in a K-Mart parking lot on May 30 and a highway overpass on May 31. Both areas briefly turned into police staging grounds near protest hot spots.
The officers appear to be state troopers or county police, though it’s not clear from the videos. Neither the Minnesota State Patrol nor the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office responded to requests from Mother Jones. The Minneapolis Police Department and Minnesota National Guard denied involvement.
The gray car in the video above was the rental car of Luke Mogelson, a New Yorker writer who typically covers war zones and is now stationed in Minneapolis to write about the protests. As the protest on Sunday evening turned hairy, with law enforcement tear-gassing peaceful groups soon after curfew, Mogelson went to check on his car, showing his press pass to officers along the way. (Media were exempt from the curfew.) One officer took a picture of his press pass and said he would “radio it up the chain so everyone knew that car belonged to the press,” said Mogelson. When he came back later that evening to retrieve his car, officers informed him that the tires were punctured. “They were laughing,” Mogelson recalled. “They had grins on their faces.”
With every violent, criminal, and petty act, police are making the case for dismantling the entire rotten edifice of law enforcement in the United States.
This making a pasta bowl video is the most lock-down thing ever:
Following the backlash soliciting and publishing an opinion piece from Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) where he called for the use of the active military to use lethal force against protesters, James Bennet has been fired as Opinion Editor.
They claim that this is a “resignation” but make no mistake, it was a firing.
Bennet thought that his role as editor was to publish cartoonish trolls for click-throughs, typified by his hiring of Bret “Bedbug” Stephens and Bari “Shanda fur die Goyim” Weiss.
He finally went a troll too far:
James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper’s opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.
“Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” said A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher, in a note to the staff on Sunday announcing Mr. Bennet’s departure.
In a brief interview, Mr. Sulzberger added: “Both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.”
This is not what one calls a conciliatory statement. Sulzberger basically called him out as incompetent when explaining why he was fired.
Ouch.
Here’s hoping that Stephens and Weiss head out the door as well, particularly the former, as Stephens has made it a practice to harry and intimidate anyone who criticizes him. (Bedbug story here.)
This entire affair does appear to imply that the New York Times is a tremendously toxic place to work.
I do not thing that this will happen, there is too much in the way of entrenched opposition, and there is little to no consensus as to what it actually means to, “Disband the city’s police department and replace it with a new system of public safety.”
The devil will be in the details, because the details will determine whether the force has people like Bob Kroll and Derek Chauvin have a place in the organization.
The Minneapolis city council has pledged to disband the city’s police department and replace it with a new system of public safety, a historic move that comes as calls to defund law enforcement are sweeping the US.
Speaking at a community rally on Sunday, a veto-proof majority of councilmembers declared their intent to “dismantle” and “abolish” the embattled police agency responsible for George Floyd’s death – and build an alternative model of community-led safety. The decision is a direct response to the massive protests that have taken over American cities in the last two weeks, and is a major victory for abolitionist activists who have long fought to disband police and prisons.
America is over-policed, over-criminalized, and over-imprisoned.
It should change, but I do not think that it will change.
BLM protests have resulted in the statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston being tossed into the harbor, and in Philadelphia, after removing the statue to Frank Rizzo, they have painted over a mural of Frank Rizzo at the city’s Italian Market.
Even if nothing else comes from the protests, and I fear that nothing else will come from this, this puts the protests on the plus side karma-wise.
Best comment about the Philly erasure, “It was a horrible mural; he was a horrible person, my eyes feel at peace now.”
Protests about Police Brutality Are Met with Wave of Police Brutality across US
This is patently obvious to anyone watching, but it needs to be said.
Needless to say, the Times staffers, prticularly those of color, have completely lost their sh%$ over this, stating (correctly IMHO) that this put staffers, particularly staffers of color:
The internal fallout from the New York Times’ decision to run an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, which called for the U.S. military to be deployed to American cities to crack down on protests against police killings of Black people, continued apace on Friday during a company all-hands meeting.
Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Chief Operating Officer Meredith Levien all offered opening statements. But as always, the most informative parts of the meeting came from the lengthy question-and-answer portion. Staffers asked for an autopsy of the piece and how it was published; if company leaders were planning to address James Bennet’s leadership of the opinion section, which has had “several misfires”; whether Opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for “openly bad mouth[ing] younger news colleagues on a platform where they, because of strict company policy, could not defend themselves”; whether the opinion section had suggested the topic of the op-ed to Cotton; and what the Times would do to help retain and support Black employees.
The newsroom first revolted Wednesday, shortly after the op-ed was published. Dozens of staffers tweeted a variation of the phrase “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger,” along with a screenshot of the op-ed’s headline. The paper’s union put out a statement about the column as well.
In a development that can only be described as mind boggling, Bennet said that, “He had not read Mr. Cotton’s essay before it was published,” even though it is clear from the Times own account that there was extensive review and editing from inside the editorial division.
Fire Editor-in-Chief Dean Banquet and Opinion Editor James Bennet, and for good measure, have them take Bret “Bedbug” Stevens, whose hobby appears to be threatening reporters on the news side of the paper, with them.