Congress Approves Defense Relief Funding For Americans To Receive Stimulus Aircraft Carrier
[Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell added that should Americans need to pay rent, they can always sell their aircraft carriers to the Saudi government.
Brilliant.
Was running errands in my “Settle for Biden” shirt today. Walking out of a store a guy said to me, “fuck Joe Biden.” I shrugged and said “yeah, I agree” and then walked away.There isn’t much to argue. But he’s better than Trump. #Vote #SettleforBiden pic.twitter.com/00gvWqNWPD
— Patrick Sochacki (@SochackiPatrick) July 26, 2020
So say we all.
2 f$#@ing hours, and at the single digits in, “Working on updates.”
F$#@ Bill Gates with Cheney’s dick.
Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has stood firm against intensifying pressure to avert massive budget cuts by raising taxes on the many billionaires who live in his state.
As that campaign to tax billionaires received a recent boost from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York’s Democratic state legislative leaders, Cuomo has insisted that he fears that the tax initiative will prompt the super-rich to leave the state. On Wednesday, he doubled down, warning that if the state tried to balance its budget through billionaire tax hikes “you’d have no billionaires left”.
But in defending billionaires, Cuomo is protecting a group of his most important financial boosters. More than a third of New York’s billionaires have funneled cash to Cuomo’s political machine, according to a Too Much Information review of campaign finance data and the Forbes billionaire list.
New York disclosure records show that 43 of New York’s 118 billionaire families have donated money to Cuomo’s campaigns and the state Democratic party committee he controls. In all, those billionaires and their family members have delivered more than $8m to Cuomo’s political apparatus since his first gubernatorial campaign. That includes large donations from billionaires in the last few weeks as Cuomo has fought to stop tax hikes on billionaires.
It is remarkable just how completely one politician completely encapsulates what is wrong with both the Democratic Party and US politics in general.
After President Trump ordered federal law enforcement officers into Portland, Ore., earlier this month, the protests largely ended the same way for days: with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests.
On Thursday, the first protest held since the federal agencies agreed to pull back their officers was a markedly more peaceful affair.
As the Black Lives Matter-inspired vigil wound down early Friday morning, there was virtually no sign of the Oregon State Police officers who had taken over protection of the federal buildings at the center of the protests.
Instead of being forcibly removed from downtown’s Lownsdale Square and the adjacent Chapman Square, which lie opposite the barricaded Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, the crowd thinned out on its own, with many protesters heading home of their own accord.
This is not a surprise. The purpose of sending federal thugs to Portland was not to keep the peace, but to create violence and chaos.
Considering Germany’s current state of European hegemon, this is particularly concerning:
Güstrow, Germany — The plan sounded frighteningly concrete. The group would round up political enemies and those defending migrants and refugees, put them on trucks and drive them to a secret location.
Then they would kill them.
One member had already bought 30 body bags. More body bags were on an order list, investigators say, along with quicklime, used to decompose organic material.
On the surface, those discussing the plan seemed reputable. One was a lawyer and local politician, but with a special hatred of immigrants. Two were active army reservists. Two others were police officers, including Marko Gross, a police sniper and former parachutist who acted as their unofficial leader.
The group grew out of a nationwide chat network for soldiers and others with far-right sympathies set up by a member of Germany’s elite special forces, the KSK. Over time, under Mr. Gross’s supervision, they formed a parallel group of their own. Members included a doctor, an engineer, a decorator, a gym owner, even a local fisherman.
They called themselves Nordkreuz, or Northern Cross.
………
They denied they had plotted to kill anyone. But investigators and prosecutors, as well an account one member gave to the police — transcripts of which were seen by The New York Times — indicate their planning took a more sinister turn.
Germany has belatedly begun dealing with far-right networks that officials now say are far more extensive than they ever understood. The reach of far-right extremists into its armed forces is particularly alarming in a country that has worked to cleanse itself of its Nazi past and the horrors of the Holocaust. In July the government disbanded an entire company infiltrated by extremists in the nation’s special forces.
………
Far-right extremism penetrated multiple layers of German society in the years when the authorities underestimated the threat or were reluctant to countenance it fully, officials and lawmakers acknowledge. Now they are struggling to uproot it.
………
Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X — a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.
………
“I fear we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” said Dirk Friedriszik, a lawmaker in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Nordkreuz was founded. “It isn’t just the KSK. The real worry is: These cells are everywhere. In the army, in the police, in reservist units.”
German imposition of sado-monetarism on the rest of the EU has led to a resurgence of right wing nationalism in both Europe and the EU, and now we know that Germany is not immune to the toxic reaction to its misguided ideology.
On June 11, Southern Pine Credit Union, of Valdosta, Georgia was shut down.
I have no clue as to whether or not the pandemic had to do with this, but it is the 2nd credit union failure of the year.
It should have been a part of my regular, “Bank Failure Friday,” posts.
Being an asshole on Twitter should not be a firing offense, no matter how much it might justify shame and approbrium:
You know what should be canceled? The legal right of most bosses to fire you for a “good cause, bad cause, or no cause.”
That status quo is so widely accepted that some progressives don’t think twice about appealing to the authoritarian power of bosses in the pursuit of social justice: Many high profile social media campaigns have been employed to get people who are caught on video committing racist acts in their everyday lives fired from their jobs. But the desire to hold racists and sexists accountable—or the related struggles against sexism, homophobia and fascism—need not be in conflict with the principles of workplace rights.
So-called “cancel culture” is not well-defined, but its critics frequently use the moniker to refer to an activist program of making individuals who harm their neighbors or coworkers with acts of racism, sexism (and worse) accountable through exposure and de-platforming—including attempts to get them fired. Liberal critics have been more likely to raise free speech concerns than any about workers’ rights, while leftists are likelier to argue that free speech doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences of speech.
………
Three years ago, we published an op-ed in the New York Times explaining how U.S. workers lack a basic right to their jobs that many workers in other countries enjoy as a legal standard. As a solution, we proposed a just cause “right to your job” law as a badly needed labor law reform. Since then, we’ve been encouraged to see the issue turn up on many progressives’ agenda.
In the debate between a right to your job and the need to de-platform bigots, some have raised concerns that without the boss’s right to fire an employee for any reason, racists and sexists would get more of a free pass at work. But this argument misses what “just cause” means. It doesn’t mean that employees cannot be fired, it means they can’t be fired for a reason that’s not related to work. Racism, sexism, harassment and other forms of conduct in and out of the workplace that make other employees feel unsafe and violate policies around respect and equity are grounds for discipline and termination—but are also subject to due process. When you look at how “just cause” plays out in areas where it exists—in the public sector, under many union contracts, or in other countries—it’s clear that racists, sexists and harassers are, in fact, disciplined.
Indeed.
When someone passes a certain level of both inhumanity and irrelevance, they end up on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.
Well, Ellen Degeneris has now crossed that threshold in a sufficiently egregious way that not only is she on they list, but, She also has been memed by The Onion:
Ellen: ‘I Never Intended To Make Staff Feel Unsafe By Wearing A Bloodied Ram Skull And Stalking Them With A Hatchet’
This is a level of screwing the pooch that approaches some sort of twisted dog bordello.
Vanity Fair has an article about the Trump administration’s initial plans for dealing with the Covid-19, and it was even more nihilistic, corrupt. and venal than I could previously have imagined:
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
Unsurprisingly, Jared Kushner was leaving this effort.
If these people are allowed to leave the White House and simply return to private life, this be deeply corrosive to society.
They need to be put in the dock.
Sent this text to Sharon* today while she was out grocery shopping:
For the Love of God, Please Get Me Coffee
She had already done so.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Last Thursday, a family friend, my kids’ old baby sitter, was not feeling, so my wife and kids did some grocery shopping for her, and delivered her groceries.
At the time, they thought that it was Strep, but it wasn’t.
She got a Covid-19 test, and it came back negative this Thursday.
Charlie, who delivered the groceries appropriately masked, was completely losing his sh%$ this week.
Even the Pink Paper, aka The Financial Times, calls out the industry for the fictitious returns that the industry reports:
Ever wondered about the extraordinary performance figures that listed private equity firms trumpet in their official stock market filings?
Take, for instance, the latest Form 10-K issued by Apollo, one of the world’s largest buyout groups. This claims that its private equity funds have “consistently produced attractive long-term investment returns . . . generating a 39 per cent gross internal rate of return (IRR) on a compound basis from inception through December 31, 2019”.
Or how about the one from KKR, which says it has “generated a cumulative gross IRR of 25.6 per cent” since the firm’s inception back in 1976?
It’s not just the eye-popping scale of these returns that captures the attention. It’s their amazing “since inception” consistency. Not only do the firms generate stratospheric numbers — far higher than anything produced by the boring old stock market — but they can apparently do it year in, year out, with no decay in returns.
………
Take Apollo, for example. Its long-term IRR has barely moved from the 39 per cent level over the past several decades. True, it did hit 40 per cent in 2008, before dropping back by a full percentage point the following year. But since then it has been like a stuck record. Financial crises? Great recessions? Market fluctuations? It seems that nothing can knock it off that 39 per cent.
It’s a similar story with KKR. The firm’s IRR since inception has fallen by just 0.7 of a percentage point in the years since 2007 and, at 25.6 per cent, remains barely below the 26.1 per cent return generated by its early “legacy” funds between 1976 and 1996.
………
But what’s concerning is the ease with which this mathematical circularity has been allowed to create a distorted impression. The main audience for private equity to date has been large, so-called “sophisticated investors”. The fact that these absurd numbers still get headline exposure makes one wonder whether these investors understand them. That is disturbing.
Even more worrying is the way that policymakers appear to have set these financial pig-iron statistics in stone. The industry standard for reporting — the Global Investment Performance Standards — actually makes it mandatory for private equity to report a since-inception IRR or “money-weighted return”.
………
Realistic numbers matter. The US authorities are thinking of letting the American public loose on private equity with their 401(k) pension plans. Retail investors need to know what they are getting into. It’s time the way private equity reports performance was rethought.
This is conscious fraud, no different in intent, and larger in scale than anything that Bernie Madoff ever imagined.
Silly rabbit, sacrifice is only for the little people:
When the pandemic prompted companies to furlough or lay off thousands of employees, some chief executives decided to show solidarity by forgoing some of their pay.
But it turns out that their sacrifice was minimal.
A survey of some 3,000 public companies shows that the cuts — which, so far, have come in the form of salary reductions — were tiny compared with their total pay last year. Total pay includes things like bonuses and stock awards that typically make up the bulk of what corporate bosses take home.
Only a small percentage of the companies cut salaries for their senior executives at all, which is surprising given that the pandemic has crushed profits and sales for many companies, forcing large layoffs. But even among businesses that did cut the boss’s pay, two-thirds of the chief executives took reductions that were equivalent to only 10 percent or less of their 2019 compensation, according to an analysis by CGLytics, a compensation analysis firm.
………
“These salary cuts were more window dressing than anything else,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The labor federation on Wednesday released a report showing that companies in the S&P 500 stock index last year paid chief executives on average 264 times as much as median employees, down from 287 times in 2018.
While she is a long shot to be Joe Biden’s choice for running mate, I consider Stacy Abrams to be the worst of all the candiates whose names have been mooted thus far.
I find Stacy Abrams is completely unacceptable because of her choices in literature.
If you think that I am joking, I am NOT joking, as Abrams is a big fan of Ayn Rand’s allegorical novel Atlas Shrugged, which I consider to be a major red flag:
One other unexpected detail: In an interview with Womenetics, a B2B services firm that specializes in helping women professionals, Ms. Abrams named three favorite books: The Institutionist, Ender’s Game and… Atlas Shrugged, not exactly a book at the top of most Democrat reading lists. Womenetics called her a “serial entrepreneur” and clearly she has a passion for business. As to how does that translate to the tough business of navigating the politics of Georgia as a Democrat legislator, she seems to have found quick success.
See also here:
When Abrams was little, visiting her grandmother, with her some 16 first cousins running around, she was the one in the corner, holed up with a book. She loved Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, The Count of Monte Cristo, Silas Marner, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Ender’s Game, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Atlas Shrugged (“But not for the Paul Ryan reasons. . . . There was something about how [Ayn Rand] highlighted the capacity of a person to be more than.”) She loved mythology. “Greek, Norse, Roman, Cherokee. If I could reach it, I would read it,” Abrams says.
Being a fan of Atlas Shrugged is on a par with taking Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal as a serious policy proposal.
It is a sign that you are a psychopath.
Where the former Presidential candidate actually caught the virus is not certain, but the timing of his infections strongly implies that he caught the virus at Trump’s Tulsa campaign rally:
Herman Cain, who rose from poverty in the segregated South to become chief executive of a successful pizza chain and then thrust himself into the national spotlight by seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, has died. He was 74.
His death was announced on Thursday on his website and on social media accounts. It did not say precisely when or where he died. Dan Calabrese, the website’s editor, attributed the death to the coronavirus, which President Trump, in a White House briefing, later referred to as the “China virus” and a “horrible plague” in affirming it as the cause.
Mr. Cain had been hospitalized in the Atlanta area this month after testing positive for the virus on June 29.
………
Mr. Cain had attended President Trump’s indoor rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20 and had done “a lot of traveling” recently, Mr. Calabrese said.
“I don’t think there’s any way to trace this to the one specific contact that caused him to be infected,” he said at the time. “We’ll never know.”
I am not a fan of Mr. Cain, and the opportunity for meming this tempting, but I’m not going to go there.
Just wear your f%$#ing mask, OK?
When DC Appellate Court ruled that District Judge Emmett Sullivan had no power to investigate possible corruption in the dismissal of charges, and multiple guilty pleas, against Michael Flynn, I kind of figured that, the two judges who wrote this opinion, a Trump and a Bush appointee, had gotten away with a nakedly partisan, and nakedly corrupt, decision.
It appears that the rest of the DC Court of Appeals was not amused, so there will be an en banc hearing to review the decision.
En banc means that the whole court, as opposed to the normal 3 judge panel, will be reviewing the case.
It appears that the will be narrowly drawn, specifically covering whether Flynn, or for that matter the DoJ has the right to prevent a finding of fact, as opposed to a review of Sullivan’s ruling:
A federal appeals court in Washington will take a second look at a judge’s effort to scrutinize the Justice Department’s decision to drop its case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed Thursday to revisit U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s plan to examine the politically charged matter, reviving the unusual case testing the limits of the judiciary’s power to check the executive branch.
The court’s brief order set oral arguments for Aug. 11. The decision to rehear the case before a full complement of judges wipes out the June ruling from a three-judge panel that ordered Sullivan to immediately dismiss the case and said Sullivan was wrong to appoint a retired federal judge to argue against the government’s move to undo Flynn’s guilty plea.
In May, Sullivan refused to go along with the government’s request to end the criminal case against Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador in Washington before Trump took office in 2017.
Instead, Sullivan asked retired federal judge John Gleeson to argue against the Justice Department’s request. That prompted Flynn’s attorneys to take the rare step of asking the appeals court to intervene midstream, and they accused Sullivan of bias.
………
The order from the court Thursday suggests that the judges are seeking a narrowly focused argument on the question of whether Flynn should have waited to appeal until after Sullivan rendered a decision. The court told lawyers on both sides to be prepared at oral argument to address whether Flynn had “no other adequate means to attain the relief” he sought from the appeals court.
………
The initial ruling against Sullivan from the three-judge panel cut short his plans to hold a hearing to examine the government’s decision.
The DoJ decision was corrupt as hell, and it was clearly pushed because William Barr sees himself as Donald Trump’s consigliere, and not the Attorney General for the United States of America.
Not only did initial jobless claims go up for the 2nd week in a row, but the 2nd quarter GDP numbers show an annual 32.9% decline.These numbers are not just the worst for the US since modern statistics started being collected after World War II, these numbers are, “US investors are assisting with privatizing the economy,” bad:
The economy contracted at a record rate last quarter and July setbacks for the jobs market added to signs of a slowing recovery as the country faces a summer surge in coronavirus infections.
The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 32.9% annual rate in the second quarter, or a 9.5% drop compared with the prior quarter. The figures were the steepest declines in more than 70 years of record-keeping.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department’s latest figures on unemployment benefits suggested the jobs market was faltering. The number of workers applying for initial unemployment benefits rose for the second straight week—by a seasonally adjusted 12,000 to 1.43 million in the week ended July 25—after nearly four months of decreases following a late-March peak. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits increased by 867,000 to 17 million in the week ended July 18, ending a downward trend that started in mid-May.
This is unbelievably grim.
If This Strikes You as Crazed Hyperbole, You Are Either Painfully Ignorant or Chris Cillizza. but I Repeat Myself.
—Justin Rosario at The Daily Banter
Mr. Rosario asks the question, “Why Do Liberals Unfriend People Over Politics?,” and answers himself, “Because Conservatives Are Soulless Monsters.”
Goldman Sachs, which was a conspirator in the Malaysian 1MDB scandal, will scate with a payment of a $2½ billion dollars.
As a part of this deal, the people at Goldman Sachs who personally aided, and personally profited from, the theft of billions of Malaysian state resources, will be getting get out of jail free cards.
This is disgusting:
Only Goldman Sachs. Last week, after months of public sparring and days of tough in-person negotiations, the Wall Street bank finally reached a deal with Malaysia over allegations that it had helped a former prime minister loot billions of dollars from the state investment fund, 1MDB.
Goldman will fork out $2.5bn, instead of the $7.5bn the finance minster had originally demanded, and the Malaysian government agreed to drop criminal charges against the bank and cease legal proceedings against 17 current and former Goldman directors.
………
Evercore’s Glenn Schorr argues that “the only thing that matters is, will this prevent Goldman from doing business in the way they need to do business? I believe it won’t.” If history — and the Malaysian result — is any guide, Mr Schorr is on to something.
Mr. Schorr means that he hopes that GS will continue business as usual.
What is left unspoken is that business as usual for the, “Great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” is corruption, looting, and fraud.