Month: February 2021

Can We Give Texas Back to Mexico?

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Wind turbines in, you guessed it, Antarctica

Snow and cold weather has hit Texas hard, and because of what can only be called high Texas idiocy, the power grid has collapsed.

So, the answer to the question, “Has privatization failed Texas utility customers?,” is F%$# yes.

In order to evade federal regulation the Texas electricity grid is largely separate from the rest of the country, and because it is Texas, suppliers of both natural gas, used to make electricity, and the electricity generators, make more profit from shutting down their plants to spike the prices.

This is what caused the California energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, deregulatory mania leading to market manipulation:

Privatizers use the one-size-fits-all economic theory of “retail choice-free market competition” to promote the deregulation of Texas electric utilities. Privatizers promise that lower electricity prices and higher system reliability will follow electric utility deregulation. Privatizers’ sloganeering convinces on-the-take politicians and the unsuspecting electorate to approve their lobbyist-written deregulation rules and laws.

Privatizers say the deregulation of Texas electric utilities is successful and other states should follow suit. This is misinformation. Relative electricity prices have increased dramatically, and dangerously lower electrical system reliability is the result of Texas electric utility deregulation in 2002.

But Texans, and Trotskyites, are never ones to let facts get in the way of their free market mousketeer theories, so Texas Governor Greg Abbot is claiming that the problem has come from renewables like wind and solar being disproportionately impacted by the weather.

It is a nice theory.  The problem is that it is complete bunk:

Frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas projected that 80% of the grid’s winter capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power.

An official with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said Tuesday afternoon that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, were offline. Nearly double that, 30 gigawatts, had been lost from thermal sources, which includes gas, coal and nuclear energy.

By Wednesday, those numbers had changed as more operators struggled to operate in the cold: 45 gigawatts total were offline, with 28 gigawats from thermal sources and 18 gigawatts from renewable sources, ERCOT officials said.

“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

While Webber said all of Texas’ energy sources share blame for the power crisis, the natural gas industry is most notably producing significantly less power than normal.

“Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” Webber said.

………

He went on to note the shutdown of a nuclear reactor in Bay City because of the cold and finally got to what energy experts say is the biggest culprit, writing, “Low Supply of Natural Gas: ERCOT planned on 67GW from natural gas/coal, but could only get 43GW of it online. We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation —so things were freezing.”

This was compounded by looting from the various energy suppliers. 

It actually pays for them to have a significant amount of their generation capacity go offline, as shown by this anecdote:

As a historic winter storm raged across Texas over the weekend, Akilah Scott-Amos received an alarming message from her power company: Please switch services because “prices are about to explode.”

The 43-year-old owner of an organic skincare and apothecary shop was initially confused by the message from Griddy, which sells wholesale power for a monthly membership, but she began to look for other providers.

Then she checked her bill.

“I paid $450 for one day. I was in shock,” Scott-Amos told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “It made no sense because we have a gas heater, a gas fireplace, and we have been keeping the temperature around the house at 65 degrees. With that amount of money, and the labeled amount of usage Griddy said was used—we would have to be lighting up the whole neighborhood.”

The nightmare only got worse on Monday, when she realized her bill had increased by another $2,500. In comparison, Scott-Amos paid $33.93 last year for the entire month of February. 

The cost per kWh went from a bit more than 2¢ to more than $2.

………

But data from ERCOT suggests the price of getting the lights back on might be too steep for some Texans. As first reported by Reuters, the market prices on the power grid spiked more than 10,000 percent on Monday in the aftermath of the deep freeze. Prices skyrocketed to more than $9,000 per megawatt-hour—compared to the pre-storm prices of less than $50 per hour.

The amped-up wattage costs have affected Griddy customers in particular because of the company’s distinctive business model. In Texas’ hypercharged market for electricity, Griddy makes money by debiting its subscribers a flat $9.99 monthly fee—and then selling them raw power at its going wholesale value, effectively stripping out any insulation between consumers and the oscillations in supply and demand.

New business models and cute names translating into ripping off consumers, yeppers, there’s a deregulated market.

It’s just another excuse to pick your pocket.

It ain’t the weather, it’s the corruption.

Helpless as a Rat-Faced Paraplegic Grizzly Bear

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Now that more has been revealed about issues with NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s management of the Cuomo crisis, a real opposition has been developing to his dominance in New York state politics.

Rather predictably, Cuomo is completely losing his sh%$ over this, and lashing out like a wounded animal. 

Hizzoner has never been the most amiable of blokes, but he just threatened to “destroy” a state legislator over this:

For months, Assemblyman Ron Kim has been one of the few Democratic lawmakers willing to criticize Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for his handling of the state’s nursing homes during the pandemic, pressing for investigations into the matter.

So when a top aide to Mr. Cuomo recently admitted that his administration had withheld nursing home data from state lawmakers, Mr. Kim, whose Queens district was hit hard by the coronavirus, said it appeared the governor was “trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence.”

Hours after Mr. Kim made that comment to The New York Post last Thursday, he said he got an irate late-night call from the governor. Mr. Cuomo began with a question — “Are you an honorable man?” — and then proceeded to yell for 10 minutes, Mr. Kim recalled, threatening to publicly tarnish the assemblyman and urging him to issue a new statement clarifying his remarks.

Mr. Cuomo made good on his threat on Wednesday afternoon.

………

In lengthy remarks, Mr. Cuomo also accused the assemblyman of a “continuing racket” soliciting donations from nail salon owners, who were upset about a 2015 nail-salon reform law that he helped craft.

“I believe it was unethical if not illegal,” Mr. Cuomo said, suggesting that Mr. Kim was engaging in “pay to play.”

The scathing back-and-forth comes as the Cuomo administration continues to deal with the fallout from a series of revelations about its withholding the data, effectively covering up the full extent of how many nursing home residents died from the virus.

In the last month, the Cuomo administration has nearly doubled the official count of deaths of nursing home residents, from about 8,500 to more than 15,000 — in the face of a blistering report from the state attorney general, Letitia James, and a court order.

Mr. Cuomo has strongly denied any wrongdoing, despite a nearly six-month delay between the formal request from lawmakers in August and the release of the data in the wake of Ms. James’s report.

………

The following day, after the Post story had published, Mr. Kim was home with his wife and about to bathe his children when he received the call from the governor.

Mr. Cuomo, he said, was furious with him about Mr. Kim’s comments to The Post, which quoted him as saying, among other things, that his takeaway from the call was that the Cuomo administration “had to first make sure that the state was protected against federal investigation.”

“He goes off about how I hadn’t seen his wrath and anger, that he would destroy me and he would go out tomorrow and start telling how bad of a person I am and I would be finished and how he had bit his tongue about me for months,” Mr. Kim said. “This was all yelling. It wasn’t a pleasant tone.”

………

Cuomo officials maintained that the governor never said that he would “destroy” Mr. Kim, and characterized the conversation between the two men as “calm,” denying the governor yelled.

I believe Kim, not Cuomo, because Cuomo has cultivated a reputation for viciousness for decades, and I think that he is deathly afraid of what will happen to him when he is no longer feared.

………

“The governor can personally attack me all he wants in an effort to distract us from his incompetent management,” Mr. Kim said in a statement. “But these facts are not going away because they are the facts and are unacceptable.”

Dave Sirota has a very good summary of how Cuomo screwed the pooch by prioritizing campaign donors over public health and then lied about it. 

It has been made worse by his incompetent micro-management of the vaccine rollout, which has had doses thrown out rather than risk his draconian edicts.

The bottom line here is that Cuomo f%$#ed up, and his instinct on this matter, which is to try to bully his way out of this, does not appear to be working.

Please, אִם יְרצֵה הַשֵׁם, Henry Kissinger ( יִמַּח שְׁמו ) Next*

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Rush Limbaugh has died of cancer at the age of 70.

Finally, he has done something to improve the world:

Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats.

Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”.

He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.

Whether he was a vile person who was revealing himself, or just an actor playing a role does not mater.

The man was a stain upon humanity.

Spoiler: This incident from early in his career shows that he was just an asshole:

Limbaugh (pronounced “LIM baw”) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged “Rusty” in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as “Bachelor Jeff Christie”, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to “take the bone out of your nose and call again”.

You will not be missed.
*A loose translation is, “God willing, Henry Kissinger (May his name be effaced) Next.

Of Course They Are

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Despite the Pandemic, despite the new variants spreading across the nation, despite the fact that sick workers coming into work further spread the disease, Republicans are still trying to kill paid sick leave, because if your employer cannot exploit you, they want you dead:

Pennsylvania state Rep. Seth Grove introduced legislation last month to block cities and municipalities from imposing paid sick leave requirements on businesses, even as COVID-19 cases are raging throughout his state and the country. Last week, local news media reported that the Republican lawmaker was now quarantining after exhibiting coronavirus symptoms and awaiting test results.

Grove’s preemption bill is the latest salvo in an ongoing war over stripping worker protections that continues to be fought in statehouses and Congress, even as the coronavirus pandemic spirals out of control. With Democrats in Washington preparing to drop paid sick leave from President Joe Biden’s first COVID relief bill, potentially leaving 87 million workers without protection, the responsibility for providing the benefit to workers now falls squarely on states — the very place the war has been waged for the last decade.

Paid sick leave statutes require businesses to provide employees with medical leave for ailments and injuries. Grove has been pushing for legislation to bar localities from imposing such requirements since 2013. His latest bill, reintroducing the measure, would be retroactive to 2015 — the year Democratic strongholds Philadelphia and Pittsburgh passed laws mandating paid sick leave.

 F%$# them, and the horse they rode in on.

Yeah, This Might Work Better Than a Congressional Commission

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The N.A.A.C.P. and Representative Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) are suing Donald Trump and Rudolph Giuliani under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

This might get some action, and it will definitely have the defendants compelled to testify under oath about what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did:

The N.A.A.C.P. on Tuesday morning filed a federal lawsuit against former President Donald J. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, claiming that they violated a 19th century statute when they tried to prevent the certification of the election on Jan. 6.

The civil rights organization brought the suit on behalf of Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi. Other Democrats in Congress — including Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey — are expected to join as plaintiffs in the coming weeks, according to the N.A.A.C.P.

The lawsuit contends that Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 statute that includes protections against violent conspiracies that interfered with Congress’s constitutional duties; the suit also names the Proud Boys, the far-right nationalist group, and the Oath Keepers militia group. The legal action accuses Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and the two groups of conspiring to incite a violent riot at the Capitol, with the goal of preventing Congress from certifying the election.

………

Mr. Thompson is seeking compensatory and punitive damages in the lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington. The suit does not include a specific financial amount.

Mr. Thompson, 72, claims he was put at an increased health risk by later being required to shelter in place in a cramped area that did not allow for social distancing. The lawsuit notes that Mr. Thompson shared confined space with two members of Congress who tested positive for the coronavirus shortly after the attack at the Capitol.

………

Derrick Johnson, president of the N.A.A.C.P., said the decision to seek compensatory and punitive damages was rooted in a history of tools that have worked to fight back against white supremacy.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the Ku Klux Klan that bankrupted a chapter,” he said, referring to a 2008 judgment against a Kentucky-based Klan outfit that ordered the group to pay $2.5 million in damages. “This is very similar. If we do nothing, we can be ensured these groups will continue to spread and grow in their boldness. We must curb the spread of white supremacy.”

The short version of the 1871 Klu Klux Klan act is that an individual can be held liable both criminally and civilly for depriving a citizen of their Constitutional rights.

Preventing a member of Congress from approving the Electoral Vote count seems to be messing with the Constitution.

Where Will You Find 5 Honest Republicans

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I cannot get to that number unless I count dead Republicans, so Nancy Pelosi’s proposal for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection seems to be dead on arrival.

One need only to back to the 911 commission, where any idea of investigation of who f%$#ed it up, and holding those individuals accountable, was thrown out the window from the get-go.

It’s not that you cannot find people in the Republican Party with enough animus directed toward Trump to call him out, but the job involves calling out the entire Republican Party establishment, and beyond the “QAnon Shaman”, I cannot think of anyone else who might be inclined to do this:

There is no more terrifying a term in Washington for anyone who wants to know what actually happened than the phrase, “blue-ribbon commission.” It raises memories of past monsters like Simpson-Bowles, [Even though Simpson-Bowles was created and structured by Barack Obama specifically to facilitate the privatization of Social Security] and Tower (Iran-Contra), and 9/11—flashy public hearings followed by reports with all the sharp edges sanded off by internal politics, followed by leaks from dissatisfied staffers in which the staffers claim that they had The Answer, if only the commission members weren’t so a) corrupt, b) partisan, and c) starstruck. In a few years, everybody gets jobs on cable news shows so they can opine on the work of the special blue-ribbon commission looking into whatever the next catastrophe is. A Blue-Ribbon Commission is the living embodiment of the concept of Better Than Nothing. From the Washington Post:

Two days after former president Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate of inciting the deadly attack, Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled in a letter to Democratic colleagues that the House would soon consider legislation to form a commission to “investigate and report” on the attack and interference in election proceedings, as well as an appropriation to pay for enhanced security features on the Capitol grounds…

Supporters of the commission say such an initiative will have broader authority than those committees to pursue testimony from those in Trump’s orbit — voices that were not part of the impeachment inquiry. The commission will not be under the time constraints of those committee investigations as it produces its findings. Lawmakers in both parties speaking on Sunday news shows endorsed the idea for an independent investigation modeled after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, established in 2002 by Congress and President George W. Bush, which published a report with recommendations to guard against future attacks.

The 9/11 Commission did a great job marshaling the facts in service to producing recommendations. It did not do a great job marshaling the facts in service of informing the nation about who had screwed the pooch throughout the summer and fall of 2001. And, as Pete Williams explained on MSNBC Tuesday Morning, this was an era in which bipartisanship was not entirely a curse upon the land. Co-chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean even agreed that they would only do joint appearances. And still, a substantial portion of the commission’s membership and staff fought over the still highly flammable issue of the Bush administration’s failures of responsibility. That was then. This is now. And, on Monday night, Joy Reid got her teeth down to the bone when she asked her guests which Republicans they would trust on a commission to examine the role of a Republican president* in inciting an insurrection for which their Senate brethren just this weekend largely gave him a pass. It’s a question worth asking before everybody agrees that this commission will be the final word on anything.

Bipartisan, schmipartisan.  You won’t get sh%$ out of such a commission.

The Republicans will be determined to cover up for their fellow Republicans, and the Democrats will be determined to cover up for everyone.

Just the Time to Fire Up the Grill

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It was a nice pan

Not!!!

So, the oven has finally broken, and the chicken that I made, with a mustard and vinegar marinade, could not be cooked.

I figured, “What the F%$#?  I can just fire up the grill and put the pan in there.”

It was a Glass Pan.

The chicken was salvageable, the pan was not, so a 27 year old pan that Sharon* and I got it when we went on a date to the Corning Museum in Corning, NY is now shards.

Sharon took it all in stride.  

As I’ve told her many times, “It’s like ‘The Chicken” said, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

People Are No Longer Afraid of Rat-Faced Andy

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Democratic members of the New York House and Senate are considering rescinding the Covid powers that they granted Andrew Cuomo in the budget bill following credible allegations that he and his administration covered up nursing home deaths for political advantage.

The fact that they are considering this at all is significant, Cuomo is known for his vindictive nature, and the fact that they are considering going against him means that they think that the time is right to do this.

It may be better to be feared than liked, but at some point, if the fear goes away, and everyone hates you, things can get unpleasant: 

Some Democrats in Albany have floated the legally dubious idea of threatening to rescind Gov. Cuomo’s pandemic powers and issue subpoenas as leverage in upcoming budget negotiations.

Over the weekend, the governor’s fellow Democrats, who control both houses in the Legislature, continued to hold discussions about scaling back Cuomo’s sweeping pandemic powers after a top aide admitted the state paused the release of nursing home death data over concerns it would be politicized by the Trump administration.

Senate Dems met virtually Sunday to consider rescinding the governor’s executive authority or potentially creating a commission that could outright reject executive orders, similar to a 10-member panel used in Connecticut, sources said.

The Legislature already has the ability to overturn any COVID-related executive order via a majority vote.

On Friday, 14 Democratic state senators, including a handful from the city, joined Republicans in backing the idea of taking away Cuomo’s emergency powers before they expire in April.

………

But threatening such actions, especially subpoenas, without intent to follow through in order to influence fiscal talks could backfire big time, insiders said. “It could legally be seen as extortion,” a source said.

Yeah, much in the same way that Marty Walsh’s insisting on a concert promoter using competent workers in Boston could be legally seen as extortion? (see prior post)

………

Barclay and others have spent months demanding subpoenas, hearings or a federal probe into the state’s nursing home policies amid the pandemic.

The Cuomo administration came under renewed fire last week, facing accusations of a coverup and mounting backlash over its failure to release a full count of nursing home deaths for nearly six months.

In a call meant to bridge a growing divide with fellow Dems, the governor’s most trusted confidant, Melissa DeRosa, told lawmakers that officials “froze” last year when the Department of Justice made an inquiry into elder care facilities.

DeRosa said the administration postponed responding to legislative requests and failed to include nursing home residents who died in hospitals in publicly available data because President Trump had turned the matter “into a giant political football.”

The call came two weeks after a report from Attorney General Letitia James estimated that the state was under-counting deaths of nursing home residents by as much as 50%.

Cuomo was not concerned about Trump, he delighted in fighting with him.

This was about his attempting to cast his incompetent and corrupt management of the Covid-19 crisis (It only looked good in comparison to Donald Trump) as a triumph rather than a disaster.

New York State needs to raise taxes on the wealthy, and to end the corrupt environment that Cuomo thrives in.

I Never Realized How Much of a Menace She Was

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Former Carmen Ortiz is perhaps best known for knowingly prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death, but it turns out that she was a corrupt piece of sh%$ on a par with Trump’s worst appointments, though somehow she managed to stay in office throughout the entire Obama administration, probably due to her friendship with Eric “Place” Holder.

Among other things, she prosecuted Teamsters for picketing the show Top Chef for not using union drivers, and went after Mayor, now Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh for pressuring a concert promoter to hire experienced union workers as stage hands, claiming racketeering.  (She also made no secret of wanting to be Mayor, and Walsh’s actions followed a spate of injuries and deaths resulting from sloppy stage work, including a fire in Rhode Island that killed over 100)

Particularly after her egregious behavior in the Shwartz case, there was a lot of pressure for Obama to fire her, but she stayed on through 2017.

It is that Marty Walsh has been picked by Biden as labor secretary is a sort of nail in the coffin for whatever shred of a political career she hoped to have.

It also might be a not so subtle way of throwing some (extremely mild) shade in Obama and Holder’s way:

The last time Joe Biden was in the White House, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh seemed an unlikely nominee for a future labor secretary. Carmen Ortiz, President Barack Obama’s U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, had Walsh in her crosshairs. One summer dawn in 2016 she sent FBI agents to arrest two of his staff under a federal racketeering indictment.

The Boston Globe, New England’s most powerful news outlet, known for its coverage of the Roman Catholic Church child abuse scandals, laid siege to the mayor’s office over his labor practices and union ties. The Globe had named Ortiz its 2011 “Bostonian of the Year.” Its reporters dug their foxholes wherever she pointed, and the paper cheered on her prosecution of Walsh’s staffers.

When “Top Chef” had filmed in Boston two years earlier, Walsh visited on set with the show’s host Padma Lakshmi. Outside, the Teamsters picketed for union jobs. Ortiz indicted them, also for racketeering extortion. And in a city obsessed with haute cuisine, Ortiz leveraged star power: At trial, Lakshmi would take the stand for the prosecution.

In Boston, Ortiz was considered a rising star and was expected to run for mayor herself, a task made easier by softening Walsh up. Hey, this is Boston. If you want finesse, watch a Bruins game; if you want blood, watch a City Council race. She was regularly talked of as a top-tier statewide candidate. The only question was whether she was destined for attorney general, the Senate, the governor’s mansion, or beyond.

………

Between Kennedy’s funeral and Holder’s exile, Ortiz and her then-chief of cybercrime, Stephen Heymann, indicted internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz on 14 felony counts for allegedly downloading too many academic journal articles. Swartz had used a simple script to download academic journal articles from the platform JSTOR, which provided its articles free to anyone on the MIT network. It’s not clear Swartz even violated the company’s terms of service; finding a crime anywhere in what he did took an awfully creative prosecutor.

………

Looking to avoid a trial, Heymann compared Swartz to a rapist. By refusing to plead guilty, the line went, Swartz had “revictimized” MIT. Swartz fervently resisted, but Ortiz and Heymann had a trump card.

The Honorable Nathaniel M. Gorton is well known to the Massachusetts Bar, whose members whisper he rarely meets an indictment he doesn’t like. He’s noted as a hanging judge; prosecutors go out of their way to get high-profile cases assigned to him. A legacy admission from the Gorton’s Seafood family to Dartmouth and then Columbia Law School, he was appointed to the bench by President George H.W. Bush after Bush campaigned beside his brother Sen. Slade Gorton.

After Swartz drew Gorton, his defense lawyers told Heymann the pressure of the case had rendered Swartz suicidal, his attorney later said he told prosecutors.

“Fine, we’ll lock him up,” Heymann responded.

Swartz killed himself shortly thereafter, in January 2013.

Within days of Swartz’s death, over 61,000 people digitally signed a White House petition to fire Ortiz — a singular distinction for a U.S. attorney. The Senate and House judiciary committees pilloried her.

Ortiz told the media that she and Heymann hadn’t known Swartz was on the brink of suicide and that if they had known, things might’ve been different. (Heymann’s knowledge only surfaced much later, along with his “Fine, we’ll lock him up” response.)

Ultimately Obama refused to sack Ortiz. She in turn refused to sack Heymann, though she did pick a new chief of cybercrime. Obama thus allowed Ortiz to save face, but she never recovered politically. Try as she might, it all went downhill for her from there, eventually culminating with Biden nominating Walsh for labor secretary.

Refused to sack Ortiz, because as I have noted, Barack Obama was the worst Constitutional law professor ever. ™

Outside the Boston Globe and Ortiz’s few remaining allies, the racketeering charges against Walsh’s staff garnered Ortiz all the wrong attention.

Merriam-Webster defines a racketeer as “a person who obtains money by an illegal enterprise usually involving intimidation.”

But Ortiz never accused Walsh or his staff of pocketing anything for themselves, or for his campaign, or for his administration. The indictment instead alleged that Walsh’s staff required a producer to hire local union stagehands for an outdoor rock concert. That’s business as usual for many in the heavily unionized capital of America’s bluest state.

“Is this illegal now?” mused CBS Boston anchor Jon Keller.

Legality aside, requiring experienced stagehands familiar with the particular outdoor venue was arguably a prudent public safety measure. A few years earlier, an outdoor stage collapsed during a Sugarland show in Indiana, killing seven.

A much deadlier incident eight years before that hit closer to Boston. One hundred people perished in smoke and flames in nearby West Warwick, Rhode Island, when a nightclub named The Station burned to the ground; over 200 were injured. The blaze started when the manager of a rock band ignited indoor stage pyrotechnics.

Yet when Walsh’s office insisted on better-vetted stagehands, Ortiz tried to make a federal case out of it.

………

Those cases would continue for years after Ortiz left office. Ortiz, however, had more immediate concerns. She had to find a job outside government. The Senate was no longer in the cards.

At or near the top of Ortiz’s list was Harvard Kennedy School. Philip Heymann, Ortiz’s mentor and the father of her former cybercrime chief, was a longtime Harvard professor. And of course the school is named after the family of her late supporter, Theodore E. Kennedy. Harvard nonetheless rejected Ortiz.

You have to f%$# up pretty badly for the Kennedy School to reject a former US Attorney.

………

A while later, Padma Lakshmi failed to fully convince a Boston jury. All four Teamsters tried were acquitted.

Because picketing people who hire non-union workers is not, or at least should not be a crime.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin at first threw out the separate case against Walsh’s staff. It required a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals before it made it to trial. The second time around Sorokin deep-sixed it beyond any likely reinstatement. He ruled that the aides hadn’t received anything of benefit, so couldn’t be charged with anything.

Now Biden has driven the final nail into Ortiz’s political coffin by nominating Walsh for labor secretary despite Ortiz’s indictments — or perhaps to signal his loyalty to union organizers, he nominated Walsh because of her indictments. Either way, Ortiz is now the former prosecutor who is linked to the suicide of a once-in-a-generation talent and who fought Biden’s labor secretary nominee over his labor practices and lost. Not exactly where one wants to start a Democratic primary or confirmation hearing.

I do think that Joe Biden is sending a message with this, both about support of union activities and that he is less naive about the intersection of politics and prosecutions than was Barack Obama.

Have You Heard the One About the LAPD Valentine?

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Celebrating the murder of a Black man at the hands of police demonstrates a profound absence of humanity.

The mock valentine underscores problematic & racist perceptions of law enforcement culture regarding the communities we are sworn to protect & serve.https://t.co/w52m2mEK9U

— George Gascón (@GeorgeGascon) February 15, 2021

Pretty much

It has a picture of George Floyd with the caption, “You take my breath away.”

If you think that this is a sick and disgusting joke, you are not alone, though it appears that many in the LAPD found the image hilarious and passed the image around. 

Yes, the folks who nearly beat Rodney King to death think that slowly suffocating a black man to death is all fun and games.

And they wonder why some people make allusions to police officers being members of the genus sus:

The Los Angeles district attorney and the police department are investigating after a police officer reported that an image of George Floyd had been made into a mock-Valentine meme featuring the words “You take my breath away” and circulated among officers.

The district attorney, George Gascón, decried the reported meme of Floyd, who was Black and killed by police in Minneapolis last spring.

Gascón posted on Twitter: “Celebrating the murder of a Black man at the hands of police demonstrates a profound absence of humanity. The mock valentine underscores problematic and racist perceptions of law enforcement culture regarding the communities we are sworn to protect and serve.”Gascón hailed LAPD leadership for swiftly investigating and also tweeted that his office “will be looking into this matter to determine if the integrity of any of our cases may have been compromised by biased police work”.

The LAPD police chief, Michel Moore, earlier announced an internal examination of the situation and said investigators would try to determine how the image may have come into the workplace and who may have been involved, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Moore said the officer who made the complaint would be interviewed on Monday and added: “Our investigation is to determine the accuracy of the allegations while also reinforcing our zero tolerance for anything with racist views.”

Here is hoping that the ratf%$#s behind this get nailed to the wall.

Not Enough Bullets

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By agreeing to pay penalties without admitting wrongdoing, the pharmaceutical companies that flooded the United States with opioids will be able to deduct billions from their taxes as a result.

Needless to say, the laws involving this need to change, pronto:

Four companies that agreed to pay a combined $26 billion to settle claims about their roles in the opioid crisis plan to deduct some of those costs from their taxes and recoup around $1 billion apiece.

In recent months, as details of the blockbuster settlement were still being worked out, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and the “big three” drug distributors — McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health — all updated their financial projections to include large tax benefits stemming from the expected deal, a Washington Post analysis of regulatory filings found.

The Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health said earlier this month it planned to collect a $974 million cash refund because it claimed its opioid-related legal costs as a “net operating loss carryback” — a tax provision Congress included in last year’s coronavirus bailout package as a way to help companies struggling during the pandemic.

The deductions may deepen public anger toward companies that prosecutors say played key roles in a destructive public health crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. In lawsuits filed by dozens of states and local jurisdictions, public officials have argued that the companies, among other corporate defendants, flooded the country with billions of highly addictive pills and ignored signs they were being steered to people who abused them. 

Gee, you think that allowing these companies to turn their malevolent activities into tax breaks might be a bit controversial? 

………

All four firms disavow any wrongdoing or legal responsibility. The companies have said they produced government-approved prescription pills, distributed them to registered pharmacies and took steps to try to prevent their misuse.

U.S. tax laws generally restrict companies from deducting the cost of legal settlements from their taxes, with one major exception: damages paid to victims as restitution for misdeeds. Still, Congress has placed stricter limits on such deductions in recent years, and some tax experts say the Internal Revenue Service could challenge the companies’ attempts to deduct opioid settlement costs.

Harry Cullen, a Brooklyn-based activist who has worked to hold drug companies accountable for the epidemic, said it is “incredibly insulting” that companies would try deduct the settlement payments. “As if they are donating it to these people who they harmed in the first place.”

I would also note that the entire “No admission of guilt” settlement regime needs to end.

When the end result is, “No harm, no foul, pay 15% of what you made thought your evil deeds,” these companies will continue to do harm to society.

And He’s Gone

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When I suggested that Biden aide TJ Ducklo should be fired for his abusive behavior to a reporter, I did not expect this to happen, but now the former Assistant Press Secretary has resigned.

His behavior was indefensible, so it wasn’t:

White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo has resigned, the day after he was suspended for issuing a sexist and profane threat to a journalist inquiring about his relationship with another reporter.

In a statement on Saturday, Ducklo said he was “devastated to have embarrassed and disappointed my White House colleagues and President Biden”.

“No words can express my regret, my embarrassment and my disgust for my behavior,” he said. “I used language that no woman should ever have to hear from anyone, especially in a situation where she was just trying to do her job. It was language that was abhorrent, disrespectful and unacceptable.”

It is the first departure from the new administration, less than a month into President Joe Biden’s tenure, and comes as the White House was facing criticism for not living up to standards set by Biden himself in their decision to retain Ducklo.

During a virtual swearing-in for staff on inauguration day, Biden said “If you ever work with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I will fire you on the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”

Ducklo was suspended for a week without pay on Friday after a report surfaced in Vanity Fair outlining his sexist threats against a female Politico journalist to try to suppress a story about his relationship, telling her “I will destroy you”.

Thoughts and prayers, I guess.

It’s Now Boris’ England

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Yes, it is

It appears that the British National Health Service has decided to issue do not resuscitate orders for learning and developmentally disabled patients with Covid-19, because the UK was never properly de-Nazified at the end of the 2nd World War, I guess.

It’s something that I take kind of personally, since I have a nephew who, if he lived in the UK, would be subject to this sort of bigotry:

People with learning disabilities have been given do not resuscitate orders during the second wave of the pandemic, in spite of widespread condemnation of the practice last year and an urgent investigation by the care watchdog.

………

The Care Quality Commission said in December that inappropriate Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNACPR) notices had caused potentially avoidable deaths last year.

DNACPRs are usually made for people who are too frail to benefit from CPR, but Mencap said some seem to have been issued for people simply because they had a learning disability. The CQC is due to publish a report on the practice within weeks.

The disclosure comes as campaigners put growing pressure on ministers to reconsider a decision not to give people with learning disabilities priority for vaccinations. There is growing evidence that even those with a mild disability are more likely to die if they contract the coronavirus.

………

Younger people with learning disabilities aged 18 to 34 are 30 times more likely to die of Covid than others the same age, according to Public Health England.

Most people would call this horrifying, but I imagine that the Tories consider this an unintended benefit, because it reduces costs.

Trump Acquitted in Impeachment Trial*

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So, Donald Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial, by a vote of 57-43, which means that 7 Republicans voted to impeach.

It’s clear that he was guilty as hell, but the Senate Democrats decide not to call witnesses, after the House managers wanted to call witness because, Chris Coons (D-DE) was planning a hot date with his wife for Valentines day, (also here). seriously? 

Former president Donald Trump was acquitted Saturday of inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, becoming the first president in U.S. history to face a second impeachment trial — and surviving it in part because of his continuing hold on the Republican Party despite his electoral defeat in November.

That grip appeared to loosen slightly during the vote Saturday afternoon, when seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote for conviction — a sign of the rift the Capitol siege has caused within GOP ranks and the desire by some in the party to move on from Trump. Still, the 57-to-43 vote, in which all Democrats and two independents voted against the president, fell far short of the two-thirds required to convict.

The tally came after senators briefly upended the proceeding by voting to allow witnesses — only to reverse themselves amid Republican opposition and following hours of negotiations with House Democrats and Trump’s defense team.

I am not exaggerating about the Valentines day thing:

During the Senate break after the witness vote Saturday, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) twice came into the managers’ room off the Senate floor, according to multiple Democratic sources. Coons pressed House Democrats to relent, saying their quest for witnesses would cost them Republican votes to convict and maybe even some Democrats.

“The jury is ready to vote,” Coons told the managers, according to a senior House Democratic aide. “People want to get home for Valentine‘s Day.”

Coons is up for reelection in 2026, and it would do well for Democratic voters to remember his bit of rat-f%$#ery during the impeachment.  

If wants to spend every valentines day with his wife, he can get himself a job that he is better suited to.

*I sure picked the wrong month to stop swearing.

Linkage

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Speaking of cutting people new assholes, I actually designed parts for a tool that actually does this:

I Don’t Care that He Has Cancer, Just Fire Him

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Biden Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo crossed some very bright red lines in his objection to reporting on his personal relationship with Axios political reporter Alexi McCammond.

The bullying and misogyny shown against Politico reporter Tara Palmeri* is completely beyond the pale.

Threatening to “destroy” her and saying that she was acting out of jealousy because of some man that Palmeri, “Wanted to F%$#” is grounds for firing, particularly for someone whose title has the words “Press Secretary” in it.

Also, quite frankly, even with his stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, the Biden administration cannot let this slide:

A White House official tried to quash a story about his relationship with a reporter by issuing threats and using derogatory language to another reporter pursuing it, according to two sources familiar with the incident. In a sympathetic profile Monday, People revealed that White House Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo is dating Axios political reporter Alexi McCammond, who covered the Joe Biden campaign. But behind the scenes, Ducklo had previously lashed out at Politico reporter Tara Palmeri, who was reporting the story, exhibiting behavior that led to tense meetings between the Washington news outlet’s editors and senior White House officials.

After Vanity Fair published this account, the White House announced that Ducklo would be suspended for one week.

The confrontation began on Inauguration Day, January 20, after Palmeri, a coauthor of Politico’s Playbook, contacted McCammond for comment while one of her male colleagues left a message for Ducklo, according to the sources. Ducklo subsequently called a Playbook editor to object to the story, but was told to call the Playbook reporters with his concerns. But instead of calling the male reporter who initially contacted him, Ducklo tried to intimidate Palmeri by phone in an effort to kill the story. “I will destroy you,” Ducklo told her, according to the sources, adding that he would ruin her reputation if she published it.

During the off-the-record call, Ducklo made derogatory and misogynistic comments, accusing Palmeri of only reporting on his relationship—which, due to the ethics questions that factor into the relationship between a journalist and White House official, falls under the purview of her reporting beat—because she was “jealous” that an unidentified man in the past had “wanted to fuck” McCammond “and not you.” Ducklo also accused Palmeri of being “jealous” of his relationship with McCammond. (Palmeri had no prior relationship or communication with McCammond before calling her to report on the Playbook item, which was a story that she was assigned and had not independently pursued.)

………

Palmeri declined to comment. Psaki and Ducklo did not immediately respond to requests for comment. After publication, Psaki issued a statement: “TJ Ducklo has apologized to the reporter, with whom he had a heated conversation about his personal life. He is the first to acknowledge this is not the standard of behavior set out by the President. In addition to his initial apology, he has sent the reporter a personal note expressing his profound regret. With the approval of the White House Chief of Staff, he has been placed on a one-week suspension without pay. In addition, when he returns, he will no longer be assigned to work with any reporters at Politico.”

………

Ducklo’s alleged response to Politico’s reporting raises serious questions about behavior that is tolerated in the Biden White House. “I am not joking when I say this: If you are ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot. No ifs, ands, or buts,” Biden said during a virtual swearing-in of appointees on his first day in the White House. Playbook highlighted those remarks on January 21 under the heading “Biden Sets Standard for Professional Behavior,” and asked, “Serious question on our minds this morning: Does this standard apply to how mid-level press aides treat reporters?”

What to do here is very simple.  You fire him.

I understand that you want to do right by him, he has been a good soldier, and he has stage 4 lung cancer that has metastasized, but as a matter of integrity, this is a promise that Biden should keep.

As a matter of tactics, he is toxic for the next few years anyway.

If you want to thread the needle, and he is getting cancer treatment, promise to keep covering his insurance.

As an aside, with Medicare for All, this would not be a problem.

*I never thought that I would have to defend a reporter from Tiger Beat on the Potomac. (TBOTP)

Tweet of the Day

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While I am generally opposed to bitcoin, I make an exception for South Florida. Miami is the rightful home of everything fraudulent, weird, and sleazy. And I say this with love. https://t.co/7erEwDjSDK

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 12, 2021

This succinctly sums up both the current cryptocurrency craze and south Florida.

As Zathras would say, “But at least there is symmetry.”

A Free State First

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Maryland has become the first state in the nation to enact a tax on online advertisements.

They had to override a veto though, because Governor Larry “Rat-F%$#” Hogan vetoed the bill, because he promised no new taxes ever.

Revenue is to be dedicated to education:

Maryland today became the first state in the nation to impose a tax on digital advertising revenue, overriding an earlier veto from the governor and incurring the wrath of piles of Big Tech businesses that are all but guaranteed to sue.

The bill (PDF) levies a state tax of up to 10 percent on the annual gross revenues of all digital advertising aimed at users inside Maryland state. Proceeds from the new tax are explicitly earmarked to go into an education fund dedicated to improving Maryland public schools.

“Right now, they don’t contribute,” the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Bill Ferguson (D) said of the bill. “These platforms that have grown fast, and so enormously, should also have to contribute to the civic infrastructure that helped them become so successful.”

Both chambers in the state’s General Assembly, its Senate and its House of Delegates, approved the bill by wide majorities last year. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed the bill in May, but it had sufficiently high support in both chambers of the legislature to pass a veto override, and both houses approved the veto override this week.

It will work on a sliding scale, with larger companies, like Google and Facebook, paying up to 10% of gross revenue from the portion of their ads from Maryland, which constitutes about 1.8% of the US population.

………

A coalition of small and medium businesses and trade groups launched a coalition last year to lobby against the tax. The group, which bills itself as Marylanders for Tax Fairness, argues that the tax will “place an unnecessary and undue burden on the state’s entrepreneurs and job creators.”

Yadda, yadda, yadda,

The internet economy wants not to pay taxes.

F%$# that.

………

Among the coalition members are not only several Maryland-based businesses and organizations, including several local Chambers of Commerce, but also most of the large tech-related trade groups. All of the usual suspects who represent advertising, Internet, tech, telecom, or media firms are on the list, including the Internet Association, the IAB, the NCTA, and TechNet. Those four groups represent every online firm from Amazon to Zillow and just about any brand you can name in between.

The stakes for all the firms involved may go well beyond Maryland. Other states, including high-population New York, are considering similar advertising revenue bills of their own.

I’m not sure what the right rate is, though I do support an aggressively progressive tax.