As I understand the nature of the competition, the team that accumulates the largest number of cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy wins.
Month: February 2021
So Says the ASSLaw Fellow
Jan Rybnicek, an antitrust attorney and a Senior Fellow at the Global Antitrust Institute of the Antonin Scalia School of Law (ASSLaw) has taken issue with both the Biden administration and in Congress to restrict mergers in the name of increasing competition in the marketplace.
She states that slowing the paces of M&A activity will reduce employment in the United States, despite the fact that mergers result in massive job cuts more often than not.
In fact the only areas of the economy that might see reductions in employment are beyond brokers and lawyers, so how could anyone claim with a straight face that this would cause job losses.
It’s almost as if the person writing this is an M&A lawyer, and ……… Checks Notes ……… never mind.
Another Step Back from the Slaughter in Yemen
President Biden has reversed Trump’s designation of the Yemeni Houthis as terrorists.
This is significant in a number of ways:
- It facilitates humanitarian aid in the war-ravaged nation.
- It simplifies any US role in negotiations regarding a permanent resolution of the conflict.
- It is a rebuke to the House of Saud.
It’s pretty clear that Biden is less favorably inclined toward Riyadh than either Trump of Obama. (It should be noted that Obama’s go to on intelligence while in office was John Brennan, who was for his entire career a fanatical supporter of the Saudi royal family)
To the degree that the US can disentangle its foreign policy from slavish devotion to the House of Saud, this is a good thing.
Good News Out of Virginia
Death penalty abolition has passed both houses of the Virginia legislature, and Governor Ralph Northam has said that he will sign the bill into law.
Welcome to the 20th century, Virginia.
16 Tons
Musical Accompaniment
Legislators in Nevada are proposing legislation to allow tech companies to create their own company owned towns.
Needless to say, the morons suggesting this needs to read up the history, or at least listen to the damned song.
It’s like they looked at the New Hampshire Town that went libertarian and was infested by bears, and said, “Here, hold my beer”.
If you’ve got enough money, acres upon acres of undeveloped land and an “innovative technology,” you soon could form a new local government in Nevada.
………
According to a draft of the proposed legislation, obtained by the Review-Journal but not yet introduced in the Legislature, Innovation Zones would allow tech companies like Blockchains, LLC to effectively form separate local governments in Nevada, governments that would carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties.
Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address as his plan to bring in new companies that are at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies,” all without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that had previously helped Nevada bring companies like Tesla to the state.
During his speech last month, Sisolak specifically named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in the area east of Reno that would run entirely on blockchain technology, once the legislation passes.
Run a f%$#ing city on blockchain?
Yeah, like that is going to end well.
Even without the dubious history of the company town.
………
The draft language of the proposal says that the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and innovative industries.”
It adds that this “alternative form of local government” is needed to aid economic development within the state.
Yes, by all means, let the grifters from block chain and the like dictate the form of government.
Given the dubious history of company towns, and the fact that their test case is for a company that doesn’t actually make anything (blockchain, seriously), does not bode well.
Called It
Not Life as We Know It
Last September, I noted that further examination of the detection of the chemical phosphine on Venus was likely not the result of the chemistry of life, and that further scientific scrutiny would show this.
Said scientific scrutiny has occurred, and while the original authors say that the presence of the chemical points to existence of life, they admit that they overstated the amounts of phosphine detected:
In September of last year, a paper announced a startling finding: evidence that a highly unstable chemical is present in the atmosphere of Venus. Since the chemical is expected to be destroyed rather quickly in the Venusian environment, its presence seems to imply that there was a steady source of the chemical, somehow feeding it into the atmosphere of the planet. Looking over the components of that atmosphere, the researchers concluded there’s no obvious way of producing it, which creates a mystery.
Since the chemical, called phosphine (PH3), had already been suggested as a possible sign of living things, speculation immediately began about the possibility of this being evidence of something alive in the clouds of Venus.
………
The original report had two key portions. One of them was a look at the possible chemical pathways that could be active under the conditions found in Venus’ atmosphere. This failed to come up with any ideas as to what, other than life, could be making phosphine. There still could be potential issues here, but none has surfaced so far. Instead, critiques of the original analysis have focused on the second portion of the September paper: the evidence that phosphine is in the atmosphere of Venus. This was obtained by using telescopes to look at a point in the electromagnetic spectrum where phosphine absorbs light, creating a signature of its presence.
Overall, this evidence seemed fairly robust. It was based on data from two telescopes, so hardware seemed unlikely to be a complication. The researchers processed the data using two independently developed software pipelines, suggesting the math behind the analysis was also likely to be solid. The big complication is the presence of another chemical, sulfur dioxide, that we know is in the atmosphere of Venus. Sulfur dioxide has a spectral signature line near the location of the signal created by phosphine.
But the researchers looked for other spectral signatures of sulfur dioxide, and they didn’t see any. So, they concluded it was rare or absent at the altitude where they were looking for phosphine (just above the planet’s clouds).
………
In this case, the calibration had some issues, and the data was reprocessed before being placed in a public archive. So, the researchers went back and redid their analysis using the updated ALMA data. While they say the signal’s still there, it’s not as prominent. Originally, the researchers had suggested that phosphine levels were in the neighborhood of 20 parts-per-billion. With the recalibrated data, this drops to somewhere between one and four parts-per-billion.
The researchers still indicate that the detection is “reasonably secure,” but the reduced levels make it easier for other sources of noise to swamp.
………
As mentioned above, the researchers developed two different software pipelines to process the data to search for the spectral signal of phosphine. That makes it less likely that the detection was an artifact hidden in the details of the processing. But “less likely” is not the same as “impossible.”
Two manuscripts have been posted that use yet other approaches to process the same data and look for spectral signatures. The first of these finds that the method used by the original paper artificially suppresses background noise, thus enhancing the apparent significance of any signals. When the researchers redo the analysis to handle this issue, the find the phosphine signal is still there, but it drops below the usual standards for statistical significance, since there’s more noise around it.
The second document simply tries a variety of statistical fits to the data and finds that most of them don’t produce a significant phosphine signal. So, it also concludes there’s no significant signal there.
………
But at least two manuscripts have appeared at the arXiv that suggest the data comes not from the cloud tops but instead from a region of the upper atmosphere called the mesosphere. The first manuscript simply explores whether the signal might actually be sulfur dioxide after all. It concludes that sulfur dioxide in the mesosphere can produce a signal that’s indistinguishable from the ones seen in the original report. For good measure, the draft also performs its own recalibration of the ALMA data and sees the phosphine signal drop to below one part-per-billion.
In the second paper, the authors use a system that models what absorption spectra will look like given different atmospheric concentrations of sulfur dioxide and phosphine. They also find that having sulfur dioxide in the mesosphere produces a signal that’s indistinguishable from the one the original research assigns to phosphine. And the conditions in the mesosphere would also suppress the other signals of sulfur dioxide that the first report had used to argue it wasn’t present.
Phosphine in the mesosphere could produce a similar signal, but the researchers calculate that the different environment there means that a typical phosphine molecule would have a half-life of one second. To produce enough phosphine to keep the mesosphere supplied, it would have to be made at a rate higher than the production of oxygen by all the photosynthetic organisms on Earth. Given that’s just a tiny bit unlikely, the authors suggest we’re just looking at sulfur dioxide.
………
None of these actually eliminate the possibility that phosphine is present at some level, although that level would have to be lower than the one reported by the original research. What they do collectively accomplish is indicating that there are several possible explanations for the signal seen by the authors, and all of them involve the presence of a chemical that we already know is in Venus’ atmosphere. So that has to be considered the primary explanation for what we’ve observed so far.
……….
So, overall, this seems like a case of science operating as it really should. Even if the end result turns out to be the death of an exciting result, seeing the process work properly helps provide more confidence in those results that do survive a careful reanalysis.
This is how science is supposed to work.
I would also note that this is how science journalism doesn’t work.
This is a Great Prank
You can now get a Verified Badge crest on your Bay Area home if you’re an influencer, public figure, or represent a brand. https://t.co/SyoURdSGe7 pic.twitter.com/H1Sz3gwBdL
— Writer for Black Mirror (@djbaskin) January 30, 2021
Truly Sublime
An artist in San Francisco had a tweet go viral where she offered “Blue Check” plaques to be placed on the homes of “Influencers” in an obvious reference to the Twitter program.
I am not surprised that it went viral, but I am surprised that some people actually thought it was real, and made an application for approval.*
On Friday, a viral Twitter thread announced the unexpected rollout of “Blue Check Homes” — a new service allowing Bay Area residents to apply to have a “Verified Badge crest” (read: blue check mark) installed on the facade of their homes to essentially identify themselves as an authentic public figure in real life.
In a matter of hours, the thread garnered international attention, swiftly amassing thousands of retweets and likes, and over 40 million impressions. The reactions from the public were wide-ranging. Some were, understandably, annoyed by the concept. Others caught onto the joke rather quickly.
But Danielle Baskin, the SF-based artist behind the prank, had no idea the website she crafted to back up the fake service would receive 495 applicants, all hoping for a crest of their own.
“I will say a percentage of them are not from a real person. People added, like, Kim Kardashian, and that was clearly a joke,” said Baskin, who in 2019 attempted to remove a series of controversial “anti-homeless boulders” from a city sidewalk by listing them on the Craigslist free section.
“But everyone else thought the website was real. I did what I thought was a mediocre Photoshop job … I thought, ‘This is all very clickbait-y.’ All of the copy, I thought, was so obviously satire.”
Until 2½ weeks ago, Donald John Trump was President.
There is no such thing as “Obvious Satire” anymore.
*Full disclosure, I went to the website and submitted Joe biden for sh%$s and giggles.
Candy-Ass Punk
Donald Trump will not testify at his impeachment trial, because he a frightened little wimp.
Unsurprisingly, when push comes to shove, he is a coward:
Donald Trump will not testify in the Senate’s upcoming impeachment trial, a spokesman for the former president said Thursday, explicitly rejecting a request from House Democrats.
Jason Miller, a spokesperson for the former president, said Trump “will not testify in an unconstitutional proceeding,” echoing the central theme of Trump’s defense in the trial.
In a letter to Trump earlier Thursday, the House’s lead impeachment manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), said Trump’s testimony was necessary because his lawyers’ first official response to the impeachment charge “denied many factual allegations set forth in the article of impeachment.”
“You have thus attempted to put critical facts at issue notwithstanding the clear and overwhelming evidence of your constitutional offense,” Raskin wrote. “In light of your disputing these factual allegations, I write to invite you to provide testimony under oath, either before or during the Senate impeachment trial, concerning your conduct on January 6, 2021.”
The request from House Democrats comes just five days before Trump is set to be put on trial on a charge of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, which left five people dead.
Raskin specifically asked that Trump testify sometime next week, between Monday and Thursday. The trial is slated to begin on Tuesday and is expected to last around one week.
“If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021,” Raskin wrote.
This is about showing up Donald Trump as a weakling.
Well played.
U.S. Employers Added 49,000 Jobs in January – WSJ
“Bad” reason why unemployment rate fell
— Liz Ann Sonders (@LizAnnSonders) February 5, 2021
The Denominator Fell
The January jobs report came out, and the word is anemic.
The unemployment rate fell, but only because fewer people were actively looking for work, and the non-farm workforce only grew by 49,000. (About 150,000 a month is necessary to maintain employment levels)
Not good:
U.S. employers resumed hiring in January, but the weak pace of job gains suggested a long road remains for the recovery.
The U.S. economy added 49,000 jobs last month. The small gain came after payrolls fell steeply in December, the first decline since the coronavirus pandemic triggered business shutdowns last spring. The unemployment rate fell to 6.3% in January from 6.7% a month earlier, in part reflecting fewer people searching for jobs.
“The recovery is only stumbling along at this point,” said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities. “Yes, we managed to eke out a gain, but we’re still 9.9 million jobs shy of where we were back in February” of last year before the pandemic hit hard, she said.
Jobs grew strongly in business and professional services, mainly in temporary help roles, the Labor Department said in its January report on U.S. employment. Many sectors, though, lost jobs last month. The leisure and hospitality sector shed 61,000 jobs, following a steep decline of 536,000 in December. Retailers and warehouses cut jobs in January after adding jobs strongly over the holidays.
The unemployment rate decline in January was driven by two factors. More people dropped out of the labor force—meaning they weren’t actively looking for a job and may have grown frustrated with their employment prospects. Also, the number of people reporting themselves as employed increased, consistent with a generally upward trend in hiring since last spring.
………
The broader economic recovery stalled significantly this winter. Unemployment claims, a proxy for layoffs, have remained above pre-pandemic levels. Consumers cut back on spending, as some were wary of leaving their homes as virus cases surged. Others wanted to shop and dine out, but had limited options.
………
Companies might struggle to find workers in part because the share of people seeking work remains depressed. The labor-force participation rate was 61.4% in January, down from 63.3% in February 2020, before the virus hit. Some people aren’t looking for work out of fear of contracting the virus. Others are burdened by increased child-care responsibilities or discouraged by limited job opportunities.
………
Many workers are facing long spells of unemployment. Just over four million people were out of work for 27 weeks or longer in January, the Labor Department said, compared with nearly 1.2 million a year ago. Others who lost their jobs earlier in the virus crisis have regained employment, but at much lower wages.
This is why the Biden administration is running around with their hair on fire to get the stimulus package out.
This is why I continue to invoke the undead felidae with a high coefficient of restitution.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene Has Much More Free Time
It would have been nice if the Republicans had dealt with this, but given that she has repeatedly called for the assassination of member of the House, but the Democrats (plus 11 Republicans) had to take action, meaning that Marjorie Taylor Greene will sit on no committees at all, the first time since, IIRC, Steve King was removed from his committees by the Republican Caucus after he explicitly supported white nationalism in 2019. (Before that, the Democrats refused to assign Jim Trafficant after he voted for the Republican Rpeaker of the House in 2001)
Normally, removal from committees is done by the Congressman’s own party, but Kevin McCarthy is too much of a wimp to do the right thing:
The House on Thursday exiled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from congressional committees, blacklisting the first-term Georgian for endorsing the executions of Democrats and spreading dangerous and bigoted misinformation even as fellow Republicans rallied around her.
The House voted 230 to 199 to remove Ms. Greene from the Education and Budget Committees, with only 11 Republicans joining Democrats to support the move. The action came after Ms. Greene’s past statements and espousing of QAnon and other conspiracy theories had pushed her party to a political crossroads.
The vote effectively stripped Ms. Greene of her influence in Congress by banishing her from committees critical to advancing legislation and conducting oversight. Party leaders traditionally control the membership of the panels. While Democrats and Republicans have occasionally moved to punish their own members by stripping them of assignments, the majority has never in modern times moved to do so to a lawmaker in the other party.
In emotional remarks on the House floor, Ms. Greene expressed regret on Thursday for her previous comments and disavowed many of her most outlandish and repugnant statements. She said she believed that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks “absolutely happened” and that school shootings were “absolutely real” after previously suggesting that aspects of both were staged.
………
Democrats argued that Ms. Greene’s comments — and Republican leaders’ refusal to take action against her — had required unusual action. In social media posts made before she was elected, Ms. Greene endorsed executing top Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi; suggested a number of school shootings were secretly perpetrated by government actors; and repeatedly trafficked in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
………
Ms. Greene also told the House that she had broken away from QAnon in 2018. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said, “and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret.”
However, that does not square with a series of social media posts she made in 2019, including liking a Facebook comment that endorsed shooting Ms. Pelosi in the head and suggesting in the same year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced with a body double, an element of QAnon’s fictional story line.
………
But the majority party, at least in modern history, has never before leveraged its power to dictate the minority party’s committee assignments. Democrats, who have been particularly incensed by Ms. Greene’s previous calls for violence after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, have insisted that Ms. Greene’s conduct demanded extraordinary measures.
………
“If anybody starts threatening the lives of members of Congress on the Democratic side, we’d be the first to eliminate them from committees,” Ms. Pelosi said.
Of course, when the Republicans regain power in the Congress, I’m sure that they will do this to Muslim members of Congress, claiming that this is a precedent, because acting in profoundly bad faith is their thing.
More “Good” Unemployment Numbers
Still higher than the preCovid-19 record, but initial claims fell to “only” 779,000:
The number of workers seeking unemployment benefits fell for the third straight week, a sign that layoffs have started to ease following an increase in early January.
Initial weekly unemployment claims declined to 779,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, following a revised 812,000 claims the prior week.
The recent easing in weekly jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—pointed to a stabilization in the number of workers applying for benefits, though the total remained at a higher weekly level than before a winter surge in coronavirus cases.
Claims also remained well above the pre-pandemic peak of 695,000 and are still higher than in any previous recession for records tracing back to 1967.
The latest jobless claims figures came a day before the government releases a more detailed look at U.S. employment in January. Economists forecast that employers added 50,000 jobs last month, following a 140,000 decline in December that marked the first decrease in payrolls in seven months. The unemployment rate is forecast to hold steady at 6.7%.
………
A separate report showed the pandemic’s effect on worker productivity. U.S. labor productivity fell at a 4.8% annual pace in the final months of 2020, the biggest quarterly decline since 1981, the Labor Department said. In the fourth quarter of the year, worker hours increased at a 10.7% pace and output rose at a 5.3% pace, pushing overall productivity lower.
This is why the Democrats need to move quickly to get the stimulus package passed.
The economy is, at best, just treading water.
Not Enough
No jail time in a settlement with McKinsey and Company for actively aiding Perdue Pharma in maximizing addictions to its opioids.
If there is a case for a corporate death penalty, this is it.
What’s more there should be criminal prosecutions against its executives:
Consulting giant McKinsey & Co. has reached a $573 million settlement with states over its work advising OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and other drug manufacturers to aggressively market opioid painkillers, according to people familiar with the matter.
The deal, reached with 47 states and the District of Columbia and expected to be publicly announced Thursday, would avert civil lawsuits that attorneys general could bring against McKinsey, the people said. The majority of the money will be paid upfront, with the rest dispensed in four yearly payments starting in 2022.
McKinsey said last week it is cooperating with government agencies on matters related to its past work with opioid manufacturers, as state and local governments sue companies up and down the opioid supply chain. At least 400,000 people have died in the U.S. from overdoses of legal and illegal opioids since 1999, according to federal data.
The consulting firm stopped doing opioid-related work in 2019 and said in December its work for Purdue was intended to support the legal use of opioids and help patients with legitimate medical needs.
That statement from McKinsey is a lie. They literally suggested that druggists be paid a bonus for overdose deaths to, “Turbocharge sales.”
Shut them down.
Prop 22 Lawsuit Dismissed by California Supreme Court
So, it appears that the Gypsy cab companies attempt to strip rights from their workers will proceed as planned.
This sucks:
The California Supreme Court today shot down the lawsuit filed by a group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union that alleged Proposition 22 violates the state’s constitution.
“We are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear our case, but make no mistake: we are not deterred in our fight to win a livable wage and basic rights,” Hector Castellanos, a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “We will consider every option available to protect California workers from attempts by companies like Uber and Lyft to subvert our democracy and attack our rights in order to improve their bottom lines.”
As an aside, now is the time to start getting signatures to repeal the bill.
The “Gig Economy” companies will have 2 years of showing that their so-called worker protections are a lie, so, unlike Prop 13, getting another bite at the apple is a good thing.
Well, It’s a Start
The Biden administration has announced that it is reducing support for military operations by the House of Saud in Yemen.
The details are not in yet, but it appears that the scope of this reduction in support is limited.
It would be nice if US administrations didn’t spend their time coddling the incompetent boy prince of the the Riyadh regime:
Joe Biden has announced an end to US support for Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen, as part of a broad reshaping of American foreign policy.
In his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden signaled that the US would no longer be an unquestioning ally to the Gulf monarchies, announced a more than eightfold increase in the number of refugees the country would accept, and declared that the days of a US president “rolling over” for Vladimir Putin were over.
“America is back,” Biden declared in remarks delivered at the state department, capping a whiplash fortnight of dramatic foreign policy changes since his 20 January inauguration. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”
Biden said the conflict in Yemen, which has killed more than 100,000 Yemenis and displaced 8 million, had “created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe”.
“This war has to end,” Biden. “And to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales.”
However, he said the US would continue to provide defensive support to Saudi Arabia against missile and drone attacks from Iranian-backed forces. US forces will also continue operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula.
There is a whole lot of wiggle room for a whole lot of mischief by the petty Persian Gulf potentiates to continuing to prosecute their war against the people of Yemen.
The distancing of Washington from Riyadh is one of the most conspicuous reversals of Donald Trump’s agenda, but it also marks a break with the policies pursued by Barack Obama, who had backed the Saudi offensive in Yemen, although he later sought to impose constraints on its air war.
A bipartisan majority in Congress had previously voted to cut off support to the Saudi campaign, citing the civilian death toll and the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. But Trump used his veto to block the move.
The US will also freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and name a special envoy to Yemen, to put more pressure on the Saudis and Emiratis and the Houthi forces they are fighting, to make a lasting peace agreement.
We’ll see how long that lasts.
With Saudi money flooding the lobbying channels inside the Beltway, I expect pushback from the very serious people, and a walk-back from the White House.
Yeah, About that
This strangest thing about this moment is almost every Dem is acting as if Obama’s first term was a horrible failure but no one wants to explicitly say that. https://t.co/CuyrgEN6XT
— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) February 2, 2021
So, let’s do a rundown of the 2009-10 Obama years and what happened:
- Democratic Governors, from 29 to 16.
- Control of state legislatures, and redistricting, from 59% to 31%. (over 1000 state leg seats)
- Double digit losses in the Senate.
- Over 5 dozen loses in the House.
Why would even the most psychopathic Democrat, or Jim Manchin (but I repeat myself) want even a small piece of such a disaster?
The answer is that they don’t which indicates that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) might actually have a small learning curve.
I never believed that I would be able to write that in a non-ironic way.
And the Crazy Gets the Republican Party Sanction
So, the Republican House Caucus has refused to take actions against Marjorie Taylor Greene for posting death threats to other members of congress, AND asserting that Jewish Space Lasers™ started the California wild fires, AND asserting that the Sandy Hook Elementary and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings were frauds promulgated by “crisis actors”, AND the whole pedophile lizard alien cannibal thing.
This means that the whole House will be voting to strip her of her committee assignments tomorrow.
The flip side is that the Republican Caucus did not remove Liz Cheney as their #3 for voting to impeach Trump, which I’ll call neutral because any good news for a Cheney is simply not good news ever:
House Republicans voted to keep Rep. Liz Cheney in party leadership despite her harsh criticism of former President Donald Trump, while declining to punish a Trump loyalist who made comments embracing conspiracy theories and political violence.
After a dizzying week of recriminations, both Ms. Cheney, of Wyoming, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) remained within the fold of the House GOP, highlighting Republicans’ efforts at stitching together a still-fractious party.
Facing Democrats’ demands that Mrs. Greene be stripped of her committee assignments, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) condemned her comments but declined to take further steps. With no action from Republicans, Democrats scheduled a full House vote Thursday to remove Mrs. Greene from the education and budget committees.
“Past comments from and endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, political violence, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference,” Mr. McCarthy said. He said that he stressed in a private meeting with Mrs. Greene on Tuesday night that she must now hold herself to a higher standard as an elected official. He also said that she apologized for her comments during Wednesday’s closed-door party meeting.
At that same gathering, Ms. Cheney defeated a motion from Mr. Trump’s allies to oust her as House GOP conference chairwoman in a 145-61 vote, conducted by secret ballot after hours of intense debate.
………
Mr. McCarthy’s decision to leave Mrs. Greene on committees shifts some of the political heat to Democrats, who will now try to remove her. But it also opens up Mr. McCarthy to frustration among some House Republicans that he hasn’t done more to manage the fallout over Mrs. Greene. Thursday’s vote could also put some House GOP lawmakers in a difficult spot in deciding whether to vote to protect Mrs. Greene from Democratic attempts to punish her, a stance that could be off-putting to donors and voters skeptical of both her and Mr. Trump.
To quote Napoleon, “Never stop your enemy from stepping on his own dick,” I guess. (It’s a loose translation from the original French)
Still, this is an unbelievable clusterf%$#.
About F%$#ing Time
Finally, legislation proposed to reverse the absurd requirement that the US Post Office prefund its pension and benefits for 50 years has a chance to pass the Congress:
This is literally the only reason that the USPS is in dire financial straits, and this been the case for almost 15 years:
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill to ease a major financial burden on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) by eliminating a requirement that it fund retirement benefits decades ahead of time.
The USPS Fairness Act would do away with a 2006 law that mandated the USPS to form a $72 billion fund to pay for retirement health benefits for over 50 years, a requirement that is not imposed on any other federal agency.
The legislation was introduced in the House by Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Colin Allred (D-Texas) and in the Senate by Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
“The unreasonable prefunding mandate has threatened the survival of the USPS and placed at risk vital services for the millions who rely on it. The prefunding mandate policy is based on the absurd notion of paying for the retirement funds of people who do not yet, and may not ever, work for the Postal Service,” DeFazio said in a statement.
The introduction of the legislation comes as President Biden faces pressure from the biggest Postal Service union to install new USPS leadership. The department was thrust into the national spotlight late in the Trump administration for changes to mail delivery that critics said would impact the collection of mail-in ballots in a way that would benefit then-President Trump.
A similar bill to the USPS Fairness Act was passed in the House last year but languished in the GOP-controlled Senate.
Here’s hoping that this actually happens.
The original bill was an attempt to privatize the post office as a way of breaking its union, and Donald Trump used the chaos in an attempt to subvert the 2020 election.
This needs to be repealed today.
If He Were Black, They Would Have Already Shot Him Multiple Times
Instead, it appears that, on the recommendation of an anonymous Kenosha police captain, teen murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and his legal team has been deliberately deceiving the court as to his whereabouts.
Obviously, this from my perspective as a non-lawyer, but this appears to be a BIG no-no for someone who is out on bail:
Prosecutors apparently couldn’t find admitted Kenosha killer Kyle Rittenhouse, so now they are seeking a warrant for his arrest.
On Wednesday, the Kenosha County District Attorney’s office said Rittenhouse had violated the conditions of his release. Prosecutors said they need a new arrest warrant specifically because Rittenhouse failed to inform the court after changing his address. The defense, however, responded by saying they intentionally concealed Rittenhouse’s true whereabouts because a local police captain instructed them to lie about where he was staying.
………
According to the conditions of his bond, Rittenhouse was supposed to relay such a change within 48 hours of moving. The motion asks Judge Bruce E. Schroeder to issue a new arrest warrant and increase Rittenhouse’s bail by $200,000.
………
The Illinois teenager was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted homicide, and two additional felonies over the admitted shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. Rittenhouse also severely wounded Gaige Grosskreutz with a rifle carried across state lines. He further faces one misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under the age of 18. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the August shooting and is now 18.
………
In sum, the defense says it intentionally wrote the wrong address on the release papers after being advised to do so by local law enforcement. This, the defense claims, was to protect the location of a “safe house” for Rittenhouse.
The motion notes [emphasis in original]: “Pierce was directly informed by a high-ranking member of the Kenosha Police Department not to provide the address of the Rittenhouse Safe House because of the numerous threats made against Kyle and his family.”
………
“While I was completing this form, I was approached by a Kenosha Police Department Captain, who offered his assistance,” Pierce continued [emphasis in original]. “I asked the Kenosha Police Captain what address to put on the form. The Kenosha Police Captain told me that I ‘absolutely should not‘ provide the address of the physical location of the Rittenhouse Safe House on the form, but to instead provide his home address in Antioch, Illinois.”
There are a couple of points here:
- What lawyer doesn’t pass this by the f%$#ing judge? (I’m already regretting ending my swearing for February)
- What cop tells a defendant in a murder trial to lie to the court?
Well, I guess the answers to this question are pretty straightforward, and the expression, “Racist dirtbag,” figures prominently in both.
Rittenhouse needs to spend his pre-trial in jail, and his lawyer should be his cell-mate, at least until he gives up whatever police captain told him to lie to the court.
Linkage
- Stack Overflow 2019 hack was guided by advice from none other than… Stack Overflow (The Register)
- Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls? (New York Times) If Donald Trump had promised to shut down the calls by bombing Kolkata and Bangalore, he would have won 48 states.
- Six degrees of sedition: Was master trickster Roger Stone behind the Capitol riot? (Salon.com) This would not surprise me.
- Nine Russian adventurers mysteriously froze to death—a new theory explains why (Ars Technica) A “Slab Avalanche”.
- The One Change I’d Make To The PRO Act (Labor Law Lite)An update to his post on the Pro act, in which the author suggests an expansion of the topics subject to negotiations.
- This Might Be a Good Time for Democrats in Congress to Stop Trading Stocks (The New Republic) The adventures of Pelosi and Feinstein show us that, “It should be illegal. Even if it isn’t, it’s politically stupid.”
- Corruption in U.S. at Worst Levels in Almost a Decade, According to New Transparency International Report (Foreign Policy) And unless I miss my guess, our dysfunctional healthcare system figures prominently in this.
Leeroy Jenkins!
The Coup in Myanmar
Yes, the coup was caught on an aerobics video
I’m hoping that there is a way for both sides, a genocidal and dictatorial military and a genocidal Nobel Peace Prize Winner, can both lose as a result of the military seizing power in Myanmar.
Last time around, Aung San Suu Kyi had the support of human rights activists everywhere, but after years of her enthusiastic support for the genocide of the Rohingya, the blush is off the rose.
One hopes that whatever happens, that the end result will be a true multiparty democracy where all of its citizens, including the Rohingya, can fully and freely participate:
Myanmar’s military said Monday that it took control of the country and declared a state of emergency for a year, after detaining civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders of her ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) in a predawn operation, staging a coup against the democratically elected government.
The raids came hours before a new session of parliament was scheduled to open and members who won the November elections were set to take their seats. Suu Kyi’s NLD won those elections in a landslide, capturing 396 out of 476 seats. It was Myanmar’s second democratic election since the country’s fragile transition from military rule to democracy.
………
Several hours after the raids, the military in a television broadcast said that a state of emergency had been declared in Myanmar and that power would be transferred to the commander in chief, Min Aung Hlaing. Myint Swe, a former general and the military-backed vice president, will become the president, the broadcast added.
The sweep also included other prominent democracy activists who have been fighting against military rule for decades, leaders of other political parties and NLD lawmakers, according to social media posts and news reports.
………Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest before her release in November 2010, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her resistance to military rule. The military-drafted constitution prevents her from leading Myanmar as president, but she is unequivocally the nation’s leader, revered as a deity, and rules through proxies. The military-drafted constitution also allows the army to step in in a situation that may “disintegrate” the country and national solidarity.
Since taking power, though, she has disappointed old allies in the West, particularly for defending Myanmar — and its military in particular — against charges of genocide over the persecution of the Rohingya ethnic minority. Suu Kyi has in recent years moved closer toward powers such as China and India, and grown increasingly estranged from countries such as the United States and Britain, which once led advocacy efforts to get her released from house arrest.
She is up there with Henry Kissinger, Barack “DronesR Us” Obama, Jimmy “Bought 4 decades of war in Afghanistan” Carter, and Elihu Root (Philippine insurrection) on a list of horrible recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.
For some reason, I tend to take it personally when people engage in religiously based genocide, and the Junta and Suu Kyi have.