That’s 12 million voters who know that the Democrats lied to them, and they were likely the margin of victory in at least one of the Georgia runoffs that gave Democrats Joe Manchin control of the US Senate.
This is horrible policy, about $8 billion in a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, 0.42%, and it is worse politics.
The official hat of the Biden Administration
The stimulus checks are the single most popular part of the bill, but the so-called moderates in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needed a scalp so that they could wave their dicks, and Biden caves.
To quote not-Tallyrand, (it is frequently misattributed to him) “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.
Democrats often wonder why they don’t get more votes, because their policies are popular.
They don’t get more votes because people do not believe that Democrats will actually follow through.
This is not surprising. The additional scrutiny, and the decrease in mindless support for cops murdering black people, should have the effect of cops murdering fewer black people:
Since Black Lives Matter protests gained national prominence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the movement has spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. Now a new study shows police homicides have significantly decreased in most cities where such protests occurred.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) began when Oakland, Calif.–based activist Alicia Garza posted a message of protest on Facebook after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer who followed and fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., was acquitted of murder in 2013. Patrisse Cullors, another Oakland community organizer, began sharing Garza’s message on social media, along with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. The slogan soon spread, building into a largely leaderless movement against structural racism and police violence. Last year, spurred by a Minneapolis police officer’s killing of George Floyd, millions of people demonstrated in hundreds of BLM protests throughout the U.S.
“Black Lives Matter represents a trend that goes beyond the decentralization that existed within the Civil Rights Movement,” says Aldon Morris, a sociologist at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the new study. “The question becomes, ‘Are Black Lives Matter protests having any real effect in terms of generating change?’ The data show very clearly that where you had Black Lives Matter protests, killing of people by the police decreased. It’s inescapable from this study that protest matters—that it can generate change.”
The study, posted in February as an online preprint item on the Social Science Research Network, is the first of its kind to measure a possible correlation between BLM and police homicide numbers. It found that municipalities where BLM protests have been held experienced as much as a 20 percent decrease in killings by police, resulting in an estimated 300 fewer deaths nationwide in 2014–2019. The occurrence of local protests increased the likelihood of police departments adopting body-worn cameras and community-policing initiatives, the study also found. Many cities with larger and more frequent BLM protests experienced greater declines in police homicides.
Yes, the Texas governor has decided to lift all Covid restrictions, because ……… TEXAS, and the governor of Mississippi has decided to lift all Covid restrictions, because ……… they can’t abide TEXAS out-stupiding them.
Biden described this as, “Neanderthal Thinking,” which is, as the eminently quotable Mr. Pierce notes, unfair to Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, who by all indications were just as capable and intelligent as our own Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
I think that we should give Texas back to Mexico, if they will take it.
As to Mississippi,couldsomeone please take them? Anyone?
That sounds nonsensical, but that is because the real question that they are asking is, “Is the path chosen by universities and colleges to rely on risky and extremely high fee strategies run by Wall Street big shots to increase returns on their endowments damaging colleges and universities?”
That answer is unequivocally yes, even if you are not as incompetent a steward of your college’s money as Larry Summers was at Harvard.
The goal of the Wall Street big shots is to maximize their own personal gain, and by promising big and providing almost Byzantine complexity that shields them from oversight, they make bank, and the colleges get f%$#ed:
These are perilous times for private, nonprofit, independent higher education, and not just because of changing demographics, ever-climbing tuitions, and pandemic shutdowns. For years, education researchers have charged that institutions are unable to control costs effectively, especially their operating costs. In public discourse, colleges and universities are often characterized as reckless spenders. So when they slash academic budgets or cut staff, nearly everyone shrugs. Higher education has gradually accommodated itself to austerity thinking. But as any critic of neoliberalism can tell you, austerity is really just another way that money and resources are redistributed upward, and outward.
It is rarely, if ever, discussed how endowment fund management is an integral part of the budget problem. As the tax filings of virtually every private college or university show, enormous investment management fees are pouring out of nearly every substantial endowment and into the pockets of fund managers. Most of these fund managers are not university employees, but rather work for industries such as private equity, hedge funds, and other so-called “alternative” investments. According to its tax filings, Oberlin College (my alma mater) paid out a total of $14,872,522 in investment management fees between 2013 and 2017, averaging around $3 million per year. During that same period, Amherst College paid out $186,601,258. At both colleges, investment management fees actually exceeded reported profits from investments several times. Excluding Harvard (which manages its roughly $41 billion endowment internally and has also faced criticism for immensely high overheads), the remaining Ivy League colleges reported paying out $241,653,279 in fees in 2017 alone. That same year, Stanford University paid out $47,901,005, and Johns Hopkins $28,112,000. The list goes on and on.
………
But we can say that the pattern reflects a widespread institutional practice with endowments, tax-free investments held by nonprofit institutions that provide education as a public good. Increasingly, endowments are invested in expensive, secretive, unregulated, illiquid, risky, and hard-to-value financial instruments—the strategy laid out by David Swensen in his book Pioneering Portfolio Management and nicknamed the “Yale Model.” While acknowledging the greater risks involved, Swensen credits Yale’s returns to this strategy, noting that “developing partnerships with extraordinary people” is the single most important element for its success. What makes these people extraordinary is not specified, but the enormous amounts of money they are paid does fit that description.
Nontraditional asset class investing has become so widely fashionable among university endowments that it has taken the form of ideology. Very few institutions seem to balk at putting alumni and other donations into risky, illiquid investments, something that would have been regarded as foolish and dangerous only a few decades ago.
As I have said here many times, “There is nothing that the finance industry cannot ruin.”
About 7 months ago, I mentioned that a Dutch broadcaster turned off tracking ads, and went with simple contextual ads, and earned more money.
Contextual ads are, for example, you read a story and the ads are based on what you are reading, so if you were looking as sports, you would get ads for beer, and if you were looking at barbecue recipes, you would get ads for beer, and if you were reading a story about a heat wave, you would get ads for beer.
Tracking ads, on the other hand will look at everything that you have done in the past 18 months, and determine that because you looked at sports, barbecue, and the weather, you get served an add for beer. (all ads lead to beer, but that is another post)
The reason that tracking ads are more popular these days is because they are supposed to get higher response rates..
Certainly, that is what the incumbents, like Facebook and Google want you to think, because if contextual ads work just as well, then pretty much anyone can go into the online ad business, and Google and Facebook can no longer slurp up most of the revenue
This is why Facebook is going nuclear about Apple’s new privacy policies, which will require an explicit opt-in for tracking.
It’s not because they would lose a whole lot of money with this, they would still sell ads, but because this is a massive A/B test on the internet giant’s business model.
If advertisers find that non tracking ads work just as well, or nearly so for less money, they will switch to non-tracking ads.
This is why we have leaked emails in which Mark Zuckerberg states that, “We need to inflict pain,” on Apple.
All this is a long way around to seeing that we now have another data-point in addition to the Dutch broadcaster NPO, we also have the New Zealand news site Stuff, which has abandoned Facebook to no effect. (They did so because of Facebook’s irresponsibility both before and after the Christchurch shootings)
The short version, (video below) is that Stuff cut advertising spending on Facebook with, “No traffic impact at all,” and since they stopped posting on Facebook, they have been unable to tease out any impact on traffic.
The theory here is that if North Dakota does not report the vote, there is no popular vote count, and hence, no basis for the national popular vote compact to execute.
My suggestion for the states that have already entered into the vote compact, about 190 EVs so far, is to change the vote compact to reflect the total REPORTED vote.
This means that the state of North Dakota loses representation, but f%$# them with Cheney’s dick:
The North Dakota Senate this week passed a bill which aims to forbid election officials from disclosing how many actual votes are cast for each candidate in upcoming presidential elections. The total tallies would only be disclosed after future Electoral Colleges convene to select an official victor.
The measure, Senate Bill 2271, was introduced by Sen. Robert Erbele, a Republican from Lehr, N.D., who represents a district situated southeast of Bismarck. It would withhold the state’s vote count from the public and allow officials to only reveal the percentage of the total vote each candidate receives.
“[A] public officer, employee, or contractor of this state or of a political subdivision of this state may not release to the public the number of votes cast in the general election for the office of the president of the United States until after the times set by law for the meetings and votes of the presidential electors in all states,” the bill states. “After the votes for presidential electors are canvassed, the secretary of state may release the percentage of statewide votes cast for each set of presidential electors to the nearest hundredth of a percentage point, a list of presidential candidates in order of increasing or decreasing percentage of the vote received by presidential electors selected by the candidates, and the presidential candidate whose electors received the highest percentage of votes.”
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The bill is designed to prevent implementation of the national popular vote compact – a multi-state agreement aimed at circumventing the Electoral College.
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The national popular vote compact is a nascent agreement amongst a coalition of states which have enacted statutes dictating that their presidential electors only cast votes for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact—which would effectively neuter the Electoral College—takes effect once the coalition of states involved possess 270 or more electoral votes. According to nationalpopularvote.com, the agreement has been passed into law in 16 states possessing a total 196 Electoral College votes, including New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
………
Appearing on the political podcast Plain Talk, the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, Saul Anuzis, said the measure was “almost a politburo situation from Soviet Russia,” referring to the political policymaking committee in the former Soviet Union.
The comments of former chairman of the Michigan GOP lickening this action to the Soviet Politburo is completely unfair though, to the Soviet Politburo.
They were way more respectful of the will of the people than the North Dakota Republican Party.
Honestly, I think that it is time to right a historic wrong, and merge North and South Dakota, who were only created as separate states to create partisan advantage.
It’s always been clear that he was pond scum, and now he is convicted pond scum:
Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling on Monday and sentenced to one year in prison, marking a historic defeat for the 66-year-old, who has remained popular among conservative voters even as his legal woes mount.
The verdict included a two-year suspended sentence, but Sarkozy’s attorney said her client would appeal, delaying the sentence from taking effect. Given that short prison sentences in France can typically be waived, it is unclear whether Sarkozy would have to spend any time in prison even if the appeal were to fail. He could also request to serve the sentence at home, subject to electronic monitoring.
The ruling followed years of parallel investigations against the former president, and some others are ongoing. Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, will face another trial later this month over accusations that his party falsified accounts during his unsuccessful reelection bid in 2012.
The charges over which Sarkozy was sentenced Monday were centered on whether he was behind a deal with a magistrate to illegally receive information on an inquiry linked to him, using false names and unofficial phone lines.
According to the prosecution, Sarkozy and his then-attorney and longtime friend Thierry Herzog attempted to bribe the magistrate, Gilbert Azibert, by offering him a high-profile position in return for information. The incident occurred after Sarkozy had left office.
The inquiry related to claims that Sarkozy and others had accepted illegal contributions from business executive Liliane Bettencourt, the late heiress of French cosmetics giant L’Oréal, ahead of the 2007 presidential campaign. Sarkozy was later cleared of those illegal-funding charges.
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Sarkozy is the second former French president in a decade to be sentenced. Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy’s predecessor and initial patron, was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for handing nonexistent jobs to political allies during his time as Paris mayor.
It comes as no surprise that the Gaullists are rife with corruption.
Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself – Peterson – 2020 (Social Science Quarterly) For the life of me, I cannot tell if this is serious or satire, “The objective of this study was to empirically test the wide belief that Reviewer #2 is a uniquely poor reviewer.”
Workers in Alabama – and all across America – are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. It’s a vitally important choice – one that should be made without intimidation or threats by employers.
Well, Robert Goulet must be spinning in his grave, because he has lost his crown for the, “Worst Rendition of an ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’ inspired song ever.”
By the teeth of the flying spaghetti monster, this is bad.
It makes Rosanne Barr’s version sound positively operatic.
On the other hand, it is a PERFECT metaphor for the incredible clusterf%$# that CPAC was this year.
On the bright side, it save lots of aviation fuel.
Black helicopters are notorious fuel guzzlers:
When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January, many of them became digital refugees, migrating to sites like Parler and Gab to find a home that wouldn’t moderate their hate speech and disinformation. Days later, Parler was hacked, and then it was dropped by Amazon web hosting, knocking the site offline. Now Gab, which inherited some of Parler’s displaced users, has been badly hacked too. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications.
On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” siphoned that data out of Gab’s backend databases in an effort to expose the platform’s largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump’s election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.
DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab’s public posts and profiles—with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site—but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. “It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content,” Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. “It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6.”
DDoSecrets says it’s not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. WIRED viewed a sample of the data, and it does appear to contain Gab users’ individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords. Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday.
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According to DDoSecrets’ Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab’s data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the site—a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn’t differentiate between a user’s input and commands in the site’s code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker’s reference to an “Anonymous Revival Project,” they’re not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do “want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists.”
It’s reassuring that all the Nazis so far seem to be Colonel Klink, but we cannot rely on that forever.
I am not one to call for divine intervention, I feel that the problems of this world are created humans, and must be solved by them, but maybe they should have a word with Korach, face to face.
Break out your shovels, conservatives, and note that you will probably have to be digging up, not digging down.
One of the things about serial harassers and abusers is that it almost never happens just once. Once someone comes out to the press, people start coming out of the woodwork.*
The reason that this happens is because typically harassment victims feel isolated, and are terrified of going out on a limb and being there alone.
Once someone else makes an allegation, they realize that they are NOT alone, and come forward as well, and so now we have Charlotte Bennett, former:
A second former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is accusing him of sexual harassment, saying that he asked her questions about her sex life, whether she was monogamous in her relationships and if she had ever had sex with older men.
The aide, Charlotte Bennett, who was an executive assistant and health policy adviser in the Cuomo administration until she left in November, told The New York Times that the governor had harassed her late last spring, during the height of the state’s fight against the coronavirus.
Ms. Bennett, 25, said the most unsettling episode occurred on June 5, when she was alone with Mr. Cuomo in his State Capitol office. In a series of interviews this week, she said the governor had asked her numerous questions about her personal life, including whether she thought age made a difference in romantic relationships, and had said that he was open to relationships with women in their 20s — comments she interpreted as clear overtures to a sexual relationship.
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Ms. Bennett said that during the June encounter, the governor, 63, also complained to her about being lonely during the pandemic, mentioning that he “can’t even hug anyone,” before turning the focus to Ms. Bennett. She said that Mr. Cuomo asked her, “Who did I last hug?”
Ms. Bennett said she had tried to dodge the question by responding that she missed hugging her parents. “And he was, like, ‘No, I mean like really hugged somebody?’” she said.
Mr. Cuomo never tried to touch her, Ms. Bennett said, but the message of the entire episode was unmistakable to her.
“I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared,” Ms. Bennett said. “And was wondering how I was going to get out of it and assumed it was the end of my job.”
………
Ms. Bennett said she had disclosed the interaction with Mr. Cuomo to his chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, less than a week later and was transferred to another job, as a health policy adviser, with an office on the opposite side of the Capitol, soon after that. Ms. Bennett said she had also given a lengthy statement to a special counsel to the governor, Judith Mogul, toward the end of June.
Ms. Bennett said she ultimately decided not to insist on an investigation because she was happy in her new job and “wanted to move on.” No action was taken against the governor.
It never happens just once.
I’m expecting to see a few more.
The only question is whether people still fear Cuomo the way that they used to.
If not, he is toast.
*This statement is offered only in the context of the current story regarding Andrew Cuomo, and not on the allegations involving Woody Allen, which I have not, and probabably never will, have a public opinion on.
A 15 dollar min wage won 60% of vote in Florida in 2020. A political reporter thinking this some kind of risky vote is equivalent of doctor recommending you balance your humors. https://t.co/eqtuFPX6ib
It really is remarkable just how dedicated the socalled “moderates” in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are to opposing policies that would get them massive support.
Seriously, this had to be the worst kept secret in the Middle East:
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the assassination of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, according to an intelligence report that the Biden administration released on Friday that offered the world a reminder of the brutal killing.
An elite team of operatives helped carry out the killing, the report said. The team reported directly to Prince Mohammed, who cultivated a climate of fear that made it unlikely for aides to act without his consent, according to the report. It omitted the brutal details of Mr. Khashoggi’s death, including the dismemberment of his body with a bone saw after Saudi officials lured him to their consulate in Istanbul.
But the Biden administration took no direct action against Prince Mohammed, the de facto ruler of the kingdom, instead announcing travel and financial sanctions on other Saudis involved in the killing and on members of the elite unit of the Royal Guard who protect the crown prince. The administration concluded it could not risk a full rupture of its relationship with the kingdom, relied on by the United States to help contain Iran, to counter terrorist groups and to broker peaceful relations with Israel. Cutting off Saudi Arabia could also push its leaders toward China.
It does not matter how much oil that they have, the House of Saud is a complete sh%$ show, and their moving closer to China, and further from the US would be a bane to the Chinese, and a boon to the USA.
Much of the evidence the C.I.A. used to conclude that Prince Mohammed was culpable in Mr. Khashoggi’s killing remains classified. But the report’s disclosure was the first time that the American intelligence community had made its conclusions public, and the declassified document was a powerful rebuke of the crown prince, a close ally of the Trump administration, whose continued support of him prompted international outrage.
The release of the report signaled that President Biden, unlike his predecessor, would not set aside the killing of Mr. Khashoggi and that his administration intended to try to isolate the crown prince.
“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said the report, issued by Mr. Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines.
The decision to rebuke the Saudis without punishing Prince Mohammed directly was the result of a weekslong debate among aides to Mr. Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value.”
Biden’s characterization is not really accurate, in that Saudi Arabia is not a nation-state in the modern sense, people are not citizens but instead subjects. It is the absolute possession of the House of Saud.
It may not appear so outwardly, but the position of the House of Saud atop the power structure of Riyadh is more precarious than it appears, and it is further jeopardized by Mohammed bin Salman’s headstrong incompetence.
The US disentangling itself to the maximum degree possible before it all comes crashing down is a good thing.
Also I would note that you have to be pretty f%$#ing “Harassy” to get large numbers of women from a Christian college known for its reactionary politics (Patrick Henry College) to publicly complain your behavior means that it had to be pretty bad.
When you add to the fact that you were doing so FROM A WHEEL CHAIR, which both makes harassment both physically and culturally more difficult. (Lots of people believed that the disabled can’t do things like harass other people, because they do not see the disabled as real people)
Also, he managed to do this in 1 semester, since he flunked out of his first semester.
Madison Cawthorn arrived at Patrick Henry College’s small Christian campus in northern Virginia in fall 2016 blazing with charm, bravado, and a flashing white smile. His former classmates said the future member of Congress would whip his white Dodge Challenger into the parking lot and regale his classmates with the story of how he survived a harrowing car crash as a teen, which left him paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair for life. After his intensive recovery, he was older than most students — 21 — and didn’t fit the mold of the Christian and largely sheltered first-year students who chose the conservative school in Purcellville because of its commitment to God and rigorous academics. And, former Patrick Henry students said, it didn’t take long for women on campus to start warning one another: You don’t want to be alone with him, especially in his car.
BuzzFeed News spoke with more than three dozen people, including more than two dozen former students, their friends, and their relatives, who described or corroborated instances of sexual harassment and misconduct on campus, in Cawthorn’s car, and at his house near campus. Four women told BuzzFeed News that Cawthorn, now a rising Republican star, was aggressive, misogynistic, or predatory toward them. Their allegations include calling them derogatory names in public in front of their peers, including calling one woman “slutty,” asking them inappropriate questions about their sex lives, grabbing their thighs, forcing them to sit in his lap, and kissing and touching them without their consent. One of these women now works as an intern for another Republican member of Congress and passes Cawthorn in the corridors of the Capitol. According to more than a dozen people — including three women who had firsthand experience and seven people who heard about these incidents from them at the time — Cawthorn often used his car as a way to entrap and harass his women classmates, taking them on what he could call “fun drives” off campus. Two said he would drive recklessly and ask them about their virginity and sexual experiences while they were locked in the moving vehicle.
“I realized he was taking me out to the middle of nowhere, Virginia,” said Caitlin Coulter, a former classmate who went for a drive with him during her senior year. “We were on these small, like, one- [or] two-lane back roads, and I just felt so uncomfortable and nervous and not even something I think at the time I could put a finger on, but just, like, danger warning.”
BuzzFeed News sent Cawthorn a detailed list of allegations in this story. His communications director, Micah Bock, did not respond to the specific allegations but instead referred BuzzFeed News to remarks the young Republican had made during a campaign debate in September: “I have never done anything sexually inappropriate in my life,” Cawthorn said.
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Long before Cawthorn’s persona as a poster child for the new right gained national traction, people who went to school with him at Patrick Henry College said they were stunned as they watched him ascend in the North Carolina race. They told BuzzFeed News they remember him as one of the only Trump supporters on their small conservative campus, where he developed a reputation for mistreating women at the school, according to more than two dozen former students.
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Then, in October, more than 160 members of the Patrick Henry community signed an open letter detailing “gross misconduct towards our female peers, public misrepresentation of his past, disorderly conduct that was against the school’s student honor code, and self-admitted academic failings,” including that Cawthorn “established a reputation of predatory behavior.” After the letter was published, Cawthorn told ABC 13 that it was based on rumors, and his campaign wrote in a Facebook post that he had the endorsement of a “significant number of PHC alumni and former students who knew him well.” The post was signed by just six people. Two worked for the campaign and a third was one of their relatives.
………
But former classmates also remember Cawthorn as magnetic and ambitious, delivering almost-too-firm handshakes, buddying up with nearly everyone he met, and flirting with and befriending many women classmates. A former high school football player and avid athlete — his Instagram feed is peppered with videos in which he claimed he was training for the 2020 Paralympic Games, which wasn’t true — Cawthorn exuded a jock persona at school, classmates said. He soon formed a small posse of guys, which seven former students told BuzzFeed News was known around campus as the “the douche crew.”
And he managed this in the single semester that he was there.
With prospects for both a minimum wage hike and Neera Tanden’s becoming head of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB) dimming, the Biden administration has decided to ignore the minimum wage and go all in on the (rather unqualified and genuinely horrible person) Neera Tanden and ignore the plight of roughly 48 million people working for less than the proposed $15 per hour.
In their desperation, an old lawyer’s adage applies, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.“
In this case, pounding the table means, ignoring the reasons for the opposition, as venal and corrupt as they and playing the “Race Card,” which in this case means getting Americans of South Asian extraction riled up about this simply because Tanden is of South Asian extraction:
President Joe Biden’s aides are urging Asian American groups to mount a last-minute campaign to try to rescue his budget chief nominee, Neera Tanden, as her prospects for Senate confirmation dwindle.
Those groups are calling and sending letters to Senate offices and advocating for Tanden on social media to try to combat what they are calling “structural racism” and “institutional racism.”
Their efforts have been actively encouraged by the White House and presidential transition staff, which remains in place to help with Senate confirmations, along with the Democratic National Committee, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
This is not an issue of Race. If it were, Deb Haaland would have never gotten the nod, as indigenous Americans have always been further down in the racial hierarchy than pretty much everyone but Blacks and Hispanics.
Invoking racism is stupid and counter productive because it will not work and because it “wears out the batteries” on the tactic.
One of the things that I recall was her deep affection for turtles.
At one point, we had 17 turtles as pets in the house, roughly divided between Red Eared Terrapins and Eastern Box Turtles, (Separate habitats) with a few others thrown in. (Also iguanas and cats, but that’s another story)
Well, this story has me wondering how she would have reacted to this picture.
A listener in Medina, Ohio messaged to tell me that her local fire department rescued 10 turtles from a blaze and they made LIL TURTLE OXYGEN MASKS for them!! My heart truly can’t handle this ❤️🐢❤️ pic.twitter.com/idhAO9q9W6
