Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Oh, Yeah, Before I Forget

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Trump’s Crack Impeachment Lawyers Misspelled ‘United States’—Again

Former President Trump’s legal team seems to think proofreading is overrated. 

Hardly a week after submitting a legal brief for Trump’s looming Senate impeachment trial that misspelled the words “United States,” they made exactly the same blunder again on Monday in the pre-trial brief laying out their defense.

The 78-page brief referred to the country Trump used to lead as the “Unites States” on page 7. While falling short of perfect, the misstep still marked something of an improvement from their last go, when the team screwed up the name of the country twice, including on the first page.

“President’s Trump speech on January 6, 2021, was not an act encouraging an organized movement to overthrow the Unites States government,” the new document reads.

This is so surreal that Salvador Dali is shaking his head.

Amazon Union Vote in Alabama Proceeds

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Despite Amazon’s calls for a delay, and in person voting, the NLRB has ruled that the vote to unionize its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse is beginning now via mail.

Truth be told, Alabama is one of the least union friendly states in the nation, both by law and by culture, but it appears that Jeff Bezos and his merry band of psychopaths have been awful enough for long enough that there is a decent chance that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) will win this.

Of course, even if they do, I expect Amazon to keep this in court for years: 

It might be the most tracked shipment in Amazon history: 5,800 mail ballots are being sent out to the union-eligible workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, fulfillment center on Monday. In the coming weeks they’ll be used to decide the largest US union election at the 26-year-old company, the country’s second-largest employer. It’s an unlikely vote, coming from an unlikely site, but if the labor organizers win, the Bessemer warehouse, not yet a year old, will become the country’s first unionized Amazon facility and potentially a bellwether for the industry nationwide.

Alabama isn’t exactly known as a hotbed of labor organizing; it’s a right-to-work state with a union membership rate of 8 percent, nearly three points below the national average (itself near an all-time low). The Birmingham suburb of Bessemer, however, has a deep history of strong unions that haven’t been shy about striking. The Amazon facility sits atop land once owned by US Steel, a major employer in the region until the industry’s decline in the latter half of the 20th century. Workers at the mills there belonged to United Steelworkers, the largest industrial union in North America.

These days, the state is home to 12,000-plus poultry workers represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. When the pandemic hit, the RWDSU became a regular feature of local news reports about the safety protections it won for its workers. The group from Amazon who first contacted the RWDSU over the summer included workers who had been union members at previous jobs; some had friends and family in the RWDSU. “I truly believe that if we win,” says Joshua Brewer, an RWDSU organizer in Alabama who’s working on the Bessemer campaign, “it will be because grandparents and uncles and parents talked to these young folks who work out here and said, this helped me, and it’s a good thing.”

Employees at Amazon fulfillment centers are tasked with retrieving products from miles of shelves and quickly packing them into boxes that eventually make their way to customers’ doors. Part of the job stress, workers say, stems from the company’s highly automated tracking system. Cameras blanket the warehouses, and the company’s Time Off Task (TOT) system tracks every second workers aren’t picking, packing, and stowing to meet quotas, or “make rate.” Too much TOT is grounds for termination. Workers fear that if a family member falls ill or some bad lunch meat necessitates extra bathroom breaks, that could be it for their job. Human frailty seems “like a kink in their system,” says Brewer. Grievance procedures, which would allow workers due process and union representation in responding to discipline, rank high on workers’ list of demands, as do more frequent, scheduled rest periods.

I really hope that they win, but Amazon is going to the wall over this, so I am pessimistic.

“Nebraska, you’re going to hear, is a quite a judicial-thinking place.”

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“Nebraska, you’re going to hear, is a quite a judicial-thinking place.”

— Bruce Castor, Trump impeachment defense attorney pic.twitter.com/aADiTCivq2

— The Recount (@therecount) February 9, 2021

This Could be a Baseline for a Song

OK, the impeachment has started, and it appears that the inanity, and the inSanity, of the Trump legal team continues unabated.

These guys are a complete mind-f%$#.  (I miss profanity)

It’s like mainlining Tang and bat guano through a refrigerated metal straw up your nose.

I can’t even.

What a Surprise

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Countries that May Manufacture or Buy Sputnik V

In a world* where Covid-19 ravages the world, and no one can see a way out beyond giving taxpayer funded research to rent-seeking pharmaceutical companies, one nuclear armed nation’s vaccing manages to turn in good numbers without looting by private actors.

By, “One nuclear armed nation,” I do not mean the United States.  The idea of creation and distribution of medications without government subsidies is completely beyond the pale in this country.

I am referring to Russia, where the Sputnik vaccine is not showing effectiveness in excess of 90%, at a lower cost and without the handling issues of the mRNA vaccines being rolled out in the United States.

There is a precedent, the widespread popularity of the AK-47, which occurred because anyone could make it without IP concerns:

President Vladimir Putin’s announcement in August that Russia had cleared the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine for use before it even completed safety trials sparked skepticism worldwide. Now he may reap diplomatic dividends as Russia basks in arguably its biggest scientific breakthrough since the Soviet era.

Countries are lining up for supplies of Sputnik V after peer-reviewed results published in The Lancet medical journal this week showed the Russian vaccine protects against the deadly virus about as well as U.S. and European shots, and far more effectively than Chinese rivals.

At least 20 countries have approved the inoculation for use, including European Union member-state Hungary, while key markets such as Brazil and India are close to authorizing it. Now Russia is setting its sights on the prized EU market as the bloc struggles with its vaccination program amid supply shortages.

………

Its decision to name Sputnik V after the world’s first satellite whose 1957 launch gave the Soviet Union a stunning triumph against the U.S. to start the space race only underlined the scale of the significance Moscow attached to the achievement. Results from the late-stage trials of 20,000 participants reviewed in The Lancet showed that the vaccine has a 91.6% success rate.

………

Sputnik V uses a platform based on the adenovirus, which causes the common cold, and has been studied in vaccine development for decades, though its effectiveness is yet to be proven. AstroZeneca’s is similar, while drugs developed by Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech rely on a new technology, which uses genetic instructions in a nucleic acid molecule called mRNA to program a person’s cells to make the viral protein itself, triggering an immune response.

Unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, Sputnik V can be stored in a fridge rather than a freezer, making it easier to transport and distribute in poorer and hotter countries. At around $20 for a two-shot vaccination, it’s also cheaper than most Western alternatives. While more expensive than AstraZeneca, the Russian inoculation has shown higher efficacy than the U.K. vaccine.

The take-away here is not that Russia is some sort of biotech super-power, it clearly is not.

The take-away here is, or at least should be, that the US model, taxpayer financed research leading to private profits through additional government subsidies (patents) is not necessarily the best model to develop medical treatments.

*To quote Don LaFontaine.

Abolish the CBO

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In the 2019 they used 11 studies, and found the median “directly affected employment” elasticities (closely related to the own-wage elasticity of employment) of around -0.25. Then they multiplied by 1.5 to capture “long run” effects, getting -0.38. pic.twitter.com/thBqW6t0Cj

— Arindrajit Dube (@arindube) February 8, 2021

The Twitter thread gets wonkier.  Short version:  The CBO juiced their report

The Republican hack running the CBO just released a report saying that raising the minimum wage would create unemployment.

That’s news to me, since the overwhelming majority of studies show no such effect.

The CBO report also disappointed people whose studies were actually used in that report.It also people who study this for a living, who note that the CBO report is complete sh%$: (I miss profanity SO much)

………

Michael Reich, a prominent minimum-wage expert at the University of California at Berkeley whose work is cited by the CBO, disputed the report’s more pessimistic estimates.

“Studies have found that wage floors have minimal to low effect on level of jobs or for inflation,” he said on a call with reporters. “Minimum-wage increases are generally paid for by small price increases, mostly in restaurants, but restaurants have increased sales….When low-wage workers get a wage increase they put it to good use — to improve living standards of themselves and their families.”

Reich did his own estimate of the minimum-wage proposal earlier this month, which found that instead of creating a budget deficit, it would increase federal tax revenue by $65 billion a year. This was due largely to increases in payroll taxes from higher wages and a reduction in government spending on safety net programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which are heavily used by people earning below minimum wage and living in poverty.

The problem is not that the CBO is full of crap now, it is that it is ALWAYS full of sh%$, and this is by design.

The CBO and the power that it is given by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) through PAYGO rules is not, and has not, fulfilled its stated purpose, to give Congress accurate and timely budget projections and information.

Rather it is a place where bills that might inconvenience fat-cat donors go to die.

Good

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Finally, a court has ruled that in order for a DNA test to be admitted as evidence, the source code must be made available to the defense.

To my mind, any software used for prosecutions should be publicly available for review:

A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him.

Attorneys defending Corey Pickett, on trial for a fatal Jersey City shooting that occurred in 2017, have been trying to examine the source code of a software program called TrueAllele to assess its reliability. The software helped analyze a genetic sample from a weapon that was used to tie the defendant to the crime.

The maker of the software, Cybergenetics, has insisted in lower court proceedings that the program’s source code is a trade secret. The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour.

MATLAB is a pretty high level language, so if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, you are writing bloated code. 

Also, if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, I guarantee that there are bugs, and likely substantial ones, because most of those lines of code are there to handle edge (unlikely) cases, where the programmer has to make broad assumptions about the data.

………

On Wednesday, the appellate court sided with the defense [PDF] and sent the case back to a lower court directing the judge to compel Cybergenetics to make the TrueAllele code available to the defense team.

“Without scrutinizing its software’s source code – a human-made set of instructions that may contain bugs, glitches, and defects – in the context of an adversarial system, no finding that it properly implements the underlying science could realistically be made,” the ruling says.

Kit Walsh, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, hailed the appellate ruling. “No one should be imprisoned or executed based on secret evidence that cannot be fairly evaluated for its reliability, and the ruling in this case will help prevent that injustice,” she said in a blog post. If TrueAllele is found wanting, presumably that will not affect the dozen individuals said to have been exonerated by the software.

It should be noted that the studies “validating” TrueAllele have been conducted by Mark Perlin, and as such are suspect.

Also, though these are slightly different application, we already know that algorithms used for health care software, Zoom face detection, educational evaluations, and criminal sentencing are all explicitly racist.

It is no stretch to assume that an algorithm explicitly developed for police and prosecutors would be biased in their favor.

That is how you make sales.

Republican Family Values

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It’s good that we have people such as protecting our morality.

If they weren’t busy supervising our morals, they might actually be practicing theirs on a larger scale:

A former Republican Senate staffer was arrested in Washington on Friday on federal child pornography charges in what investigators said was a crackdown on an online group that traded numerous illicit files and videos in recent months.

Ruben Verastigui is accused of receiving and possessing child pornography between last April and this month, according to a criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The 27-year-old was arrested Friday evening at his apartment in Northeast Washington, where police executed a search warrant. Investigators said they found “several files of child pornography” on his cellphone, along with a chat conversation in which he allegedly discussed exchanging the files and videos. During an interview with investigators, Verastigui admitted to receiving some of the files, according to the complaint.

Verastigui worked as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference as recently as last July.

………

In one conversation in April, Verastigui allegedly told a user identified as “S-1” that pornography involving “babies” was his “absolute favorite.” The user later sent him a graphic video of child abuse, court records show, followed by nine more illicit clips the following day. During the same conversation, Verastigui asked that the user come to Washington “for the purpose of sexually abusing a minor,” records show.

Investigators said they identified Verastigui from a naked photo he took in his kitchen and sent to the chat. They said the details of the room and a tattoo visible on his left arm matched a picture from his Instagram account.

………

Verastigui was active in Republican politics, most recently working as a communications manager for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, which supports Republicans who back clean-energy legislation. He was no longer employed at the organization as of Saturday, according to a statement provided by spokesman Ross Gillfillan.

………

He also worked as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference as recently as July, meaning some of his alleged offenses took place while he was a congressional staffer. A conference spokesperson told The Washington Post in an email: “We have just learned about this investigation and arrest. The individual has not worked at SRC since July 2, 2020.”

Before that, congressional records show that Verastigui worked as a digital director for the GOP staff of the U.S. Joint Economic Committee in 2018. A spokesperson for former committee chairman Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A LinkedIn page for Ruben Verastigui says he also worked as a senior designer for the Republican National Committee in 2017 and 2018, designing social media ads for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee and Donald J. Trump for President. A committee spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

………

According to the LinkedIn page bearing the name Ruben Verastigui, the user was involved in several antiabortion rights organizations before his work in government, including March for Life, Students for Life America and Live Action.

Well, with THIS guy, we know why he wants more babies born, he wants more explicit photos.   **shudder**

Students for Life confirmed Verastigui worked there from Sept. 5, 2014, to Dec. 2, 2016, after he was a student involved with the group.

………

At the 2013 March for Life rally, Verastigui was introduced as the president of his college’s Students for Life group, according to a C-SPAN video of the antiabortion rights event.

“We are the generation that has been led to believe that the killing of innocent pre-born children is okay,” he told the crowd. “How many of us are missing brothers, sisters, cousins, friends because of abortion?”

We’ve hears a lot of reports of fowl foul play among Republicans, and this one is worse, though tragically less strange than the auto-asphyxia death of a Jerry Fallwell ally a few years back.

So Says the ASSLaw Fellow

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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

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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.

16 Tons

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“Bad” reason why unemployment rate fell

— Liz Ann Sonders (@LizAnnSonders) February 5, 2021

The Denominator Fell


The scariest jobs chart ever

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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

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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%.

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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.