People who believe China is responsible for America’s coronavirus problems are even dumber than people who believe Russia is responsible for Trump’s presidency. https://t.co/Fx9xSjI8Ag

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 1, 2020

I agree on both.

Even if the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign was the most egregious since (checks notes) Winston Churchill in 1940, Clinton lost in 2016, as she did in 2008, because of the incompetence, self-dealing, and corruption of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

Even if China was opaque on Covid-19, and it was, this does not excuse the fact that it was clear that actions needed to be taken by mid January, but the response was run by a bunch people who were dedicated to burning the very idea of government down in addition to being, “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”

DDoSecrets has been established to facilitate sharing secrets, and Twitter promptly banned them and declared the site a virus risk:

For the past year, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sat in a London jail awaiting extradition to the US. This week, the US Justice Department piled on yet more hacking conspiracy allegations against him, all related to his decade-plus at the helm of an organization that exposed reams of government and corporate secrets to the public. But in Assange’s absence, another group has picked up where WikiLeaks left off—and is also picking new fights.

For roughly the past year and a half, a small group of activists known as Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has quietly but steadily released a stream of hacked and leaked documents, from Russian oligarchs’ emails to the stolen communications of Chilean military leaders to shell company databases. Late last week, the group unleashed its most high-profile leak yet: BlueLeaks, a 269-gigabyte collection of more than a million police files provided to DDoSecrets by a source aligned with the hacktivist group Anonymous, spanning emails, audio files, and interagency memos largely pulled from law enforcement “fusion centers,” which serve as intelligence-sharing hubs. According to DDoSecrets, it represents the largest-ever release of hacked US police data. It may put DDoSecrets on the map as the heir to WikiLeaks’ mission—or at least the one it adhered to in its earlier, more idealistic years—and the inheritor of its never-ending battles against critics and censors.

“Our role is to archive and publish leaked and hacked data of potential public interest,” writes the group’s cofounder, Emma Best, a longtime transparency activist, in a text message interview with WIRED. “We want to inspire people to come forward, and release accurate information regardless of its source.”

………

For DDoSecrets, the firefight has already started. On Tuesday evening, as media attention grew around the BlueLeaks release, Twitter banned the group’s account, citing a policy that it doesn’t allow the publication of hacked information. The company followed up with an even more drastic step, removing tweets that link to the DDoSecrets website, which maintains a searchable database of all of its leaks, and suspending some accounts retroactively for linking to the group’s material.

Best says DDoSecrets, an organization with no address and whose shoestring budget runs mostly on donations, is still strategizing a response and the best workaround to publicize its leaks—potentially shifting to Telegram or Reddit—but has no intention of letting the ban halt its work. “‘Too dangerous for Twitter’ is some Nixonian sh%$ I didn’t expect,” Best says.

Their superpower here appears to be that they are not assholes, as Assange of Wikileaks is, and that they have some more objective standards.

As to BlueLeaks, it is pretty big deal:

The documents reveal what information the police have on people — it’s even searchable by police badge number.

The result is shocking.

The leak revealed incidents of the FBI forwarding Tweets they deemed “threatening” to police departments, classifying protest medics and lawyers as “extremists”, and Google providing detailed information about its users on request.

As an aside, even if you do not want to read BlueLeaks, I strongly recommend that you download the file for 2 reasons:

• Every copy makes it harder to put the genie back into the bottle.
• The nature of the method of distribution, Bit Torrent, means that if you download the document, you are also make the document more available to other downloaders.

Here is the leak for DDoSecrets, and you can try to access the files driectly from the web site, but this will hammer the site, so I recommend that you download the whole file via Bit Torrent.

Note however that the file is large enough that many Bit Torrent clients will not work, so I would recommend Transmission, and you can download the portable version, which does not require an installation program or admin privileges.

And while we do not have final results, there are way too many absentee and mail-in ballots for that, we do have some results.

Final results should be available in the next week or so:

• Amy McGrath is leading Charlie Booker by about 8%, in the Kentucky Senate race, so it’s likely that Schumer’s candidate about nothing will go on to lose to Mitch McConnell.
• Incumbent Carolyn Maloney is up by 2% over Suraj Patel in NY-12 which firmly places this one in the, “Wait for the absentee ballots,” category.
• Ritchie Torres has beaten Ruben Diaz in NY-15, which is great, because Diaz (with the encouragement of Andrew Cuomo) caucused with the Republicans in the New York State Senate to prevent Democratic Party control of the legislative body.  (Also, Diaz was endorsed by the cop union, which makes this even more delicious.)
• Jamal Bowman has crushed incumbent Eliot Engel in NY-16, ending the latter’s 30+ year tenure of the latter in the House of Representatives, where he conclusively demonstrated that he never gave a sh%$ about his district.
• Mondaire Jones has beaten Adam Schleifer in NY-17, despite the latter spending $4 million of his own money.

As an FYI, AOC crushed her Republican until a few months ago Wall Street opponent.

Case in point, how meat packing plants became a petri dish for Covid-19.

With no constraints on their behavior beyond their own desire for profit, they have become a menace to their employees and their communities:

………

“I wasn’t going to get tested, because on Saturday they were going to give out half a slab of rib-eye, and I really wanted it,” she says. “I thought, I’ll get tested on Monday.” Morales says her husband eventually talked her into getting screened that Friday. She tested positive for Covid-19 and didn’t get to collect the prized meat, though she did make a full recovery. Two months later, there were six Covid-19 deaths associated with the plant and more than 900 infections. (The company disputed those numbers but did not provide its own.) While this was going on, managers at multiple JBS plants were promising $600 to workers with no unexcused absences.

………

The federal agency that does have the power to regulate conditions in meat plants is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the Department of Labor. But with its staff cut by the Trump administration and its inspection activity sharply curtailed, the agency hasn’t issued a single enforceable order for what meat plants should do to prevent workers from contracting Covid-19. As usual, meatpacking companies are on their own, unencumbered by regulators they’ve assiduously kept at bay.

Together, JBS SA and three other big U.S. producers, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef, control more than 80% of the U.S. beef market. There have long been allegations of price fixing, driving up costs at the supermarket. For the past decade, meatpackers and processors have spent close to $5 million annually on lobbying, up from only $542,000 in 1999. The industry spent $1.3 million on the 2018 election, with two-thirds of that going to Republican candidates, according to an analysis of campaign finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics. After Tyson ran full-page newspaper ads and a statement on its website warning of food shortages if meat and poultry plants were forced to shutter, President Trump signed an executive order to keep them open.

In the interest of averting cases like Morales’s, the CDC warned JBS on April 20 to stop offering inducements for workers to come in, but JBS ultimately didn’t follow the agency’s advice. OSHA, for its part, ordered its staff in April to do in-person inspections only of hospitals and other front-line facilities during the pandemic—not meat plants—because health-care employees and first responders were deemed to be the only workers at sufficient risk of contracting the virus to warrant immediate investigation. All other OSHA probes were to proceed by phone and fax. Even in normal times, OSHA and its state partners have just 2,100 inspectors, who are responsible for the well-being of 130 million U.S. workers at more than 8 million work sites. That translates to one compliance officer for every 59,000 workers.

………

A safer, less deadly meat industry could be fashioned through widespread legislative and regulatory reform. Consumers, too, could force change with mass boycotts—or if they were willing to spend more money on less meat. But in the absence of pressure, the industry has no incentive to change.

Covid-19 has become just another workplace hazard in one of America’s deadliest industries.

………

Historically, politicians and regulators have rewarded the industry with autonomy and lax regulations. As its labor supply dwindled, National Beef appealed to Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Mike Beam to muscle the union on its behalf. “Our request is that they hear from the Governor’s office about the importance and special responsibility of food production workers and to ask the Union to encourage its folks to continue to report for work,” Simon McGee, National Beef’s chief financial officer, wrote to Beam in an email.

In Nebraska, Governor Pete Ricketts directed departments not to release Covid-19 case statistics at meat plants, citing concerns about privacy and the quality of the data. Cattle production is the leading industry in the state, where cows outnumber humans 4 to 1 and license plates proudly boast that it’s “the beef state.” Among the donors who’ve supported Ricketts’s career are Tyson Foods Inc., Smithfield Foods Inc., and the Nebraska Cattlemen.

This is why we need real regulation and real antitrust, and not just in the meat packing industry.

A policewoman in Georgia, completely lost her sh%$ because she had to wait a few minutes to get her Egg McMuffin.

And this woman has a badge, a gun, and power to arrest people.

Protect and serve, protect and serve:

There’s not much sympathy online for this cop crying over an Egg McMuffin.

A tearful video of a Georgia police officer accusing a McDonald’s MCD, +0.24% of withholding her breakfast order went viral on Twitter TWTR, -0.83% on Wednesday, leading the local owners of the burger joint to apologize to the officer and clarify to MarketWatch that she “was never denied service.”

A Twitter user who calls herself “Ann” and identifies as a conservative Trump supporter in her profile posted the clip of an officer she says is named “Stacey” who sobs while recounting how the restaurant workers kept her waiting and withheld part of her breakfast order. Stacey suggests this was done on purpose as part of the growing backlash against officers and the calls for police reform in the weeks since Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were killed during their encounters with law enforcement.

“Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds,” Ann writes in her post. “She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop.” MarketWatch reached out to Ann to verify the authenticity and origins of the video, but she did not respond by press time. But the local McDonald’s owner/operators confirmed the incident to MarketWatch.

Ann’s post had already been viewed 4.5 million times and retweeted more than 50,000 times by the time this story posted, renewing a heated online debate about the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.

The clip, which runs just under two-and-a-half minutes, features Stacey explaining that she placed a mobile order for an Egg McMuffin meal. But her order wasn’t ready when she went to pick it up.

“And I’m waiting. And I’m waiting. And I’m waiting,” she says, noting that she was hungry because she had not eaten for a very long time. She was told to pull over to the side, and an employee eventually came over and gave her a coffee. But Stacey’s order was supposed to include an Egg McMuffin and a hash brown, as well.

“That’s all she hands me is the coffee,” Stacey says, breaking down into tears. “I said, ‘Don’t bother with the food because right now I’m too nervous to take it!’ It doesn’t matter how many hours I’ve been up. It doesn’t matter what I’ve done for anyone. Right now, I’m too nervous to take a meal from McDonald’s because I can’t see it being made!”

She pleaded with people watching the video to, “Please, just give us a break. I don’t know how much more I can take.” She added that she has never had such anxiety in all of her years of service, and asked people to say “thank you” when they see cops.

Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop😢😡 Come on America. We are better than this. pic.twitter.com/IcudsNfVLY

— 🌷🇺🇸Ann🇺🇸🌷🐇 (@tkag2020_ann) June 17, 2020

I think mandatory annual, or perhaps semi-annual, psychological evaluations of cops should be added to the agenda in addition to defunding the police.

There was a general election in Ferguson, Missouri, and they have elected their first black, and first woman, as mayor.

Maybe now, they will stop preying on their poor black citizens for revenue.

Also, in a development that leaves me with mixed emotions, racist dirtbag Steve King lost his Congressional primary in Iowa. I’m glad that he’s gone, but it will make it harder to flip the seat to the Democrats in November.

Finally, in the “I’m so glad that I no longer live in Baltimore City,” news, fresh from a probation stint for corruption plea, Sheila Dixon has apparently been elected again as Mayor of Baltimore.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the case, was caught using gift cards that were intended to be used for poor children’s Christmas gifts.

Putting the “Petty” in petty corruption, I guess.

It turns out that as a result of anthropogenic climate change, the tundra is turning into a real-world version of the fire swamp.

There has been an upsurge in smoldering fires persisting through the winter to reemerge in the spring:

The bitterly cold Arctic winter typically snuffs out the seasonal wildfires that erupt in this region. But every once in a while, a wildfire comes along that refuses to die.

These blazes, known as “zombie fires” or “holdover fires,” can burrow into the rich organic material beneath the surface, such as the vast peatlands that ring the Arctic, and smolder under the snowpack throughout the frigid winter.

With the Siberian Arctic seeing record warm conditions in recent weeks and months, scientists monitoring Arctic wildfire trends are becoming more convinced that some of the blazes erupting in the Arctic this spring are actually left over from last summer.

………

The drying and burning of Arctic peatlands has major consequences for the planet as a whole. Northern peatlands contain more stored carbon than rainforests do, Waddington said. He compared fires that smolder during the winter without flames, only to reignite in the spring, to scenes from the fire swamp in the 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” which features bursts of flame emerging from underground.

(emphasis mine)

This would be cool, if it weren’t presaging the destruction of the world.

Teardown and repair website iFixit has just posted what its CEO Kyle Wiens says is “the most comprehensive online resource for medical repair professionals.” The new database contains dedicated sections for clinical, laboratory, and medical support equipment, in addition to numerous other categories of devices. It also provides more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of medical device manufacturers.

Wiens says the effort began with a crowdsourcing campaign to collect repair information for hospital equipment, with a focus on “ventilator documentation, anesthesia systems, and respiratory analyzers — devices widely used to support COVID-19 patients.” But the effort grew from there, spanning more than two months as iFixit added dozens more staff members to the project; began talking to more biomedical technicians, doctors, and nurses about their day-to-day needs; and started collecting and cataloging information from libraries and other sources.

“Hospitals are having trouble getting service information to fix medical equipment — and it’s not just a COVID-19 problem. We’ve heard countless stories from biomedical technicians (biomeds, for short) about how medical device manufacturers make their jobs more difficult by restricting access to repair information,” Wiens writes in iFixit’s blog post about the new database. “Thanks to travel limitations, the problem is bigger than ever. Manufacturer service reps can’t keep pace with the growing demand for repair of critical hospital equipment. Even if they could, they can’t respond as quickly as the biomeds, already at the front lines.” 

Needless to say, OEMs hate right to repair, because it cuts out a profit stream.

To them, I say, f%$# you, without lube.

While I am sure that members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) and their consultants thought that it was a good idea to pick a “moderate” candidate to replace Katherine “Katie” Hill.

I can just imagine the consultants extolling an uninspiring and timid candidate, Christy Smith, who opposes Medicare for all, takes PAC money, and is squishy on climate change, and in a special election, one where bringing out the base is paramount, she gets demolished by double digits.

I understand why members of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) favor uninspiring candidates who do not make waves; because they don’t make waves, they rake in the bucks, and require massive bucks in an attempt to make the sow’s ear into a silk push.

And the consultants, and their friends in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) get a percentage of the media buy.

Ka Ching.

Unfortunately, it also means that you lose elections, but those consultants need to make their payments on their Tesla Model X’s.

Wow. Identical twins drank from the same glass, 1 got Covid and the other is totally fine. Don’t have the article handy but, if you google “2 girls 1 cup”, it should come up.

— Mike Ellis (@TheOnlyMike_E) May 12, 2020

Public service announcement DON’T GOOGLE THIS if you do not understand the reference.

Just don’t.

The man leading Sweden’s coronavirus response says the country’s elevated death toll “really came as a surprise to us.”

Dr. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, appeared on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” on Tuesday, when he described the country’s controversial approach.

“We never really calculated with a high death toll initially, I must say,” he said.

“We calculated on more people being sick, but the death toll really came as a surprise to us.”

As of Tuesday, Sweden reported more than 2,700 COVID-19 deaths and more than 23,000 infections. That death toll is far higher than its Nordic neighbors’ and many other countries that locked down.

This was pretty much a lead pipe cinch from day one.

Covid-19 is ferociously contagious, and not particularly amenable to treatment,  so if you have more cases, you have more deaths.

Q.E.D.

This is a good thing. It is clear that this deal smells to high heaven:

ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the Internet’s domain name system, has given itself another two weeks to decide whether to allow control of the .org domain to be sold to private equity firm Ethos Capital. The decision comes after ICANN received a blizzard of letters from people opposed to the transaction, including California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Becerra’s letter was significant because ICANN is incorporated in California. That means it’s Becerra’s job to make sure that ICANN is living up to the commitments in its articles of incorporation, which promise that ICANN will operate “for the benefit of the Internet community as a whole.”

Becerra questioned whether ICANN was really doing that. “There is mounting concern that ICANN is no longer responsive to the needs of its stakeholders,” he wrote.

………

California’s attorney general pointed to several specific concerns about the transaction. One was the shadowy nature of the proposed buyer, Ethos Capital. “Little is known about Ethos Capital and its multiple proposed subsidiaries,” Becerra writes. Ethos Capital, he said, has “refused to produce responses to many critical questions posted by the public and Internet community.”

Ethos Capital’s plan is to buy the Public Interest Registry (PIR) from its current parent organization, the nonprofit Internet Society. To help finance the sale, Ethos will saddle PIR with $300 million in debt—a common tactic in the world of leveraged buyouts. Becerra warns that this tactic could endanger the financial viability of the PIR—especially in light of the economic uncertainty created by the coronavirus.

………

Becerra ends his letter with a warning: “This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community.”

This whole thing smells of self-dealing, which is contrary to US non-profit law, California non-profit law, and ICANN’s own rules.

Shut it down.

pic.twitter.com/0PmTiu6kXp

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) April 3, 2020

It’s funny because it’s true.

Italy is one of the countries hardest hit by the corona virus.

One of the hardest hit cities in Italy is Nembro.

Now the Mayor of Nembro and the CEO of a chain of Italian clinic have done an analysis of excess deaths indicating that in Italy, where testing and reporting is FAR more extensive than in the US, deaths from Covid-19 are at least 4 times more than reported.

It should be noted that in unsettled situations like wars and plagues, excess deaths is the generally the best way to get accurate numbers:

Nembro, one of the municipalities most affected by Covid-19, should have had – under normal conditions – about 35 deaths. 158 people were registered dead this year by the municipal offices. But the number of deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 is 31.

In Nembro the almost deserted streets, the absent traffic, a strange silence is sometimes interrupted by the siren of an ambulance that carries with it the anxiety and worry that fill the hearts of all in these weeks. In Nembro every member of the community continuously receives news that he never wanted to hear, every day we lose people who were part of our lives and our community. Nembro, in the province of Bergamo, is the municipality most affected by Covid-19 in relation to the population. We do not know exactly how many people have been infected, but we know that the number of deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 is 31. We are two physicists: one who became an entrepreneur in the health sector, the other a mayor, in close contact with a very cohesive territory, where we know each other very well. We noticed that something in these official numbers did not come back right, and we decided – together – to check. We looked at the average of the deaths in the municipality of previous years, in the period January – March. Nembro should have had – under normal conditions – about 35 deaths. 158 people were registered dead this year by the municipal offices. That is 123 more than the average. Not 31 more, as it should have been according to the official numbers of the coronavirus epidemic.

The difference is enormous and cannot be a simple statistical deviation. Demographic statistics have their «constancies» and annual averages change only when completely «new» phenomena arrive. In this case, the number of abnormal deaths compared to the average that Nembro recorded in the period of time in consideration is equal to 4 times those officially attributed to Covid-19. If a comparison is made between the deaths that have occurred and the same period in previous years, the anomaly is even more evident: there is a peak of «other» deaths in correspondence with that of the official deaths from Covid-19.

It may be that some of these from other causes that occurred because of an overloaded healthcare system, but the overwhelming majority of those excess deaths are from Covid-19.

These numbers also set the fatality rate at an absolute minimum of 1%.

Not good.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn has announced that he going short in a big way on commercial real estate.

Private equity has gone big into commercial and rental real estate, and so I am not surprised that ht thinks that this is unsustainable:

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn told CNBC on Friday he expects the U.S. commercial real estate market will crumble, much like the broader housing market collapse of 2008.

“You’re going to have this blow up, too, and nobody’s even looking at it,” Icahn said on “Halftime Report.”

Icahn said he is shorting the commercial mortgage bond market and it’s his “biggest position by far.”

Short selling is a bet against stocks or bonds, with shorts borrowing shares from an investment bank and selling them in hopes that the asset will lose value. If it does drop, shorts buy the shares back at a cheaper price and return them to the bank, turning a profit on the difference.

Icahn’s short is specific to credit default swaps, or “CDS,” which are assets that back mortgages of corporate offices and shopping malls. Icahn said the housing market bubble of 2008 has “happened all over again” due to loans made in 2012 to shopping malls and more.

Look out below.

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford, retired a few months ago, and now has secured a lucrative sinecure with Lockheed-Martin hawking the F-35 mistake jet:

In 2015, things weren’t looking great for the Marine Corps’ F-35B fighter jet. Reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Department of Defense inspector general had found dozens of problems with the aircraft. Engine failures, software bugs, supply chain issues, and fundamental design flaws were making headlines. The program was becoming synonymous in the press with “boondoggle.”

Lockheed Martin, the program’s lead contractor, desperately needed a win.

Luckily for Lockheed, it had a powerful ally in the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Joseph Dunford. Five years later, Dunford would be out of the service and ready to collect his first Lockheed Martin paycheck as a member of its board of directors.

………

On September 30, 2019, Dunford, the military’s highest ranked official, stepped down from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He had served in the Marine Corps since 1977, working his way up to the highest tier of the armed services over 42 years.

Just four months and 11 days later, he joined the Pentagon’s top contractor, Lockheed Martin, as a director on the board.

In announcing Dunford’s hire, a January press release from Lockheed Martin quotes CEO Marillyn Hewson: “General Dunford’s service to the nation at the highest levels of military leadership will bring valuable insight to our board.”

Dunford’s consistent cheerleading of the F-35 and his subsequent hiring at its manufacturer create the perception of a conflict of interest and raised the eyebrows of at least one former senior military official.

“Here he is having been an advocate for it, having pressed it, having pushed for it … and now he’s going to work for the company that makes the aircraft, that just, to me, stinks to high heavens,” retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as special assistant to Colin Powell when he led the Joint Chiefs, told POGO.

This should be illegal.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger has ordered all Confederate-related paraphernalia to be removed from Marine Corps installations, his spokesman confirmed on Wednesday.

………

The document did not say when all of the Confederate-related paraphernalia needed to be removed by.

Berger’s spokesman confirmed to Task & Purpose that the commandant had sent a directive to his senior staff ordering all installations to get rid of symbols of the Confederate States of America.

The adoration of people who tried to destroy the United States by some of the military needs to be nipped in the bud.

First, I now have an explanation as to why some of the more ordinary statements about inequality and the like were booed by the debate crowd, it is likely that Bloomberg bought a significant portion of the tickets, because they cost in excess of $1,700:

Candidates on the debate stage were markedly rowdier on Tuesday — and they weren’t the only ones. Throughout the night, the audience seemingly was, too.

In moment after moment, including when Sen. Bernie Sanders pressed former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg on the overwhelming support he receives from billionaires, the audience responded effusively with boos. Notably, in several instances, the reaction seemed to favor Bloomberg, who was once again confronted by multiple candidates over issues including “stop and frisk” and alleged sexist comments.

The apparent support for Bloomberg from the crowd raised questions about whether there was an outsized presence of his supporters in the audience, given the extensive cheers he seemed to garner at the event compared to the Nevada debate. Speculation on Twitter was only amplified by a local news article that went viral, which claimed tickets started at a whopping $1,750 to $3,200 for donors looking to sponsor a package of events, including the debate. An update was later published to indicate that these ticket options were removed from the Charleston County Democrats’ website.

This is actually kind of reassuring. My first take was that South Carolina Democrats were a bunch or retrograde morons.

Bribery and corruption actually sounds better.

My second take is that Buttigieg’s sneering attack on 60’s revolutionary politics was effectively an attack on the Stonewall riots:

After Sanders responded by calling for nuance in US views toward foreign leaders — and by tying his views on Cuba to former President Barack Obama’s stance on the country — Buttigieg argued against Sanders’s position and claimed it demonstrates why the senator is unfit to be the Democratic presidential nominee:

The only way you can [restore American credibility] is to actually win the presidency, and I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump with his nostalgia for the social order of the ’50s and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolution politics of the ’60s. This is not about what coups were happening in the 1970s or 80s, this is about the future. This is about 2020.

(emphasis mine)

The, “Revolution politics of the ’60s,” ended the Vietnam war, gave us civil rights, and was the genesis of the gay rights via among other things, the Stonewall Riots.

Buttigieg would never have served in the military, or married his husband without those pesky 60s revolutionaries.

Seriously, Mayor Mayo is a poster child for unconscious privilege.

Speaking of privilege,  Chris “Tweety” Matthews’ grilling of Elizabeth Warren about her challenging Bloomberg on his treatment of women, because Matthews cannot imagine believing the woman, is one for the ages:

During the presidential debate in South Carolina on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren used some of her speaking time to remind voters that former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg allegedly once told a pregnant employee of his to “kill it”—“it” as in the fetus. Longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews was, by all indications, appalled by what he heard. But it wasn’t the part about Bloomberg’s alleged discrimination that seemed to disgust him—it was that Warren was making such a fuss about how she believed the woman was telling the truth.

Why does Tweety have a job?

If Bloomberg can’t handle being asked by Warren how many NDAs he’s had signed, just imagine when Trump offers him a box to stand on and asks him how it feels to have to spend $4 million per friend.

—Matt Taibbi

 Tru dat.  At least Trump knows how to attack back.

This is some more commentary regarding L’affaire Roger Stone, specifically, Donald Trump’s tweet criticizing the sentence that the prosecutors recommended, the subsequent amended (reduced) sentencing recommendation that came straight from Barr’s office, and the withdrawal of the entire prosecution team in protest.

William Barr actually gave an interview stating that Trump’s tweets make it difficult for him to do his job.

In what is a profoundly depressing, is that the mainstream press has presented this as an example of the integrity of the Attorney General, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Even right wing knuckle dragger Laura Ingraham understood what was being said, “Barr was basically telling Trump, ‘don’t worry, I got this’.”

Barr is telling Trump to shut the f%$# up while he finishes the coverup.

This is not occurring in isolation, Barr is looking to sabotage the case against Michael Flynn in the sane way.

William Barr is not, and has never, functioned as an Attorney General.

He is Donald Trump’s consigliere, just as he was George H.W. Bush’s consigliere and covered up Bush’s role in Iran Contra.

I do not believe that William Barr needs to resign as AG, I believe that he needs to be frog-marched out of the Department of Justice in handcuffs.