Year: 2017

This Must Have Been What It Was Like to Watch Mort Sahl Implode in the 1960s

No Comments

Stephen Colbert Opens Up a Can of Whup Ass on Rachel Maddow

I haven’t watched Rachel Maddow since she gleefully revealed the straw poll of super delegates just before the California primary.

It wasn’t the revelation per se, all of NBC clearly had orders to push the story, it was the glee with which she was telling California voters that that didn’t matter.

Lately though, she has been going tinfoil hat in a way reminiscent of Mort Sahl’s decidedly unfunny fixation on the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission report, which wrecked the career of what had been the most promising comedian of the late 1950s.

It’s been Russophobic baiting that would be worthy of the late, and unlamented, Roy Cohn.

Now she’s completely jumped the shark in revealing Donald Trump’s 2005 1040 form, both pages, no details, and it reveals that he paid about 25% of his income in taxes.

It’s been described as a, “Cynical, self-defeating spectacle,” and the reporter who obtained the document, David Cay Johnston, said that he could not be sure that Trump hadn’t leaked the tax returns himself.

Think about it:  After over a year of allegations that he was basically broke, and that he paid no taxes, we discover, at least in 2005, he earned over $150 million, proving that he’s really rich, not fake rich, and that he actually paid a tax rate that makes him look honest.

It really is pathetic, as Stephen Colbert’s devastating parody of her clearly shows.

My theory is that Hillary supporters know that the f%$#ed up, but are unable to admit their guilt, and it’s driving them cray-cray, but I’m an engineer, not a psychiatrist, dammit!*

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Quote of the Day

No Comments

The issue isn’t that one small rate hike will destroy the economy, it’s that rate hikes like this are the Fed’s way of signalling that they will never let wages go up again.

—Duncan “Atrios” Black on the Federal Reserve’s 250 basis point (¼%) rate hike.

He is absolutely correct.

It is the official policy of the Fed, and much of the US government, to suppress wages of working people.

Either inflation or deficit concerns are the excuse.

This Is a Bright Line That Has Been Crossed

No Comments
You can argue about whether or not the special forces inserted into Syria have a combat role or not.

Personally, I think that the whole “they are just training forces” dodge is a canard.

That being said, when you move in artillery units with their guns, you are involved in the ground war, period, full stop:

The Pentagon has deployed several hundred Marines to northern Syria, the Washington Post and CNN reported this week. Their mission: firing long-range artillery to help recapture Raqqa, ISIS’s self-proclaimed capital city.

The Marines are equipped with M777 howitzers, which can fire GPS-guided explosives up to 25 miles.

That’s a big change from the “train, advise, and assist” role U.S. forces have been playing so far — although as with many previous troop deployments to Iraq and Syria, it was not debated, let alone authorized, by Congress.

But the White House press secretary brushed off a question about the move, saying that sending “several hundred advisers” did not amount to “hostile action.”

Right-wing radio host John Fredericks asked Sean Spicer on Thursday whether Trump was committed to seeking congressional authorization for new deployments.

“I think there’s a big difference between an authorization of war than [sic] sending a few hundred advisers,” Spicer replied. “And I think most in Congress would probably agree with that as well. I think that’s a big difference between a hostile action and going in to address some certain concerns, whether it’s certain countries in the Middle East or elsewhere.”

Spicer referred the question to the Department of Defense. But when reached by The Intercept, a Pentagon spokesperson disputed Spicer’s characterization.

“This is fire support,” said Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a public affairs officer for the Marine Corps, explaining that the new deployment would fire long-range artillery in an assault on Raqqa. “They will be providing partner support for the Syrian Democratic Forces.”

This is unequivocally a combat role.  This is boots on the ground.

This if f%$#ing artillery, aka the “King of the Battlefield.”

We are in for a world of hurt here.

Linkage

1 Comment

This video details how the Democrats are devoid of any guiding principles, because it has been, “hollowed out by corporate money.” (Warning, frequent use of the s-word and the f-word)


Ht JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the video.

Oh, Snap!

No Comments

The Congressional Budget Office (has scored Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement bill, and says that it would strip health insurance from 24 million people.

Rather predictably, the Republicans completely lose their sh%$, and attack the CBO chief that they themselves appointed:

An hour after the Congressional Budget Office released its dire assessment of the GOP Obamacare plan, Donald Trump’s top health official went on the attack.

“We disagree strenuously with the report,” Tom Price said. “The CBO report’s coverage numbers defy logic.”

That initial Republican assault on Monday was the first of many that amounted to dismissing their own scorekeeper.

Left unmentioned by Price, Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary: When he was in Congress, he recommended the CBO’s current director, Keith Hall, for the job. Hall took the helm at the CBO in April 2015, chosen by Republican House and Senate leaders to provide advice to a GOP-controlled Congress.

Obamacare sucks, the Republican proposal sucks even more, and the pre-2009 state of affairs sucked even more.

This might explain why the ACA hasn’t created a groundswell of political support for the Democrats, “We suck a little bit less,” which these days seems to be the motto for the Dems, just does not motivate voters these days.

It’s Official

No Comments

The objections of the Lords were turned back, and Parliament has authorized Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with a largely free hand:

Parliament has passed the Brexit bill, paving the way for the government to trigger Article 50 so the UK can leave the European Union.

Peers backed down over the issues of EU residency rights and a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal after their objections were overturned by MPs.

The bill is expected to receive Royal Assent and become law on Tuesday.

This means Theresa May is free to push the button on withdrawal talks – now expected in the last week of March.

This is not going to the path to prosperity that the Brexit supporters, nor the disaster that Brussels, Berlin, and Paris hope it to be, but will be a clusterf%$#, and it is going to be a mess.

In 5 years it will have sorted itself out, and, and other EU members will see that the UK isn’t a post apocalyptic wasteland, and they might consider edging for the door, particularly if the Germans continue to run things.

Do You Want some Cheese with that Wine?

No Comments
Former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory is having a sad, because nobody wants to hire someone whose name is synonymous with bigotry. (He will forever be associated with the infamous bathroom bill)

Here’s how to fix this, don’t be a bigot in the first place:

Former Gov. Pat McCrory says the backlash against House Bill 2 is making some employers reluctant to hire him but he’s currently doing consulting and advisory board work.

McCrory has been appearing frequently in interviews with national media outlets to defend the controversial LGBT law, but he hasn’t announced what’s next for his career. In a podcast interview recently with WORLD, an Asheville-based evangelical Christian news website, McCrory talked about his challenges on the job market.

The former Republican governor says HB2 “has impacted me to this day, even after I left office. People are reluctant to hire me, because, ‘oh my gosh, he’s a bigot’ – which is the last thing I am.”

McCrory explained more about his current situation in an interview Monday evening with The News & Observer.

“I’ve currently accepted several opportunities in business to do work that I’d done prior to becoming governor in consulting and advisory board positions, and I’ve also been exploring other opportunities in academia, nonprofits and government,” he said. “And I’ll hopefully be making some of those decisions in the near future.”

McCrory declined to name the companies he’s working for. But the former governor said that he’s been considered for part-time university teaching positions – he wouldn’t say where – but that academic leaders “have shown reluctance because of student protests.”

HB2 was bigotry, and you endorsed it, and supported it at every opportunity.

You are a bigot, perhaps tyh best known bigot in North Carolina, and these days, people don’t want to be publicly associated with bigots.

You had a choice, and you went with folks who hate.

Live with the consequences.

I Certainly Hope So

No Comments

In the annals of White House press corps(e) there has been a lot of whining.

Now it appears that some of this “august” assemblage is wonder if Donald Trump is just f%$#ing with them.

If this is the case, I cannot conceive of a more deserving group of  dissolute reprobates.

It appears that the administration is not respecting the sacred seating chart:

………

 The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, in the West Wing, has seven rows of seven seats. The Associated Press, Reuters, and the biggest TV networks have reserved seats in the front row; blogs like Politico and Real Clear Politics are near the middle; BuzzFeed and the BBC are in the back. The seating chart is the purview of the White House Correspondents’ Association, an independent board of journalists who, with the sombre secrecy of a papal conclave, assess news organizations according to factors such as regularity of coverage and centrality to the national discourse.

 There are also correspondents who might be called floaters—those who have White House credentials but no assigned seat. Some floaters work for outlets that are too new to have been included in the most recent seating chart; others work for outlets that are marginal or disreputable. When press briefings are half empty, floaters can find vacant seats. In the early days of the Trump Administration, when each day’s briefing is oversubscribed, floaters pack the aisles, angling for a spot visible from the podium. The paradigmatic example of a floater is Raghubir Goyal, an amiable, somewhat absent-minded man in his sixties. Goyal claims to represent the India Globe, a newspaper that, as far as anyone can tell, is defunct. Nevertheless, he has attended briefings since the Carter Administration, and has asked so many questions about Indo-American relations that his name has become a verb. “To Goyal”: to seek out a reporter who is likely to provide a friendly question, or a moment of comic relief. All press secretaries get cornered, and all have, on occasion, Goyaled their way out. But no one Goyals like Spicer.

 Until recently, the more established White House correspondents have regarded floaters as a harmless distraction—the equivalent of letting a batboy sit in the dugout. Now they are starting to see the floaters as an existential threat. “It’s becoming a form of court-packing,” one White House correspondent told me. Outlets that have become newly visible under the Trump Administration include One America News Network, which was founded in 2013 as a right-wing alternative to Fox News; LifeZette, a Web tabloid founded in 2015 by Laura Ingraham, the radio commentator and Trump ally; Townhall, a conservative blog started by the Heritage Foundation; the Daily Caller, co-founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, now a Fox News host; and the enormously popular and openly pro-Trump Breitbart News Network. Most of the White House correspondents from these outlets are younger than thirty. “At best, they don’t know what they’re doing,” a radio correspondent told me. “At worst, you wonder whether someone is actually feeding them softball questions.” He added, “You can’t just have a parade of people asking, ‘When and how do you plan to make America great again?’ ”

 For years, the first question of each press briefing has usually gone to the Associated Press, whose reporters sit in the middle of the front row. In Spicer’s first briefing, on January 21st, which lasted five and a half minutes, he uttered several verifiable falsehoods—“This was the largest audience to ever witness an Inauguration, period”—then left without taking any questions. For the first question of his second briefing, he called on the New York Post, whose reporter, sitting in the fifth row, was clearly surprised. He asked, “When will you commence the building of the border wall?” In Spicer’s third briefing, his first question went to a reporter from LifeZette, who wondered why the Administration hadn’t taken a harder line on immigration. Many of Spicer’s early briefings were unusually short—about half an hour, with ten minutes of prepared remarks in the beginning. He often escapes from the podium without facing many tough questions from mainstream journalists. (This month, perhaps hoping to foreclose public scrutiny, or to starve “Saturday Night Live” of material, Spicer did his briefings off-camera for a week.)

 Major Garrett, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News, sits in the front row. “Historically, the way the briefing room has been organized is, the closer you are, the farther you’ve come,” Garrett said. “And the person at the podium has tended to recognize that.” More experienced reporters, he said, “ask questions that are sharper, more informed. Not, ‘What’s your message today?’ Not, ‘Here’s a paintbrush—would you paint us a pretty picture?’ ” If established reporters got fewer questions relative to the floaters, I asked, would this be good or bad for democracy? “We’ll see,” Garrett said. “We’re engaged in a grand experiment.”

 A TV correspondent told me that calling on front-row reporters first isn’t just about appealing to their egos: “It’s also about maintaining a sense of predictability, a sense that eventually the substantive questions will be answered. Throwing that into chaos—‘Maybe you’ll get a question, if you shout loud enough, who knows?’—makes everyone desperate and competitive and makes us look like a bunch of braying jackals. Which I don’t think is an accident.”

 ………

 A longtime Washington reporter from a mainstream network echoed that sentiment. “I don’t mind them bringing in conservative voices that they feel have been underrepresented,” he said. “Personally, I don’t even mind them f%$#ing with the front-row guys, the Jonathan Karls of the world. Those guys are a smug little cartel, and it’s fun to watch them squirm, at least for a little while. But at what point does it start to delegitimize the whole idea of what happens in that room? When does it cross the line into pure trolling?”

(%$# mine)

I hope that Trump and his Evil Minions™ are trolling the press.

It’s long overdue, and it is an indication that perhaps those smug guys in the front to stop preening at press briefing, and return to shoe leather journalism.

It’s clear that the Bob Woodward model of context free access journalism simply does not cut it these days.

It hasn’t for decades.

This is the Magic of the Marketplace that New FCC Chair Ajit Pai So Loves

No Comments
the map is pretty staggering. pink is poor areas, green is areas where AT&T provides decent internet. almost no overlap. pic.twitter.com/ay9Jw7KR0J

— libby watson (@libbycwatson) March 10, 2017

The Wonders of the Market

There is a (soon to be canceled by the Trump administration, no doubt) federal program that requires that low cost internet be provided to poor people where broadband is available.

AT&T’s way of dealing with this was to scrupulously ensure that there was no broadband available to the poor so that they could over charge them:

It’s no secret that ISPs can make more money from network upgrades in wealthy neighborhoods than low-income ones, and a new analysis of Cleveland, Ohio, by broadband advocacy groups appears to show that AT&T is following that strategy. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and a Cleveland-based group called Connect Your Community alleged in their report today that “AT&T has systematically discriminated against lower-income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies over the past decade.”

Last year, the NDIA brought attention to AT&T’s refusal to provide $5-per-month Internet service to poor people in areas where the company hasn’t upgraded its network. When the Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV in 2015, the FCC required AT&T to provide discount broadband to poor people as condition of the merger. But the condition apparently allowed AT&T to charge full price in areas where maximum download speeds were less than 3Mbps. After the NDIA spoke out, AT&T announced it would stop exploiting the loophole and instead provide discount Internet to poor people in all parts of its network.

Today’s followup report from the NDIA and Connect Your Community analyzes FCC data on AT&T Internet deployments in Cleveland, where many residents were initially declared ineligible for the discount broadband service.

“Specifically, AT&T has chosen not to extend its ‘fiber-to-the-node’ VDSL infrastructure—which is now the standard for most Cuyahoga County suburbs and other urban AT&T markets throughout the US—to the majority of Cleveland Census blocks, including the overwhelming majority of blocks with individual poverty rates above 35 percent,” the report said.

………

AT&T DSL speeds are often extremely slow when service is delivered entirely over copper telephone wires from central offices that can be nearly three miles from individual homes. Data speeds degrade with distance over copper, so AT&T boosts speeds in many areas by bringing fiber deeper into each neighborhood with its fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) technology. AT&T’s fastest speeds of all involve bringing fiber all the way to each home.

“AT&T apparently chose not to install fiber-to-the-node infrastructure anywhere in the areas served by its four Cleveland central offices with the greatest concentration of high-poverty neighborhoods,” the advocacy groups wrote. “The absence of FTTN in these lower-income neighborhoods, and the overall disparity in FTTN deployment between Cleveland and the suburbs, can be traced largely to AT&T’s failure to deploy FTTN anywhere in the service areas of four ‘central offices’… with large lower-income customer bases: those at 6513 Guthrie, 5400 Prospect, 2130 East 107th, and 12223 St. Clair.”

By contrast, “Most of Cuyahoga County’s suburban communities are fully covered” by faster AT&T network technologies, including fiber-to-the-home, the report said.

………

The NDIA shared its findings with Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat, but it isn’t expecting any action from the FCC’s Republican leadership.

“The current chair of the FCC [Ajit Pai] is not likely to be interested,” Siefer told Ars. “We have shared this research with Commissioner Clyburn’s office. We do not see a path in the current climate (federally and in Ohio) to force AT&T to make the upgrades. We do see this research as proof that further deregulation is not going to reduce the digital divide. Our solutions will likely include local, state, and federal policies that encourage equitable build-out. We also need competition to bring down residential broadband costs. If AT&T is not going to serve low-income areas then we need policies and initiatives that actively recruit other broadband providers.”

Pai’s theory is that if you allow poorly regulated monopolists to gouge and charge monopoly rents, then they will invest in better service.

Reality indicates that all that if you allow poorly regulated monopolists to gouge and charge monopoly rents, they will invest in ensuring that they can maintain those monopoly rents, to the exclusion of customer service and innovation.

AT&T spent its money in Ohio on banning municipal broadband, instead of getting poor people decent internet service.

Tweet with picture

Gender Reversal Teaches Uncomfortable Lessons – Marginal REVOLUTION Linkage

No Comments

(Updated to fix typos)

A snipped of the debate vid:

Sweet Irony

No Comments

Breitbart News just came out against Trumpcare:

Donald Trump has been very good for the news business — and the news business has been very good for Donald Trump.

But no publication has had a more mutually beneficial relationship with our new president than Breitbart. Trump’s campaign brought the site’s brand of reactionary populism into the mainstream — and its former mastermind into the West Wing. By the time the ballots were cast, no other news outlet had grown its audience more over the 2016 cycle.

And Breitbart, of course, supplied Trump with a megaphone, a strategist, and relentlessly positive coverage — even when the mogul’s campaign manager low-key battered one of the site’s reporters.

So, Breitbart’s latest headline on the Trump-Ryan health-care plan is probably causing some consternation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Any heartburn being experienced by Steve Bannon, former editor-in-chief of Breitbart, is the source of much pleasure for me personally.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

But I do think one thing that has happened is that during the Cold War, for good or ill, Americans believed that they were the force of good. That belief is a lot harder to sustain in this day and age, for a range of reasons (not least the warrantless wiretapping and torture that Hayden facilitated). So just maybe the values remain the same, but America has changed?

—Marcy Wheeler, noting that Hayden’s blame of millennials for leaks is not based in reality.

Nathan Myhrvold Needs to Be Fired ……… Out of a Cannon ……… and into the Sun

No Comments
Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO at Microflaccid, now owns and runs Intellectual Ventures, the most egregious patent troll in the world.

Myhrvold has always maintained that his company fosters advancement, citing a lab, which has never actually made anything, and asserting that its patents actually have merit.

An appeals court has disagreed observing that simply adding, “Do it on a computer,” to an existing process does not make it a unique and patentable invention:

Intellectual Ventures boasts of having more than 30,000 patents—but you’d have to look for a long time to find one that can hold up under real scrutiny.

After staying quiescent for years, IV opened up a barrage of lawsuits to enforce its patents in 2010. But the companies that decided to stand up to IV rather than buckle under have been faring well, as judges have found the patents that IV has chosen to enforce in court less than impressive. It’s a telling sign about the giant patent-holder’s collection. Given the opportunity to pull just about any patent out of its huge collection, one would assume the company would choose the best of the lot. But much of it appears to be exactly the kind of easy handouts from the dot-com boom era that have been called out by critics of “patent trolls.”

Earlier this week, Intellectual Ventures lost two more major patent cases at the nation’s top patent court. It lost a case against Erie Indemnity Company and several other insurers, which had stood accused of infringing US Patent Nos. 6,510,434, 6,519,581, and 6,546,002. The same judges also tossed patents asserted against banking company Capital One. All were found invalid under the Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. precedent, which barred many patents that describe basic business processes and add computer jargon.

While we are at it, we should also fire the US Patent Court (technically the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) into the sun, which has expanded IP well beyond what is necessary to foster creativity.

This sh%$ is out of control, and while some rent seeking is acceptable to encourage creativity, this is just parasitic.

This is What Happens After Elections

No Comments

After refusing to resign, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara has been fired.

There will be a lot of hand wringing about this, and I am disappointed that this will likely slow the progress of the investigations of Andrew Cuomo and Roger Ailes, but this what happens when there are elections.

It’s something that has been drilled into my head by my dad, who worked for in the cabinet of Bill Egan, Governor of Alaska, and when Wally Hickel took over he was offered the opportunity to stay on, he politely declined.

His judgement was reaffirmed when the Hickel administration fired one of his coworkers for getting a hunting license at the in-state rate a few months early.

This is what happens when someone new takes over, particularly when they are of the opposing party:

The call to Preet Bharara’s office from President Trump’s assistant came on Thursday. Would Mr. Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, please call back?

The following day, Mr. Bharara was one of 46 United States attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama asked to resign — and to immediately clean out their offices. The request took many in his office by surprise because, in a meeting in November, Mr. Bharara was asked by the then-president-elect to stay on.

Mr. Bharara refused to resign. On Saturday, he announced on Twitter that he had been fired.

………

Mr. Bharara was a highly public prosecutor who relished the spotlight throughout more than seven years in office. He pursued several high-profile cases involving Wall Street, and he was in the midst of investigating fund-raising by Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, and preparing to try former top aides to the governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, who are both Democrats. It was not immediately clear how his departure would affect those cases and others that were pending.

Mr. Bharara stayed quiet until Saturday afternoon. Then, on his personal Twitter account, which he set up eight days ago, he wrote: “I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired.” Referring to the Southern District of New York, he continued, “Being the US Attorney in SDNY will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life.”
 

………
 
Mr. Bharara’s job had appeared to be secure. In November, he met at Trump Tower with the president-elect and several of his advisers, including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, according to two people briefed on that discussion who requested anonymity.

At the meeting, according to those briefed, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Bharara to remain in the job, which Mr. Bharara relayed to reporters and television cameras in the Trump Tower lobby.

Then came the order to resign on Friday, creating what was described as a feeling of whiplash in the prosecutor’s Manhattan office. One person familiar with the views of current prosecutors described an oddly subdued reaction mixed with anxiety as the events unfolded. “You have a sense of how it’s going to end, and it’s not going to end well,” the person said.

But Mr. Bharara, unlike his fellow United States attorneys, publicly refused to leave. He gave no statement citing a policy or legal issue affecting his decision to refuse the resignation order.
 
………

Mr. Bharara’s office is overseeing the case against the former aides to Mr. Cuomo and the inquiry into fund-raising by Mr. de Blasio, who has been a target of Mr. Trump’s ire as he has positioned himself as a vocal opponent of the president’s on the left.

His office is also overseeing an investigation into whether Fox News, which is owned by the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, failed to properly alert shareholders of settlements with female employees who had accused the channel’s former chief, Roger Ailes, of sexual harassment.

It’s not how I would have liked this to turn out, but this is very much business as usual.

Once Again, Their Evil Outstrips My Fertile Imagination

No Comments

The Republicans are proposing a bill that would allow employers to coerce genetic testing from their employers and share the data with whomever they please:

A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.

Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.

The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not affect federal spending, as the main bill does.

“What this bill would do is completely take away the protections of existing laws,” said Jennifer Mathis, director of policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a civil rights group. In particular, privacy and other protections for genetic and health information in GINA and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act “would be pretty much eviscerated,” she said.

………

Employers got virtually everything they wanted for their workplace wellness programs during the Obama administration. The ACA allowed them to charge employees 30 percent, and possibly 50 percent, more for health insurance if they declined to participate in the “voluntary” programs, which typically include cholesterol and other screenings; health questionnaires that ask about personal habits, including plans to get pregnant; and sometimes weight loss and smoking cessation classes. And in rules that Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued last year, a workplace wellness program counts as “voluntary” even if workers have to pay thousands of dollars more in premiums and deductibles if they don’t participate.

Actually, this explains a lot about Obamacare.

It appears that it was drawn up under the assumption that the average American was a fat ignorant slob with no agency, and so they needed to be coerced.

And people wonder why, even as people support almost all the parts of the ACA, they hate the whole package.

Because it was delivered to the American public dripping with contempt.  (“Deplorables”)

Welcome to Operation Unbelievable Clusterf%$#

1 Comment

It looks like we are sending ground troops into Syria, specifically Marines artillery and armored vehicles, which is a significant escalation from the special forces previously in Syria:

The United States, feeling confident enough about its war on the totalitarian Islamic State, has upped the stakes by deploying a detachment of Marine artillery into Syria.

To be sure, U.S. troops are certainly in combat in Syria, although the deployment of artillery is a step further than Special Operations Forces working with local U.S. allies in the country. Commandos often travel in smaller numbers, can move faster and do not need as much security as artillery units.

………

Pentagon officials stated that the deployment of the troops and their 155-millimeter M-777 howitzers, summoned from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has “been in the works for sometime,” according to The Washington Post.

………

Meanwhile, in a highly visible — and deliberately visible — move, U.S. soldiers riding in Stryker armored vehicles flying American flags drove into the Syrian city of Manbij to prevent a clash between the SDF and the Turkish-backed FSA brigades.

This will not end well.

Human Sacrifice, Dogs and Cats Living Together… Mass Hysteria!

No Comments

It appears that we are now having Pennsylvania Mennonites protesting Donald Trump policies:

Mary Beth Martin and Lindsey Martin Corbo each held one side of the large cardboard poster, the mother and her adult daughter eager to deliver a personal if unconventional message to their congressman, Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker.

“Hey Smucker,” said the sign, written in red, green, and blue marker. “300 years ago our Mennonite family took sanctuary in PA, just like yours did.

“Lancaster values immigrants.”

The anger might have been directed at Smucker, but Martin and Corbo were really there – like 100 others – because of President Donald Trump.

The two women were among a hundred newly engaged activists assembled in Republican-heavy Lancaster County – an area that went to Trump in November by 57 percent – braving toe-freezing temperatures to protest Trump and the lawmaker, who was 200 yards away at a chamber of commerce breakfast.

That Martin and Corbo were protesters was – by their own admission – a remarkable development. Both are members of the Mennonite Church, a religion that encourages its members to stay away from politics just as it asks them to shun the wider culture.

This is like a half step away from the Amish engaging in civil disobedience, and I ain’t talking about Rumspringa here.

H/t Charlie Pierce.