Oh thank God. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pay my mortgage. https://t.co/sPY2HPhYeo
— Hilary Duff Man (@Turkeysalad89) November 13, 2020
Yeah, pretty much.
Month: November 2020
Headline of the day
Biden Will Have The Most Diverse, Intersectional Cabinet Of Mass Murderers Ever Assembled
Too true.
Tweet of the Day
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/RkByUy2KIJ
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) November 11, 2020
This is a truly epic example of ownage. 
Exploding Cetaceans in History
It has been been 50 years since Florence, Oregon was showered with rotting flesh and blubber.
One of the epic fails in the history of carcass disposal, and it’s ended up on YouTube:
Can We Please Give Texas Back to Mexico?
In the episode of the continuing series, Of Course They Did, It’s Texas, a bill has been submitted in the state house that would tax solar and wind power, but not fossil fuels, because ……… I don’t know, maybe owning the libs?
There are fools, there are damn fools, and then there is the Texas legislature:
Power bills likely would rise next year for Texas consumers who get their electricity from wind, solar, coal and nuclear generation if the Legislature approves a bill filed this week.
The bill from state Rep. Ken King would add 1 cent to every kilowatt hour of energy generated. The tax likely would be passed on to consumers, adding about $12 a month to bills for households that use 1,200 kilowatt hours of renewable power sources each month. Power generated from natural gas would be exempt from the tax.
Wind produced about 20 percent of electricity last year in Texas, which is the nation’s leader in wind power generation, and 47 percent came from natural gas, according to the state’s grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Luke Metzger, executive director of the Austin-based clean energy advocacy group Environment Texas, said the bill makes no sense.
It flies against the rhetoric of Texas’ market-based system of electricity, putting the thumb on the scale for natural gas and raising taxes on Texans by $2.3 billion every year,” he said in a prepared statement. “It would also discourage wind and solar power, which are reducing pollution, helping us tread more lightly on the planet, and boosting rural economies.
Seriously, this guy should have been drowned at birth.
I Just Had a Real Political Insight
I was in an online discussion today about the inaccuracy of the polls, and I noted that one of the issues is that people are no longer answering their phones because of the deluge of robocalls.
And then I made the throw away line:
If Donald Trump Has Promised to Nuke Bangalore to End the Spam Calls, He Would Have Won 48 States.
I just realized that there is a real and deep truth, and I made the point by accident. (Which is probably the only way that I could find a deep insight, I’m kind of shallow.)
Also: If a presidential candidate promises to crack down on robocalls, they will top 400 electoral votes.
Another Better, but not Good, Unemployment Report
709,000 initial jobless claims last week, so better, but still worse than any week not in 2020.
New applications for unemployment benefits fell sharply last week, suggesting layoffs are easing as the broader economy flashes signs of improvement.
Initial claims for jobless benefits, a proxy for layoffs, declined to 709,000 last week from 757,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday. While weekly claims have fallen from a peak of near 7 million at the end of March, they remain well above levels of about 200,000 seen before the coronavirus hit this spring.
Tweet of the Day
William Greenbladt, a photojournalist, who took this photo of the McCloskey’s pointing guns at protestors sent them a $1500 bill because they lifted the photo and used it as a Christmas card. pic.twitter.com/EpdRSp19Hx
— Michael Cali (@cali_photo) November 5, 2020
Not generally a fan of expansive IP protections, but sending an invoice to the S. Louis Ken and Karen for their use of his photograph of them brandishing their weapons epic.
Yeah, This Does Not Fill Me with Confidence
It turns out that the CEO of Pfizer timed the announcement of their Covid vaccine to correspond whith a pre-scheduled order to sell most of his stock in the company.
This is not the action taken by someone who has faith in the long term prospects of this product.
Given that the product needs to be shipped at -70°C (-94°F), and this technique has ever used in humans before, I would not go long on Pfizer either:
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla sold 62% of his stock on the same day the company announced its experimental COVID-19 vaccine succeeded in clinical trials.
The vaccine announcement sent Pfizer’s shares soaring almost 15% on the day.
Bourla sold 132,508 shares in the company at an average price of $41.94 a share, or $5.6 million total, according to filings registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 52-week high for Pfizer’s stock is $41.99, meaning Bourla sold his stock at almost its highest value in the past year. His stock sale was carried out through a routine Rule 10b5-1, a predetermined trading plan that allows company staff members to sell their stock in line with insider-trading laws. Bourla’s sale was part of a plan adopted August 19, the filing showed. He continues to own 81,812 Pfizer shares.
Am I being too paranoid in thinking that the promise of this vaccine is yet another over-hyped Covid treatment being hyped for the personal benefit of senior management?
True
Glenn Greenwald makes a very good point, that by any impartial measure George W. Bush was a more damaging to the US and the world:
That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy — a longing, a desire, a craving — has long been obvious.
The Democrats’ own actions proved that they never believed their own melodramatic and self-glorifying rhetoric about Trump as The New Hitler — from their leaders joining with the GOP to increase The Fascist Dictator’s domestic spying powers and military spending to their (correct) belief that the way to oust The Neo-Nazi Tyrant was through a peaceful and lawfully conducted democratic election in which vote totals and, if necessary, duly constituted courts would determine the next president.
………
I began writing about politics in 2005 as a reaction to the lawlessness, executive power transgressions and authoritarian Article II theories imposed by Bush/Cheney officials in the name of fighting terror. They claimed the right to violate Congressional statutes restricting how they could spy, detain, or even kill anyone, including American citizens, as long they justified it as helpful in the fight again terrorism.
They invented new theories of secrecy to hide virtually everything they did and, worse, to bar courts from subjecting their actions to legal or constitutional scrutiny. Josh Marshall’s entire career is based on a well-documented claim that the Bush White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired U.S. Attorneys who were investigating their own associates, including those of Karl Rove. The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers and sources under the 1917 Espionage Act — enacted by Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent from U.S. involvement in World War I — than all prior presidents combined.
………
That the War on Terror itself was racist and Islamophobic — how else to explain year after year of predominantly Muslim countries being bombed by the Bush and Obama administrations? — was barely disputed in liberal discourse. Karl Rove’s core campaign strategy in 2002 and 2004 was to place anti-gay referenda on as many state ballots as possible, and disseminate slanderous propaganda about same-sex couples, all to incentivize evangelicals to vote. And now we’re subjected to the revolting sanctimony of the very same same operatives and supporters who did that, trying to prove the unprecedented evil of Trump by insisting that at least prior administrations did not rely on bigoted tropes or racist rhetoric.
………
And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?
………
And even if Trump has lied more frequently and more blatantly than prior presidents — a conclusion I would probably accept — how do those lies compare to the one sustained over many years, from liberals’ most currently beloved neocon pundits and journalists, that convinced Americans that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda and thus likely responsible for the 9/11 attack, leading to the invasion and destruction of a country of 26 million people and, ultimately, the rise of ISIS?
It is not an exaggeration to say that much of the division on the center-left over the past four years has been shaped by whether one sees Trump as a symptom of American pathologies or as its primary cause, of whether one views the return of pre-Trump “normalcy” as something to loathe or something to crave, of whether one views the Bush/Cheney years and War on Terror abuses (to say nothing of the horrors of the Cold War) as at least as bad as anything Trump has ushered in or whether one sees those pre-Trump evils as somehow more benign and less ignoble.
Bush killed more people, Obama deported and assassinated more people, and both of them normalized the excesses of the US state security apparatus.
Trump is a lesson that can be learned from, because the evil that put him in power did not come from him, though he certainly has no lack of personal evil, it came from a broken and corrupt society.
No fundamental change means that in 4 or 8 years something worse, if just because it is more subtle and more competent, will be knocking at the orifices of the American body politic.
Here is a Shocker
It has been obvious for decades, ever since the child abuse scandal broke in the Catholic church, that John Paul II, in addition to aggressively embracing murderous right wing dictators, was wilfully blind about priests f%$#ing kids in their charge.
In response to scandals involving defrocked cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Pope Francis commissioned a study to find out what happened, and they determined that Pope John Paul II ignored repeated and credible warnings about the former priest.
This is not a surprise. Ignoring this sort of thing was a direct outgrowth of JPII’s view of the church and spirituality.
His successor, Benedict, was found to have been insufficiently forceful in dealing with this:
An unprecedented Vatican internal investigation has found that Pope John Paul II knew about and overlooked sexual misconduct claims against Theodore McCarrick, instead choosing to facilitate the rise of an American prelate who would be defrockedand disgraced two decades later.
The Vatican’s reportamounts to a stunning play-by-play of the kind of systemic failure that the Catholic Church normally keeps under wraps, describing how McCarrick amassed power and prestige in the face of rumors, and sometimes written evidence, of his sexual misconduct with seminarians, priests and teenage boys.
The report devotes a good deal of attention to John Paul II and the pivotal years of McCarrick’s rise, but it also portrays Pope Benedict XVI as trying to handle the cardinal quietly and out of the public spotlight, and Pope Francis as assuming that his predecessors had made the right judgments. It shows how U.S. bishops sanitized reports of what they knew and all but ensured that warnings would arrive at the Vatican unsubstantiated or dismissible. In Rome, church leaders found every rationale for believing a “good pastor” over a victim.
For a church that has grappled for a generation with its sexual abuse crisis, the report— 449 pages, and two years in the making — goes further than any previous effort in naming names and providing details of a coverup. Such assessments have been long requested by victims of abuse, but they are nonetheless fraught for the church, because revelations have the potential to recolor the reputations of major figures within the faith, including John Paul, who was named a saintin 2014.
Screwing the Poor as He Leaves
Just days after losing the election, the Trump administration has come up with a new way to f%$# immigrants.
They froze the wages of H2A agricultural workers on November 5:
After the last polls closed, but before the final votes had been tallied, Donald Trump’s administration quietly issued a rule to help corporate interests deny pay hikes to frontline farmworkers who help maintain America’s food supply. The rule follows a Trump administration report forecasting a steep rise in agribusiness profits.
On Nov. 5, the Department of Labor (DOL) published a rule to freeze wages for farmworkers who are working under H-2A visas until 2023. The H-2A visa program allows foreign farmworkers to access temporary visas to work in the United States for approved employers.
The American Farm Bureau Federation, the agriculture industry’s major lobbying group, welcomed the new rule, saying it provides “stability during the uncertainty created by the pandemic and trade imbalances.”
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue praised the wage freezes in a press release: “This rule shows once again President Trump’s commitment to America’s farmers by delivering lower costs when they need it the most.” He added that, “Over the past several years farm wages have increased at a higher pace than other industries, which is why this DOL rule could not come at a better time.”
The move to slash workers’ wages follows Perdue’s department in September reporting that “net farm income, a broad measure of profits, is forecast to increase $19 billion (22.7 percent) from 2019 to $102.7 billion in 2020.”
Perdue is personally invested in agribusiness, and watchdog groups recently demanded the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector general investigate whether Perdue violated the ethics agreement he signed when he joined the Trump administration.
For them, it’s a double win: They get to hurt immigrants and the poors at the same time.
I cannot wait for January 20.
Tommy Heinsohn 1834-2020
How I Will Remember HIm
Boston Celtics Legend Tommy Heinsohn has died at age 86.
I really don’t recall his days as a Celtics player, but I do recall his time as Celtics coach, and I remember how he seemed to regularly blow his stack and get ejected from the game. (Hence this classic beer ad)
It was at this time that I became a life long Celtics fan, and I remember his walking in front of the bench in an almost constant state of near apoplexy.
My dad remembered a forward during the Celtics glory days who had a rather unique flat shot that he developed playing in a gym with a low roof.
Another part of my childhood gone:
Tom Heinsohn, the Hall of Fame forward who played on eight N.B.A. championship teams with the Boston Celtics, coached them to two titles and became their passionate broadcaster for more than 40 years, died on Monday at his home in Newton, Mass. He was 86.
Jeff Twiss, a spokesman for the Celtics, confirmed the death. He said Heinsohn had multiple illnesses, including diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD.
Playing on the parquet floor of the old Boston Garden from 1956 to 1965, Heinsohn brought a superb shooting touch to the dynasty engineered by Coach Red Auerbach. He loved to shoot, most famously hitting flat-trajectory jumpers, and he had a deadly running hook.
………
Coaching a rebuilt team after the retirement of Bill Russell, who had become a player-coach with the Celtics after revolutionizing the game with his defensive prowess at center, Heinsohn took Boston to N.B.A. championships in 1974 and ’76.
Barr is Still Trying to Rat-F%$# the Election
William Barr just issued a memo directing US prosecutors to directly intervene in (non-existent) claims of vote fraud in state courts.
In response, Richard Pilger, who oversaw voter fraud investigations at the Public Integrity Section of the DoJ, resigned immediately.
Mr. Barr’s authorization prompted the Justice Department official who oversees investigations of voter fraud, Richard Pilger, to step down from the post within hours, according to an email Mr. Pilger sent to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times.
………
Mr. Pilger, a career prosecutor in the department’s Public Integrity Section who oversaw voting-fraud-related investigations, told colleagues he would move to a nonsupervisory role working on corruption prosecutions.
“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mr. Pilger’s message.
Justice Department policies prohibit federal prosecutors from taking overt steps, like questioning witnesses or securing subpoenas for documents, to open a criminal investigation into any election-related matter until after voting results have been certified to keep their existence from spilling into public view and influencing either voters or local election officials who ensure the integrity of the results.
………
Mr. Barr’s memo allows U.S. attorneys to bypass that career prosecutor and take their requests to his office for approval, effectively weakening a key safeguard that prevents political interference in an election by the party in power.
Barr is the most corrupt US Attorney General ever, but unlike the distant number 2, John Mitchell, he won’t go to jail, because we don’t do that to powerful white men any more.
Lawers, particularly the professional staff at the DoJ, need to file complaints Bar Associations where he has been admitted to practice law.
In related news, the allegations of voting irregularities are so fact free that expensive white shoe law firms are getting skittish about taking the Trump campaign’s money:
Like many big law firms, Jones Day, whose roots go back to Cleveland in the late 1800s, has prided itself on representing controversial clients.
There was Big Tobacco. There was the Bin Laden family. There was even the hated owner of the Cleveland Browns football team as he moved the franchise to Baltimore.
Now Jones Day is the most prominent firm representing President Trump and the Republican Party as they prepare to wage a legal war challenging the results of the election. The work is intensifying concerns inside the firm about the propriety and wisdom of working for Mr. Trump, according to lawyers at the firm.
Doing business with Mr. Trump — with his history of inflammatory rhetoric, meritless lawsuits and refusal to pay what he owes — has long induced heartburn among lawyers, contractors, suppliers and lenders. But the concerns are taking on new urgency as the president seeks to raise doubts about the election results.
Some senior lawyers at Jones Day, one of the country’s largest law firms, are worried that it is advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Mr. Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections, according to interviews with nine partners and associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.
At another large firm, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, based in Columbus, Ohio, lawyers have held internal meetings to voice similar concerns about their firm’s election-related work for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, according to people at the firm. At least one lawyer quit in protest.
I’m not saying that Donald Trump should have competent and aggressive legal counsel. EVERYONE should have competent and aggressive legal counsel.
What I am saying is that the rats are leaving the sinking ship, and I am very amused.
I Cannot Believe that I am Citing a Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
But given that it’s clearly a part of an effort by their editorial page to foment conflict within the Democratic Party, it’s not a surprise.
That being said, progressive icon Cenk Uygur take on the Democratic party, that the current Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is incompetent and useless, is (IMNSHO) completely correct.
Schumer, Pelosi, and the rest of them are about as useful as tits on a bull:
Will there ever be accountability for Democrats? The establishment wing of the party blew one election to Donald Trump and came to the precipice of blowing another. Were there any lessons learned from 2016? Nope. Same guys, same mistakes. The band marches on.
Start with Chuck Schumer in the Senate. With more coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world and a buffoonish Republican president, he couldn’t find a way to pick up three seats. That means Republicans can block any progressive legislation. Will Mr. Schumer face accountability? Of course not.
Nancy Pelosi lost seats in the House when every Democrat in the country thinks we have the worst president in history. There’s got to be some accountability for that, right? Nope. Not a chance. There is no more revered person in Washington than Mrs. Pelosi. The rest of the country sees her as a feckless elitist, but Washington sees her as a master legislator. She’s passed one major piece of legislation in her career: a health-care law whose central provision was conceived by the Heritage Foundation.
This is the same Democratic leadership that lost almost 1,000 state legislative seats nationwide to Republicans during the Obama era. That’s a large village in Kazakhstan. Was there any accountability after those failures? Nope. Still the same folks in charge.
………
The national media has seen all of this unfold but rarely commented on it. There was no reckoning after Hillary Clinton’s historic loss. It was blamed on James Comey, the Russians, the Bernie Bros., the weather, the dog that ate our votes. A question for the Democrats: Did you ever consider that maybe, just maybe, it was actually you? But the media didn’t ask. They’re all in the same establishment together. Criticizing the corporate wing of the Democratic Party would feel like criticizing themselves.
………
Will it happen now? Very unlikely. The members of this establishment all know and like each other. Most important, they have the same interest in protecting the status quo, which has empowered and enriched them. That’s why they’ll continue to pretend there is no problem and that the Democratic Party was always supposed to serve corporate donors and lose easy elections.
My name is Matthew Saroff, and I endorse this message.
Linkage
- Are Dead People Voting By Mail?Evidence From Washington State Administrative Records (Stanford DPL) Money quote, “Using these public records, we have found that dead people’s ballots are almost never voted fraudulently and subsequently counted as valid votes in the state of Washington.” (PDF)
- A 5-story building in China ‘walks’ to new location (CNN) Shades of Hayao Miyazaki.
- How Police Unions Bully Politicians (The New Republic) Not just normal politics, but threats of violence and the like.
- Whale Tail Saves Train: How the Sculpture Prevented a Train Crash (Popular Mechanics) Weird.
- Washington Couple Shocked When Missing Cat Turns Up 2,500 Miles Away In Alaska (The Animal Rescue Site News) Wandered into a shipping container, and someone spotted a social media post about it.
- As If the Platypus Couldn’t Get Any Weirder (Gizmodo) Perry fluoresces under ultraviolet light.
- Hoping for a return to normal after Trump? That’s the last thing we need (The Guardian) Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister notes that business as usual is not sustainable.
- They Are Trying To Silence AOC, Because Money Never Sleeps (The Daily Poster) The Lincoln Project, and the rest of the flim-flam men who play at being “Very Serious People” are trying to blame the progressives, yet again,
I Do Not Believe This
In a The New York Times OP/ED, Anand Giridharadas recounts a statement from Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer that I do not believe.
I don’t know whether Mr. Giridharadas is trying to blow smoke up our ass-holes, or if Schumer is trying to blow smoke up Mr. Giridharadas’ asshole, but this is quote is simply not credible:
On Election Day eve, I spoke with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York — the minority leader, who could, by a razor’s edge, become the majority leader in 2021 if the results of two presumptive runoffs for Senate seats in Georgia go the Democrats’ way. Because, like Mr. Biden, Mr. Schumer is an institutionalist and a moderate, I asked him about this idea of restoration versus transformation. Almost as soon as he heard me say the word “normalcy,” he began, for lack of a better term, to filibuster: “No, no, I don’t buy that.”
“My view,” he told me, “is if we don’t do bold change, we could end up with someone worse than Donald Trump in four years.” What passed for change in the past two decades (including during the Obama years) had not, he acknowledged, been “big enough or bold enough.” When I asked if Democrats bore some responsibility for that, he deflected: “There’s plenty of blame to go around.”
Charles Schumer is a creature of the status quo, a creature of our corrupt campaign finance system, and a creature of the special interests.
If you believe that he will be an agent of change, I want 15 grams of whatever you are smoking sent up to my room, because it is some intense sh%$.
Boy, I Screwed up This One………
In 2014, as Gamegate affair was metastasizing into an orgy of white male privilege and terrorism, I made fun of what I referred to the “Quinnspiracy“, seeing it as little more a controversy about gaming and gaming journalism.
Shortly after that, what was a kind of an inside-baseball controversy became the blueprint for white male (and it is almost always white male) terrorism via the internet.
At the time, I thought that it was a metaphor for the corruption in game journalism, and how it made it difficult for independent studios to get any coverage. (Valid, but irrelevant to what it revealed)
The real story, which was that an army of violent racist, sexist, and homophobic dirt-bags poised to terrorize our society, and in 2016, our electoral politics.
The Unemployment Rate Dropped in October
As always, I am a pessimist, and think that this largely an illusion, and possibly some politically rat-f%$#ery.
Given the election, and the likelihood that Trump will spend the next 2½ months wrecking the place, I do not expect this to improve.
Also, a deeper dive into the numbers reveals some very real problems:
A better-than-expected October jobs report was immediately met with warnings that the surge in COVID-19 cases in the US could eventually force parts of the economy back into partial lockdowns.
That will apparently serve as the “fine print” on an otherwise solid report which showed the unemployment rate falling below 7%.
As ever, it’s important to look under the proverbial hood for evidence of the dreaded “scarring” effect that Jerome Powell (and other Fed officials) have consistently warned about since the onset of the pandemic. Jumping right in, long-term unemployment rose to 32.5% in October. That’s up sharply from 19.1% in September.
That figure has surged over the past two months. As Bloomberg’s Katia Dmitrieva puts it, “one-third of the unemployed haven’t had a job since the first round of coronavirus layoffs in April.”
Each month, I look at permanent job losses. Think of it as the economic equivalent of fatalities in the pandemic. It’s a macabre lagging indicator.
In October, that figure was little changed, stuck at nearly 3.7 million, up 2.4 million from February.
Needless to say, a situation that finds 2.4 million more job losses classified as “permanent” versus just eight months ago, argues for additional fiscal support.
Also notable is the rise in persons employed part time for economic reasons. October’s 383,000 increase was the first in five months.
………
The unfortunate reality is that payrolls remain 10 million lower than they were pre-pandemic. There’s (much) more work to be done. And surging COVID cases aren’t going to make that work any easier.
I am not the only won who thinks that we are in for the proverbial bumpy ride.
Watch This Video
It’s titled, “No, Elon Musk is a Terrible Person,” and it shows just how close that he is to being a Bond villain:
This guy is at his core a nasty piece of work.