Category: Hypocrisy

Always Read the Footnotes

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holy shit I’ve rarely seen a footnote used to such devastating effect. https://t.co/FjHRNcZYzE pic.twitter.com/sk597elmBR

— Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) April 13, 2021

The Tweet that led me to the footnote

A while ago, (correctly) I called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, with his insistence that any vaccine be licensed exclusively to one for-profit entity.

I still say that and now The New Republic says the same thing, complete with a ghastly portrait of Gates with horns.

They go through the history of IP absolutism and how it has harmed people, and refer us to the case of South Africa and AIDS drugs where Big Pharma and their evil minions in government and the media suggested that compulsory licensing and generics would lead to the spread of drug resistant variants of HIV, because Africans are lazy and disorganized people who won’t take their pills regularly.  (In reality, Africans took their pills more reliably than their privileged brothers in the rest.

After mentioning this, there is an asterisk, and at the bottom of the page is a footnote about TNR‘s former editor-in-chief Andrew Sullivan:

*Among journalists echoing this argument was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. When The New York Times reported Sullivan was defending the companies’ lawsuit while taking undisclosed funding from PhRma, the industry trade association, Sullivan remained defiant in the face of evidence-based accusations that he was an unethical journalist. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with [drug industry sponsorship],” he told Salon. “In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry.” It later turned out that Africans adhered more closely to the twice-daily pill regimens than patient populations in rich countries.

They just called their editor in the early 1990s, a racist hypocrite dirtbag. (Mark Ames has a rather good bill of particulars on his entire career).

I think that the publication is distance themseves the damage done by two profoundly toxic people, Sullivan, and former publisher Marty Peretz.

It’s a glorious take-down of a thoroughly contemptible human being.

Just so you know, his “storied career” at TNR included:

  • Publishing articles suggesting from racist eugenicist (and one time cross-burner) Charles Murray  that Black people were genetically inferior.
  • Published articles on public health paid for by the tobacco industry.
  • Brought in serial fabulist Stephen Glass to TNR, and published serial plagiarist and fabulist Ruth Shalit.

And that’s just the sh%$ that he did while he was at TNR. 

H/T Atrios.

Must Get This Book

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I just read a review of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, and the book sounds like a real barn-burner:

Who are the members of the professional managerial class? Neither capitalists nor workers, one strains to define them in purely economic terms. If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves.

Is it due to nature or nature? Occupational hazard or innate insufferableness? No one really knows for sure. What is known is that these are the most annoying people on the planet. People who get positively aroused at the idea of telling you what to do, correcting you, and telling you that they just read an article in The New York Times about just that issue and now have something old to say in a new way. A day without them giving out a did you know factoid is like a day without sunshine. The type of people who can only have an orgasm if they see someone getting a parking ticket.

Catherine Liu lives among these people and seems rather fed up. Her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class makes it crystal clear that she is having a lot of passive-aggressive lunch meetings with other members of the University of California, Irvine faculty.

(emphasis mine)

That line made me laugh.

………

However, Liu focuses on another way the PMC mask their will to power: moral preening. She claims the professional managerial class hoards virtue for itself as part of its war against the working class. Which is to say, Liu recognizes that the PMC and the working class are, in fact, class enemies.

Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, she accepts that the PMC at one time played a positive role in society by challenging the barbarity of earlier iterations of capitalism; specifically when members of the PMC were advocates for creating professional standards in fields like medicine and social research, and were advocating for welfare state economic reforms. But as the post-World War 2 capitalist settlement soured and neoliberalism became ascendant, Liu claims “the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying favor with the capitalists it once despised.”

This was not a moral awakening, but an awokening. A power play by the PMC to secure their class position within the capitalist system using the lofty language of social justice to defend basic material interest.

I also call them Hillary Clinton voters.

………

The main argument of the book, or so it seems to me, is that the professional managerial class of present is actively working against building socialism in the United States. That the PMC could really be considered the prime obstacle to unifying the working class as they continually divide working people along the rigid lines of identity to serve their own class interests:

[The PMC] prefers obscurantism, balkanization, and management of interest groups to a transformative reimagining of the social order. It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background decor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people.

Looks like someone just got herself uninvited to an 80s party.

What the review, and probably the book, do not address is how so much of this is driven by what the late Dave Graeber called Bullsh%$ Jobs.

I would argue that much of the dysfunction described in this review is an artifact of what Graeber described as the, “profound psychological violence,” of having a career that one knows on some level has no value.

F%$# Howard Dean

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I campaigned for Howard Dean in 2004. 

In 2006, as head of the DNC, he organized the 50 state strategy, which devolved money and power to local organizers, and won back the house and Senate. 

Then he got kicked to the curb by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, and he decided to start lobbying.

I was disappointed, but now I’m just sick and tired of his crap.

The doctor who came closest to the Presidency in at least the past 20 years, is now shilling for big pharma at the costs of many thousands of lives in 3rd world countries. 

His impassioned defense of big pharma looting through the use of patent subsidies just lost me.

I guess that there are 3 kinds of politicians in the United States:

  • Sell-outs.
  • Those who will sell-out one day.
  • Bernie Sanders.

To quote God, “It’s like those miserable Psalms — they’re so depressing.”

Howard Dean, the former progressive champion, is calling on President Joe Biden to reject a special intellectual property waiver that would allow low-cost, generic coronavirus vaccines to be produced to meet the needs of low-income countries. Currently, a small number of companies hold the formulas for the Covid-19 vaccines, limiting distribution to many parts of the world.

“IP protections aren’t the cause of vaccination delays,” Dean claimed in a column for Barron’s last month. “Every drug manufacturing facility on the planet that’s capable of churning out Covid-19 shots is already doing so.”

This is flat out not true, and he knows it.

“Creating a new medicine is a costly proposition,” wrote Dean. “Companies would never invest hundreds of millions in research and development if rivals could simply copy their drug formulas and create knockoffs.”

The drug companies did not, “Invest hundreds of millions in research and development,” we the taxpayers did.

His lying about this serves no one but his corporate clients.

Many of the manufacturing plants prepared to mass produce low-cost vaccines are centered in India, which has committed to supplying the poorest countries in the world. But the waiver petition, Dean wrote, “is unreasonable and disingenuous; it’s a ruse to benefit India’s own industry at the expense of patients everywhere. President Biden would be wise to reject it.”

The strident opposition to the waiver, which is supported by an international coalition of human rights organizations as well as a growing cohort of congressional Democrats, may surprise Dean’s liberal supporters. But while Dean boasts a long history of support for single-payer health insurance coverage and government intervention into lowering domestic drug prices, he has reversed his positions on virtually every major progressive health policy issue since moving to work in the world of corporate influence peddling.

………

Despite publicly funded research and huge infusions of government cash for the development and delivery of vaccines, drugmakers have carefully guarded their monopoly on the intellectual property rights and signaled to investors that they plan to soon hike prices. The pharmaceutical industry, including representatives of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, have pushed the Biden administration to oppose the intellectual property waiver petition and go further to even impose sanctions on any country that moves to manufacture vaccines without their express permission.

………

In another recent column, again reflecting the interests of drugmakers, Dean wrote in favor of a last-minute regulation proposed by the Trump administration to narrow the government’s ability to lower the prices of certain pharmaceutical products financed with public money, a rule that could stifle any future attempt to rein in the costs of coronavirus vaccines.

………

“He sorts of pops up whenever you argue against anything that would lower drug prices,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that works to reform intellectual property rights to expand access to medicine.

“It’s appalling because he’s introduced as a progressive; he still gets on ‘Rachel Maddow,’” said Love. “But he’s on the payroll. He’s not a registered lobbyist — he somehow finds a way not to register — but he’s sort of an influencer, he’s paid to influence the debate.”

Another part of my misspent middle age (I was 42 in 2004) is destroyed.

Seriously, Dr. Dean, go back to Vermont, and shut the f%$# up.

My, How Nick Clegg has Fallen

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Roll Tape!

In 2010, largely on the basis of being telegenic and glib, Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats, (Slightly Silly Party) managed to snag enough seats in Parliament, no mean feat in Britains first-past-the-post system, to be the junior member in coalition with David Cameron and the Tories until the next election, where

In the next election, they lost 48 of 57 seats, because the electorate realized that all Clegg cared about was proximity to power.

Speaking of Nick Clegg’s pathological need to be close to power, he is now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, and so, much like his days in UK politics, defending the indefensible.

In this case, the former head of the Lib Dems is defending Facebook’s algorithms and its reckless and insecure handling of user data. 

Clegg’s descent into an irrelevant joke does not surprise me one bit:

Facebook wants to reintroduce users to its algorithms.

On Wednesday, within the span of a few hours, the company took several steps to encourage users to trust its ranking and recommendation systems. In a blog post, Facebook said it would make it easier for users to control what’s in their feeds, pointing to both new and existing tools. In an apparent attempt to buttress that announcement, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg published a 5,000-word Medium post defending the company’s ranking algorithms and repudiating the argument that those algorithms create dangerous echo chambers. Clegg also defended Facebook’s algorithms in a wide-ranging interview with The Verge published on the same day.

Taken together, these moves appear to be a concerted campaign by Facebook to repair the negative reputation of its algorithms, which many say actively encourage and incentivize political polarization, misinformation, and extreme content. The efforts come as the company faces heavy criticism from lawmakers for its platform design, and just a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress during a hearing on misinformation.

In its latest PR blitz, Facebook is pushing the idea that it’s not particularly responsible for the proliferation of polarization and extreme content on its platforms and is taking appropriate steps to combat both. That defies longtime critics, who have said Facebook’s algorithms are engineered to reward the most odious content, a specific narrative that Facebook and Clegg are actively denying.

………

“Nick Clegg’s Medium post is a cynical, breathtaking display of gaslighting on a scale hard to fathom even for Facebook,” a spokesperson for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of scholars and activists critical of Facebook, told Recode. “Clegg asks, ‘Where does FB’s incentive lie?’ A better question might be: Where does Nick Clegg’s incentive lie? The answer to that is clear.”

“Facebook managed to both insult its users for being too dimwitted to understand how its algorithms work while also blaming them for taking advantage of them too effectively,” said Ashley Boyd, the vice president for advocacy at Mozilla, in a Wednesday statement. “The News Feed controls unveiled today amount to nothing more than an admission that its algorithms are the problem.”

Ashley Boyd’s quote is spot on, and I have nothing to add.

The Glory that is the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment)

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Civis Analytics, one of the constellation of grifters sucking the life out of consultants for the Democratic Party, founded by Obama Alumni, purged their workforce of people because they were labor organizing.

Trouble found Sunny Rao early the morning of October 30. By the time the Washington State–based data scientist woke up, the group text she shared with several co-workers at the Democratic data firm Civis Analytics had already begun to buzz. “Someone said that they had been fired,” she recalls. Worried, Rao tried to log in to her work computer, only to find it locked. Then she checked her email, and there it was, the news she’d feared: She was terminated effective immediately. No one “even met with me to tell me that I was getting fired or why,” she tells Intelligencer.

………

Rao and Klem say the company gave them no explanation for their dismissals. The timing was odd, too: Civis was working on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and the election was only days away. On the Google Hangout meetings, managers did not give a reason for laying off so many staff members at once, according to the fired employees. With nothing else to do, the group text began to put the pieces together. By the end of the day, they’d learned that Civis had fired 11 people. All were vocal activists at work, known among co-workers for their willingness to question company practices in meetings. Instead of experiencing confusion, Klem and Rao began to feel betrayal.

………

Twelve current and former Civis employees say the company’s internal practices fell short of its public promise to be a progressive place to work. “We were working to make Civis live up to the values posted on their website,” says an employee who was fired on October 30. In December, seven of those terminated filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging Civis had illegally fired them for organizing. Last month, the NLRB dismissed the charge. An official for the regional board said its decision owed to a Trump-era precedent, according the attorney who represented the Civis employees, that had raised the standard for workers to prove unlawful retaliation. The seven workers say they plan to appeal this week, placing their hopes in the same Biden administration they helped to elect.

………

Wagner said he was “shocked” by the NLRB charge. “Civis has worked with labor unions since we were founded, and we strongly support the rights of workers to organize. We had no knowledge of any potential union organizing efforts and no evidence of it – no emails, no request for meetings, nothing.”

Still, if Wagner is telling the truth, and Civis had no idea that anyone wanted a union, the firings could still violate the National Labor Relations Act. Workers have the right to organize, whether it’s for a union or for leading protests at work. Retaliation is unlawful, and the NLRB can order employers to reinstate workers and offer them back pay — as the company’s new attorneys could tell them. Civis retained Jackson Lewis, a law firm an AFL-CIO official once called “the devil incarnate,” to handle its case at the NLRB.

Because, of course they did.

Ethics, schmethics, there is grifting to be done.

The allegations against Civis sting more given its origins. Wagner, who was the chief analytics officer for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, built the company to put liberals in power. The pitch was simple. Democratic campaigns needed a network of reliable number-crunchers, and rather than build new analytics teams every four years, candidates could now turn to a single company. During the 2020 election cycle, the firm earned $8.5 million for work on the campaigns of Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren and on other Democratic ventures. While political campaigns still generate much of the company’s revenue, it also works in public health and for various government agencies and, yes, labor unions, like the American Federation of Teachers, to the tune of almost $1 million since 2014.

………

On its website, Civis makes a lot of promises to prospective workers with principles. “No a**holes,” reads its mission statement. But the former workers all say a banal reality lurked behind the buzzwords: Civis was not all that different from any other corporate employer. In a 2019 incident that still rankles former employees, Wagner announced a companywide pivot — and that meant layoffs — that he called a “CTRL-alt-delete moment” for Civis in a staff meeting. The flippancy infuriated workers, who cite it in conversations with Intelligencer as a sign that portended battles to come.

Kind of like how the Obama White House was a “Genuinely hostile workplace to women.” 

Talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

In March 2020, as the pandemic began and the Democratic primary hit its most frantic tempo, contract employees struggled with heavy workloads and waited for permanent jobs that had been promised but never appeared. Right after the pandemic hit and staff moved to remote work, the company introduced a controversial new policy. Members of its government team now had to hit a quota of billable hours, starting at an average of 37 and a half a week. Civis told staff the new policy would be more equitable than the status quo, which saw some employees billing at much higher rates than others. Quotas aren’t all that unusual for consulting companies, but Civis paired its quota with unlimited paid time off, which was. Workers also had non-billable job responsibilities to perform on top of the quota, and former employees say that when staff took sick leave, even in the middle of a pandemic, they had to make up the hours later. The company had several initiatives designed to improve Civis from within — like a diversity-and-inclusion working group — but, staffers grumbled, where was the time to participate?

37½ billable hours a week is the equivalent of at somewhere between 55 and 75 actual hours a week.

………

“I was the highest-level woman of color on the government team,” she says. In regular one-on-one meetings with a Civis executive, she says she repeatedly asked for anti-racism training for employees at work. The organization hosted implicit-bias trainings and donated money to five charities, but she felt that didn’t go far enough. Particularly galling for Rao was a summertime presentation by her managers, which singled her out as proof that Civis prized diversity. “When we hired Sunny, we met the Rooney Rule but only interviewed two people,” said one of the slides reviewed by Intelligencer.

………

Workers say they coordinated with each other via a private Slack channel and phone calls on how to press Civis for changes. They wanted better paid-leave policies, clearer career progression for contract workers, professional development, and an end to what they called “the progressive pay cut” — a below-market wage offered to young workers in search of jobs that don’t offend their principles. When they raised these issues in staff meetings or one-on-one conversations, three former employees say, managers thanked them for speaking up.

This is explicitly protected activity under the NRLA, and Civis CEO Dan Wagner knows this, because if he’s hired the biggest union busting law firm in the nation, Jackson Lewis, they have told him that it is explicitly protected activity, and how to evade the requirements of the law.

Around the same time, in late May, a senior Civis analyst named David Shor tweeted himself into trouble. Amid mass protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Shor shared a link to research that showed a decrease in Democratic votes after similar unrest in 1968. Critics accused him of racial insensitivity. Six days later, Civis fired him, putting the company under a harsh spotlight. Former and current employees say Shor’s firing exacerbated unease with the way Civis managed employees. While commentators dissected the Shor case and its implications for free speech, Civis employees viewed it more as a labor issue, a sign that management was capricious and everyone was vulnerable.

By the fall, the resentment inside Civis came to a boil. Early in October, four former employees recall, a co-worker learned mid-meeting that her grandmother had died. Devastated, she left the call, then asked for bereavement leave in a one-on-one meeting with her manager. It didn’t go well, she later told co-workers who spoke to Intelligencer. The woman’s manager told her that she could take leave — but only if she made up the hours when she returned, her former co-workers recall her saying. Watching the billable-hours policy directly affect a co-worker and friend “made me personally angry and motivated to organize to affect change,” one co-worker tells Intelligencer. Within days of the incident, two employees reached out to a contact at the AFL-CIO for advice on the process of organizing a union.

Separately, Civis employees asked for greater transparency regarding the way the company chose its clients. As the presidential election approached, a Civis contract with Facebook worried a number of staff, including workers who weren’t involved in any conversations about unionization. The employees felt Facebook spread too much hate and had done too little to drive the violent far right off its platform. At an October 20 meeting open to the entire company, employees wanted to know how exactly Civis chose its clients, including Facebook: What good was the Civis litmus test if staff had no say in how it worked?

………

Ten days after that Facebook meeting, Sunny Rao, Sarah Klem, and nine other people were fired. Asked whether they believed their Facebook criticisms contributed to their firings, the workers would not comment. It’s certain, though, that they’d already been vocal company critics for months. Former and current employees tell Intelligencer that the 11 people who lost their jobs were all known internally for their activism at work, though only seven filed a charge with the NLRB.

………

Though the NLRB’s Chicago office, where Civis workers filed the original charge, didn’t deliver the finding the workers had hoped for, it may not have vindicated Civis either. The employees’ former attorney says the NLRB made it clear that Trump-era precedent had tied its hands: A divided 2019 ruling from the national board raised the bar for workplace activists to prove they’d been fired as retaliation. The case, Electrolux Home Products, Inc. and J’vada Mason, made it easier for employers to invent a pretext and still slide through the board’s review process, says Brandon Magner, a labor lawyer and the author of the Labor Law Lite newsletter.

Now that the seven who filed the NLRB charge have said they will go to the NLRB’s Office of Appeals, the Civis case could end up being more influential than they anticipated. Control of the national board is about to switch parties, as current appointees see their terms expire. “If everything goes the way it should, the ‘Biden board’ will be in place,” Magner explains. If the timing’s right, there’s “a chance” Civis could become a test case for overturning Electrolux, he adds.

If the NLRB overturns Electrolux on these assholes backs, I will be amused.

 

Remarkably Toxic Individuals

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It turns out that only 12 people are responsible for the overwhelming majority of anti-vaxx content online.

It really is amazing what a few horrible people can do:

They’ve been dubbed the “Disinformation Dozen”: 12 individuals or organizations are tied to up to 65 percent of anti-vaccine content circulating on major social media networking sites, according to an analysis of popular anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter.

………

The report accuses Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who was banned from Instagram last month — Joseph Mercola, Ty and Charlene Bollinger — whose Twitter accounts were briefly suspended at the beginning of the pandemic — Sherri Tenpenny, Rizza Islam, Rashid Buttar, Erin Elizabeth, Sayer Ji, Kelly Brogan, Christiane Northrup, Ben Tapper and Kevin Jenkins of spreading disinformation and claims that their social media accounts “have repeatedly violated Facebook and Twitter’s terms of service agreements.” And the CCDH has receipts — the report is full of screenshots of “example violations” that range from misleading to antisemitic.

It’s not a surprise.  The past few years have shown us the potential effects of a few toxic individuals in the right (wrong?) places.

How Could We Tell?

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Mitch McConnell is threatening to be completely obstructionist if the Democrats make any change to the filibuster. 

We saw how he behaved 2009-2016, and how he has behaved this far this year, so I don’t think that he has a claim to have engaged in any good faith dealing during his entire career. 

Does the phrase, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.,” ring a bell?

Mitch McConnell and good faith are as distantly related as Richard Feynman and a slime mold.*

As I am wont to say, F%$# him with Cheney’s dick:

The fight over the Senate filibuster escalated sharply on Tuesday, as President Biden for the first time threw his weight behind changing the rules even as Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, threatened harsh reprisals if Democrats moved to weaken the procedural tactic.

In an interview with ABC News, Mr. Biden gave his most direct endorsement yet of overhauling the filibuster, saying that he favored a return to what is called the talking filibuster: the requirement that opponents of legislation occupy the floor and make their case against it.

“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster; you have to do it, what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” the president said. “You had to stand up and command the floor, and you had to keep talking.” The comments were a significant departure for Mr. Biden, a 36-year veteran of the Senate who has been frequently described by aides as reluctant to alter Senate procedure.

………

Mr. Biden’s comments came as Mr. McConnell issued his stark warning and as the president’s allies on Capitol Hill began building a public case for the elimination of the tactic.

After Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, called for changes to reduce its power, Mr. McConnell, of Kentucky, bluntly promised a “scorched earth” response and pledged to grind the Senate to a standstill and derail Mr. Biden’s agenda if Democrats took that step.

“Everything that Democratic Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump, everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama, would be child’s play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if — if — they break the Senate,” Mr. McConnell said.

………

Seeking to slow Democrats and get the attention of the White House, Mr. McConnell was adamant that Republicans would tie the Senate into knots in retaliation if they took the step. He made his declaration after Mr. Durbin, a respected veteran of the institution, had said on Monday that it was time to stop allowing the minority party to routinely block legislation by requiring a three-fifths majority to advance most bills. It was the most explicit call yet by a Democrat leader to take action.

McConnell is already tying the institution in knots.  He cannot do any more evil than he is already doing now, and as such, he is at absolutely no risk of being gleeped by the Todal.†

Mr. Durbin noted that it was Mr. McConnell who institutionalized the use of the filibuster, which historically had been used rarely before the Kentuckian was in charge. Mr. Durbin said the procedural weapon was a particularly sore point for him, since it is has for two decades prevented Democrats from enacting the so-called Dream Act, a popular bipartisan bill that he wrote that would create a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children. Though it has majority support, it has never been able to clear the 60-vote threshold.

………

In his comments, Mr. McConnell threatened that Republicans would turn the rules against Democrats and try to make it virtually impossible to do anything in the Senate if they proceeded with the change. He referred to the fact that the chamber operates under arcane rules often bypassed through what is known as a unanimous consent agreement where no senator objects. If Democrats plunged ahead to gut the filibuster, he warned, Republicans would deny consent even on the most mundane of matters, effectively bogging down the Senate.

“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues,” Mr. McConnell said. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin — to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like — none. None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity, and this is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon.”

Yes we can, because you have been making it so for decades.

To the degree that Mitch McConnell sheds tears over any change to the filibuster, I will use them to salt my soup.

*Yes, I AM aware that I am probably insulting slime molds.
†The Todal is a punishment sent by the Devil to punish evildoers for not doing sufficient evil. Read James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks. It is a masterpiece.

It’s Called Pleading the Belly, and it is Bullsh%$

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In the latest twist in Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes efforts to evade justice, she is now trying to delay the trial because she is pregnant.

Tis is not an uncommon legal strategy, it’s called “Pleading the Belly”, which has its own Wikipedia page. 

I rather fear that her privilege is going to win out again.

The alleged Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is pregnant, according to a new court filing, potentially delaying her trial by several weeks.

Holmes is being charged with fraud for her role at the helm of Theranos, a blood-testing startup that was a rising star in Silicon Valley before it emerged it had misrepresented the effectiveness of its technology.

Lawyers for Holmes asked the judge on 2 March to delay the start of jury selection to 31 August, after her due date.

“The parties have met and conferred, and both parties agree that, in light of this development, it is not feasible to begin the trial on July 13, 2021, as currently scheduled,” said the filing.

There is no reason to delay jury selection.

Absent her being in active labor, pregnancy does not prevent a defendant from participating in jury selection or in the pretrial motions.

Were she not white or rich (her parents come from money), she’d be waiting in jail for the trial to start.

Another Slander Thrown at the PRO Act

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As I have mentioned before, the PRO Act significantly expands the right for workers to organize as well as increasing their protections against the nefarious actions of employers and their consultants.

Rather unsurprisingly, the champions of capital over labor do not like this bill, and equally unsurprisingly, they are claiming that the Pro Act would kill freelancing. 

This is a lie, and the freelancers pushing this are useful idiots:

Private opposition to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act has so far been surprisingly muted. The proposed bill is remarkably comprehensive in nature, encompassing the most far-reaching rewrite of the National Labor Relations Act since the Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947. Perhaps this is because few insiders believe the PRO Act can pass a deadlocked Senate without a clearer commitment by Democratic politicians to gut the legislative filibuster, but whatever the case, you have to do some digging to see any real organized campaign against the bill as a whole. Even then, it’s the usual suspects ringing the alarm bells: the Chamber of Commerce, the Associated Builders and Contractors, the HR Policy Association, and other organizations which historically have strongly opposed unionism and any pro-worker legal amendments.

The exception to this is coming from a small but vocal community of freelance writers who have taken to Twitter and other social media platforms to signal their opposition to the bill’s inclusion of the so-called “ABC Test.” The test, which contrary to popular belief has appeared in numerous state laws long before California’s Dynamex/Prop 22 episode, states that a worker is presumed to be an employee unless the employer can show that all three of the following conditions are satisfied:

  1. The worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work;
  2. The worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
  3. The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.

………

However, the rest of these articles demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of labor law, invoking themes of forced unionization and ruined careers. These predictions are unfounded. The ABC Test, if passed as part of the PRO Act, would only affect the analysis of employee vs. independent contractors status for the purposes of the NLRA. Put simply, the relevant question is whether certain workers possess rights under Section 7 of the NLRA, which guarantees employees (and employees only) the right to strike, collectively bargain, and engage in various other “concerted activities” for “mutual aid or protection.” Those deemed independent contractors under the NLRA have no such rights, and indeed would likely be engaged in price-fixing under antitrust law if attempting such tactics.

What would the PRO Act not affect? Literally anything else. It would not change a worker’s employment status for the purposes of state laws, such as those involving minimum wage, overtime, unemployment compensation, or various benefit schemes. Thus, a worker could feasibly be classified as an employee with unionization rights under the NLRA while still qualifying as an independent contractor under said state laws. Just ask SAG-AFTRA or IATSE, who count many “freelancers” in the entertainment industry as members; they have no consistent employer but still collectively bargain for superior wages and benefits compared to non-union counterparts.

The whole, “Pity the poor freelancer,” screed becomes even more ludicrous when one sees the actual plight of the actual stringers who do work for news outlets.

A few “Superstars” might get their noses out of joint about having to pay union dues, but I care about their lot almost as little as they care about the lot of their coworkers.

As Atrios Says

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“Time for another blogger ethics panel.”

It’s a catch phrase of his dating back to the early aughts, that he used, and still uses, whenever a reporter or columnist at one of the major news outlets is caught profiting off of an undisclosed conflict of interest.

This time, it’s David Brooks, who was caught taking a full time salary from the Aspen Institute as well as running the Weave Project,  both of which have taken money from Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the Walton (Walmart) family, and a plethora of corporate sources that he routinely shills for.

Brooks has resigned from the Aspen institute, the status of the rest of his affairs is unclear:

David Brooks has resigned from his position at the Aspen Institute following reporting by BuzzFeed News about conflicts of interest between the star New York Times columnist and funders of a program he led for the think tank.

Eileen Murphy, a spokesperson for the Times, said in a statement that editors approved Brooks’s involvement with Aspen in 2018, when he launched a project called Weave. But current editors weren’t aware he was receiving a salary for Weave.

Spoiler, he is receiving a salary for Weave.

………

Brooks’s resignation comes after BuzzFeed News discovered further evidence of conflicts of interest and entanglements with corporate and billionaire donors to Weave.

Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

BuzzFeed News first revealed Brooks never disclosed to Times readers that he takes a full-time salary for his work on Weave, or that its funders include Facebook, the father of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy individuals and corporations. Brooks recently wrote a blog post for Facebook’s corporate website in praise of Facebook Groups, a product that has often been a fount of misinformation and hate speech.

………

If you know someone who lives alone ask them to join NextDoor, which is Facebook for neighborhoods. It helps them stay in touch with those right around them. Vital in a crisis.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 14, 2020

Over the past 24 hours, BuzzFeed News discovered new evidence of potential conflicts. On March 15 of last year, as Americans faced a deadly pandemic, Brooks appeared on “Meet The Press”and offered some advice.

“We need to take moral steps to make ourselves decent neighbors to each other as we go through this thing. I think people should get on Nextdoor, this sort of ‘Facebook for neighbors,’” he said.

Left unsaid by Brooks was that Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, had donated $25,000 to Weave. A day before his appearance on the nationally televised NBC program, Brooks also tweetedto his nearly 250,000 followers, “If you know someone who lives alone, ask them to join NextDoor.”

Another new revelation: Last month, Brooks appeared in a Walton Family Foundation video and did not disclose that the organization, run by the billionaire family that founded Walmart, also funds his project.

Brooks’s failure to disclose these conflicts of interest added to the string of ethically questionable actions by the columnist and author related to his work on Weave.

Brooks will survive this, he fits the NYT narrative for a, “Reasonable Conservative,” but in a less toxic workplace than the Times newsroom, he would be gone.

They Do Want Vaccines, You Racist Dirt-Bag

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Sites in PG County mostly serve (White) folks from outside the County

So, now Maryland Governor Larry “Ratf%$#” Hogan is claiming that it’s not his policies that are undervaccinating Black people, it’s that Black folks don’t want vaccines. 

While the never Trumpers see Hogan as the future of the party, it is clear that he as extensively relied on racist appeals to maintain his popularity, particularly by deliberately short-changing Baltimore City and Prince George’s County, the which have the two largest minority communities in the state:

A 94-year-old veteran got so tired of waiting for an appointment that he drove around his Washington suburb at random, hunting for a vaccine.

A partially blind 81-year-old wanted a shot but had no computer or smartphone to register online. Yet another elderly Black resident of Maryland’s hardest-hit county, this one 102 years old, relied on church friends a few decades younger to help her through a distribution system best navigated by Gen Z.

Amid concern that prioritizing speed has heightened vaccine inequity statewide, Prince George’s County stands out: The majority-Black suburb has by far the most coronavirus cases in Maryland, and the lowest percentage of vaccinated residents.

Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has repeatedly cited vaccine hesitancy among minority groups as the key cause for the lagging rates, saying at one point that African American and Latino residents in Prince George’s, who represent 84 percent of the county’s population, are “refusing to take the vaccine.”

But local, state and federal leaders from across Maryland — all of them Democrats — blame the state’s decentralized sign-up system, which they say prioritizes those with more time, technology and information at their disposal over those who are disproportionately dying.

In interviews, more than a dozen vaccine-seeking Prince Georgians agreed.

………

Statewide, Black people represent 31 percent of Maryland’s population but only 16 percent of vaccine recipients for whom race has been reported. That disparity has grown wider over the past two months, according to a state analysis. Prince George’s lags far behind other counties, with just 8.3 percent of residents having received their first shot as of Thursday. 

………

An equity task force Hogan created released plans on Thursday to target underserved communities with pop-up clinics and other efforts, and solicit ideas from community groups about how best to deliver vaccine doses. The governor acknowledged the state was “not where we need to be with the Black community or the Hispanic community.”

But Hogan also said he believes the state has done far more than others to acknowledge and address racial inequity in vaccine distribution.

“I’m not going to respond to every criticism of every person who does not like what we say or do,” he said.

To quote John Mulaney, “That’s what I thought you’d say you dumb f%$#ing horse.”

Last week, the governor outraged Democratic lawmakers when he said Baltimore City was receiving more doses than it was “entitled to.” 

Yes, massah. 

He’s got more class than Trump, who doesn’t, but he’s pandering to the same racist dirt-bags.

There Is a Religious Parallel Here, but I Cannot Put My Finger on It………

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This reminds me of that religious story, something something something Golden Calf, something something graven image, something something false idols.

But what do I know, I’m not very religious. https://t.co/rOwxvNQM7W

— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) February 26, 2021

Actuall, I can put my finger on it, I made a similar observation some years back when a group of Christofascists decided to lay hands on the Wall Street Bull in an attempt to drive the “Devil” out of the financial markets.

Spoiler: It did not work.

I am not one to call for divine intervention, I feel that the problems of this world are created humans, and must be solved by them, but maybe they should have a word with Korach, face to face.

Break out your shovels, conservatives, and note that you will probably have to be digging up, not digging down.

 

Of Course He Did

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Today in Republican Family Values™ we discover that freshman Republican Madison Cawthorn spent his college years harassing women on campus.

Also I would note that you have to be pretty f%$#ing “Harassy” to get large numbers of women from a Christian college known for its reactionary politics (Patrick Henry College) to publicly complain your behavior means that it had to be pretty bad.

When you add to the fact that you were doing so FROM A WHEEL CHAIR, which both makes harassment both physically and culturally more difficult. (Lots of people believed that the disabled can’t do things like harass other people, because they do not see the disabled as real people)

Also, he managed to do this in 1 semester, since he flunked out of his first semester.

Still, it appears that Mr. Cawthorn wins the gold on this, which is ironic, since he was also caught lying about training for the Paralympics:

Madison Cawthorn arrived at Patrick Henry College’s small Christian campus in northern Virginia in fall 2016 blazing with charm, bravado, and a flashing white smile. His former classmates said the future member of Congress would whip his white Dodge Challenger into the parking lot and regale his classmates with the story of how he survived a harrowing car crash as a teen, which left him paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair for life. After his intensive recovery, he was older than most students — 21 — and didn’t fit the mold of the Christian and largely sheltered first-year students who chose the conservative school in Purcellville because of its commitment to God and rigorous academics. And, former Patrick Henry students said, it didn’t take long for women on campus to start warning one another: You don’t want to be alone with him, especially in his car.

BuzzFeed News spoke with more than three dozen people, including more than two dozen former students, their friends, and their relatives, who described or corroborated instances of sexual harassment and misconduct on campus, in Cawthorn’s car, and at his house near campus. Four women told BuzzFeed News that Cawthorn, now a rising Republican star, was aggressive, misogynistic, or predatory toward them. Their allegations include calling them derogatory names in public in front of their peers, including calling one woman “slutty,” asking them inappropriate questions about their sex lives, grabbing their thighs, forcing them to sit in his lap, and kissing and touching them without their consent. One of these women now works as an intern for another Republican member of Congress and passes Cawthorn in the corridors of the Capitol. According to more than a dozen people — including three women who had firsthand experience and seven people who heard about these incidents from them at the time — Cawthorn often used his car as a way to entrap and harass his women classmates, taking them on what he could call “fun drives” off campus. Two said he would drive recklessly and ask them about their virginity and sexual experiences while they were locked in the moving vehicle.

“I realized he was taking me out to the middle of nowhere, Virginia,” said Caitlin Coulter, a former classmate who went for a drive with him during her senior year. “We were on these small, like, one- [or] two-lane back roads, and I just felt so uncomfortable and nervous and not even something I think at the time I could put a finger on, but just, like, danger warning.”

BuzzFeed News sent Cawthorn a detailed list of allegations in this story. His communications director, Micah Bock, did not respond to the specific allegations but instead referred BuzzFeed News to remarks the young Republican had made during a campaign debate in September: “I have never done anything sexually inappropriate in my life,” Cawthorn said.

………

Long before Cawthorn’s persona as a poster child for the new right gained national traction, people who went to school with him at Patrick Henry College said they were stunned as they watched him ascend in the North Carolina race. They told BuzzFeed News they remember him as one of the only Trump supporters on their small conservative campus, where he developed a reputation for mistreating women at the school, according to more than two dozen former students. 

………

Then, in October, more than 160 members of the Patrick Henry community signed an open letter detailing “gross misconduct towards our female peers, public misrepresentation of his past, disorderly conduct that was against the school’s student honor code, and self-admitted academic failings,” including that Cawthorn “established a reputation of predatory behavior.” After the letter was published, Cawthorn told ABC 13 that it was based on rumors, and his campaign wrote in a Facebook post that he had the endorsement of a “significant number of PHC alumni and former students who knew him well.” The post was signed by just six people. Two worked for the campaign and a third was one of their relatives.

………

But former classmates also remember Cawthorn as magnetic and ambitious, delivering almost-too-firm handshakes, buddying up with nearly everyone he met, and flirting with and befriending many women classmates. A former high school football player and avid athlete — his Instagram feed is peppered with videos in which he claimed he was training for the 2020 Paralympic Games, which wasn’t true — Cawthorn exuded a jock persona at school, classmates said. He soon formed a small posse of guys, which seven former students told BuzzFeed News was known around campus as the “the douche crew.” 

And he managed this in the single semester that he was there.

He was a very busy boy.

Manchin to Support Haaland for Secretary of the Interior

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After publicly playing Hamlet for a few days, Joe Manchin (DINO-WV) has announced that he will support the nomination of Deb Halland as Secretary of the Interior.

Why her, she participated in protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, which as a VERY pro fossil fuel Senator from a coal state he should find even more unsettling than a few mean Tweets about Republicans made by Neera Tanden.

The idea that only CEO contributes to a company’s growth and not all employees is really pernicious https://t.co/2d9xgU0IHJ

— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) August 27, 2016

Pretty mild, actually

It turns out that Manchin is probably lying about his reason to oppose Tanden.

It seems that his daughter, Heather Bresch, academic fabulist and CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, was criticized by Tanden for raising her own pay while gouging consumers for the Epipen® anaphylaxis treatment

This would not be the first time that Manchin has used his official position to benefit his daughter. His finger prints are all over an effort to get Bresch an MBA degree that she did not earn. 

So Joe Manchin’s actions here are even more stupid, sordid, and corrupt than I had previously imagined.

Still no sympathy for Ms. Tanden though.  She’s a hack and a psychopath, and she shut down a publication in response to unionization, so am firmly of the belief that she should not be kitchen staff supervisor* at the White House, much less director of the OMB.

*It’s a reference to the comic book Cerebus the Aardvark.

It Was Racism that Killed the Beast

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Dan Froomkin has a must-read analysis on the testimony of former Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund before Congress.

In it he conclusively shows that Sund is deliberately deceptive to Congress, focusing on a poorly distributed FBI memo (the January 5 memo) from the day before the assault on the Capitol, while misleading about a far more detailed and extensive report from his own Capitol police from two days earlier, which was given to him, where his own intelligence unit warned about the very real possibility of a actions by the protesters where, “Congress itself is the target.”

I agree with Froomkin’s assessment:  Lund’s lackadaisical response stems not from bad intelligence, but from racism:

Steven Sund, the disgraced former chief of the Capitol Police Department, was explicitly warned in a Jan. 3 memo from his own intelligence unit that thousands of desperate, violence-prone Trump supporters were planning to target Congress on Jan. 6, encouraged by the president himself.

The memo didn’t really say much more than was already obvious to anyone paying attention, but it was authoritative, detailed, and, of course, prescient.

Sund waved it off. He didn’t bother to share it with the rank and file. He didn’t equip his frontline officers with tear gas, or other non-lethal crowd-control weapons, or riot gear. Instead, he sent them out in street uniforms to man barricades made of bike racks, and get the shit beaten out of them, in one case fatally. He let the Capitol fall to a mob.

But in his first public comments on Tuesday, Sund had the breath-taking gall to blame the breach of the Capitol not on his own poor decision-making, but on a “clear lack of accurate and complete intelligence across several federal agencies.”

………

The Feb. 5 FBI report was shared with the Capitol Police intelligence unit. Sund said he didn’t get it, however, and under leading questioning from Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon blamed the unit’s director, John Donahue, for that.

………

Sund’s story is that because of flawed intelligence, he judged the danger posed by the Jan. 6 protests as similar in scale to that posed by previous pro-Trump rallies nearby, none of which amounted to much.

But take a few moments to read this one, “redacted” excerpt from the internal Jan. 3 memo that the Post made public. Sund’s excuses fall apart. (The public really needs to see the full, unredacted memo, by the way.)

Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out. Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th. As outlined above, there has been a worrisome call for protesters to come to these events armed and there is the possibility that protesters may be inclined to become violent. Further, unlike the events on November 14, 2020, and December 12, 2020, there are several more protests scheduled on January 6, 2021, and the majority of them will be on Capitol grounds. The two protests expected to be the largest of the day – the Women for American First protest on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal protest in Areas 8 and 9 — may draw thousands of participants and both have been promoted by President Trump himself. The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event. This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike.

Imagine reading that memo and failing to put your own officers on red alert; failing to prepare them to repel what seemed like an inevitable onslaught.

The closest any senator came to asking about that was Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. “It’s not that we had inadequate resources, but a failure to deploy the people that we were supposed to,” he told Sund. He noted that Sund had in a previous letter acknowledged knowing that white supremacist groups and other extremist groups were expected on Jan. 6 and might become violent.

………

As Rep. Cori Bush – a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests – put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps… we would have been shot, we would have been tear gassed.”

The reporting on this element of the story – why Sund and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, also older white males, weren’t particularly alarmed by the MAGA horde – has been terrible. Nearly nonexistent.

The one exception has been an article by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica, based on interviews with 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers. They reported:

The interviews… revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once.

Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren’t even nearby. Nobody asked why Sund didn’t give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two sergeants-at-arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the “other”.

This was willful blindness driven by (at best) privilege, and the Congressmen questioning should have (metaphorically) strung up Sund by his entrails over this.

He just lied to Congress, and he deliberately hung men under his command out to dry, but the story of the mainstream media is going to be about how this mook is a victim of circumstance.

Of Course They Are

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In response to surprise Senate and Presidential campaign defeats, Georgia Republicans are trying to make voting as difficult as possible.

When your policies are bad, the response of the GOP is not to change those policies, or even to try to sell their policies better.  Their response is to pick and choose their voters, because they are a bunch of racist fascists:

Georgia Republicans have unveiled sweeping new legislation that would make it dramatically harder to vote in the state, following an election with record turnout and surging participation among Black voters.

The measure is one of the most brazen efforts to make it harder to vote in America in recent years. The bill would block officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by Black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls to the polls” effort. It would place new limits on the use of mail-in ballot dropboxes, restrict who can handle an absentee ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of other identification with their application for a mail-in ballot. It would also require voters to provide the same driver’s license information on the mail-in ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable ID.

The bill gives voters less time to request and return mail-in ballots, not only moving up the deadline to return an application but also limiting requests to start 78 days ahead of an election instead of the current 180. It requires election officials to reject ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct and bans organizers from offering food or water to voters standing in line to cast a ballot.

“With exacting precision, the bill targets voters of color,” said Nse Ufot, chief of the New Georgia Project, one of the groups that mobilized voters of color in Georgia. “Georgia Republicans saw what happens when Black voters are empowered and show up at the polls, and now they’re launching a concerted effort to suppress the votes and voices of Black Georgians.”

Working to find common ground with these people is a fools errand.

They only care about power (theirs) and hatred (of those who do not look or pray like them).

How Utterly Proper

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Hillary Clinton has selected right wing pro-fracking pro TPP DINO Ken Salazar to head her transition team:

Two big issues dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both.

Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric.

Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity.

She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen.

And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments.

As a senator, Salazar was widely considered a reliable friend to the oil, gas, ranching and mining industries. As interior secretary, he opened the Arctic Ocean for oil drilling, and oversaw the botched response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since returning to the private sector, he has been an ardent supporter of the TPP, while pushing back against curbs on fracking.

He said this:

“We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone,” Salazar told the attendees, who included the vice president of BP America, another keynote speaker at the conference. “We need to make sure that story is told.”

He is ignoring many cases of contaminated water, including some cases where the water would burn.

And he claims that there is not one single case of a problem.

As interior secretary, he was waiving environmental reviews for BP project as its as its Deepwater Horizon was still spewing thousands of barrels a day in to the Gulf of Mexico,

And this ratf%$# will be vetting her staff, which means that in a very real way, he will have more impact on the shape of her administration than anyone but her.

If you think that Clinton is a progressive, I have some of Donald Trump’s debt to sell you.

A Noun, and a Verb, and 91………Whatever

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Rudy “A Noun, a Verb and 9/11” Giuliani some how managed to forget the 911 terrorist attacks:

In early January 2010, Rudy Giuliani, known for his obsessive focus on the 9/11 attacks, made a bizarre comment on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The former mayor argued, “What [President Obama] should be doing is following the right things that [George W. Bush] did – one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror.”
Giuliani added, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”
Of course, we had a very memorable domestic attack under Bush. The “one” under Obama, in this case, apparently referred to “Underwear Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab, who attempted to detonate a concealed explosive on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, but who failed. This “attack,” fortunately, led to zero casualties.
More than six years later, Giuliani is still confused.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Monday said terrorists failed to successfully strike the United States in the eight years before President Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton took office.
“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States,” Giuliani said Monday ahead of a speech by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on foreign policy. “They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

Seriously.  Giuliani is a man who has been a horror show his entire life, (he announced his divorce in a press conference before he told his then wife) with the exception of one day, and when it is inconvenient, it slips his mind.

What a horrible man.

Combat Ready My Ass

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The US Air Force has declared that its first squadron of F-35s is combat ready:

The U.S. Air Force on Tuesday declared an initial squadron of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35A fighter jets ready for combat, marking a major milestone for a program that has faced cost overruns and delays.

………

“The U.S. Air Force decision to make the 15 F-35As … combat ready sends a simple and powerful message to America’s friends and foes alike – the F-35 can do its mission,” the program’s chief, Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, said in a statement.

Not so much:

Dan Grazier, a fellow of the Project On Government Oversight, said, however, “This is nothing but a public relations stunt.” He added that it would not be possible to know if the F-35 jets were ready for combat until after initial operational testing.

That’s putting it mildly.

As the folks at The Register note. “It’s got dodgy radar, relies on an insecure database, boasts a buggy operating system, and a laser targeting system that can’t be used for training in the UK, but the United States Air Force is satisfied that the F-35A fighter is ready for combat.”

Also: its ejection seat can injure smaller (less than 165 lb) pilots, and its cannon cannot be fired.

This is a statement that is intended for the consumption of the Pentagon and Congress, and not reflective of the maturity of the program.