Category: Legislation

She is a Psychopath

No Comments

Senator Sinema a little too happy for poverty wages to remain pic.twitter.com/ze2T2CGtML

— RootsAction (@Roots_Action) March 5, 2021

Horriffic

It’s one thing to vote against raising the minimum wage, even if you are, as Kyrsten Sinema (D=AZ) is, nominally a member of the Democratic Party.

It’s quite another to show up dressed like a Japanese school girl, and then cast your vote with a thumbs down as one is a roman emperor.

It’s even worse when one sees the unholy glee she expresses in crushing MILLIONS of American workers.

Kyrsten Sinema is even more of a psychopath than is Mitch McConnell.

At least HE has the decency to skulk in the shadows while he does evil.

Sinema revels in the evil that she is doing.

Getting rid of her and Manchin is worth losing the Senate.

It’s like They Are Playing to Lose

No Comments

The headline in New York Magazine says it all, “Democrats Strip $1,400 Checks From 12 Million for No Reason.” 

That’s 12 million voters who know that the Democrats lied to them, and they were likely the margin of victory in at least one of the Georgia runoffs that gave Democrats Joe Manchin control of the US Senate.

This is horrible policy, about $8 billion in a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, 0.42%, and it is worse politics.


The official hat of the Biden Administration

The stimulus checks are the single most popular part of the bill, but the so-called moderates in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needed a scalp so that they could wave their dicks, and Biden caves.

To quote not-Tallyrand, (it is frequently misattributed to him) “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

Democrats often wonder why they don’t get more votes, because their policies are popular.

They don’t get more votes because people do not believe that Democrats will actually follow through.

What Should Be Done Now, and Won’t Be Done

No Comments

Now that the Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that a minimum wage increase cannot be passed through the reconciliation process, the course of action is clear, or at least it should be.

The President of the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris, can overrule the unelected Senate official, and it would require a vote of 60 Senators to overrule her decision.

Unfortunately, given that Biden has already said that he thought that a minimum wage increase was dead, and Biden’s chief of staff has said that Harris would not rule against her, it appears that they are playing to lose.

Not a surprise.  Learned helplessness, is an innate trait of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), and Joe Biden has enormous affection for an institution frequently called, “A Petri Dish for Psychopaths.”

If they were not cowards or delusional, here is what would happen:

On Thursday, a key Senate official advised Democratic lawmakers that the chamber’s rules do not allow them to include a minimum wage increase in President Joe Biden’s first COVID-19 relief legislation. The ruling from the parliamentarian means that Vice President Kamala Harris could decide the fate of one of the Democratic Party’s most significant campaign promises — but it remains unclear what she will end up doing.

As the presiding officer of the Senate, Harris — who has long touted her support for a $15 minimum wage — can now use the power her predecessors have used to ignore the advisory opinion and fulfill Biden’s campaign promise to boost the wage. A confidential memo obtained by The Daily Poster now circulating on Capitol Hill spells out exactly how that could be accomplished.

However, White House chief of staff Ron Klain this week declared that Harris will refuse to use that power — a decision that would effectively put the Biden-Harris administration in the position of potentially killing the prospect of minimum wage legislation for the foreseeable future. Immediately after the parliamentarian’s ruling, the White House issued a statement reiterating Klain’s comment, declaring that “Biden respects the parliamentarian’s decision.”

Some congressional Democrats have already been arguing that the Biden administration’s refusal to overrule the parliamentarian would be immoral and a political disaster for their party.

………

As such, Democrats are working to pass the COVID bill using the convoluted budget reconciliation process. The process will allow for a simple majority vote on the final legislation, but it also allows Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough to recommend tossing certain provisions if she decides they violate the so-called Byrd Rule, which is designed to prohibit extraneous matters outside of federal spending issues to be added to budget legislation.

BTW, while not common, overruling the parliamentarian is by means rare, particularly given that the Senate can pass one reconciliation bill in a year:

Vice presidents have ignored the parliamentarian in the past. According to Slate, “Vice President Hubert Humphrey routinely ignored his parliamentarian’s advice.”

Roll Call reported last month: “Precedents for ignoring parliamentary advice include 1967, 1969, and 1975 efforts to change the Senate’s threshold to end debate from a two-thirds vote to three-fifths.”

 ………

In a new memo circulating to lawmakers and obtained by The Daily Poster, Harris’s power as the presiding Chair of the Senate is spelled out, citing a precedent set during the Clinton administration.

“It would take 60 votes to overturn the ruling of the Chair on a Byrd Rule point of order, regardless of what the Parliamentarian advises,” states the memo. “Based on a search of the Congressional Record, it appears that only twice has the chair’s ruling on a Byrd Rule point of order been appealed. Both instances occurred on August 6, 1993, during consideration of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. Neither appeal garnered the 60 affirmative votes necessary to overturn the Chair’s ruling.”

Like I said, the Dems are playing to lose, and come 2022, lose they will.

Of Course They Are

No Comments

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).

Today in Evil

No Comments

After discovering that municipal broadband is better and cheaper than what you can get from the incumbent carriers, House Republicans introduce legislation banning the practice, because there is not enough opportunity for graft campaign donations the private sector when the government does the job better and cheaper.

Everyone hates their private ISP, the Dems should run on this, but the moderates want to continue to extract protection money campaign donations from the Baby Bells as well:

House Republicans this week proposed legislation that would ban the creation of municipal broadband networks at a federal level, and shutter networks in areas where some private competition exists – purportedly to improve internet access across the US.

Dubbed the CONNECT Act (Communities Overregulating Networks Need Economic Competition Today), the bill [PDF] says: “A State or political subdivision thereof may not provide or offer for sale to the public, a telecommunications provider, or to a commercial provider of broadband internet access service, retail or wholesale broadband internet access service.”

The CONNECT Act would also ban states from operating municipal broadband networks in areas where two or more private operators exist. The language here is fairly vague, and it doesn’t state how affected operators should dispose of their existing infrastructure. It’s also fairly limited about what constitutes a “private operator”, deferring only to the barebones definition in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

………

Twenty-two states have passed laws that either prohibit municipal broadband entirely, or impose restrictions that make municipal broadband projects significantly harder to launch and operate. Minnesota, for example, requires municipalities to obtain a supermajority (65 per cent) of voters in a referendum before providing telecommunications services. Montana and Pennsylvania only permit projects if there is no private competition. Texas and Missouri have outright bans on municipal broadband.

The Democratic response should be to pass legislation preempting the state bans and offering subsidies (which would be smaller than those given to the likes of AT&T and Verizon) for the establishment of municipal broadband.

They should, but they won’t.

Worse Response to a Bad Idea

No Comments

The Australian government is in the process of passing a law that requires payment for linking to news sites, which to my mind is a horrible idea, and Mark Zuckerberg’s response to all of this is to have Facebook ban all Australian news content from their platform. 

Granted, Australia is not a huge market, at 25 million people, it’s only about 5 million more people than the New York City metropolitan area, but this ham-fisted response is going to do a lot of damage to Facebook while mildly inconveniencing the people of Australia.

I don’t expect Zuckerberg to cave, and in that case, I see Australia generally moving to some other source of rumors, genocidal racists, fascism, and cat pix.

The Australians are a hardy and inventive people:

Facebook has followed through on its threat to ban Australians from seeing or posting news content on its site in response to the federal government’s news media code.

The tech giant’s Australian and New Zealand managing director, Will Easton, said this would block links to Australian publishers from being posted, while no Australian users would be able to share or see content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

“The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” he said in a blog post published on Thursday morning. “It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia.

“With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.”

………

Users on Thursday reported seeing a pop-up error window when they attempted to post links to news, stating these cannot be posted in response to the news media code.

………

Facebook’s move is in contrast to the approach from the other major platform subject to the code, Google.

Although Google had threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia if the code went ahead, in the past week, Google has signed agreements with some of Australia’s biggest publishers, including News Corp, Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media, for payment for its News Showcase product. The Nine deal is reportedly worth $30m a year.

As several people have pointed out to me, Facebook blocked itself. pic.twitter.com/LVhyJMAHfp

— Josh Taylor (@joshgnosis) February 17, 2021

Yes, Facebook banned Facebook, I think that the Aussies would call this an “Own Goal”

It gets even worse, because Facebook f%$#ed up the rollout of the ban, shutting down non-profits and government agencies as well:

The Bureau of Meteorology, state health departments, the Western Australian opposition leader, charities and Facebook itself are among those to have been hit by Facebook’s ban on news in Australia.

On Thursday morning Facebook began preventing Australian news sites from posting, while also stopping Australian users from sharing or viewing content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

The social media giant said it made the decision in response to the news media bargaining code currently before the Senate, which would force Facebook and Google to negotiate with news companies for payment for content.

………

As Australia prepares to begin the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, state health departments, including SA Health and Queensland Health, were unable to post.

St Vincent’s Health in Melbourne said it was “extremely concerning”its Facebook page had been blocked “during a pandemic and on the eve of crucial Covid vaccine distribution”.

Facebook is claiming that this was a “Mistake.”

If you believe that, I have a bridge in Melbourne made completely of Koala poop to sell you.

Of Course They Are

No Comments

Despite the Pandemic, despite the new variants spreading across the nation, despite the fact that sick workers coming into work further spread the disease, Republicans are still trying to kill paid sick leave, because if your employer cannot exploit you, they want you dead:

Pennsylvania state Rep. Seth Grove introduced legislation last month to block cities and municipalities from imposing paid sick leave requirements on businesses, even as COVID-19 cases are raging throughout his state and the country. Last week, local news media reported that the Republican lawmaker was now quarantining after exhibiting coronavirus symptoms and awaiting test results.

Grove’s preemption bill is the latest salvo in an ongoing war over stripping worker protections that continues to be fought in statehouses and Congress, even as the coronavirus pandemic spirals out of control. With Democrats in Washington preparing to drop paid sick leave from President Joe Biden’s first COVID relief bill, potentially leaving 87 million workers without protection, the responsibility for providing the benefit to workers now falls squarely on states — the very place the war has been waged for the last decade.

Paid sick leave statutes require businesses to provide employees with medical leave for ailments and injuries. Grove has been pushing for legislation to bar localities from imposing such requirements since 2013. His latest bill, reintroducing the measure, would be retroactive to 2015 — the year Democratic strongholds Philadelphia and Pittsburgh passed laws mandating paid sick leave.

 F%$# them, and the horse they rode in on.

Oops!

No Comments

It turns out that because of sloppy law writing in Missouri, theft is no longer a felony in the Show Me State:

On an opinion that went largely unnoticed, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that had the effect of making most stealing offenses no longer felonies thanks to an apparently inadvertent change to state law way back in 2002. The far-reaching decision sent criminal defense attorneys across the state scrambling.

The case – State v. Bazell – was brought by a woman who had been convicted of multiples felonies for stealing firearms, among other things, in a burglary case. The court said the firearm felonies should be knocked down to misdemeanors because a portion of the state’s criminal code designating certain types of offenses as felonies is written in a way that doesn’t make it applicable to the state’s definition of stealing itself.

“If the words are clear, the Court must apply the plain meaning of the law,” the opinion said. “When the meaning of a statute is clear, the Court should not employ canons of construction to achieve a desired result.”

………

Subparagraph 3 covers a whole assortment of stealing crimes, including the stealing of explosives, credit cards, motor vehicles, property deeds, anything worth between $500-$25,000 and in any case in which the suspect physically takes something from the victim’s person. Additionally, subparagraph 8 – which designates stealing anything worth more than $25,000 as a Class B felony – has similar language, and thus is no longer applicable as well, public defenders believe.

Because of Tuesday’s ruling, anyone who was charged with a felony for those kinds of crimes has a chance to get it brought down to a misdemeanor, as long as it’s for a crime after 2002, when the language was added, Flottman said.

Son of Missouri Harry S Truman must be spinning in his grave.

Son of Missouri Mark Twain must be laughing somewhere.

Metadata Fail

2 Comments

California State Assemblyman Adam Gray demanded an expensive and potential paralyzing audit of the California Air Resources Board, in what was a blatant attempt to hamstring the organization.

Environmentalists, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together, suggested that he was doing the bidding of lobbyists.

Mr. Gray denied that he was carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, but it turns out that not only was he metaphorically carrying their water, he was literally carrying their letter.

Metadata from the document showed that it had been drafted by a lobbyist:

………

“I think the environmentalists are going to point you over here and say he’s taking oil money, he’s trying to block the program,” Gray said in an interview. “I’m not trying to block the program. I’m for fighting climate change.”

But in pushing for the audit, Gray got a big assist from the oil industry. The industry’s main lobbyist wrote the request.

Metadata in the Microsoft Word document in the draft request obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows that its author is Eloy Garcia. Garcia is the lead lobbyist for the Western States Petroleum Assn. or WSPA, which represents oil companies in Sacramento.



The letter that Gray and more than a dozen other lawmakers sent to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee on Aug. 4 was word for word the same as Garcia’s draft.

First, Adam Gray is completely, and most deservedly, owned.

Second, how many times does this have to happen before people get a clue? 

Information on removing the metadata is a quick Google search away.

F%$# Me. I Agree with Rand Paul.

1 Comment

I guess that we file this under that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, because Senator Aqua Buddha is opposing the massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia because of their indiscriminate brutality in Yemen:

Citing concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he’s looking for ways to stop a $1.15 billion weapons deal with Riyadh that would include the sale of 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored vehicles, and other military equipment.

Paul’s pledge comes as Saudi Arabia resumed its bombardment of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa following the collapse of peace talks in Kuwait between representatives of the government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“I will work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale,” Paul told Foreign Policy in a statement. “Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

Humanitarian organizations are criticizing the proposed weapons sale as a setback for efforts to bring pressure on Riyadh to throttle back its military campaign. The U.N. estimates that at least 6,400 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict while more than 2.8 million have been displaced from their homes.

He’s right.

Saudi Arabia provided support for the 911 bombers, and they created ISIS.

They are not our allies, and we should not be helping them in Yemen, which, among other things, has resulted in a massive increase in the power of al Qaeda in that nation.

Damn! The NORML Tinfoil Hat Fits!

No Comments

One of the under-reported facts in the DNC email leaks was that the alcohol lobby was working aggressively with the DNC to foreclose any move toward legalization:

The WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is causing quite a stir for Hillary Clinton after some of the messages appeared to show the supposedly neutral committee favoring her presidential campaign over that of primary rival Bernie Sanders.

But the emails also contain a juicy tidbit for followers of the increasingly prominent debate about marijuana legalization.

One message sent to DNC Finance Director Jordon Kaplan shows that the alcohol industry is spending money to get members of Congress to pay attention to marijuana-impaired driving.

………

While the excerpt from a public email newsletter is not exactly a secret like the internal DNC messages are, it is a revealing window into the alcohol industry’s apparent concern over the marijuana policy reform movement’s increasing success.

Pro-legalization advocates have long speculated that as criminalization and stigma disappear, many adults will choose to use marijuana instead of drink alcohol, which could lead to diminishing profits for beer, wine and liquor manufacturers and sellers.

The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America’s website calls marijuana policy a “key issue” and its annual convention last year featured a panel titled, “Everything You Need to Know about Marijuana Legalization.” A press release said the session would cover “how marijuana legalization could impact another socially sensitive product: beverage alcohol.”

………

WSWA represents companies in the middle of the three tiers: Distributors who buy alcohol from producers and then place it into retail establishments where consumers shop.

“Without a similarly robust system, the marijuana market could present the potential for illicit and unregulated activity akin to that which occurred with alcohol prior to and during Prohibition,” the group’s site says. “Accordingly, WSWA stands ready to serve as a resource for states in explaining the merits of the three tier system as a systematic and effective regulatory framework.”

So WSWA isn’t necessarily opposed to legalization. It just seems to want to be the middleman between producers and retail sellers — and to grab a piece of the profits along the way.

So not a surprise.

NBA Does the Right Thing

No Comments

I’m rather shocked that the NBA is pulling the 2017 All Star Game from Charlotte because of North Carolina’s anti-gay law.

I don’t expect sports leagues to do the right thing, so I am pleasantly surprised:

The NBA announced Thursday it will move the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte due to North Carolina’s law that bars local governments from extending civil rights protections to gay and transgender people.

“The NBA has decided to relocate the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte with the hope of rescheduling for 2019,” the league said in a statement.

“While we recognize that the NBA cannot choose the law in every city, state, and country in which we do business, we do not believe we can successfully host our All-Star festivities in Charlotte in the climate created by HB2,” as the law is commonly known.

Women of American: 1 — The State of Texas: 0

1 Comment

The Supreme Court just ruled that Texas’ antiabortion law is unconstitutional:

Putting the right to abortion back on the same constitutional footing the Supreme Court laid down nearly a quarter-century ago, a divided Supreme Court on Monday swept away new forms of state restrictions on the way clinics can function. Together with recent refusals by the Court to allow states to narrow the scope of the abortion right itself, the new ruling in Whole Woman’s Health Clinic v. Hellerstedt thwarted a wave of new laws against women’s choice to end pregnancy.

………

The Casey decision had partly reaffirmed the basic abortion rights ruling of 1973, Roe v. Wade, but still protected a wide range of choice for a women to seek an abortion up to “viability” — the point at which the fetus would be capable of living if delivered from the woman’s body. Many state legislatures have recently tried to ban abortions before that point, but the Supreme Court has refused to hear defenses of those new laws, and Breyer’s opinion noted that the Court still follows the 1992 standard.

At issue in the new case, named for an abortion clinic in San Antonio, were two parts of a Texas law (“H.B. 2”) passed by the legislature three years ago. Both provisions were ruled unconstitutional Monday: a requirement that any doctor performing an abortion have a privilege to admit patients to a regulate hospital within thirty miles of the clinic; and a requirement that every abortion clinic’s facilities be upgraded to equal those of a surgical center.

Unlike the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the five-Justice majority refused to accept the word of the Texas legislature that both of the measures it enacted would protect women’s health. The task of judging whether a law puts an unconstitutional burden on a woman’s right to abortion, the new ruling declared firmly, belongs with the courts, not the legislatures.

Both of the restrictions in H.B. 2, the Court declared, put an undue burden on a woman’s access to abortion, and thus cannot stand. Although the Court’s opinion never once questioned the motives of the state legislature, even though challengers to the two restrictions had argued that the health-and-safety argument was a cover for anti-abortion sentiment, his opinion was filled with findings that the legislation would do just the opposite, and imperil the health of pregnant women.

I expected a 4-4 tie.

There are about 20 states where new abortion restrictions are now likely to be reversed.

Good news today.

About F%$#ing Time

No Comments

I’m not calling for reinstituting the draft, but it’s good that they have stopped excluding women from Selective Service registration:

By a 85-13 vote on Tuesday, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year. It did not include amendments that would have required greater authorization for conflicts, and did not include an amendment from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to end Selective Service. Instead, it welcomed women into Selective Service for the first time, starting in 2018, unless that policy is stripped when the bill goes to conference.

The vote contained some element of surprise, as Republicans had stopped the female draft provision in the House. In fact, its presence in that version of the NDAA was a kind of ruse gone wrong. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a military veteran opposed to women serving in combat, proposed the draft amendment during mark-up, to make a point. Expecting the amendment to fail, he voted against it, ready to argue that Democrats and other supporters of women in combat were hypocrites.

Hopefully this makes it to Obama’s desk.

You Have Got to be Sh%$ting Me

No Comments

The AMC network has started threatening fans with copyright litigation for making guesses about plot twists:

What’s up, Hollywood TV people? Hey, could you do everyone a favor and maybe stop being complete assholes to your biggest fans — and especially completely abusing copyright law to harass and bully those people? Almost exactly a month ago we wrote about HBO abusing the DMCA process to go after people who were predicting what would happen in Game of Thrones, accusing them of violating copyright law in accurately predicting what would happen in the future. As we noted, that’s not at all how copyright law works, but apparently AMC took a look at what HBO was doing and said “hey, let’s do that too.”

A large Facebook fan group (with almost 400,000 subscribers) called “The Spoiling Dead Fans” has announced that it has received a completely bogus DMCA notice from AMC:

After two years, AMC finally reached out to us! But it wasn’t a request not to post any info about the Lucille Victim or any type of friendly attempt at compromise, it was a cease and desist and a threat of a lawsuit by AMC Holdings, LLC’s attorney, Dennis Wilson. They say we can’t make any type of prediction about the Lucille Victim. Their stance is that making such a prediction would be considered copyright infringement. AMC tells us that we made some claim somewhere that says we received “copyright protected, trade secret information about the most critical plot information in the unreleased next season of The Walking Dead” and that we announced we were going to disclose this protected information. We still aren’t sure where we supposedly made this claim because they did not identify where it was.

Their stance is wrong and short-sighted. It’s wrong because merely predicting what’s going to happen in a show is not copyright infringement. It’s short-sighted because the people making these guesses tend to be the show’s biggest fans. Pissing off your shows’ biggest fans not only seems monumentally assholish, but also entirely counterproductive.

The DMCA is arguably the worst piece of legislation passed in my lifetime.

Well, This is a Fine F%$# You

No Comments

The German Parliament just voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and Turkish President Erdogan’s head is exploding:

The German Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a symbolic but fraught resolution on Thursday declaring the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 a genocide, escalating tensions with Turkey at a diplomatically delicate juncture.

The Turkish government angrily denounced the vote as “null and void,” and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called his ambassador in Germany back to Ankara for consultations.

“The way to close the dark pages of your own history is not by defaming the histories of other countries with irresponsible and baseless decisions,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, wrote on Twitter. In Ankara, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, “There is no shameful incident in our past that would make us bow our heads.”

Germany needs Turkey’s help in following through on a deal with the European Union to manage the refugee crisis attributed in large part to the Syrian civil war. At the same time, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been under pressure not to be seen as caving to pressure from Ankara to compromise on Western values, particularly after a recent dust-up over freedom of speech set off by a German comedian’s satire that outraged Mr. Erdogan.

………

Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its coalition partners supported the resolution, which was originally proposed for last year, to mark the centennial of the start of the killings. But it was repeatedly delayed, most recently in February, over concerns about angering Ankara.

As the vote approached, debate intensified in Germany, which is home to an estimated three million people of Turkish descent, many of whom have dual citizenship. About 2,000 Turks demonstrated last weekend in Berlin, rallying to say that Parliament is not a court and therefore should not pass judgment.

………

Her decision to do so, despite those objections, may have been influenced by an episode in March, when a German comic, Jan Böhmermann, lampooned Mr. Erdogan with a crude poem. Ms. Merkel initially criticized the verses, giving the impression — which she later said was a mistake — that she advocated restrictions on freedom of expression in Germany. Critics portrayed her as weak.

Cem Ozdemir, the co-chairman of the opposition Greens and a driving force behind the resolution, accused Ms. Merkel of paying little heed to Turkey for most of her decade in power, until circumstances forced her to engage with Mr. Erdogan.

On Thursday, Mr. Ozdemir said there was “never a favorable time to speak about something as dreadful as genocide.”

Mr. Ozdemir read century-old statements by officials of the German Empire showing they knew that up to 90 percent of Armenians had been killed. “Working through the Shoah is the basis of democracy in Germany,” Mr. Ozdemir said, referring to the Holocaust. “This genocide is also waiting to be worked through.”

There have been people fighting for this for decades.

Merkel is not one of these people. She felt a political need to push this through because she is seen as kowtowing to an increasingly megalomaniacal and despotic Turkish leader.

Still, this is a positive move, and hopefully we will see more of this.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

No Comments

It looks like the FBI managed to sneak language into the intelligence authorization bill allowing the FBI to demand email and logs from an ISP without a warrant:

A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs — most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

Since a 2008 Justice Department legal opinion, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand “electronic communication transactional records,” such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.

The spy bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, with the provision in it. The lone no vote came from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who wrote in a statement that one of the bill’s provisions “would allow any FBI field office to demand email records without a court order, a major expansion of federal surveillance powers.”

Wyden did not disclose exactly what the provision would allow, but his spokesperson suggested it might go beyond email records to things like web-surfing histories and other information about online behavior. “Senator Wyden is concerned it could be read that way,” Keith Chu said.

I know what you’re thinking:  That the FBI would never abuse its power to go after people they disagreed with politically and abuse their powers.

That’s why their headquarters is named after J. Edgar Hoover, because they would never function as a private army for a rogue director.

3 “Democrats” Who Think That Your Financial Advisor Should Be Allowed to Cheat You

1 Comment

The Senate voted to prohibit regulators from requiring financial advisors to work in their own client’s best interest:

The Senate voted Tuesday to strike down a controversial Obama administration rule for financial advisers, setting up a showdown with the White House.

Senators voted 56-41 to overturn the Labor Department’s fiduciary rule, which requires financial advisers to act in the best interest of retirement savers.

The Senate’s vote paves the way for a battle with the White House, which has pledged that President Obama will veto the legislation once it reaches his desk.

“The final rule reflects extensive feedback from industry, advocates, and Members of Congress, and has been streamlined to reduce the compliance burden and ensure continued access to advice, while maintaining an enforceable best-interest standard that protects consumers,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.

………

Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group, defended the regulation.

The rule “simply says that financial professionals who claim to offer honest, unbiased advice on retirement savings should actually have to do that,” the group said.

“The motive for this resolution is not a genuine concern about the wellbeing of retirement savers. Instead, some Wall Street salespeople and their firms are worried about losing out on the billions of dollars in excess profits they have been making by recommending investment products that serve their own interests.”

If you look at the vote you will find 3 “Democratic” senators who voted to allow grandma to be cheated out of her retirement, former Congressional “Blue Dog” Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), and Jon Tester (D-MT).

They need to be primaried, big time.

They are all up for reelection in 2018

Chemical Coat Hangers

No Comments

In Texas, women are going to Mexico to buy chemicals to induce n abortion, because it is next to impossible to get a safe abortion in Texas:

Susanna was young, single, broke and pregnant in southern Texas where, thanks to the state’s strict laws, her chances of getting a surgical abortion at a clinic were slim to none.

So she did what an estimated 100,000 women or more in Texas have done – had a self-induced abortion.

With the help of a friend, some online instructions and quick dash across the Mexican border for some pills, she addressed the issue of unwanted pregnancy in a state where women are finding abortion services too expensive and too far away.

Restrictive laws took hold in Texas in 2013, forcing so many clinic closings that fewer than 20 remain to serve 5.4 million women of reproductive age.

The Texas legislature sees The Handmaiden’s Tale as a blueprint for the file.

Oh Snap!

No Comments

Despite a veto threat from the Obama administration, the Senate passed a bill allowing 911 victims to sue them for their ties to the terrorists:

A bill that would let the families of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the terrorist plot passed the Senate unanimously on Tuesday, bringing Congress closer to a showdown with the White House, which has threatened to veto the legislation.

The Senate’s passage of the bill, which will now be taken up in the House, is another sign of escalating tensions in a relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers.

Administration officials have lobbied against the bill, a view that the White House spokesman Josh Earnest reiterated after the vote. And the Saudi government has warned that if the legislation passes, it might begin selling off up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they face a danger of being frozen by American courts. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the warning to lawmakers and the administration while in Washington in March.

The House of Saud is claiming that if this passes, they will dump their Treasuries on the market, which will cause the dollar to tumble.

So the dollar falls, making imports more expensive, and our exports more expensive.

This would have the effect of reinforcing our manufacturing economy and improving our balance of trade.*

The Senate bill carves out an exception to the [1976] law [which grants immunity to foreign governments] if foreign countries are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill American citizens within the United States. If the bill were to pass both houses and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 suits.

………

Mr. Schumer said he believed that Democrats would override a veto from Mr. Obama. ………

So, if the House follows suit, and Obama vetoes the bill, this is going be a major sh%$ storm, and it’s going to jam up the Democrats something fierce.

It plays into one of Trump’s narratives, and it’s a very popular idea among the American public.

What’s more, Republicans would love to override an Obama veto.

The simple solution would be for Obama not to veto the bill, but because the foreign policy establishment continues to view the House of Saud to be an invaluable ally, as opposed to the medieval terrorism supporters that they actually are, so the ever establishment Obama will follow through on his veto.

*Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.