Category: Politics

More of This

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Joe Biden has signed an executive order giving farmers the right to repair their own tractors.

This is something that always seems to founder the rocks of the McConnell reef, and it is good policy, the right of people to what they own should be sacrosanct, and it shows the farmers, and the independent repair shops who serve those farmers, that it’s not all talk.

Tractors, with John Deere being a particularly egregious c%$# about it, have increasingly been locking farmers out of their own equipment, to the degree that older tractors actually have a higher resale value than newer models.

President Joe Biden will direct the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to draft new rules aimed at stopping manufacturers from limiting consumers’ ability to repair products at independent shops or on their own, a person familiar with the plan said.

While the agency will ultimately decide the size and scope of the order, the presidential right-to-repair directive is expected to mention mobile phone manufacturers and Department of Defense contractors as possible areas for regulation. Tech companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have imposed limits on who can repair broken consumer electronics like game consoles and mobile phones, which consumer advocates say increases repair costs.

The order is also expected to benefit farmers, who face expensive repair costs from tractor manufacturers who use proprietary repair tools, software, and diagnostics to prevent third-parties from working on the equipment, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the action ahead of its official announcement.

………

The Biden Administration effort comes as the European Commission has also announced plans for new right-to-repair rules that would govern smart phones, tablets, and laptops. Environmental activists have said that restrictions on repairs encourage waste by making consumers more likely to throw out damaged items because of the high cost of repair.

But tech companies and manufacturers have warned that opening access to underlying software and services could endanger Americans, from improperly installed batteries on tech devices to modifications on tractors and other heavy equipment that could bypass environmental and safety systems.

By, “Endanger Americans,” the tech and agricultural equipment companies mean, “Endanger our monopoly rents.”

Now get to work on laws that prevent manufacturers from doing this, though one would think that the anti tie-in sales provisions of the Magnuson—Moss Warranty Act should already cover this.

My Condolences to the People of New York

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It looks like Eric Adams, aka Rudy with a Tan, will be the next mayor of New York City.

Seeing as how his Republican opponent in the general election does not have billions of dollars (Bloomberg), and is a racist con-man, Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Anglos Angles.

I expect to see more charter schools, less police accountability, and more stop and frisk.

To quote Dick Tuck, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

Eric L. Adams, who rose from poverty to become an iconoclastic police captain and the borough president of Brooklyn, declared victory in the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City on Tuesday, putting him on track to become the second Black mayor in the history of the nation’s largest city.

The contest, which was called by The Associated Press on Tuesday night, was seen as one of the city’s most critical elections in a generation, with the winner expected to help set New York on a recovery course from the economic devastation of Covid-19 and from the longstanding racial and socioeconomic inequalities that the pandemic deepened.

But as the campaign entered its final months, a spike in shootings and homicides drove public safety and crime to the forefront of voters’ minds, and Mr. Adams — the only leading candidate with a law enforcement background — moved urgently to demonstrate authority on the issue.

Mr. Adams held an 8,400-vote lead over Kathryn Garcia, a margin of one percentage point — small enough that it was not immediately clear whether she or any of his opponents would contest the result in court. All three leading candidates had filed to maintain the option to challenge the results. If no one does so, Mr. Adams’s victory could be certified as soon as next week.

Not my problem, I live in Baltimore.

I Missed This

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Last week,

the House Juciciary Committee passed some rather expansive anti-monopoly billis, which is generally a good thing, as Matt Stoller notes:

………

And now to the good, bad, and meaning of the break-up votes. Here’s Jerry Nadler, the Chair of the Judiciary Committee.

The Good

The Judiciary Committee wrote and passed six different bills, two of them being general purpose antitrust acts and four being big tech-specific ones. These bills are an outgrowth of the 16-month investigation into Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, with an analysis of millions of documents and hundreds of witnesses.

I would note the fact that only two of them being general is a bad thing.

Monopolies and ologopolies in insurance, banking, media, finance, pharmaceuticals, groceries, etc. need to be reined in as well.

………

So what do these bills do?

The first two are relatively simple. The first increases the amount of money that our antitrust enforcers can use to bring cases and regulate markets. (The FTC’s budget is $351 million, this would boost it to $418 million, while the Department of Justice Antitrust Division would go from $188 million to $252 million.) I wasn’t so keen on this one for a long time, because the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division are terrible and asking for more resources was an excuse for bad legal strategy. But with Lina Khan at the FTC, I’m more optimistic that she can restore the agency’s legitimacy. Or at least, now I know there’s someone there who recognizes the task at hand.

The second is a bill that is very procedural, but antitrust is a weedy area, and it matters. One of the techniques that monopolists use to avoid scrutiny is to move cases brought by state attorneys general to courts that are friendlier to big corporations. California, for instance, is well-known for tech-friendly judges – Google tried to move one key antitrust case on adtech to its home state. But big pharma does it too. In 2016, 40 state attorneys general filed suit in Connecticut against 18 pharmaceutical companies alleging price-fixing and market allocation of 15 generic drugs. The pharmaceutical companies, most of which were headquartered in the Philadelphia-area, successfully transferred the case to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. It still hasn’t gone to trial. The second bill stops this nonsense, and lets state AGs keep the cases in the district they choose to bring suit. (Jurisdictional fights have always been a problem – in my book I profiled a 1937 suit over the monopolist Alcoa, in which the firm got the suit moved to its home town of Pittsburgh, and Congress in response nearly passed a law making it easier to remove judges.)

These two bills might not seem like a big deal. However, if these two bills were all that passed, they would still comprise the single most important strengthening of Federal antitrust law in a generation. For decades, antitrust was just not important, and the Judiciary Committee didn’t bother to focus on it. So to have these markups, and pass these bills, is in itself meaningful.

More money to enforcers and making it more difficult to judge shop (which should also apply to federal bankruptcy proceedings) are a good thing, but explicitly listing harms to competitors, and evaluating whether the behavior will lead to greater consolidation, a refutation of Robert Bork’s corrupt and hypocritical views on antitrust, are badly needed as well.

The other four bills solved for problems specific to Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, problems ostensibly laid out in the big tech report by the subcommittee last year. Here are the four bills and what they did.

1) The ACCESS Act mandates that big tech firms have to make their systems open to competitors and business rivals, in the same way that AT&T customers can talk to T-Mobile customers, or users of different email systems can communicate with one another.

2) The merger bill makes it harder for big tech firms to buy rivals.

3) The nondiscrimination bill is intended to ban the ability to big tech firms to preference their own products, the way Google substitutes its own reviews for Yelp reviews, even if Yelp’s reviews are better.

4) The break-up bill is supposed to split apart big tech firms by prohibiting platforms from owning any line of business that uses that platform.

All four passed the committee, which is extraordinary and unexpected. And not only did they pass, but they passed with both Republicans and Democrats working on them.

These bills do not address a bigger question, which is that many agencies refuse to enforce the law, (Stoller gives the example of the FTC refusing to enforce the Robinson-Patman act, which led to an explosion of store mega-chains) and judges who have 50 years of precedent to defer to the word of the monopolists in court.

I think that the laws need to be completely rewritten to reject the past 50 years of jurisprudence, as well as placing the burden of proof on the accused monopolists.

It’s a good start though.

Corrupt Partisan Pig-Felching Bastards

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In what is a continuation of Chief Justice John Roberts’ life long quest to prevent Black people from voting, the Supreme Court has upheld Arizona’s voter suppression laws and further gutted the voting rights act.

This is a nakedly partisan and nakedly corrupt decision:

Conservatives have effectively accomplished their long-term goal of blotting the 15th Amendment out of the Constitution with a bottle of Wite-Out®. This has been the conservative project (whether those conservatives have called themselves “Democrats” or “Republicans” depends on the era) since the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870.

The 15th Amendment, of course, prohibits both state and federal governments from denying the right to vote on the basis of race. Conservatives were shockingly effective at reading this amendment out of the Constitution for the first hundred years after its ratification. The amendment was so bad at stopping conservative racism that we needed a whole different rule, the 24th Amendment, which was ratified in 1964, to outlaw the poll tax, which had become a favorite way for white people to deny minority voting rights.

………

Yesterday, in a Supreme Court case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Justice Samuel Alito told conservatives how to defeat the Voting Rights Act, once and for all. White supremacists don’t have to storm the Capitol to hoard political power anymore. They just have to follow Alito’s instructions.

The issue in the case was pretty straightforward, as these things go. Arizona had enacted two voter restrictions. One outlawed “ballot harvesting”—which is the scary Republican label for, say, an older person giving their mail-in ballot to somebody else to walk it to the drop-off location. The other allowed the state to discard votes accidentally submitted at the wrong polling place.

Both of these laws had the effect of suppressing minority voter participation. That’s not a conjecture I’m making based on my apparent Black superpower of understanding what white people are trying to do. That’s an empirical fact, one we know from the data we have from Arizona elections, and that was acknowledged by the Arizona defenders of the laws and the Supreme Court itself. These laws disproportionately affected voters of color, period.

But the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court said that the racial bigotry inherent in these laws is fine, because they concluded it’s not that much bigotry. In the situation where ballots are cast in the wrong precinct, Alito noted that 1 percent of Hispanic, African American, and Native American voters cast votes in the wrong precinct (votes that can now be completely discarded in Arizona), while .5 percent of white voters did. Alito says that this disparity is too small to matter for the Voting Rights Act.

………

Elena Kagan, joined by Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, blasted Alito’s framing in a dissent that is already more well-known than Alito’s majority opinion. It’s worth reading in full, but this part is stellar:

And what is a “mere inconvenience” or “usual burden” anyway?… Consider a law banning the handing out of water to voters. No more than—or not even—an inconvenience when lines are short; but what of when they are, as in some neighborhoods, hours-long? The point here is that judges lack an objective way to decide which voting obstacles are “mere” and which are not, for all voters at all times.

Kagan’s mention of water was a clear reference to the current eruption of voter suppression laws, enacted by Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere. She was absolutely right to go there, because Alito’s awful logic will not stay in Arizona. Instead, it will give voter-suppression efforts (those already happening and those yet to come) a clear safe harbor to smuggle in all their bigotry.

Alito applies his new conception of the Voting Rights Act to laws restricting the “time, place, and manner” of voting. Alito then makes up a five-factor test to apply to these voter restrictions (spoiler alert: racists win), but the upshot is that, going forward, states that argue that their voter suppression efforts only restrict when people can vote, where they can vote, and what they have to do in order to vote can functionally ignore the Voting Rights Act. It won’t matter if those time, place, and manner restrictions have a disparate racial impact. It won’t even matter if those restrictions are done with the express intent of racial bias. The presumption that voter restriction is illegal if it is designed to exclude or suppress minority voters has been replaced by Alito’s new ruling that the state can impose restrictions that merely inconvenience voters of color on purpose.

………

This is what conservative justices have always been here to do. People think that the issue that unites conservative justices is hostility toward abortion or antipathy toward the LGBTQ community or a shared passion for corporate malfeasance. And sure, conservatives broadly share horrible views about all that stuff. But the thing that truly binds a Trump judge with a Bush judge with a Ronald Reagan judge, the thing that reaches out across time and space to put Roger Taney in bed with William Rehnquist and John Roberts is their rejection of Black voting rights and the laws and the precedents meant to protect them. The idea that the 15th Amendment prohibits laws that say “No N***** Votes” but nothing else is the consistent theme of conservative voting-rights decisions. Unless the law explicitly uses the n-word, conservatives are going to tell you that it’s a “race neutral” restriction on voting and turn to stone.

………

Conservatives will never stop trying to take away the right of nonwhite citizens to vote. That has been their unyielding position since the end of the Civil War. You can have a free and fair democracy, or you can have conservatives in control of the judiciary, but the history of this country says that you can’t have both.

The history of conservative jurisprudence on voting is to the ideals of the constitution what Ebola is to the concept of French kissing.

The packing of the Supreme Court over the past 4 years has been a disaster for the nation, and a clear and present danger for our freedoms.

We Have a New Definition of Chutzpah

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Amazon is demanding that FTC chief Lina Khan recuse herself on any decisions about Amazon’s abuse of its monopoly power because she has extensively studied the subject. 

They claim that she has pre-judged the issue, but really they are saying that anyone less corrupt than Robert Bork is biased.

Amazon can go Cheney themselves:

Amazon filed a 25-page petition today with the Federal Trade Commission asking that Chairwoman Lina Khan recuse herself from antitrust investigations into the company.

Khan, a frequent critic of Amazon and other Big Tech firms, was appointed FTC chair less than two weeks ago. Though there has been plenty of speculation about her first moves, her short tenure to date means she hasn’t had much opportunity to file lawsuits or announce investigations. Amazon’s petition shows that its legal team hasn’t sat idle since her nomination as commissioner and subsequent appointment as chair.

“Although Amazon profoundly disagrees with Chair Khan’s conclusions about the company,” Amazon wrote in the petition, “it does not dispute her right to have spoken provocatively and at great length about it in her prior roles. But given her long track record of detailed pronouncements about Amazon and her repeated proclamations that Amazon has violated the antitrust laws, a reasonable observer would conclude that she no longer can consider the company’s antitrust defenses with an open mind.”

Khan made a name for herself four years ago when she published a paper in a law journal. Titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” the paper made the case that current antitrust laws have fallen short as tech platforms have risen to dominance. She argued that prices are a poor yardstick with which to measure anticompetitive behavior and market power, especially among platform companies like Amazon. The peculiar economics of platforms means that companies are happy to forgo profits in the name of growth, which leads to predatory pricing, she said. And because the very nature of platforms allows companies to control access to various products and services, it creates incentives for companies to favor their own products over rivals.

Since graduating from law school, Khan worked for the Open Markets Institute, which advocates for stronger antitrust laws and enforcement, and for the House Judiciary Committee, where she worked with Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) to open a congressional inquiry into tech companies’ behavior.

The term for Amazon’s filing here is bullsh%$.

If Ms. Khan had made this statement as a government official, or if she had economic ties to Amazon or its competitors they might have an argument.

Here though, we simply have two drastically different views of the competitive landscape, and her statements were in an academic context.

To quote the noted philosopher Bender Bending Rodriguez:

If any member of the staff of the FTC were to suggest that there were a legitimate case for her recusal, I would suggest that they be reassigned to the FTC office in Butte, Montana.

Bye, Felecia

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Meghan McCain has quit as a host of The View on short notice.

She was probably pushed: 

Meghan McCain, the lone conservative voice on ABC’s daily talk show “The View,” told viewers Thursday that she was leaving her co-host chair at the end of the season this month.

McCain said at the start of the New York-based program that she wants to stay in Washington, D.C., where she worked during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I have this really wonderful life here that I ultimately feel like I didn’t want to leave,” McCain said.

McCain, who is married to conservative writer Ben Domenech, gave birth to a daughter, Liberty,[ed comment, WTF?] last fall. The couple have split their time between New York and Washington.

………

The Daily Mail, which first reported that McCain would exit, said the host had two years left on her contract with ABC.

(emphasis mine)

She announced it on very short notice. 

Pushed, with good reason.

The Solution to this Problem is Democratic Legitimacy

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Didier Reynders, the European Union’s justice minister is arguing that challenges to EU law on the basis of national law threaten to break up the organization.

That nations in the EU are taking these steps is no surprise.  The EU has no democratic legitimacy.

It has been, since its origins as the European Coal and Steel Community, a profoundly undemocratic institution.

The European Parliament is about as ineffective as the Roman Senate under Caligula,* and posesses far less power than said august Roman institution.

Ordinary voters still have a voice in their local government and in their local judiciary, while they have none (by explicit design) in the EU.

As such challenging EU dictum through the local courts is a logical, and likely popular, strategy, particularly in the face of German hegemony within the The European Commission:

The EU’s justice commissioner has vowed to fight back against a proliferation of legal challenges and rulings by member states that have attacked the supremacy of EU law, warning that they could destroy the union itself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Didier Reynders said that this increased questioning of the primacy of EU law — and the right of the European Court of Justice to have the final word — created a “spillover effect” that had emboldened others to follow suit.

In a sign of the perceived threat, the European Commission this month launched legal proceedings against Germany in response to an explosive ruling by its constitutional court last year that the ECJ had acted beyond its competence in a case related to European Central Bank bond-buying.

This ruling is actually an artifact of German hegemony.  Bashing the lazy and profligate south has been a winning electoral strategy in Germany since the adoption of the Euro as a currency.

The next big legal challenge Brussels is bracing for is a decision by the Polish constitutional tribunal, which could come on July 13, on whether certain elements of the EU’s treaties are compatible with the constitution. The case, brought by Poland’s nationalist government, is regarded by legal experts as the most serious challenge yet to the EU’s legal order.

If the EU, and the Eurocrats, fail to realize that without political legitimacy through meaningful democratic processes these problems will only get worse.

Democracy is inconvenient, and a pain in the ass sometimes, but absent a muscular application of this concept to EU governance, the EU may cease to exist.

*The real history of Caligula appointing his favorite horse, Incitatus, to the Roman Senate is actually saner than is commonly represented. He threatened to appoint the horse to the Senate in order to demonstrate just how dysfunctional the body was.

It was a prank intended to humiliate the Senate.

New York Mayor Primary Election and Ranked Choice Voting

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With the counting of the in-person votes being more or less finished (this is the famously corrupt and incompetent New York City Board of Elections, after all), what looked like a run-away victory has turned into a nail biter.

Just to remind you, the voting was that you could rate candidates from 1 to 5, and the votes were tabulated based on the first choice initially, giving Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams 31.6%,  former de Blazio counsel Maya Wiley with 22.3%,  former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, with 19.7%, and smug asshole Andrew Yang with a dismal 11.7%.

With a normal US style election, what the British call, “First Past the Post,” Adams would be the next mayor of New York.

This was not a normal US style election though, it was ranked choice voting, which is also called instant runoff voting (IRV), though it’s not exactly instant, as we can see from the delay of a bit over a week.

Additionally, the top two finishers were originally numbers 1 and 3 in the first vote.

With IRV,  if no one gets a majority on the first vote, then the person with the lowest total votes in the first round has their votes struck from the tally, and those voters second choice is counted instead.

If no one still has 50%+1 of the votes, the procedure is repeated until someone does have an absolute majority.

In this case, Katheryn Garcia overtook Maya Wiley, and it appears that she is pretty close to Eric Adams, something on the order of 2-3%, with thousands of absentee ballots not yet counted. 

Then those numbers were withdrawn, because they mistakenly included test data, but it is clear that the top 2 at the end of the process will be Adams and Garcia, and that it will be close.

Given that Eric Adams is Black, these results illustrate interesting point about instant RUNOFF voting, which is an artifact of most (if not all) runoff voting systems in the United States, which is that runoff votes allow white voters to get behind the proverbial “White Guy”, which is why it has been a fixture of voting in the South for years.

Without getting into the weeds of the relative merits of first past the post versus instant runoff voting versus proportional representation, I think that it is clear that any runoff system, whether instant or traditional, will make it more difficult for a minority candidate to win.

It’s troubling, and so I have mixed emotions about the whole process:

The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”

The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.

But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”

By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available “starting on June 30.”

Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.

………

For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale, and skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process despite its successful use in other cities.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner.

………

A few hours later, the board disclosed its unspecified discrepancy, and it was not at all clear Tuesday night how accurate the most recent tally was, or if it was accurate at all.

The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.

………

If elected, Mr. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Some of Mr. Adams’s supporters have already cast the ranked-choice process as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, an argument that intensified among some backers on Tuesday afternoon as the race had appeared to tighten, and is virtually certain to escalate should he lose his primary night lead to Ms. Garcia, who is white.

It appears that I’m not the only one who thinks that runoffs tend to disadvantage minority candidates.

………

While it is difficult, it is not unheard-of for a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election to eventually win the race through later rounds of voting — that happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010, and nearly occurred in San Francisco in 2018.

The winner of New York’s Democratic primary, who is almost certain to become the city’s next mayor, will face Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who won the Republican primary.

Yeah, that racist clown is the Republican nominee, so the primary is the real election here, even if the eventual nominee is found in bed with Donald Trump.

………

Other close observers of the election separately expressed discomfort with the decision to release a ranked-choice tally without accounting for absentee ballots.

Yeah, this has been completely mismanaged.

BTW, did I mention that the board of elections also sent out the absentee ballots late in 2020? 

The good citizens of New York are in for a bumpy ride.

Tweet of the Day

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Among the worst parts of climate anxiety is knowing full well that when the Earth ends up literally just being one giant ball of fire, the final tweets will be Republicans insisting there’s no climate crisis & Dems saying they can’t do anything because of the parliamentarian.

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 28, 2021


The use of the word “Literally” here is accurate.

Toyota USA Needs a Major Management Shakeup

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This car model from Toyota has taken on a new meaning. pic.twitter.com/dNLMI9GhnC

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) June 28, 2021

Best Tweet on the Subject

Because the car manufacturer leads in campaign donations to members of the “Sedition Caucus” since January 6. 

I understand the need for companies to spread the campaign donations around, I’ve always felt that the current system is more extortion than it is bribery, but you can donate to Republicans without being the single most aggressive of people who supported the insurrection at the Capitol:

Nearly three-dozen corporate PACs have donated at least $5,000 to Republicans who objected to certifying the 2020 election, yet Toyota leads by a substantial margin.

………

By the numbers: Data compiled by the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington show Toyota gave $55,000 to 37 GOP objectors this year.

  • That equates to a quarter of the bloc that voted to nullify President Biden’s win after the Capitol siege.

  • Toyota gave more than twice as much — and to nearly five times as many members of Congress — as the No. 2 company on the list, Cubic Corp., a San Diego-based defense contractor.

  • The Japanese automaker’s donations this year included a February contribution to Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican who has been one of Congress’ most vocal election conspiracy theorists. According to an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the Capitol attack, Biggs also helped put on that event, a charge Biggs has denied.

What they’re saying: “We do not believe it is appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification,” a Toyota spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Axios. 

This is a bummer.  

I have a 2004 Toyota Prius with about  ¼ million miles on it, and I like the car, I consider it my midlife crisis car,* but it is getting long in the tooth, and it’s getting to be time to find a replacement.

I WAS considering a newer Prius, possibly a Prime plug-in, but I try to avoid buying from companies with stupid and psychotic management.  (It’s actually it’s a REMARKABLY high bar to clear with American management these days.)

Any recommendations from my reader(s) for a decent reliable high MPG car not from Toyota?

*Yeah, a 2004 Prius as my midlife crisis car. I am the dullest motherf%$#er on the face of the earth.

The Schadenfreude Drought is Over

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Did you hear that the New York State appellate court just suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license pending a more permanent disposition?

The court basically said that  his lies in court in support of Trump had been so egregious that a permanent disbarment should be on the menu:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former top federal prosecutor, New York City mayor and lawyer to a president, had his law license suspended after a New York court ruled on Thursday that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of the 2020 election on behalf of Donald J. Trump.

The move was a humbling blow to a man who was once known as a law-and-order crusader and whose political ambitions and creative courtroom tactics against mob bosses turned him into a fixture on national television.

The New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Mr. Giuliani’s law license on the recommendation of a disciplinary committee after finding he had sought to mislead judges, lawmakers and the public as he helped shepherd Mr. Trump’s legal challenge to the election results. For months, Mr. Giuliani, who was Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, had argued without merit that the vote had been rife with fraud and that voting machines had been rigged.

In its 33-page decision, the court said that Mr. Giuliani’s actions represented an “immediate threat” to the public and that he had “directly inflamed” the tensions that led to the Capitol riot in January.

“The seriousness of respondent’s uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated. This country is being torn apart by continued attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election and of our current president, Joseph R. Biden,” the decision read.

Courts and law bars hate ruling on things political, but this rat-f%$#ing is so pervasive, that they feel that they have no choice but to act.

Given that Giuliani has not actually practiced as a lawyer, except for his Trump related rat-f%$#ing, for years, it won’t effect him much financially, but it marks his exit from respectable society. 

Or at least, that’s what I hope.  After all Roy Cohn remained a fixture of society well after his “sell by” date.

There Was a Primary in New York Last Night

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The Democratic primary for mayor was conducted by ranked choice voting (also called instant runoff voting), so the the results won’t be certain for a few days,

It appears that the 2nd worst candidate has won, with Eric Adams getting about ⅓ of the first round vote.

Adams is a machine politician, and (among other things) expressed support for the restoring the NYPD’s racist stop and frisk policies.

The worst candidate was Andrew Yang, the former Presidential candidate, who (among other things) based his candidacy on harassing the homeless, crypto-currency, and self-driving cars.

Eric Adams, who ran for mayor of New York City on a message intensely focused on issues of public safety, emerged on Tuesday with a substantial lead in the Democratic primary, but fell well short of outright victory in a race that will now usher in a new period of uncertainty.

With 82 percent of the results in, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was the first choice of 31.6 percent of those who voted in person on Tuesday or during the early voting period, as New Yorkers chose a leader to steer the city’s reopening and economic recovery.

The initial outcome capped an intensely acrimonious campaign defined by debates over public safety and the economy, political experience and personal ethics, as the candidates presented sharply divergent visions for how they would lead New York into its post-pandemic future.

Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, was in second with 22.3 percent; Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, was in third with 19.7 percent. Either would become the city’s first female mayor.

Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, was a distant fourth, and was the first candidate to concede on Tuesday night, a striking development after he had spent months as the dominant candidate in the race.

Yang was never the dominant candidate in the race.  He was just well funded, and presented a shiny bauble for the press to cover.

There was also the (not quite decided) race for Manhattan District Attorney, which is a classic first past the post where Alvin Bragg is leading Tali Farhadian Weinstein by about 3½% with 84% reporting.

I hope that Weinstein loses.  In addition to spending millions of her own dollars, ran ads which could be credibly reported as racist, being tied at the hip to Wall Street, and was one of the very rich people who were revealed to have paid next to no taxes.

Given that the Manhattan DA is at the center of many investigations agaings Donald Trump, Weinstein is ……… Problematic, to put it mildly.

Finally, in upstate New York, a black Socialist woman has defeated the incumbent in the primary in Buffalo:

India B. Walton knew her bid to unseat the entrenched 16-year mayor of Buffalo was a long shot.

………

A self-described democratic socialist, Ms. Walton, 38, has never held political office, and she was challenging Mayor Byron Brown, 62, who was seeking a fifth term, had served as chair of the state Democratic Party and was once was mentioned as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Few people thought she could win. Mr. Brown mostly tried to ignore her campaign.

But on Tuesday, Ms. Walton defeated Mr. Brown in the city’s Democratic primary, making it almost certain that she will become not only the first woman elected mayor in New York State’s second-largest city, but also the first socialist at the helm of a large American city in decades.

Her upset on Wednesday shocked Buffalo and the nation’s Democratic establishment as most of the political world was more intensely focused on the initial results of the still-undecided mayoral primary in New York City. Her win underscored the energy of the party’s left wing as yet another longtime incumbent in the state fell to a progressive challenger, echoing the congressional wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman.

If Ms. Walton wins in the general election in November — a likely result in a city that leans heavily Democratic — she would join the growing ranks of Black female mayors elected to lead other major U.S. cities, including Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Kim Janey in Boston and London Breed in San Francisco.

………

Ms. Walton, whose campaign was backed by the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, said she preferred not to get caught up in the semantics of labels — describing her ideology as focused on “putting people first.”

The last time a socialist was the mayor of a large American city was 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor. And it was more than a century ago when a socialist won a mayoral race in New York: In 1911, George R. Lunn, of the Socialist Party of America, was elected mayor of Schenectady, according to Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant.

While rare, socialist mayors are not unheard-of: Bernie Sanders took office in 1981 as mayor of Burlington, Vt., a city one-sixth the size of Buffalo, before being elected to Congress nearly a decade later.

Ms. Walton ran an unabashedly progressive campaign in a Democratic city of about 250,000 people — about 37 percent of them Black — that had elected mostly white men as mayors for nearly two centuries. (Mr. Brown became the city’s first Black mayor in 2006.)

She said she supported implementing rent control protections. She pledged to declare Buffalo a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. And she vowed to reform the city’s Police Department, arguing in favor of an independent civilian oversight board and changing the way police officers respond to mental health calls.

“Our police budget is as high as it’s ever been, and crime is also up, so something is not working,” she said.

People suggesting that campaigning on reform of the police, take note.  It’s a winner, at least in a Democratic primary.

Law enforcement in the US is broken, as is painfully obvious from this picture.

………

Mr. Brown’s actions suggested that he did not take Ms. Walton’s challenge seriously. He refused to debate her — “Maybe he believed pretending I didn’t exist was going to make the race go away,” Ms. Walton said — and he did not campaign vigorously, failing to fund-raise as aggressively as he had in previous primaries or spend on ad buys until late in the race.

“I think it was almost a perfect storm that was working against the mayor in this case, but it was brought about by his nonchalance in this race,” said Len Lenihan, the former Erie County Democratic chairman.

Rule 1 of politics:  People will not vote for someone who never asks for their vote.

………

Under Mr. Brown, Buffalo, in western New York, has undergone a resurgence in recent years with the construction of major projects in the downtown area. But the city’s poverty rate is more than twice the national average, and its unemployment rate, while improving, has not fully recovered to prepandemic levels.

Indeed, there was a sense among some residents who voted for Ms. Walton that low-income communities were not reaping the benefits of downtown development.

………

Upstate New York has large swaths of rural and conservative areas, but many of its cities are reliable Democratic strongholds with large minority communities that left-wing activists see as fertile ground to replicate the upsets they have staged downstate. So far, democratic socialists have picked up seats in the House, the State Legislature and the New York City Council, but Ms. Walton’s win would mark the first time a D.S.A.-backed candidate won a citywide election in New York.

This is a good start

Ms. Walton’s win was also buttressed by extensive support from the Working Families Party, which had previously endorsed Mr. Brown. The party helped her campaign set up an online fund-raising operation, a large field program with hundreds of volunteers and a text message and phone bank operation that made 19,000 calls on the night before the election — in a contest where fewer than 25,000 voters cast ballots.

This is an explicit “F%$# You” to “Ratface Andy” Cuomo, who has done his best to kill the WFP trough riders on legislation.

………

Ms. Walton is an organizer for activist groups that supported the state’s bail reforms and legalizing recreational marijuana. Last summer, she gained exposure marching against police brutality in the protests following George Floyd’s death.

She ultimately decided to run, she said, because Mr. Brown had failed to implement meaningful reforms at the Buffalo Police Department and because of what she saw as his poor response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Again, BLM is a winning cause, unless you are a Democrat cowering fear to Republican racists and corrupt police unions.

Her first step should be to reassure various developers who have incentive deals that the city of Buffalo will abide by their contracts, but that the recipients of taxpayer largess need to abide by the terms of their contract as well.

It is interesting how New York State seems to be the epicenter of Socialist political victories in the US.

Bipartisan is a Synonym for Scam

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Why am I not surprised that the “Bipartisan” Senate infrastructure plan is primarily about giveaways to politically connected operators through privatization.

Privatization is where private operators are paid to take ownership of public assets.  (Think Chicago parking meter deal fiasco)   

It’s always about sacrificing the public weal to the altar of private profit:

………

But the really scary piece is labeled “Public private partnerships, private activity bonds, and asset recycling.” In the name of building world-class infrastructure, these lawmakers would sell it off in fire sales to private financiers. We have lots of experience with infrastructure privatization that strongly suggests it should be avoided.

There was a time when Democrats did oppose such schemes; it was during the Trump administration. To the extent that Trump had an infrastructure vision, it was rooted in privatization. Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, who would each take high-level jobs in the Trump administration, wrote a paper before the 2016 election outlining their vision: $1 trillion in investment provided by private bond buyers, who would be guaranteed a tax credit to buy the bonds, interest on the debt, and an equity stake with dividends (with up to a 10 percent profit margin). It adds the usual song and dance about how private enterprise is so much more efficient than the public sector, therefore saving money overall.

It takes about two seconds to recognize how ridiculous this is. The government doesn’t require a 10 percent margin on equity, tax credits, and interest payments. That’s a layer of profit that gets built into the expenditure. Governments usually contract out design and construction to private contractors, but there are only two ways for these companies to reduce ownership and operation costs below what the public sector would spend, while still being profitable. They can cut back, either on safety or labor or maintenance; or they can extract a lot of profit from users of the infrastructure (think toll roads). If the infrastructure isn’t inherently profitable, like a bridge in New York City or a toll road in southern California might be, the upgrade probably won’t get built.

Democrats rightly and loudly objected to giving up public assets to private investors at the time. The biggest money-makers would be favored, they said, and less lucrative projects in rural or impoverished areas shunned. Governments would not only lose ownership but democratic control over roads, water systems, electrical grids, and who knows what else. As companies manage costs, it could lead to less resilient, more dangerous infrastructure. And the public would have a high likelihood of being gouged.

Bipartisanship is most often a beard used to defraud the taxpayers,

About F%$#ing Time

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The House of Representatives has voted to repeal the 2002 Authoriziation of Use of Military Force (AUMF) used to invade Iraq, which is a good, if meager, first step.

It would be excellent policy to do this, so don’t expect that the Republicans will even allow a vote in the Senate:

The House voted on Thursday to revoke the authorization it gave in 2002 to invade Iraq, a step that would rein in presidential war-making powers for the first time in a generation.

The bipartisan action reflected growing determination on Capitol Hill to revisit the broad authority that Congress provided to President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through measures that successive presidents have used to justify military action around the world.

The 2002 authorization was repeatedly applied well beyond its original intent, including in a campaign much later against the Islamic State in Iraq and for the killing of the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani last year.

The vote was 268 to 161, with 49 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in favor of the bill. The debate now moves to the Senate, which is expected to take up similar legislation as the United States military completes its withdrawal from Afghanistan after nearly two decades of fighting there.

………

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said on Wednesday that he would put a similar measure on the Senate floor. A blueprint written by Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, will be considered next week by the Foreign Relations Committee.

President Biden said this week that he backed the House measure, making him the first president to accept such an effort to constrain his authority to carry out military action since the war in Afghanistan began 20 years ago. Mr. Biden’s decision came on the heels of announcing a full troop withdrawal from the country.

This is the minor AUMF in the scheme of things though.  It’s the post 911 one that is the one where the vast bulk of military deployments have found legal justification.

Even if the Senate joins the House in repealing the 2002 authorization, Congress would still leave in place a much broader authorization, passed three days after the Sept. 11 attacks, on approving the use of force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Successive presidents have cited the 2001 authorization to justify operations against “associated forces,” and critics say it has given presidents excessive latitude to wage “forever wars” without further congressional approval in the Middle East and beyond.

Until now, the Senate has refused to bring up legislation to repeal the authorization of military force, and the House has done so only as an amendment to broader legislation that never went anywhere.

The 2002 AUMF has not been used in over a decade, but the 2001 AUMF is still being used today.

Baby steps, I guess.

What a Bunch of Whiny Snowflakes

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A police officer in the Portland (Oregon) Police Bureau “Rapid Response Team” (Goon Squad) was caught on video wailing a journalist, and when he finally forced her to the ground, he continued to strike her with his night stick in her head.

Today, for the first time in the history of Portland, Oregon, an officer was indicted for his actions in suppressing a protest.  

It was only 4th degree assault, a misdemeanor, but in response, the PPB Goon Squad voted to disband, because they are afraid of the rule of law.

They are still on the force, but the “Rapid Response Team” is now shut down.

Considering their behavior, I would say, “Good Riddance,” because they are a bunch of bad cops who should not be allowed close to a water pistol, but Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is (once again) taking the side of the abusive cops, even as more evidence piles up against other members of the unit:

Portland’s public safety landscape has undergone tectonic shifts in under 72 hours.

On June 15, the day after the Portland Police Association filed for closed-door mediation to hash out its contract with the city, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announced that a grand jury had indicted Portland police officer Corey Budworth on one count of assault in the fourth degree for his use of force at an Aug. 2020 protest.

Budworth, now on administrative leave, was a part of the police bureau’s Rapid Response Team, a 50-member unit most known for its management of protests. RRT members, whose assignment on the team is voluntary, receive specialized training in “crowd psychology and behavior [and] team formations and movements,” according to PPB.

Hours after Budworth’s indictment, news broke that Erik Kammerer, a squad leader for RRT who is also a homicide detective for the police bureau, is under review by the Oregon Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution. (WW has reported extensively on complaints alleging Kammerer used excessive force during protests.)

………

In response, Mayor Ted Wheeler—who said he learned of the RRT dissolution late Wednesday night—has activated mobile law enforcement units in PPB and requested assistance from Oregon State Police.

………

Wheeler also said that he heard directly from RRT members during an impromptu Thursday morning Zoom meeting between the mayor’s office and law enforcement.

“I want to acknowledge the toll this past year has taken on them and their families—they have worked long hours under difficult conditions,” Wheeler said. “I personally heard from some of them today, and I appreciate their willingness to share their concerns about managing the many public gatherings that often were violent and destructive.”

It is a disgrace that this piece of sh%$ mayor is still in office. (He’s also in the pocket of real estate developers)


………
Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a longtime advocate of police reform in Portland, called the RRT resignations “an opportunity to commit change.”

“We should formally disband the RRT, but through Council action,” Hardesty said in a statement Thursday. “The good old boy network is crumbling and we can either be a part of the change or part of the status quo—but the arc of justice is bending quickly and it’s imperative that the Portland City Council lands on the right side of history.”

Hardesty went on to describe the RRT members as “staging their own protest” through their resignations, which she said occurred “the moment there is a possibility for accountability for inappropriate and potentially illegal conduct.”

This is my assessment too.

The fact that the police are SO shocked that they are held accountable is a mark of just how bad the culture of policing in Portland is right now.

Until some police officers are disabused of the notion that they can act with impunity, and their fellow cops are disabused of the notion that it is OK for them to look the other way, it will never be fixed.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

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A leaked audio of a Senator Joe Manchin (DINO-WV) call with rich donors has revealed, among other things, that he asked donors at the group, “No Labels,” to bribe fellow Senator Roy Blunt.

Joe Manchin is not just a conservative Democrat, he is a disloyal one, and given that a recording of his call was leaked, one who who has people close to him looking to give him a well deserved shiv between his shoulder blades:

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, in a private call on Monday with a group of major donors, provided a revealing look at his political approach to some of the thorniest issues confronting lawmakers.

The remarks were given on a Zoom teleconference session that was obtained by The Intercept.

The meeting was hosted by the group No Labels, a big money operation co-founded by former Sen. Joe Lieberman that funnels high-net-worth donor money to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans. Among the gathering’s newsworthy revelations: Manchin described an openness to filibuster reform at odds with his most recent position that will buoy some Democrats’ hopes for enacting their agenda.

………

The wide-ranging conversation went into depth on the fate of the filibuster, infrastructure negotiations, and the failed effort to create a bipartisan commission to explore the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, and offers a frank glimpse into the thinking of the conservative Democrat who holds the party’s fate in his hands.

Manchin told the assembled donors that he needed help flipping a handful of Republicans from no to yes on the January 6 commission in order to strip the “far left” of their best argument against the filibuster. The filibuster is a critical priority for the donors on the call, as it bottles up progressive legislation that would hit their bottom lines. 

OK, this is not an invalid comment, though a US Senator asking high dollar donors to act as his enforcers is pretty damn skeevy.

………

When it came to Sen. Roy Blunt, a moderate Missouri Republican who voted no on the commission, Manchin offered a creative solution. “Roy Blunt is a great, just a good friend of mine, a great guy,” Manchin said. “Roy is retiring. If some of you all who might be working with Roy in his next life could tell him, that’d be nice and it’d help our country. That would be very good to get him to change his vote. And we’re going to have another vote on this thing. That’ll give me one more shot at it.”

That is flat out corrupt.  He is asking, in an open Zoom call with big donors, that they condition any future employment for Roy Blunt on his current votes.

He is actively calling for a bribe, or at least extortion based on the threat of withholding a bribe, which is pretty much the same thing.

An Unalloyed Bit of Good News

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Lina Khan, who shot to fame when her article in the Yale Law Review, Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, mainstreamed an new (actually old, pre-1970) and aggressive anti-trust policy.

Since then she has been a leading voice in the movement for forceful and expansive enforcement of anti-monopoly enforcement, and now, she has been confirmed as Chair of the FTC.

Hopefully, this presages a much more assertive approach to monopolies by the agency:

In a move that heralds a growing effort to check the power and influence of Big Tech, President Biden on Tuesday appointed Lina Khan, a top antagonist of the tech industry, to chair the Federal Trade Commission, the federal government’s primary antitrust watchdog.

Biden’s decision to put Khan in charge of the FTC’s agenda is the clearest sign yet that his administration will take a drastically different approach to regulating the tech giants than did President Barack Obama, whose administration took a largely hands-off approach toward Silicon Valley.

………

Khan, 32, is known for her unconventional proposals to counter the tech giants’ power. While still in law school in 2017, she wrote a paper denouncing Amazon for what she said was anti-competitive behavior and suggesting U.S. anti-competition laws were poorly equipped to counter the world of e-commerce. (Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Here proposal is not all unconventional. It was a pretty standard view of anti-trust before Robert Bork and Evil Minions™ perverted the field.

………

During her confirmation hearing, she signaled she would take a tough line on regulating tech giants. She said that in the past few years, new evidence has come to light showing there were “missed opportunities” for enforcement actions against tech companies under the Obama administration. She also said new findings show the FTC must be “much more vigilant” when it comes to large acquisitions in digital markets.

Khan also said she was particularly concerned about the ways in which large companies use their dominance in one market to give them an upper hand in others, an issue under intense scrutiny by Congress.

Hopefully, this presages an extremely muscular by the Federal Trade Commission.

Why Hasn’t This Been Done?

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The Biden administration has at this point failed to nominate a replacement for the relentlessy corrupt Ajit Pai as chairman. 

To quote the movie, Ocean’s Eleven, “You had ONE job.”

President Joe Biden’s failure to break the Federal Communications Commission’s 2-2 partisan deadlock is reaching a “critical point,” 57 advocacy groups wrote in a letter to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris Friday.

Nearly five months after his inauguration, Biden has not yet nominated a Democratic FCC commissioner to fill the empty fifth slot. Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel has been leading the commission as acting chairwoman, but she lacks the majority needed to do anything opposed by the FCC’s two Republicans, such as reinstating net neutrality rules and reversing former Chairman Ajit Pai’s deregulation of the broadband industry. Even a step like raising the FCC’s broadband-speed standard—which hasn’t changed in over six years—will likely require a party-line vote because Republicans prefer a low speed standard for the FCC’s annual report on how many Americans lack modern broadband access.

In early April, over 100,000 people signed a petition urging Biden to quickly break the FCC deadlock. Advocacy groups are frustrated that they are still waiting. Why Biden is taking so long is unclear.

“Given the legislative calendar and the diminishing number of days for hearings and confirmation votes, we have reached a critical point to guarantee the agency charged with ensuring affordable communications access can do its work during your administration,” the groups wrote in their new letter.

This is an, “Own Goal,” and. to quote someone who is not named Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

We don’t want to wait until 2023, when, following 2 years of ineffectual action by Congressional Democrats leads to both the House and the Senate being flipped, when Mitch McConnell will dictate who can be put in that post.