The Pentagon has just ordered the ordered the Nimitz (CVN-68) back to the Persian Gulf.

My guess is the Trumpster Fire wants to get his war on.

Not good.

Schumer Begins 2021 Promising To Fight — Then Immediately Surrenders

—The Daily Poster

Really needs no additional commentary,

So, 2020 is over.

Thank whatever deity that you worship, or not, as is your preference, that you have made it through a thoroughly bad year.

It’s not the worst year, 1346-1353 has us thoroughly beat, as does 1914-1918, 1939-1945, 1520 in the Americas, 536, and probably a few others that I’ve missed.

Still, 2020 sucked, and I’m hoping that 2021 will be a smidgen better, but I’m not optimistic.

Still, I am glad to have this year over.

2020, 24 Hours to go

Too good a pun not to share.

My boyfriend got his covid vaccine yesterday and I can tell you the most prominent side effect is the inability to shut up about getting the covid vaccine

— Emaperidol (@Emaperidol) December 16, 2020

As amusing as this is, it is made perfect by this response:

Vegans, cross fitters, and now vaccine recipients 🤦🏼 we will never hear the end of it.

— Mistah Mugatu (@j_melancon) December 17, 2020

This is truer than taxes.

I would sooner hire John Wayne Gacy as my kid’s birthday party clown then Rahm for transportation sectary. https://t.co/CWdEAXDlWB

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) November 18, 2020

When one tries to figure out who the most overrated man in politics is, Rahm Emmanuel is definitely in the top 5.

He is a corrupt and incompetent charlatan.

Steve Bannon, conservative activist and under-bridge troll, is out on bail following being charged with fraud.

Well now, his legal team has quit after he publicly announced that he wanted to behead Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI directory Christopher Wray.

First, public death threats against government officials is never a good look, and this goes double when you are on bail, and your behavior can justify a judge to revoke bail.

Really stupid, and I really hope that the judge takes umbrage at his behavior:

Trump has been saying that he might leave the country if he loses the election.

This raises an obvious question:  When is revealed to be both a criminal and broke, and this is clearly the endgame, who would actually not just put his sorry ass back on the the next plane to the Southern District of New York?

There are doubtless some tin-pot dictators out there who would be inclined to host him for ideological reasons, but the costs, both in terms of domestic unrest and foreign pressure.

I’m wondering what the over and under is on Trump ending up in prison.

“Human sacrifice was a bloody and barbaric tradition – but could stopping it altogether be why the rains aren’t coming?” – bronze age opinion columnist

— Tom Whyman (@HealthUntoDeath) September 29, 2020

This is a good allegory both the mainstream media and the so called “Centrists” of the body politic.

They just can’t resist stepping their own dicks to kowtow to the rich:

Democrats are backing away from vows to reverse President Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of the Senate and White House.

Senate Democrats had suggested they could move quickly on the issue, but now say they are likely to delay stand-alone tax legislation if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected president and their party controls the House and Senate.

………

Democrats realize they need to tread carefully on taxes and the economy. While Biden is leading Trump in the national polls, voters still give Trump higher marks on handling the economy.

There are also divisions among Democrats over how far to go with taxes on corporations and the wealthy, which makes it difficult to move quickly on the issue.

The Blue Dogs, the New Dems, and the rest of their “Third Way” fellow travelers want to make sure that they can continue to deliver inequality and corruption for their corporate and moneybags clients.

“I think we ought to make the decision when we have a better sense of where the economy is going,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who added “there’s an element of truth” to the argument that policymakers shouldn’t raise taxes during a recession.

My second cousin once removed being a classic example of this.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee and one of Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) closest allies, said she has “no idea” when Democrats would move a tax package next year if they win control of the White House and the Senate.

………

“I’m sure a tax piece will be in there somewhere, but No. 1 priority will be COVID,” she added.

That means never, at least not in a meaningful way.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Democrats will need to “balance” the need to raise revenues with the overall health of the economy, which has slowed dramatically as a result of the pandemic.

Also, never.

………

Some Democrats are pushing for ratcheting up taxes on millionaires and billionaires immediately if their party wins big in November.

Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, a liberal political action committee, said waiting to raise taxes on the rich is a “terrible idea.”

………

Progressive leaders such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are pushing for a wealth tax, but Schumer is more focused on lifting the cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), a top priority in New York and other states with high costs of living.

Schumer is pushing for tax relief to the already very well off.

………

Biden’s tax plan does not include a wealth tax. Instead, he would raise revenue by raising the top income tax rate on individuals from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, subject earnings over $400,000 to Social Security payroll taxes, and tax capital gains at the same rate as other income for people who earn more than $1 million.

Half measures.

The between the corporate Democrats, and the relentless hippie punching against anyone who wants to help ordinary folks, seems almost calculated to demoralize the base.

Actually primary morning, because I was (and still am) waiting for some results.

Despite a significant amount of Democratic Party money, Kris Kobach lost the Republican Party primary for Senate.

Dems figured that Kobach would be the weaker candidate, because his immigration hysteria based snake oil show has clearly passed its “Sell by date”, as evidenced by his continuous failures both as Kansas Secretary of State and as a part of Trump’s voting commision.

The Justice Democrats racked up another scalp as Cori Bush upset incumbent Lacy Clay.

That seat had been in the Clay family since his dad first won the seat in 1968.

Finally, in the race for the House in MI-14, Rashida Tlaib, one of the 4 members of the, “Squad,” is leading by a roughly 2:1 margin but only about  15% of precincts have reported, so it’s still up in the air.

(Update)

It’s been called, and Tlaib walked away with it.

As a Mississippi senator, John C. Stennis signed the infamous “Southern Manifesto” decrying integration. He fought black equality in the Navy and, as a prosecutor, sought execution for three black men who’d been tortured into confessing.

For several decades, his name has graced an aircraft carrier currently based in Norfolk — the only senator to have that honor.

Now, amid a national reckoning over America’s racist roots, some are pushing for that to change.

“Today’s sailors, Marines, and officers should not have to make the psychologically damaging choice of speaking up or serving in silence in a vessel named for an ardent segregationist and white supremacist, who condoned beating the skin off black people until they either confessed or died,” retired Lt. Cmdr. Reuben Keith Green wrote in a recent piece for the U.S. Naval Institute. “It is incompatible with American values and the recent directives from the Navy to expect for them to have to do so.”

This is why the military should be prohibited from naming anything after anyone until they have been dead for at least a decade.

It’s Thursday, which means that initial jobless claims for last week has has been released, and because the first Friday of July is a holiday, they also released the Kraken June unemployment rate.

Unemployment (U3) fell to 11.1%, though the more expansive (and IMHO more accurate) U6 measure remained above 18%.

Unemployment over 10% is catastrophic, and the weekly job losses of 1.4 million would have been considered apocalyptic in pre-2020 days, though they are a significant improvement over what has been going on since March.

It should also be noted that the week that was used for the unemployment sample, it’s always the week containing the 12^th almost surgically cuts off before the explosion of Covid-19 cases:

The U.S. economy added a record 4.8 million jobs in June, according to federal data released Thursday, but a surge in new infections and a spate of new closings threatens the nascent recovery.

Two key federal measurements showed the precarious place the economy finds itself in three and a half months into the pandemic as the country struggles to hire back the more than 20 million workers who lost their jobs in March and April.

While companies have continued to reopen, a large number of Americans are finding their jobs are no longer available. The unemployment rate in June was 11.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, down from a peak of 14.7 percent in April but still far above the 3.5 percent level notched in February.

And another 1.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance for the first time last week and more than 19 million people are still receiving unemployment benefits, stubbornly high levels that show how many people are struggling to find or keep work.

The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday said the coronavirus pandemic gave such a shock to the labor market that it would not fully recover for more than 10 years. 

The economy is still in a dire condition, with the only good news being that the continuing cratering in hotel occupancy is likely to destroy Trump’s highly leveraged hotel empire.

This was exactly what DNS over HTTPS was supposed to prevent.

Comcast has agreed to be the first home broadband internet provider to handle secure DNS-over-HTTPS queries for Firefox browser users in the US, Mozilla has announced.

This means the ISP, which has joined Moz’s Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) Program, will perform domain-name-to-IP-address lookups for subscribers using Firefox via encrypted HTTPS channels. That prevents network eavesdroppers from snooping on DNS queries or meddling with them to redirect connections to malicious webpages.

………

At some point in the near future, Firefox users subscribed to Comcast will use the ISP’s DNS-over-HTTPS resolvers by default, though they can opt to switch to other secure DNS providers or opt-out completely.

………

Incredibly, DNS-over-HTTPS was heralded as a way to prevent, among others, ISPs from snooping on and analyzing their subscribers’ web activities to target them with adverts tailored to their interests, or sell the information as a package to advertisers and industry analysts. And yet, here’s Comcast providing a DNS-over-HTTPS service for Firefox fans, allowing it to inspect and exploit their incoming queries if it so wishes. Talk about a fox guarding the hen house.

ISPs “have access to a stream of a user’s browsing history,” Marshall Erwin, senior director of trust and security at, er, Mozilla, warned in November. “This is particularly concerning in light of the rollback of the broadband privacy rules, which removed guardrails for how ISPs can use your data. The same ISPs are now fighting to prevent the deployment of DNS-over-HTTPS.”

Comcast is pinky swearing that it won’t misuse the data, which means about as much as their statement about when their service tech is supposed to show up.

People who believe China is responsible for America’s coronavirus problems are even dumber than people who believe Russia is responsible for Trump’s presidency. https://t.co/Fx9xSjI8Ag

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 1, 2020

I agree on both.

Even if the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign was the most egregious since (checks notes) Winston Churchill in 1940, Clinton lost in 2016, as she did in 2008, because of the incompetence, self-dealing, and corruption of both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

Even if China was opaque on Covid-19, and it was, this does not excuse the fact that it was clear that actions needed to be taken by mid January, but the response was run by a bunch people who were dedicated to burning the very idea of government down in addition to being, “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”

DDoSecrets has been established to facilitate sharing secrets, and Twitter promptly banned them and declared the site a virus risk:

For the past year, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sat in a London jail awaiting extradition to the US. This week, the US Justice Department piled on yet more hacking conspiracy allegations against him, all related to his decade-plus at the helm of an organization that exposed reams of government and corporate secrets to the public. But in Assange’s absence, another group has picked up where WikiLeaks left off—and is also picking new fights.

For roughly the past year and a half, a small group of activists known as Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has quietly but steadily released a stream of hacked and leaked documents, from Russian oligarchs’ emails to the stolen communications of Chilean military leaders to shell company databases. Late last week, the group unleashed its most high-profile leak yet: BlueLeaks, a 269-gigabyte collection of more than a million police files provided to DDoSecrets by a source aligned with the hacktivist group Anonymous, spanning emails, audio files, and interagency memos largely pulled from law enforcement “fusion centers,” which serve as intelligence-sharing hubs. According to DDoSecrets, it represents the largest-ever release of hacked US police data. It may put DDoSecrets on the map as the heir to WikiLeaks’ mission—or at least the one it adhered to in its earlier, more idealistic years—and the inheritor of its never-ending battles against critics and censors.

“Our role is to archive and publish leaked and hacked data of potential public interest,” writes the group’s cofounder, Emma Best, a longtime transparency activist, in a text message interview with WIRED. “We want to inspire people to come forward, and release accurate information regardless of its source.”

………

For DDoSecrets, the firefight has already started. On Tuesday evening, as media attention grew around the BlueLeaks release, Twitter banned the group’s account, citing a policy that it doesn’t allow the publication of hacked information. The company followed up with an even more drastic step, removing tweets that link to the DDoSecrets website, which maintains a searchable database of all of its leaks, and suspending some accounts retroactively for linking to the group’s material.

Best says DDoSecrets, an organization with no address and whose shoestring budget runs mostly on donations, is still strategizing a response and the best workaround to publicize its leaks—potentially shifting to Telegram or Reddit—but has no intention of letting the ban halt its work. “‘Too dangerous for Twitter’ is some Nixonian sh%$ I didn’t expect,” Best says.

Their superpower here appears to be that they are not assholes, as Assange of Wikileaks is, and that they have some more objective standards.

As to BlueLeaks, it is pretty big deal:

The documents reveal what information the police have on people — it’s even searchable by police badge number.

The result is shocking.

The leak revealed incidents of the FBI forwarding Tweets they deemed “threatening” to police departments, classifying protest medics and lawyers as “extremists”, and Google providing detailed information about its users on request.

As an aside, even if you do not want to read BlueLeaks, I strongly recommend that you download the file for 2 reasons:

• Every copy makes it harder to put the genie back into the bottle.
• The nature of the method of distribution, Bit Torrent, means that if you download the document, you are also make the document more available to other downloaders.

Here is the leak for DDoSecrets, and you can try to access the files driectly from the web site, but this will hammer the site, so I recommend that you download the whole file via Bit Torrent.

Note however that the file is large enough that many Bit Torrent clients will not work, so I would recommend Transmission, and you can download the portable version, which does not require an installation program or admin privileges.

And while we do not have final results, there are way too many absentee and mail-in ballots for that, we do have some results.

Final results should be available in the next week or so:

• Amy McGrath is leading Charlie Booker by about 8%, in the Kentucky Senate race, so it’s likely that Schumer’s candidate about nothing will go on to lose to Mitch McConnell.
• Incumbent Carolyn Maloney is up by 2% over Suraj Patel in NY-12 which firmly places this one in the, “Wait for the absentee ballots,” category.
• Ritchie Torres has beaten Ruben Diaz in NY-15, which is great, because Diaz (with the encouragement of Andrew Cuomo) caucused with the Republicans in the New York State Senate to prevent Democratic Party control of the legislative body.  (Also, Diaz was endorsed by the cop union, which makes this even more delicious.)
• Jamal Bowman has crushed incumbent Eliot Engel in NY-16, ending the latter’s 30+ year tenure of the latter in the House of Representatives, where he conclusively demonstrated that he never gave a sh%$ about his district.
• Mondaire Jones has beaten Adam Schleifer in NY-17, despite the latter spending $4 million of his own money.

As an FYI, AOC crushed her Republican until a few months ago Wall Street opponent.

Case in point, how meat packing plants became a petri dish for Covid-19.

With no constraints on their behavior beyond their own desire for profit, they have become a menace to their employees and their communities:

………

“I wasn’t going to get tested, because on Saturday they were going to give out half a slab of rib-eye, and I really wanted it,” she says. “I thought, I’ll get tested on Monday.” Morales says her husband eventually talked her into getting screened that Friday. She tested positive for Covid-19 and didn’t get to collect the prized meat, though she did make a full recovery. Two months later, there were six Covid-19 deaths associated with the plant and more than 900 infections. (The company disputed those numbers but did not provide its own.) While this was going on, managers at multiple JBS plants were promising $600 to workers with no unexcused absences.

………

The federal agency that does have the power to regulate conditions in meat plants is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the Department of Labor. But with its staff cut by the Trump administration and its inspection activity sharply curtailed, the agency hasn’t issued a single enforceable order for what meat plants should do to prevent workers from contracting Covid-19. As usual, meatpacking companies are on their own, unencumbered by regulators they’ve assiduously kept at bay.

Together, JBS SA and three other big U.S. producers, Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef, control more than 80% of the U.S. beef market. There have long been allegations of price fixing, driving up costs at the supermarket. For the past decade, meatpackers and processors have spent close to $5 million annually on lobbying, up from only $542,000 in 1999. The industry spent $1.3 million on the 2018 election, with two-thirds of that going to Republican candidates, according to an analysis of campaign finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics. After Tyson ran full-page newspaper ads and a statement on its website warning of food shortages if meat and poultry plants were forced to shutter, President Trump signed an executive order to keep them open.

In the interest of averting cases like Morales’s, the CDC warned JBS on April 20 to stop offering inducements for workers to come in, but JBS ultimately didn’t follow the agency’s advice. OSHA, for its part, ordered its staff in April to do in-person inspections only of hospitals and other front-line facilities during the pandemic—not meat plants—because health-care employees and first responders were deemed to be the only workers at sufficient risk of contracting the virus to warrant immediate investigation. All other OSHA probes were to proceed by phone and fax. Even in normal times, OSHA and its state partners have just 2,100 inspectors, who are responsible for the well-being of 130 million U.S. workers at more than 8 million work sites. That translates to one compliance officer for every 59,000 workers.

………

A safer, less deadly meat industry could be fashioned through widespread legislative and regulatory reform. Consumers, too, could force change with mass boycotts—or if they were willing to spend more money on less meat. But in the absence of pressure, the industry has no incentive to change.

Covid-19 has become just another workplace hazard in one of America’s deadliest industries.

………

Historically, politicians and regulators have rewarded the industry with autonomy and lax regulations. As its labor supply dwindled, National Beef appealed to Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Mike Beam to muscle the union on its behalf. “Our request is that they hear from the Governor’s office about the importance and special responsibility of food production workers and to ask the Union to encourage its folks to continue to report for work,” Simon McGee, National Beef’s chief financial officer, wrote to Beam in an email.

In Nebraska, Governor Pete Ricketts directed departments not to release Covid-19 case statistics at meat plants, citing concerns about privacy and the quality of the data. Cattle production is the leading industry in the state, where cows outnumber humans 4 to 1 and license plates proudly boast that it’s “the beef state.” Among the donors who’ve supported Ricketts’s career are Tyson Foods Inc., Smithfield Foods Inc., and the Nebraska Cattlemen.

This is why we need real regulation and real antitrust, and not just in the meat packing industry.

A policewoman in Georgia, completely lost her sh%$ because she had to wait a few minutes to get her Egg McMuffin.

And this woman has a badge, a gun, and power to arrest people.

Protect and serve, protect and serve:

There’s not much sympathy online for this cop crying over an Egg McMuffin.

A tearful video of a Georgia police officer accusing a McDonald’s MCD, +0.24% of withholding her breakfast order went viral on Twitter TWTR, -0.83% on Wednesday, leading the local owners of the burger joint to apologize to the officer and clarify to MarketWatch that she “was never denied service.”

A Twitter user who calls herself “Ann” and identifies as a conservative Trump supporter in her profile posted the clip of an officer she says is named “Stacey” who sobs while recounting how the restaurant workers kept her waiting and withheld part of her breakfast order. Stacey suggests this was done on purpose as part of the growing backlash against officers and the calls for police reform in the weeks since Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were killed during their encounters with law enforcement.

“Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds,” Ann writes in her post. “She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop.” MarketWatch reached out to Ann to verify the authenticity and origins of the video, but she did not respond by press time. But the local McDonald’s owner/operators confirmed the incident to MarketWatch.

Ann’s post had already been viewed 4.5 million times and retweeted more than 50,000 times by the time this story posted, renewing a heated online debate about the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.

The clip, which runs just under two-and-a-half minutes, features Stacey explaining that she placed a mobile order for an Egg McMuffin meal. But her order wasn’t ready when she went to pick it up.

“And I’m waiting. And I’m waiting. And I’m waiting,” she says, noting that she was hungry because she had not eaten for a very long time. She was told to pull over to the side, and an employee eventually came over and gave her a coffee. But Stacey’s order was supposed to include an Egg McMuffin and a hash brown, as well.

“That’s all she hands me is the coffee,” Stacey says, breaking down into tears. “I said, ‘Don’t bother with the food because right now I’m too nervous to take it!’ It doesn’t matter how many hours I’ve been up. It doesn’t matter what I’ve done for anyone. Right now, I’m too nervous to take a meal from McDonald’s because I can’t see it being made!”

She pleaded with people watching the video to, “Please, just give us a break. I don’t know how much more I can take.” She added that she has never had such anxiety in all of her years of service, and asked people to say “thank you” when they see cops.

Stacey who has been a cop for 15 yrs went to @McDonalds She paid for it in advance and this is how she gets treated for being a cop😢😡 Come on America. We are better than this. pic.twitter.com/IcudsNfVLY

— 🌷🇺🇸Ann🇺🇸🌷🐇 (@tkag2020_ann) June 17, 2020

I think mandatory annual, or perhaps semi-annual, psychological evaluations of cops should be added to the agenda in addition to defunding the police.

There was a general election in Ferguson, Missouri, and they have elected their first black, and first woman, as mayor.

Maybe now, they will stop preying on their poor black citizens for revenue.

Also, in a development that leaves me with mixed emotions, racist dirtbag Steve King lost his Congressional primary in Iowa. I’m glad that he’s gone, but it will make it harder to flip the seat to the Democrats in November.

Finally, in the “I’m so glad that I no longer live in Baltimore City,” news, fresh from a probation stint for corruption plea, Sheila Dixon has apparently been elected again as Mayor of Baltimore.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the case, was caught using gift cards that were intended to be used for poor children’s Christmas gifts.

Putting the “Petty” in petty corruption, I guess.