I just had to wipe and reinitialize my cell phone.
Reinstalling all the old apps now.
Joe Biden’s Marijuana Legalization Isn’t Legalization
What he wants to do is to reschedule from 1 to 2.
This will place in the same category as cocaine and methamphetamines, which means that its distribution will still be tightly restricted, and usage outside of those tight conditions remain a felony.
It also means that he will be making the manufacture and distribution the exclusive purview of big pharma.
It’s actually worse than the status quo, which is not a surprise, “Uncle Joe” has been among the most hardcore of the drug warriors for over 4 decades:
No one person created America’s war on drugs. No individual is responsible for the accompanying manufactured crises of mass incarceration and impoverishment of working class communities of color. But in the same shamed strata as Richard Nixon and Nancy Reagan, in the view of many, you can find Joe Biden, the wobbly 2020 frontrunner and former vice president.
In his 40 years in the Senate, as is now well known, Biden was a key architect of harsh criminal penalties for nonviolent drug users. Undoing much of his own work was one way to make sense of a large part of the criminal justice plan his presidential campaign recently released. Finding a centrist’s safe-and-happy medium on weed in particular, Biden has not embraced legalization—a.k.a. commercialized, recreational pot use—but has claimed to back decriminalization, or removing at least most pot offenses from the criminal justice system.
But Biden is actually pushing a policy that could wreck the growing American weed industry and massively disrupt users’ access to the drug, attorneys, consultants, academics, and entrepreneurs well-versed in US cannabis policy say.
“I view Biden’s plan as a ham-fisted handing over of cannabis to the pharmaceutical industry,” said Gavin Kogan, a California-based cannabis executive and attorney who chairs Grupo Flor, a large, vertically-integrated cannabis firm.
Cannabis is currently listed as a Schedule I controlled substance, the classification intended for drugs with a high potential for abuse and no medical value—a designation contradicted by a 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine review, mocked on a daily basis by dozens of states with medical-use laws, and that even Attorney General William Barr apparently believes is untenable.
Other than cannabis, there are no major state-legal markets for Schedule I drugs. Would making weed Schedule II—intended only for strictly controlled pharmaceutical drugs, and not recreational nor wellness products, the rubrics under which cannabis is often marketed and sold to Americans—make more sense? It might, but here’s the catch: Drugs listed under Schedule II (which include cocaine and methamphetamine as well as prescription opiates like fentanyl) are available legally but only under strict Food and Drug Administration controls. That is, only with a doctor’s prescription, only after a lengthy FDA-overseen approval process that can include years of clinical trials (and then sold only via a licensed pharmacy), and only for limited applications.
In other words, there are no Schedule II drugs grown, processed, and sold in the way cannabis is brought to market in the United States, either—so that label, too, is probably inadequate. More to the point, if strictly enforced to the letter, Biden’s marijuana policy could rip cannabis away from its current producers and sellers and hand over control of commercial weed to corporate interests instead.
“If the federal government actually enforced the CSA [Controlled Substances Act] Schedule II [on cannabis in a Biden administration], then almost all current state-legal activities would be banned and could be shut down,” said Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College who has served as co-director of the nonpartisan RAND Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center.
………
It wasn’t just advocates with skin—financial or otherwise—in the game suggesting Biden’s plan would likely amount to a gift to a few key players. Experts said the impact of the policy, if enacted, was pretty cut-and-dried.
“To the extent that FDA regulation always favors bigger companies that can afford to meet the regulations, then, yes, putting cannabis in Schedule II would be a sort of Big Pharma model,” said David Herzberg, a historian at the University at Buffalo who specializes in drug policy and authored Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac, a review of how prescription drugs have been developed, marketed, and sold.
………
It’s not clear exactly how Biden hit upon Schedule II as the magic solution, or if he took input from drug-policy reform advocates or cannabis industry players—or took cues instead from the anti-legalization activists working against them. A spokesman for Biden’s campaign did not respond to emails, text messages, or a phone call seeking comment.
“There’s no way this [Biden’s plan] will ever go far enough to remedy the damages these communities of color have suffered,” said Solonje Burnett, co-founder of the Brooklyn-based cannabis brand hub Humble Bloom, adding that his was a “half measure” that put him on “the wrong side of history, again.”
………
“His stance is to blow up 90 percent of the existing regulated and traditional market,” said Sean Donahoe, an Oakland, California-based cannabis-industry consultant. That could be a disruption worse, even, than any George Bush or Barack Obama-era crackdown—when many businesses and operators suffered raids or received threatening letters.
This “shows [Biden’s] fundamental worldview is framed through a corporate lens with no regard for existing operators, nor good public policy,” Donahoe added.
As absurd as it might be to list cannabis in Schedule I, lumping weed with opiates, coke, and pharmaceuticals in Schedule II is also intellectually dishonest, critics said.
………
The proposal would do for cannabis “the same thing it’s done for meth: Ensure reduced research initiatives, selective prosecution, and a thriving black market,” said Michael Backes, a Southern California-based cannabis industry consultant and author of Cannabis Pharmacy: The Practical Guide to Medical Marijuana.
This is classic Biden: It’s wrong, and favors entrenched and predatory incumbents, just like he did with the credit card industry.
Speaking of Cable Company Rat-F%$#ery………
People hate their internet companies.
Whether it is Comcast, Charter, CenturyLink, Verizon, Frontier, etc. their business plan is all about creating and maintaining a monopoly, and then extracting rents with over-priced and under-performing internet.
It’s why US internet costs are among the highest in the developed world while having the lowest performance.
The response of the incumbent providers has been to lobby to maintain their monopolies, doing things like forbidding municipal broadband.
Well, it appears that their lobbying is losing its effectiveness, even in Republican dominated states like North Carolina:
Broadband expansion legislation that stalled earlier this year after strong opposition from cable and telecommunications providers cleared a key N.C. House committee Thursday, but only after a long debate on the role of government in providing internet access.
House Bill 431, the FIBER NC Act, would eliminate existing state restrictions on local government investments in broadband infrastructure and put in place a system that would allow counties and municipalities to build out the infrastructure and then lease it to a private provider.
Members of the State and Local Government Committee debated for an hour and half before approving the bill in a 13-9 vote.
The majority, a mix of the committee’s Democrats and a handful of Republican legislators from rural districts, also defeated an amendment to require a local referendum on public broadband investment by the same margin.
The bill was introduced early in the session but has been opposed by the state’s main internet providers, who say it is government encroachment into private enterprise.
North Carolina might not be the last place where I would expect to see such a bill progressing, but it’s the second or third to last place where I would expect to see it.
People are getting sick and tired of the looting.
Rule 1 of Connectivity is that Phone and Cable Companies will F%$# You Like a Drunk Sorority Girl
Rule 2 is SEE RULE 1.
Case in point, AT&T lying to the court about the effects of its merger with Time Warner:
When AT&T acquired Time Warner last year for $85 billion, the companies said the deal would be great for consumers, who would benefit from lower prices and improved service.
The Justice Department said the opposite, predicting the merger would give AT&T so much market power that price hikes and channel blackouts were all but inevitable.
And now we know. The government was right.
AT&T wasted no time in raising the price of its DirecTV satellite-TV service by $5 a month. It then raised the price of its DirectTV Now streaming service by $10 a month. (The company said last week DirecTV Now is being renamed AT&T TV Now.)
More than 6.5 million of AT&T’s DirecTV and U-verse pay-TV customers are currently cut off from CBS channels because AT&T says CBS wants too much money for its programming.
Meanwhile, more than 12 million Dish Network and Sling TV subscribers have lost access to AT&T’s HBO and Cinemax channels because, according to Dish, AT&T wants too much money for its own programming.
Put more succinctly, AT&T, after raising subscriber costs, wants to pay as little as possible for channels included on its pay-TV services. But it wants as much as possible from other pay-TV services for its own channels.
And it’s willing to hold consumers hostage to get what it wants.
“When you start seeing blackouts, it’s obvious you’re looking at a merger that’s not serving consumers very well,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the nation’s top antitrust authorities.
………
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled last year — and was subsequently upheld by an appellate court — that the government was mistaken when it warned of consumers being harmed by the merger.
Leon said it would be counter-productive for a merged AT&T/Time Warner to withhold its own channels from competing pay-TV providers or black out competitors’ channels, and thus the likelihood of this happening was low.
“The evidence of his being wrong is bordering on the absurd,” said Christopher Sagers, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.
………
“Plain and simple, the merger created for AT&T immense power over consumers,” Andy LeCuyer, Dish’s senior vice president of programming, said in a statement.
“AT&T no longer has incentive to come to an agreement on behalf of consumer choice,” he said. “Instead, it’s been given the power to grab more money or steal away customers.”
………
Einer Elhauge, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the current circumstances “seem to be precisely what the Department of Justice predicted would happen after the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, and precisely what AT&T successfully persuaded the trial court was implausible for it to ever do post-merger.”
His verdict? “It looks like the court just got it wrong.”
If so, what if anything can be done?
There was once a time when regulators decided AT&T had too much power over the phone industry and decided to break up the company.
I wonder if the same case now can be made for AT&T’s power over the TV industry.
………
The antitrust experts I spoke with said AT&T’s post-merger behavior makes a strong case for separating pay-TV and programming companies — but it may be too late to fix the problem.
I hope that it’s not too late, but once again, Robert Bork’s laissez faire theories of monopolies and competition are shown to be wrong.
In fact they are not just wrong, they are delusional, and I would argue deeply hypocritical.
Canada Concludes that the US Drug Market is Insane
Canada uses a sophisticated formula to set drug prices.
They have just updated the algorithm to eliminate US drug prices from their calculations because they are completely out of line.
Pharma is unamused, but they can go and Cheney themselves:
The Canadian government on Friday announced final regulations to reduce patented drug prices it said would save Canadians C$13.2 billion ($10 billion) over a decade, overriding heavy opposition from pharmaceutical companies.
………
The new rules, described in a statement by Health Canada, were largely in line with a December 2017 draft. They came after months of delay prompted speculation the government would back down in the face of industry lobbying or simply run out of time before Canada’s October election.
………
Under the new rules, Canada will change the countries the federal drug price regulator, the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), compares domestic prices to, dropping the United States and Switzerland where prices are highest, and let the agency consider the cost-effectiveness of new medicines.
It will also force drugmakers to disclose some confidential discounts to the PMPRB, which sets maximum prices.
………
Global drugmakers, including Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co and Amgen Inc, argued against the draft plan.
Petitpas Taylor said the new rules would lay the foundation for a new national pharmaceutical care program. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is expected to announce a program to cover the cost of prescription drugs for some or all Canadians, but the program’s scope is not yet clear.
Good.
Big pharma needs to be taken down.
Be Still My Beating Heart
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has announced that his committee is conducting an impeachment inquiry of Trump.
I think that there is plenty of probably cause for an inquiry, but I can’t help but wonder if this is just some sort of ploy to take the heat off of House leadership:
House Democrats have begun impeachment proceedings against President Trump. A key Democrat admitted as much Thursday.
“This is formal impeachment proceedings,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), told CNN on Thursday, after weeks of dancing around whether his committee would formally consider impeaching Trump.
“We are investigating all the evidence, gathering the evidence,” Nadler added. “And we will [at the] conclusion of this — hopefully by the end of the year — vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won’t. That’s a decision that we’ll have to make. But that’s exactly the process we’re in right now.”
His statement makes clear what a lawsuit filed Wednesday by his committee states: that the “Judiciary Committee is now determining whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the President based on the obstructive conduct described by the Special Counsel.”
I would also suggest looking into tax evasion, fraud, and mob connections.
Tweet of the Day
Cops investigating white nationalists pic.twitter.com/5RdQReEUwq— Voodoo Pork (@Voodoo_Pork) August 4, 2019
Yeah, this is pretty much the definition of the, “Thin Blue Line.”
We Are Unbelievably Screwed
It looks like updated models are showing that anthropogenic climate change will be even more disastrous than previously predicted:
Our planet’s climate may be more sensitive to increases in greenhouse gas than we realized, according to a new generation of global climate models being used for the next major assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The findings—which run counter to a 40-year consensus—are a troubling sign that future warming and related impacts could be even worse than expected.
One of the new models, the second version of the Community Earth System Model (CESM2) from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), saw a 35% increase in its equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), the rise in global temperature one might expect as the atmosphere adjusts to an instantaneous doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Instead of the model’s previous ECS of 4°C (7.2°F), the CESM2 now shows an ECS of 5.3°C (9.5°F).
“It is imperative that the community work in a multi-model context to understand how plausible such a high ECS is,” said NCAR’s Andrew Gettelman and coauthors in a paper published last month in Geophysical Research Letters. They added: “What scares us is not that the CESM2 ECS is wrong…but that it might be right.”
At least eight of the global-scale models used by IPCC are showing upward trends in climate sensitivity, according to climate researcher Joëlle Gergis, an IPCC lead author and a scientific advisor to Australia’s Climate Council. Gergis wrote about the disconcerting trends in an August column for the Australian website The Monthly.
Researchers are now evaluating the models to see whether the higher ECS values are model artifacts or correctly depict a more dire prognosis.
I would note that every time that researchers update their models as a result of real world data, the predictions get more and more dire.
We are in for a huge world of hurt.
Do You Want Some Cheese to Go with That Whine?
The NY Times published a searchable database and 4870 pages of donor names, all 146,000, all the way down to donors who gave $1 to the Clinton Foundation.What’s the public interest in publishing a donor who gave $1? https://t.co/Qo1ISmxSJP
— amicable stationery helper 📎 (@xiruxi) August 7, 2019
Hypocrisy Much
Joaquin Castro is Presidential candidate Julian Castro’s twin brother, he grew a beard so that they are not confused, and he just
tweeted the names of people who have donated the maximum to the Trump campaign, and the Republicans, and the press has completely lost their sh%$.
This information is publicly available on the web, and, as death threats and doxxing is central to right wing communication, the pot is calling the kettle back:
Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressman from Texas and chairman of the presidential campaign of his twin brother, Julián, fired back on Tuesday after being castigated on social media for tweeting the names and occupations of his constituents who’d maxed out their donations to President Donald Trump.
His tweet contained a graphic titled “Who’s funding Trump?” and listed the names of 44 people who purportedly contributed the maximum amount allowed by campaign finance laws. Their occupations, which, like donor names, are public record, were also listed. Close to a dozen of the donors shown are retirees.
“Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump,” Castro wrote, naming local businesses whose owners were on the list. “Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’”
The graphic, which Castro indicated had originated with a Democratic activist group, was blasted out to the more than 27,000 followers of his congressional campaign account on Tuesday afternoon. It came as politicians’ loaded rhetoric has come under closer scrutiny after a mass shooting over the weekend in El Paso that killed 22 and wounded dozens of others. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, which mirrored language used by the suspected shooter in a racist manifesto, has loomed over the tragedy in the days since.
You are supporting a racist ratf%$#, in any decent society, opprobrium should be a consequence of this, you delicate snowflakes.
Missing the Point
Over at Five Thirty Eight, where myopically examining data is increasingly their brand, Maggie Koerth-Baker concludes that there are no “lone wolf” terrorists, because they are all tied into the white supremacist community.
This misses the point: Random, but statistically predictable, acts of terrorism are actually a part of a deliberate strategy.
The right wing in general, and white supremacists in particular, knows that there will be a baseline level of random violence against their targets as a result of their social structure and rhetoric, and they plan on this.
This has been true since pseudo-random terrorists started fire-bombing abortion clinics in the 1980s.
I am not alone in this, the very first comment on this article use3 the term, “Stochastic Terrorism.”
Terror with plausible deniability is a conscious goal.
An Inverted Yield Curve Predicted Twelve of the Last Five Recessions
For those who are not up on the term, longer term bonds typically pay more interest than shorter term ones, because they lock up your money for a long time.
When, for example, the 3-month US Treasury pays more than a 10-year treasure, the yield curve is said to be inverted.
This is significant because pretty much every US recession since the end of World War II has been preceded by an inverted yield curve, though, to be fair, a lot of not-recessions have been preceded by inverted yields as well.
Well, we are now seeing a pretty large inverted yield curve:
A widely watched bond market indicator sent its strongest recession warning in more than a decade on Wednesday, as the global growth outlook dimmed and questions swirled about the Federal Reserve’s commitment to cut interest rates in light of rising US-China trade tensions.
The yield on three-month US Treasury traded as much as 41.23 basis points above that on the benchmark 10-year government bond — the widest gap since March 2007. Such an inversion of the yield curve — in which short-term yields are higher than longer-term ones — has preceded every recession of the last half century.
My guess is that this time it is right, because it’s been a long time, and our economic growth seems to be primarily an artifact of speculation and consumer debt, neither of which are sustainable.
Worst Incentive Deal Ever
I am referring, of course, to former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s deal with Foxconn, which an independent report has declared beyond redemption.
I don’t know why the state needed to commission a study to come to this conclusion, it was patently obvious to every voter in the Badger State:
In 2017, Wisconsin offered Foxconn a record-breaking subsidy to build an LCD factory in the state, only to see the promised factory fall behind schedule and grow progressively smaller. Now, the Wisconsin Department of Administration has requested a reassessment of the costs and benefits to the state regarding the far-tinier facility.
The report, which was conducted by Tim Bartik of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, finds that the smaller facility raises the already unusually high cost per job even further. If the subsidy levels in the current contract are kept, each Foxconn job would cost taxpayers about $290,000, Bartik found, compared to $172,000 if Foxconn built the original $10 billion, 13,000-job facility. For comparison, Bartik estimated the subsidies Virginia offered Amazon for its second headquarters amounted to between $10,000 and $13,000 per job.
“The most important conclusion of this analysis is that it is difficult to come up with plausible assumptions under which a revised Foxconn incentive contract, which offers similar credit rates to the original contract, has benefits exceeding costs,” Bartik wrote. “The incentives are so costly per job that it is hard to see how likely benefits will offset these costs.”
………
The analysis comes five months after a Foxconn executive met with Evers and expressed interest in revising the company’s contract with the state. Foxconn hasn’t said what it would push for, but Evers administration documents obtained by The Verge summarize the meeting and the company’s broad requests: updating the contract to reflect the smaller factory, including additional Foxconn subsidiaries, and extending the period Foxconn can qualify for capital investment tax credits.
Such changes make sense for Foxconn. The company has radically scaled back its plans and likely wants assurances that it won’t be found in breach of contract. But Evers was critical of the deal during his campaign and would likely be reluctant to agree to these changes without getting concessions of his own. In this context, the new economic impact assessment can be seen as setting a new baseline for further negotiations.
………
The Fiscal Bureau analysis was based on a best-case scenario. It relied on economic impact estimates supplied by the consulting firm EY (formerly Ernst & Young), which Foxconn had hired to pitch its project. It also assumed Foxconn would actually build what it promised and hire at an extremely fast rate. Instead, the company has repeatedly scaled back its plans and fallen far behind on hiring. Rather than a 20 million-square-foot factory manufacturing large LCD screens, Foxconn says the factory it’s now building will be less than 1 million square feet and make smaller screens. While the company had initially planned to employ 5,200 people by next year, it now says the new factory will employ only 1,500 people. Even that seems like a stretch goal: at the end of 2018, Foxconn employed only 156 people in the state.
………
Of course, there’s no guarantee that Foxconn will build what it is now saying it will, either. When The Verge spoke with O’Brien in June, his observations of LCD manufacturing machinery supply chains indicated that Foxconn was unlikely to meet the 2020 deadline it set for itself. If the last two years are any guide, any given Foxconn plan is only good until the next one.
One hopes that the implosion of this deal will take the bloom off of the rose for similar deals.
It’s happened with the Olympics, where taxpayers have increasingly revolted against the excesses of hosting the games.
Ha Ha!!!
As we are all aware, Donald Trump is fighting tooth and nail to prevent investigations by the Democratic Party controlled house, ignoring subpoenas and challenging any attempt at information gathering in court.It looks like Congressional and New York State investigators have done an end run of his obstruction by demanding documents from his partners:
Major Wall Street banks have given congressional committees investigating President Trump thousands of pages of documents related to Russians who may have had dealings with Mr. Trump, his family or his business, people familiar with the congressional probes said. Some banks are also giving documents related to Mr. Trump’s business, the Trump Organization, to New York state investigators, people familiar with the New York investigation said.
Wall Street firms including Bank of America Corp. , Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG , JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Co. have recently provided the documents to congressional investigators, according to people familiar with those probes. The investigators are working on a joint probe into potential foreign influence on Mr. Trump and his family by the House Financial Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee. More information will likely be handed over in coming weeks as the banks continue to respond to subpoenas sent in April, the people said.
Separately, Deutsche Bank, Mr. Trump’s primary bank, has turned over emails, loan agreements and other documents related to the Trump Organization to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, in response to a civil subpoena sent earlier this year, according to people familiar with the New York investigation.
Ms. James’s office has also in recent weeks received financing documents and emails from Investors Bancorp Inc., the people said. The Short Hills, N.J., regional bank handed over thousands of pages in response to a civil subpoena demanding information on a 2010 mortgage on Trump Park Avenue, a condominium building in Manhattan owned by Mr. Trump, the people said.
Mr. Trump has filed several lawsuits seeking to block lawmakers and states from getting access to his bank, accounting and tax records. The documents being provided by the banks could give investigators some of the same information Mr. Trump is trying to block.
Of course, particularly with Pelosi running the show, I expect Democrats to squander this opportunity.
Useful Metric
A list of Democratic Presidential candidates with the most donations from billionaires.
This list is important, because it shows who the billionaires perceive as being most friendly to their agenda, which is basically the preservation of their wealth and power.
What is interesting is just how many has beens (Gillibrand, O’Rourke, Klobuchar) and never was (Bennet, Hickenlooper) candidates are beating the number 2 & 3 candidates, Warren and Sanders, in this metric.
Obviously, getting donations from billionaires does not, in and of itself, make a candidate unsuitable, but it is a very big red flag.
In order (# of billionaires):
- Pete Buttigieg (23)
- Cory Booker (18)
- Kamala Harris (17)
- Michael Bennet (15)
- Joe Biden (13)
- John Hickenlooper (11)
- Beto O’Rourke (9)
- Amy Klobuchar (8)
- Jay Inslee (5)
- Kirsten Gillibrand (4)
- Elizabeth Warren (2)
- Steve Bullock (2)
- Tulsi Gabbard (1)
- Andrew Yang (1)
- Marianne Williamson (1)
- Bernie Sanders (0)
- Julian Castro (0)
- Bill De Blasio (0)
- Tim Ryan (0)
And yes, I spent almost as much time tweaking the HTML code for the numbering as I did the article.
Tweet of the Day
Re the crime of Hiroshima: In one of the cruel ironies of history, defeating global fascism in World War Two required the help of a state with a rich history of ethnic cleansing, genocide, forced labor, imperialism, and mass violence. And then it also required the Soviet Union.— Tarik Cyril Amar (@TarikCyrilAmar) August 7, 2019
Read up on the Bengal Famine if you have any questions.
Nope, No Corruption Here
Click through for my pithy architectural critiques
Papers have revealed that the National Rifle Association was considering purchasing a 10,000 square foot mansion for its executive VP Wayne LaPierre.
I do not agree with the NRA’s current mission, but this is not about their lobbying for the firearms industry, it’s about the proper management of a not-for-profit organization.
I incorporated a not-for-profit, and shepherded its application for tax exempt status with the IRS about 30 years ago, so I have more than a passing familiarity with these issues, and this crosses a pretty bright red line.
What’s more, it appears that tey attempted to use kickbacks from a vendor to conceal this.
Here is hoping that the New York Attorney General with be on the organization like white on rice:
The chief executive of the National Rifle Association sought to have the nonprofit organization buy him a luxury mansion last year after a mass shooting at a Florida high school, selecting a French country-style estate in a gated Dallas-area golf club, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the NRA, told associates he was worried about being targeted and needed a more secure place to live after 17 people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the people said.
LaPierre and his wife, Susan, were intensely involved in the selection of the property, rejecting an upscale high rise in Dallas with numerous security features in favor of a 10,000-square-foot estate with lakefront and golf course views in Westlake, Tex., on the market for about $6 million, according to emails and text messages described to The Washington Post.
Yea, right, “Security considerations.”
………
The discussions about the estate, which was not ultimately purchased, are under scrutiny by New York investigators. The transaction was slated to be made through a corporate entity that received a $70,000 wire from the NRA in 2018, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The entity was created at Wayne LaPierre’s request by a law firm working for Ackerman McQueen, the NRA’s longtime ad agency, according to the people.
The origins of the idea to buy the mansion, its proposed purpose and the reason the deal never went through are now being fiercely disputed by the NRA and Ackerman McQueen, which are locked in a bitter legal fight.
In a statement late Tuesday night, Ackerman McQueen said LaPierre had sought the ad firm’s assistance with the real estate transaction, a proposal it said alarmed company officials. “Actions in this regard led to Ackerman McQueen’s loss of faith in Mr. LaPierre’s decision-making,” the firm said.
It appears that this was a bridge too far for Ackerman McQueen, but the basic execution was for the NRA to overpay their ad agency, and then that the agency would kick back personal benefits to LaPierre.
This is thoroughly corrupt an completely illegal.
………
The New York attorney general’s office is now examining the plan for an NRA-financed mansion as part of its ongoing investigation into the gun lobby’s tax-exempt status, in which it has subpoenaed the group’s financial records, the people said.
Yeah, pretty much.
………
Angus McQueen, the now-deceased chief executive of the ad firm, had learned about the location of the property and was furious about LaPierre’s claim that he needed the property for security reasons, the people said.
“He said ‘The scales fell from my eyes,’ ” said one person familiar with the discussions. “They were buying a Taj Mahal on a golf course with a social membership.”
In a statement last month, Ackerman McQueen said it decided to stop paying a series of expenses for NRA executives, including LaPierre, in 2018 out of concern they were “suspicious” and their true nature was concealed from the NRA board and members.
No sympathy for Angus McQueen, or Ackerman McQueen. To quote Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Ackerman McQueen was complicit in looting the NRA, because it made them money.
Hopefully, there is a way for both of them to lose.
Quote of the Day, I Cannot Believe That I Am Quoting the Cato Institute Edition
The real significance of Gabbard’s critique, however, lies not in the proposition that Harris was a particularly unprofessional or malign prosecutor, but rather in the fact that she seems to have been a rather ordinary prosecutor who simply did her job the way most prosecutors do. And if that makes a former-prosecutor-turned-presidential-candidate look like a monster, then perhaps that says more about prosecutors in general than it does about Kamala Harris in particular.
—Clark Neily, and it was published at Cato.org.
It’s an insightful perspective on our justice system and the role that the almost completely unaccountable power of prosecutors in this system.
Power without accountability is a recipe for corruption.
Never Give to the DNC
There are a number of reasons why not to give to the Democratic National Committee: It is ineffective, DNC Chair Tom Perez is clueless, and it is dominated by political consultants who make their money off the revolving door between the committee and private business.
It doesn’t help that these consultants are over priced and incompetent, otherwise, I would be complaining about President Hillary Clinton.
And now we know that the organization is completely unwilling to take even baby steps toward accountability and competence, because they just nixed an internal committee that would review spending and report to the DNC members who theoretically run the organization:
A proposal to bring unprecedented oversight to the way that the Democratic National Committee spends the billion dollars it raises between presidential elections was rejected by the DNC Rules and Bylaw Committee Tuesday, after a spirited debate highlighting that there is no independent oversight reporting back to the DNC’s 450 members.
The decision did not come without some Rules Committee members saying that the oversight issue was legitimate. But they did not feel that creating a new elected committee to review the DNC’s spending decisions was the best approach. The oversight proposal was the last piece of business from the DNC’s post-2016 Unity Reform Commission recommendations, which sought to heal the party’s internal divides after that cycle.
“I am disappointed,” said Jim Zogby, a longtime DNC member and Arab-American human rights leader, who noted that Tuesday’s proposal was the latest in a series of efforts to introduce greater transparency and oversight before 2020’s election.
………
“Look, I’ve been a DNC member—this is my 27th year. I was an executive committee member for 16 years. The issue of never seeing the budget, never being able as a member to evaluate the budget, sticks in my craw. I think it should stick in the craw of every member of the body,” he said. “At the end of the day, the ability to know how money is spent, and have some say in it, or, at least, as the [DNC] bylaws call for, to evaluate it, is essential for the governing body of any organization.”
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Leone’s last point was referring to the current DNC leadership, under Chair Tom Perez, saying that the party’s spending has been much more transparent and accountable than in previous years. Another objection came from David McDonald, an RBC member from Washington, who said looking retrospectively could distract from current campaigns.
So let me get this straight: We can’t let the members know how the money is spent, because it might distract from us spending our money in stupid ways.
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“The [DNC] chair simply cannot appoint the committee that oversees the finances of the chair and the expenditures that are determined by the chair. That simply makes no sense,” he said. “We would not get into trouble—and we have had trouble—if the Finance Committee… [had had] an oversight committee that can do the due diligence and report back to us, ‘This happened. That happened. This didn’t happen. That didn’t happen. We make these recommendations for the future.’”
The DNC does not want to know when they do stupid things: It’s how friends and relatives of current DNC staffers make their money, spending on stupid sh%$, and then getting a percentage of their ineffectual advertisement buys.
Corruption is the goal, not an accidental byproduct of incompetence.
Don’t Worry About the DPRK and Iran
Because it looks like two nuclear powers may be on a path to military conflict over Modi’s revoking Kashmir’s automomy.
From a purely selfish perspective, it makes sense for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to do this, it gives him a political boost, and he legitimately wants to make sure that Muslims in India are second class citizens.
He is a bigot and a fascist a half step removed from the Hindu nationalists who assassinated Mahatma Ghandi:
India on Monday revoked the special status of Kashmir, the Himalayan region that has long been a flashpoint in ties with neighboring Pakistan, moving to grasp its only Muslim-majority region more tightly.
In the most far-reaching political move in one of the world’s most militarized regions in nearly seven decades, India said it would scrap a constitutional provision that allows the state of Jammu and Kashmir to make its own laws.
“The entire constitution will be applicable to Jammu and Kashmir,” Interior Minister Amit Shah told parliament, as opposition lawmakers voiced loud protests against the repeal.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged India and Pakistan, which also claims Kashmir, to exercise restraint. The U.S. State Department said it was closely following the events and expressed concerns over reports of detentions.
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Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said the move “was in clear violation of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions” in the region, according to a statement released after a telephone call with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on Monday evening.
“As the party to this international dispute, Pakistan will exercise all possible options to counter the illegal steps,” its foreign ministry said in a statement.
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir, where a nearly 30-year armed revolt has killed tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops have been deployed to quell it.
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Hours earlier the Indian government launched a security crackdown in the region, arresting local leaders, suspending telephone and internet services, and restricting public movement in the main city of Srinagar.
Local TV channels citing Press Trust of India reported that former Kashmiri chief ministers Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah had been detained at a state guest house.
To quote (not) Tallyrand, this is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.
Modi’s bigotry and arrogance could end up killing hundreds of millions of people.
Hoax Tweet of the Day
Let me reaffirm that this is a hoax, but it’s funny as hell:
BREAKING:In a major ethics violation, Kamala Harris’ iconic and memorable rainbow sequin coat she wore to San Francisco Pride was sewn together by truancy convicts in a California prison work camp, sources report. pic.twitter.com/MqliI2RD8D
— MSDNC (@MSDNCNews) August 4, 2019
Again, not true, but, as Stephen Colbert would say, there is a lot of truthiness there.