To Hell with Civility: Enough with the Pity Party for Mitch Mcconnell, Please
Seriously, we will never, ever see good government in our nation again unless the malefactors of politics are confronted with some consequences for their despicable actions.
Disturbing a night out with the wife is pretty weak tea, but it is a start.
I know that it’s Monday, but I think that I can say with no small amount of certainly that I am the only person I know who sliced their finger tying their shoe.
It wasn’t a bad cut, after a band aid, it is fine, but still………
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, is whining about the, “unfairness” of San Francisco’s homeless tax:
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Friday sounded off against a San Francisco measure to increase corporate taxes that would give the city more funding to tackle its homeless crisis.
Dorsey said he was opposed to San Francisco’s Proposition C because he believes one of companies he leads as CEO, Square, will be taxed at unfair rates compared to other major companies such as Salesforce.
The Twitter head wrote in a series of tweets that with the proposition’s passage, Square could potentially face more than $20 million in taxes in 2019 compared to Salesforce.
Seriously, just how much money do you need, Jack?
How many yachts do you need to water-ski behind.
What a repulsive excuse for a human being.
The Trump administration is preparing to tell Russian leaders next week that it is planning to exit the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in part to enable the United States to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, according to American officials and foreign diplomats.President Trump has been moving toward scrapping the three-decade-old treaty, which grew out of President Ronald Reagan’s historic meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. While the treaty was seen as effective for years, Russia has been violating it at least since 2014 in an effort to menace other nations.
That the Russians are violating the INF is stated as an absolute fact, but this is a matter of some dispute. (I’m inclined to believe that the Russians are in violation, but it’s not enough to abrogate the treaty ……… yet)
But the pact has also constrained the United States from deploying new weapons to respond to China’s efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and to keep American naval forces at bay. Because China was not a signatory to the treaty, it has faced no limits on developing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which can travel thousands of miles.
The White House said that no official decision had been made to leave the treaty, known as I.N.F., which at the time of its signing was considered a critical step in defusing Cold War tensions. But in the coming weeks, Mr. Trump is expected to sign off on the decision, which would mark the first time he has scrapped an arms control treaty, the American officials said.
This is a huge tactical miscalculation.
In the mid 80s, when GLCMs and Pershing IIs were deployed to Europe, it was a very heavy lift, with massive protests and unrest.
These days, it would be impossible to deploy these systems to Europe, even to the UK.
It would be electoral poison.
This is a very stupid move.
The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.
A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.
Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.
The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.
“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”
The radical right just needs to hate, and Trump will do whatever he he can to pander to them.
These folks are really a clear and present danger to any modern society.
For future discussions of Russian troll farms and the like, I will use the phrase, “Russian democracy promotion efforts.”
This is NOT because I approve of these efforts, but rather to show my opprobrium US “Democracy promotion” activities.
I approve of neither the Russians encouraging the “alt-right”, nor of US support for neo-Nazi skinheads in the Ukraine or of Jihadis in Syria.
I am referring, of course, to the (now confirmed) death of Jamal Khashoggi.
Gee, a fistfight with Khashoggi single-handedly taking on a 15 person hit squad, which included a pathologists who brought a bone saw, “Just in case.”
Sound fishy to you? It does to me too, but Donald Trump is just fine with this story:
After two weeks of shifting stories, Saudi Arabia said Saturday that its agents strangled Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist, after a fistfight inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and that 18 men had been arrested in the case.
Those arrested included 15 men who were sent to confront Mr. Khashoggi, plus one driver and two consular staff, a Saudi official said.
State media reported that Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to the crown prince, had been dismissed, along with Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy director of Saudi intelligence, and other high-ranking intelligence officials. The Saudi official said General Asiri had organized the operation and that Mr. Qahtani had known about it and contributed to the aggressive environment that allowed it to escalate into violence.
President Trump on Friday night said that Saudi Arabia’s acknowledgment of the death and its announcement of arrests were “good first steps” but said he would consider “some form of sanction” in retaliation.
Here is their narrative:
But the order to return Mr. Khashoggi to the kingdom was misinterpreted as it made its way down the chain of command, the official said, and a confrontation ensued as soon as Mr. Khashoggi saw the men. He tried to flee, the men stopped him, punches were thrown, Mr. Khashoggi screamed and one of the men put him in a chokehold, strangling him to death, the official said.
“The interaction in the room didn’t last very long at all,” the official said.
The team then gave the body to a local collaborator to dispose of, meaning that they do not know where it ended up, and returned to the kingdom, the official said.
Note some facts:
The brazenness of this lie would have Samuel L. Jackson going full Jules Winnfield.
Specifically, the MiG 31 Foxhound, which looks to be leveraging its high speed and high altitude performance to perform as a satellite launcher and ASAT platform:
The Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptor has found a second life—in fact, more than one. Not only has the aircraft known to NATO as the Foxhound been extensively upgraded, but it has also taken on new tasks: as an air-launcher for the Kinzhal ground-strike system and as an aerospace missile system to deliver small satellites to orbit or fight enemy satellites.
In September, at the Russian aviation industry’s test center in Zhukovsky near Moscow, an experimental MiG-31, No. 81, performed its first flight with an extremely large unknown missile suspended on the centerline pylon. The first high-speed taxiing of this coupling was done several months earlier.
The current program is supposed to be a follow-on of the 30P6 Kontakt (Contact) satellite intercept program of 1984-95, under which the MiG-31D aircraft using the Fakel 79M6 missile was made, and the improved MiG-31DM with the Fakel 95M6 missile was being designed.
………
The advantage of an airborne anti-satellite system over a ground-based one is longer range: The MiG-31 can deliver a missile over a distance of up to 1,000 km (621 mi.) before launch. The characteristics of the current system remain unknown. But they are probably similar to those of the previous Kontakt system, which was intended to destroy nonmaneuvering or maneuvering satellites in low orbits.
The 79M6 missile, weighing 4,550 kg (10,000 lb.), was launched by a MiG-31D flying at a speed of Mach 2.55 and altitude of 22 km. Its target was at an altitude of 120-600 km, depending on the distance. The missile flight time was 100-380 sec. The satellite was to be destroyed by a direct hit or detonation of a small, 20-kg explosive charge. The target was designated for the MiG-31 by the ground-based 45Zh6 Krona (Crown) system, consisting of a large decameter and centimeter-wavelength electronic-scanning radar and optical-laser locator and rangefinder. The Krona system was overhauled and upgraded in 2009-10.
………
The Russians have offered several systems for launching commercial satellites using the MiG-31 platform, but none of the designs has materialized. In 2001, Russia Aircraft Corp. (RSK) MiG MiG unveiled the MiG-31S project, a platform for two vehicles developed by the Astra Research Centre at the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI): the Micron rocket and Aerospace Rally System (ARS) rocket plane. The Micron was to be able to launch a 200-kg satellite to an altitude of 100 km, or 50 kg to 300 km. The ARS was to be a three-seat vehicle for suborbital flights (to an altitude of 130 km), intended for astronaut training in weightlessness conditions (up to 3 min.), research of the upper layers of the atmosphere and tourist and advertising flights.
This is contrasted with the US aviation forces, where the closest they come to reusing old airframes is converting them to target drones.
The Trump administration is considering whether to grant a South Carolina request that would effectively allow faith-based foster care agencies in the state the ability to deny Jewish parents from fostering children in its network. The argument, from the state and from the agency, is that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act should not force a Protestant group to work with Jewish people if it violates a tenet of their faith.
The case being made by South Carolina is an extension of the debate around RFRA, which is more commonly associated with discrimination against LGBTQ people, but by no means applies exclusively to that group.
If granted, the exemption would allow Miracle Hill Ministries, a Protestant social service agency working in the state’s northwest region, to continue receiving federal dollars while “recruiting Christian foster families,” which it has been doing since 1988, according to its website. That discrimination would apply not just to Jewish parents, but also to parents who are Muslim, Catholic, Unitarian, atheist, agnostic or other some other non-Protestant Christian denomination.
I’ve really had enough with how the local, state, and federal government coddle these Talibaptist whack-a-doodles.
I got handed an Ayn Rand sandwich straight from a can it tasted so bland I asked a lass to pass me a glass of Engel’s Conditions of the Working Class:
The closed-door “training academy” was aimed at a select group: recent law school graduates who had secured prestigious clerkships with federal judges. It was organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that has played a leading role in moving the courts to the right, and it had some unusual requirements.
“Generous donors,” the application materials said, were making “a significant financial investment in each and every attendee.” In exchange, the future law clerks would be required to promise to keep the program’s teaching materials secret and pledge not to use what they learned “for any purpose contrary to the mission or interest of the Heritage Foundation.”
………
“Law clerks are not supposed to be part of a cohort of secretly financed and trained partisans of an organization that describes itself on its own web page as ‘the bastion of the American conservative movement,’” said Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford. “The idea that clerks will be trained to elevate the Heritage Foundation’s views, or the views of judges handpicked by the foundation, perverts the very idea of a clerkship.”
On Thursday afternoon, a few hours after The New York Times published an online article about the training, Heritage announced that it was suspending the program.
………
According to the application materials, Heritage’s unnamed donors were to pay for travel expenses to Washington, hotel rooms and meals during the three-day program. The curriculum would cover, the materials said, “originalism, textualism, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights and other substantive legal and practical subject matter.” Originalism and textualism are modes of interpreting the Constitution and statutes that are generally but not exclusively associated with conservatives.
The application called for several short essays. One prompt said, “Please describe your understanding of originalism.” Another said, “Please identify the United States Supreme Court justice (past or present) whose jurisprudential philosophy and approach to judging you agree with most, and explain why.”
This is as disturbing as it is completely expected.
I hypothesize that aliens not contacted us because they have intercepted the broadcast of our televangelists, and they are trying to figure out whether or not we are an elaborate hoax.
Seriously, if your only exposure to the planet earth is our television, particularly Sunday morning programming, whether it be Pat Robertson or Chuck Todd, you would have to conclude that this is all some intricate prank, and a rather cruel one at that.
Facebook and Google’s hegemony in the online ad world has reached its inevitable result, it has been revealed that Facebook has been aggressively defrauding advertisers over the effectiveness of its video ads.
If I had a chance to say anything to Mark Zuckerberg about this, it would be, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.
According to a newly public filing in an ongoing lawsuit, a group of advertisers now says that Facebook has been willfully withholding information about how much time its users spend watching paid ads—if more people spend more time watching ads, then those ads can command higher rates.
The case of LLE One LLC et al. v. Facebook, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was filed two years ago and is currently pending in federal court in Oakland, California. In it, the plaintiffs say that, as part of the discovery from their lawsuit, they have learned that Facebook’s “action rises to the level of fraud and may warrant punitive damages.”
As the plaintiffs’ attorneys continued:In addition to Facebook knowing about the problem far longer than previously acknowledged, Facebook’s records also show that the impact of its miscalculation was much more severe than reported. The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60-80 percent; they were inflated by some 150-900 percent.
There are no good metrics because there are no independent metrics, and there won’t be, because Facebook so dominates the space that they can, and do, refuse to provide their underlying numbers to independent verification.
The market no longer serves as a corrective, and the alternatives are either aggressive and pervasive regulation, or broken up to its component parts, or (my choice) both.
Cat on Brexit pic.twitter.com/j210eHBeq2— cetier1 (@cetier1) October 17, 2018
You may disagree, but if there is one thing that I know, it is that it never pays to argue with a cat.
Well, now Nancy Floreen is trying to claim that she was really a Democrat the whole time.
She was never a Democrat. She was a tool of the developers who found pretending to be a Democrat was useful.
It’s time for the Democratic Party of Montgomery County to tell her to pound sand, and say, “No backsies.”
Montgomery County executive candidate Nancy Floreen says she will return to the Democratic fold after the Nov. 6 election — regardless of whether her independent bid for the liberal county’s top post is successful.
Floreen, a 16-year county council member and two-time delegate to the Democratic National Convention, left the party in July to make a surprise run for county executive, gathering enough petition signatures to appear on the November ballot.
The move was prompted by her opposition to the Democratic nominee, 12-year council member Marc Elrich. It left some Democrats feeling betrayed.
At a candidate debate Wednesday morning hosted by the Greater Bethesda U.S. Chamber of Commerce and moderated by Bethesda Magazine editor and publisher Steve Hull, Floreen said she would re-register as a Democrat if she’s elected.
Floreen later said she plans to return to the party regardless of the outcome of the election, “because I am a Democrat at heart.”
“I only changed parties in order to run the petition drive,” she said. “I’ve been very upfront about that.”
You are a contemptible piece of excrement, you’ve been very upfront about that.
BTW, whenever you hear a corporate Democrat call for unity, know that it’s only a one way street.
It turns out that government pension plans are flushing their money down the toilet by playing high fees to Wall Street.
Of course, this observation misses the primary purpose of state pensions wasting money on hedge funds and private equity, it creates opportunities for bribes and corruption:
Recent research from North Carolina State University finds that state pension plans would be better off avoiding external asset managers when investing their plans’ assets – and would carry substantially smaller unfunded liabilities if they had simply invested in a conventional index fund.
“We set out to answer three questions about state pension plans, their external management fees and the return on their investments,” says Jeff Diebold, an assistant professor of public administration at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. “First, what influences the amount of money that state pension plans pay in external management fees? Second, do higher fees lead to better performance? And third, how would those pension plans have fared if they had taken the money spent on external management fees and invested it in a conventional portfolio, with 60 percent invested in the S&P 500 and 40 percent invested in an intermediate bond fund?”
To address these questions, the researchers turned to the Public Plans Database, where they were able to find data from 49 state-administered pension plans – spanning 30 states – regarding how much those plans spend each year on external management fees. Specifically, the researchers evaluated data on the performance of those 49 plans, spanning the years 2001-2014.
………
“Unfortunately, higher fees did not lead to better performance,” Diebold says. “There was no positive relationship between what plans paid in fees and how they performed. You don’t always get what you pay for.”
For the third research question, the researchers only evaluated 42 of the 49 plans, because the evaluation required at least 10 years of data. But for those 42 plans, the researchers found that the more a plan spent on external fees, the more it lost – relative to what it would have made investing in the conventional portfolio of the S&P 500 and intermediate bond funds.
For example, the plan that spent the fourth least amount of money on external fees would have cut 5 percent of its unfunded liability if it had invested in the conventional portfolio. The median plan would have eliminated 14 percent of its unfunded liability. And the plan with the fourth highest fees would actually have recouped 44 percent of its unfunded liability – approximately $4.2 billion – if it had invested its external fees in the S&P 500 and intermediate bond funds. In this context, an unfunded liability is the amount of the pension plan’s obligation for which the plan has not set aside money.
There is a good reason reason for me to refer to big finance as parasites, because they sure as hell aren’t symbiots.
It appears that murdering their columnists is a bridge too far for the Washington Post editorial board:
The Washington Post told a prominent Republican lobbyist he’d lose his gig as a contributing opinion writer unless he stopped lobbying for Saudi Arabia, a spokesperson for the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.
The ultimatum came after the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. permanent resident who was a columnist for the Post and wrote critically of the Saudi government. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month, and allegations that he was killed by Saudi authorities have strained the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.
The lobbyist, Ed Rogers, the chairman of the BGR Group, writes for the newspaper’s PostPartisan blog.
Kristine Coratti Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Post, confirmed that the newspaper told Rogers he’d no longer be able to contribute if he continued to lobby for Saudi Arabia. She declined to comment further.
Lobbying for the slaughter and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, that’s fine, but murder one Post columnist, that is simply beyond the pals.
As Ian Walsh so pithily notes:
It’s not that Kashoggi’s death isn’t a crime, but that any number of nameless people can be killed, raped, and tortured, and elites don’t care. It’s only when it’s one of them that they care.
Normal people are nothing–less than nothing–to our elites.
But they take care of their own.
But still, we’re going to help the House of Saud starve, bomb, and burn civilians throughout Yemen.
This is a relationship that is not in the long term interest of the United States.
It appears that the Federal Courts do not take kindly to the conceit that it’s OK to defraud students because it’s rich people doing it:
Obama-era rules that lay out how students defrauded by colleges can erase their debt took effect Tuesday, after the Trump administration and an association of for-profit colleges lost their bids to delay them.
That means that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now responsible for implementing a rule that she said makes it too easy for students to cancel their student loans and that she has fought to kill.
Consumer advocates back the regulations, saying the government must take a more aggressive stance against colleges that they say routinely take advantage of veterans and vulnerable students.
But conservatives worry about the hit to taxpayers if a large number of student borrowers are allowed to avoid paying off their loans. In addition, colleges, particularly for-profit ventures, opposed the Obama administration rules as harmful to their programs and students seeking loans to attend them.
The federal government has a virtual monopoly over the $100 billion-a-year student loan market, so the rules about how it will handle fraud and other issues are important.
In June 2017, DeVos put the regulations on hold and said she would replace them with her own. Two former students of a for-profit college, as well as 19 states and the District, sued to stop the delay.
Last month, a U.S. district court said that the DeVos move was “arbitrary and capricious” and that the rules should take effect. It gave the agency until last Friday to try to issue a new delay, but the Education Department said it would not try again.
“The secretary respects the role of the court and will defer to its judgment in whether parts of the 2016 rule will go into effect,” Elizabeth Hill, a DeVos spokeswoman, said Friday.
In a morass of incompetence, corruption, and soulless evil at the Trump Administration, Betsy DeVoss is truly in a class of her own.
It’s good to see her lose.
Merkel’s allies in the German state of Alabama Bavaria just got their heads handed to them in recent state elections:
Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, the sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, suffered a historic loss in Germany’s wealthiest state, losing the majority it has held for much of the postwar period. Despite the ninth consecutive year of economic growth and record employment levels, the party lost votes to two rising parties on the left and right, the Greens and the Alternative for Germany.
The CSU, led by controversial Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, won 37.2 percent of the votes, according to preliminary results. It was the party’s lowest rating since 1950. The CSU was expected to win 34 percent in the latest opinion polls surveys earlier this month. In 2013, it won 47.7 percent of the votes, but still won the majority in the state’s legislature due to a complicated system of awarding seats.
You will notice that the CSU dropped by about 10%, or about ¼ of its previous vote totals, and the SPD lost about 12%, over ½ of its votes.
Establishment parties (the CSU/CDU) is taking it on the chin
Establishment parties that stand for nothing (the SPD), like what now passes for the “Center-Left” in Europe, are being destroyed.
I’m just hoping that the Greens and the Left Party, and not the neo-Fascist AFD end up on top.
Say, “Don’t F%$# Trump Supporters.“
Not my idea, nor is it Ms. Filipovic’s idea. It’s Aristophanes’ idea.
Divorce your Republican husbands.— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) September 28, 2018
H/t Naked Capitalism