Tag: Evil

Today in Evil

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Memos have been released showing that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis actively deceived the public about the spread of Covid for political gain.

We already knew that he was a miserable excuse for a human being, but now we have proof:

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced, a South Florida Sun Sentinel investigation has found.

DeSantis, who owes his job to early support from President Donald Trump, imposed an approach in line with the views of the president and his powerful base of supporters. The administration suppressed unfavorable facts, dispensed dangerous misinformation, dismissed public health professionals, and promoted the views of scientific dissenters who supported the governor’s approach to the disease.

The DeSantis administration’s approach to managing COVID-19 information carries costs. It supports a climate in which people proudly disdain masks, engage in dangerous group activities that could spread the disease, and brush aside information that conflicts with their political views. With partygoers packing Florida bars and holiday travelers filling hotels and guest rooms, the state faces a few difficult months before the possible relief of vaccines.

These findings are based on interviews with more than 50 people, including scientists, doctors, political leaders, employees of the state health department, and other state officials, as well as more than 4,000 pages of documents:

  • The Florida Department of Health’s county-level spokespeople were ordered in September to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election.
  • The DeSantis administration refused to reveal details about the first suspected cases in Florida, then denied the virus was spreading from person to person — despite mounting evidence that it was.
  • State officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, relenting only under pressure or legal action from family members, advocacy groups and journalists.
  • The DeSantis administration brushed aside scientists and doctors who advocated conventional approaches to fighting the virus, preferring scientists on the fringes who backed the governor’s positions.
  • The governor’s spokesman regularly takes to Twitter to spread misinformation about the disease, including the false claim that COVID was less deadly than the flu.
  • The governor highlighted statistics that would paint the rosiest picture possible and attempted to cast doubt on the validity of Florida’s rising death toll.

“The governor is a smart, educated guy,” said Thomas Unnasch, co-director of the Center for Global Health and Infectious Disease Research at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “But he also is a politically savvy guy. He is encouraging people who are of the opinion that the virus is not as severe and profound as others say it is and putting politics before science.”

………

Don’t issue news releases or write social media posts about COVID, they were told, according to three health department county spokespeople who asked not to be identified. Instead, talk about flu shots, hearing-loss screenings — anything but the virus.

“It is all part of the top-down control of messaging from the governor’s office,” said a senior official in the health department.

The order came from Alberto Moscoso, communications director for the state health department. It’s unclear who told Moscoso to issue the order. He left the department on Nov. 6 and declined comment for this report.

This is ineluctably evil. 

In a just world, he’d be facing impeachment right now, but we are talking about Florida.

The Ukraine Being the Ukraine Again

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In news that should surprise no one, a Ukrainian Jewish professor was fired for protesting a monument to a man who organized murderous pogroms against Jews.

Guys, you need to stop this.  You are making the Russians look like David Ben Gurion:

A Jewish journalism professor says he was fired from a Ukrainian university for his opposition to a statue honoring a militia leader whose troops killed Jews in pogroms.

The case is a rare example of real-life implications stemming from the heated debate in Ukraine on nationalist memory that has stayed for the most part in the realm of theoretical exchanges.

Zoriy Fine, a photographer from the city of Vinnytsia, says he was fired from the Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University just two weeks after he was appointed to work there as a lecturer on journalism in 2017, according to an 11,000-word account he published last week.

Fine says his former employers told him he was dismissed for speaking out against a statue of Simon Petlyura, a politician and militia leader who fought for Ukrainian independence in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Some of Petylura’s loyalists killed 35,000 to 50,000 Jews in a series of pogroms between 1918 and 1921.

………

The university denies Fine’s claims. He resigned “of his own will” and the university had no intention of firing him, a spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Fine says the experience made him leave Ukraine for Poland, where he lives as a “21st century dissident,” he wrote.

According to Fine, he was dismissed shortly after publishing on his website a letter to his late father telling him that “it’s good that you didn’t live to see” the veneration of Petlyura, whose militiamen killed Fine’s paternal great-grandfather in 1919.

Fine says he has remained silent on the affair until now for fear that speaking out might harm the chances of his daughter graduating from medical school, he wrote. He published his story upon her graduation.

It should be remembered that the worst of the Ukrainian body politic was specifically empowered by  the Obama administration, in particular Victoria Nuland, as a matter of policy.

Collaborating with Nazis never works out well.

We Are Doomed

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Just interviewed the head of a major progressive group who said that the Biden transition team reached out after the Tanden nomination to say “aren’t you happy, we met your demands, we brought in a movement leader”

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) December 1, 2020

Biden-world isn’t being cynical with this pick, they actually believe that they are throwing a bone to progressives because they imagine progressives like Neera Tanden. Team Biden really thinks they are picking lots of progressives. https://t.co/5OgJvuJFKe

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 30, 2020

It appears that senior staff in the Biden campaign have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie, because they think that picking Neera Tanden is a favor to liberals.

This actually explains a lot.  

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), now largely alumni of the Obama administration, honestly believe that your life story is your politics, which explains why they pushed the hapless Amy McGrath so hard. 

McGrath was literally the worst political campaigner that I have ever seen in my life

Neera Tanden is not, and has never been a progressive, she’s been a party apparatchik, and the thoroughly despised overseer of a Podesta brothers’ lobbying shop that masqueraded as a think tank.


This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.*

Biden and his Evil Minions™ are going to lead the Democratic Party into an electoral catastrophe that will make 2010 look like Johnson in 1964.

Midterms are base elections, and they think that kicking the base in the nuts is doing said base a favor.

*What, you’ve never seen Ruthless People? Great movie.

Round Up the Usual Wankers

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In an attempt to prevent money from getting people who actually need it, Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Angus King (I-ME), Joe Manchin III (D-WV), and Mitt Rmoney (R-UT) and Mark R. Warner (D-VA) have proposed an emergency stimulus package that does little and will be an excuse for not doing more:

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a coronavirus aid proposal worth about $908 billion on Tuesday, aiming to break a months-long partisan impasse over emergency federal relief for the U.S. economy amid the ongoing pandemic.

………

It would provide $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits for roughly four months — a lower amount than the $600 per week Democrats sought, while still offering substantial relief to tens of millions of jobless Americans. The agreement includes $160 billion in funding for state and local governments, a key Democratic priority opposed by most Republicans, as well as a temporary moratorium on some coronavirus-related lawsuits against companies and other entities — a key Republican priority that most Democrats oppose. The measure also includes funding for small businesses, schools, health care, transit authorities and student loans, among other measures.

It’s weak tea, and does not do anything meaningful, but for these folks, it’s a feature, not a bug.

They are not there to solve problems, they just want to preen on the Sunday gas-bag circuit, because it is always about them.

Quote of the Day

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While I’m thinking about the psychology of people, it has occurred to me that there is a generation of people in DC (politics, media, associated) who were youngish and had their peak formative moment when they helped to kill a million people in Iraq. What a high that must have been (those of us who paid a lot of attention then know just how high out of their gourds they all were on their righteous crusade).

Imagine being 25 and convincing yourself that you saved the world by helping to blow the shit out of so many people. Habit forming high.

Those chemicals start hitting their brains again every time the opportunity to blow up some other country presents itself.

Every “humanitarian intervention” is just another big line of coke.

—Atrios

This is the most coherent explanation of what drives the “Liberal Interventionist“.

They do this, despite always failing, because it gets their rocks off.

It’s a twisted juxtaposition of a psychotic need for a dopamine rush, and careerism.

Our Own Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation*

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I am referring of course, to the “White Shoe” consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, which has increasingly made justifying the illegal and immoral, and whose latest bit of evil was a proposal for Perdue Pharma to pay distributors a bounty for overdose deaths, because, like any good dope dealer, it’s all about the Benjamins.

The short version is that in order to convince distributors not to share their concerns about how Oxycontin was resulting in an explosion of deaths with regulators, or ending their relationship with Perdue, McKinsey & Company proposed a $14,810.00 payment for death or hospitalization.

It’s blood money, and it is a criminal conspiracy to bribe those distributors not to take actions that would harm the bottom line.

Even if the Sacklers and their Evil Minions™ never took up this suggestion, it is a felony to even discuss this, and McKinsey is guilty.

They really need to get the Arthur Anderson treatment.

Their name, and memory, should be effaced:

When Purdue Pharma agreed last month to plead guilty to criminal charges involving OxyContin, the Justice Department noted the role an unidentified consulting company had played in driving sales of the addictive painkiller even as public outrage grew over widespread overdoses.

Documents released last week in a federal bankruptcy court in New York show that the adviser was McKinsey & Company, the world’s most prestigious consulting firm. The 160 pages include emails and slides revealing new details about McKinsey’s advice to the Sackler family, Purdue’s billionaire owners, and the firm’s now notorious plan to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales at a time when opioid abuse had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

In a 2017 presentation, according to the records, which were filed in court on behalf of multiple state attorneys general, McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold.

The presentation estimated how many customers of companies including CVS and Anthem might overdose. It projected that in 2019, for example, 2,484 CVS customers would either have an overdose or develop an opioid use disorder. A rebate of $14,810 per “event” meant that Purdue would pay CVS $36.8 million that year.

………

Though McKinsey has not been charged by the federal government or sued, it began to worry about legal repercussions in 2018, according to the documents. After Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against Purdue, Martin Elling, a leader for McKinsey’s North American pharmaceutical practice, wrote to another senior partner, Arnab Ghatak: “It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything” other than “eliminating all our documents and emails. Suspect not but as things get tougher there someone might turn to us.”

Why the F%$# haven’t they been charged? 

They not only engaged in a criminal conspiracy which would include bribery and other racketeering, they initiated the proposal to do so.

Mr. Ghatak, who also advised Purdue, replied: “Thanks for the heads up. Will do.”

It is not known whether consultants at the firm went on to destroy any records.

The two men were among the highest-ranking consultants at McKinsey. Five years earlier, the documents show, they emailed colleagues about a meeting in which McKinsey persuaded the Sacklers to aggressively market OxyContin.

The meeting “went very well — the room was filled with only family, including the elder statesman Dr. Raymond,” wrote Mr. Ghatak, referring to Purdue’s co-founder, the physician Raymond Sackler, who would die in 2017.

Mr. Elling concurred. “By the end of the meeting,” he wrote, “the findings were crystal clear to everyone and they gave a ringing endorsement of moving forward fast.”

………

McKinsey’s involvement in the opioid crisis came to light early last year, with the release of documents from Massachusetts, which is among the states suing Purdue. Those records show that McKinsey was helping Purdue find a way “to counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed” from OxyContin.

………

“This is the banality of evil, M.B.A. edition,” Anand Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant who reviewed the documents, said of the firm’s work with Purdue. “They knew what was going on. And they found a way to look past it, through it, around it, so as to answer the only questions they cared about: how to make the client money and, when the walls closed in, how to protect themselves.”

………

McKinsey put together briefing materials that anticipated questions Purdue would receive. [At an FDA oversight hearing] One possible question: “Who at Purdue takes personal responsibility for these deaths?”

The proposed answer: “We all feel responsible.

Shut them down, and shame and jail anyone associated with McKinsey and Company.

They are ineluctably evil.

*Immortalized by Douglas Adams as, “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.“

Throw the Book at Them

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The National Rifle Association has admitted to looting by senior executives in tax filings.

Given the level of corruption of this organization, the option of the dissolving it should be seriously considered by authorities:

After years of denying allegations of lax financial oversight, the National Rifle Association has made a stunning declaration in a new tax filing: Current and former executives used the nonprofit group’s money for personal benefit and enrichment.

The NRA said in the filing that it continues to review the alleged abuse of funds, as the tax-exempt organization curtails services and runs up multimillion-dollar legal bills. The assertion of impropriety comes four months after the attorney general of New York state filed a lawsuit accusing NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre and other top executives of using NRA funds for decades to provide inflated salaries and expense accounts.

The tax return, which The Washington Post obtained from the organization, says the NRA “became aware during 2019 of a significant diversion of its assets.” The 2019 filing states that LaPierre and five former executives received “excess benefits,” a term the IRS uses to describe executives’ enriching themselves at the expense of a nonprofit entity.

The disclosures in the tax return suggest that the organization is standing by its 71-year-old chief executive while continuing to pursue former executives of the group. The filing says that LaPierre “corrected” his financial lapses with a repayment and contends that former executives “improperly” used NRA funds or charged the nonprofit for expenses that were “not appropriate.”

“Corrected”, my ass.  The organization is a complete scam, and it needs to be shut down.

They Are Guilty, Give Them the Death Penalty

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I am referring, of course, to Purdue Pharma, who just pled guilty to pushing drugs on millions of Americans, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

They are guilty of felony murder, and should be subject to the death penalty.

I’m opposed to the death penalty for human beings, but for corporations, I’m cool with that.

Fines are not enough, and the Sackler clan needs to be reduced to penury:

Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty on Tuesday to criminal charges that it misled the federal government about sales of its blockbuster painkiller OxyContin, the prescription opioid that helped fuel a national addiction crisis. The admission brought a formal end to an extensive federal investigation that led to a multibillion-dollar settlement between the company and the Justice Department.

“The abuse and diversion of prescription opioids has contributed to a national tragedy of addiction and deaths,” Jeffrey A. Rosen, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Today’s convictions underscore the department’s commitment to its multipronged strategy for defeating the opioid crisis.”

Purdue’s chairman, Steve Miller, acknowledged in a remotely conducted hearing in federal court in New Jersey that in order to meet sales goals, the company told the Drug Enforcement Administration that it had created a program to prevent OxyContin from being sold on the black market, even though it was marketing the drug to more than 100 doctors suspected of illegally prescribing OxyContin.

Purdue also pleaded guilty to paying illegal kickbacks to doctors who prescribed OxyContin and to an electronic health records company, Practice Fusion, for targeting physicians with alerts that were intended to increase opioid prescriptions. Practice Fusion has paid $145 million in fines for taking those kickbacks.

Doctors overprescribing OxyContin, along with illicit distribution of the drug, have contributed to the deaths of more than 450,000 Americans since 1999.

The premeditation for capital murder is in the underlying felony.

The company should be wiped from the earth, and the ill-gotten gains of the Sacklers should be clawed back from them.

No quarter.

Cuck Fomcast

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After billions in public subsidies, Comcast has instituted data caps throughout its network.

The lesson here is that if you want to expend tax dollars for broader internet access, it is best that the networks receiving those subsidies should be owned by the taxpayer:

With millions of Americans trapped at home to protect themselves from a deadly pandemic during the holiday season, the Internet is one of the only conduits connecting them to friends, family and the outside world. Now, Comcast, one of the monopoly corporations that controls the conduit, is extending its fees on bandwidth usage to all 39 states where it operates — even as the company has received hundreds of millions of dollars of public subsidies and new tax breaks.

Whether or not those data caps remain permanent could hinge on whether president-elect Joe Biden and Democrats are willing to take action against a corporation that has been one of their major campaign donors.

At issue is Comcast’s move on Monday that caps home internet usage at 1.2TB of data per month for its customers in 12 additional states, and charging customers up to $100 per month if they exceed the cap. Comcast’s move was flagged by Stop The Cap, which discovered that the company had quietly updated language on its website.

The new limits, which will take effect in March, are being imposed in states that have given Comcast and its subsidiaries more than $738 million in tax subsidies in the last few decades. Those states include New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, where state and local governments have given Comcast and its subsidiaries $484 million, $132 million, and $79 million in tax subsidies, respectively, according to data from Good Jobs First.

In all, Comcast and its subsidiaries — which include NBC and MSNBC — have received nearly $1 billion in state and local subsidies. Additionally, Comcast received $861 million in federal tax subsidies during the first year of the Trump tax cuts, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy.

“This is why monopolies are bad,” tweeted Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. “Comcast can arbitrarily exploit us for profit during a pandemic just because it feels like it. Meanwhile, Comcast collects tons of tax breaks and government subsidies. Comcast should be broken up.”

No, Comcast should be expropriated and become a public agency operated for a public benefit. 

Creating 50 Comcasts where there was only 1 is not a fix.

Neither will happen though, they gave big bucks to the Biden campaign.

Amazon Again

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We don’t care, we don’t have to ……… we’re Amazon.

The Monster from Seattle is engaging in a systematic program of spying on its workers and activists, because they don’t care, they don’t have to, they’re Amazon.

Seriously, this company is ineluctably evil:

A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company’s obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon’s “peak season” between Black Friday and Christmas. The reports, obtained by Motherboard, were written in 2019 by Amazon intelligence analysts who work for the Global Security Operations Center, the company’s security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world.

The documents show Amazon analysts closely monitor the labor and union-organizing activity of their workers throughout Europe, as well as environmentalist and social justice groups on Facebook and Instagram. They also indicate, and an Amazon spokesperson confirmed, that Amazon has hired Pinkerton operatives—from the notorious spy agency known for its union-busting activities—to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.

Internal emails sent to Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center obtained by Motherboard reveal that all the division’s team members around the world receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action), and a description of what happened, such as a “strike” or “the distribution of leaflets.” Other documents reveal that Amazon intelligence analysts keep close tabs on how many warehouse workers attend union meetings; specific worker dissatisfactions with warehouse conditions, such as excessive workloads; and cases of warehouse-worker theft, from a bottle of tequila to $15,000 worth of smart watches.

The documents offer an unprecedented look inside the internal security and surveillance apparatus of a company that has vigorously attempted to tamp down employee dissent and has previously been caught smearing employees who attempted to organize their colleagues. Amazon’s approach of dealing with its own workforce, labor unions, and social and environmental movements as a threat has grave implications for its workers’ privacy and ability to join labor unions and collectively bargain—and not only in Europe. It should also be concerning to both customers and workers in the United States and Canada, and around the world as the company expands into Turkey, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and India.

Amazon intelligence analysts appear to gather information on labor organizing and social movements to prevent any disruptions to order fulfillment operations. The new intelligence reports obtained by Motherboard reveal in detail how Amazon uses social media to track environmental activism and social movements in Europe—including Greenpeace and Fridays For Future, environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s global climate strike movement—and perceives such groups as a threat to its operations. In 2019, Amazon monitored the Yellow Vests movement, also known as the gilet jaunes, a grassroots uprising for economic justice that spread across France—and solidarity movements in Vienna and protests against state repression in Iran.

………

“Like any other responsible business, we maintain a level of security within our operations to help keep our employees, buildings, and inventory safe,” Lisa Levandowski, a spokesperson for Amazon told Motherboard. “That includes having an internal investigations team who work with law enforcement agencies as appropriate, and everything we do is in line with local laws and conducted with the full knowledge and support of local authorities. Any attempt to sensationalize these activities or suggest we’re doing something unusual or wrong is irresponsible and incorrect.”

Levandowski denied that Amazon hired on-the-ground operatives, and said that any claim that Amazon performs the described activities across its operations worldwide was “N/A.”

In a report from November 2019, however, an analyst wrote that Amazon hired Pinkerton spies who were “inserted” into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that management coached job candidates on how to complete job interviews and possibly even conducted the process for them.

………

The report refers to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States supplied detectives to infiltrate unions and hired violent goon squads to intimidate workers from engaging in union activity in steel mills. Today, Pinkerton is a subsidiary of the Swedish security company Securitas AB, and has supplied operatives to monitor strikes in West Virginia as recently as 2018.

………

“It’s not enough for Amazon to abuse its dominant market power and face antitrust charges by the EU; now they are exporting 19th century American union-busting tactics to Europe,” Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, a global federation of trade unions that represents more than 20 million workers, told Motherboard. “This is a company that is ignoring the law, spying on workers, and using every page of the U.S. union-busting playbook to silence workers’ voices.”

………

Since Amazon posted job listings for two intelligence agents who could track “labor organizing threats,” journalists have obtained more documents that reveal some of the sophisticated technology and strategies the company has used to surveil its workforce and gain intelligence on worker organizing. In September, Motherboard obtained evidence that Amazon had been using a social media monitoring tool to spy on dozens of private Facebook groups for Amazon Flex drivers in the United States and Europe. Last month, a report in Recode revealed that Amazon has made significant investments in a new geospatial tool that tracks threats to the company. Out of 40 or so data points Amazon that tracks at least half are labor or employee-related, including “Whole Foods Market Activism/Unionization Efforts,” “union grant money flow patterns,” “and “Presence of Local Union Chapters and Alt Labor Groups.”

You know, it would be a good idea to put someone’s head on a pike at the beginning of the Biden administration, and Jeff Bezos would be a particularly good guy to make an example of.

If the Feds could take down Capone, they can take down Bezos.

Student Athlete My Ass

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It appears that when college football players decide to sit out the season because the sport is a Corona virus infested hellhole, the colleges pull their scholarships in violation of both human decency and NCAA regulations.

NCAA Division 3 sports are slavery, pure and simple:

Henry Bazakas embodied everything the University of California wants in a football player.

A third-generation Cal student who grew up in Berkeley, Bazakas arrived on campus five years ago as a walk-on offensive lineman. Three times he earned an award for having the team’s highest grade-point average. He and a teammate spearheaded a summer reading program at local elementary schools. He won another award, for his commitment to strength and conditioning while recovering from a torn knee ligament. And last season, after he finally earned an athletic scholarship, he started three games at left tackle.

But none of that counted for much in June, when Bazakas called the Cal football coach, Justin Wilcox, to say that he was opting out of his final season because of health concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The call was the beginning of an odyssey that illustrates the normally unseen, cutthroat side of the business of college football, with tensions that have been magnified for athletes by the determined push to play during the pandemic.

Nine days later, Bazakas found his scholarship had been cut off, and he was then billed more than $24,000 halfway through his summer term because the athletic department had revoked the financial aid that it had already paid.

The summer school aid was ultimately reinstated by a university appeals committee, which said the school had violated N.C.A.A. rules by abruptly pulling Bazakas’s aid before giving him an opportunity for a hearing.

Bazakas also asked for his scholarship back for the fall semester, but the appeals panel sided with the athletic department’s decision to not renew it. While most of his teammates arrived at Cal with scholarships pledged for four years, walk-ons, like Bazakas, who eventually earn scholarships may not get them in subsequent years, and Cal had met an N.C.A.A. deadline in July not to renew his.

………

As major college football has lurched through the pandemic in pursuit of billions in television revenue — Cal had its first two scheduled games canceled, then lost Sunday to U.C.L.A. in a game arranged two days before kickoff — not even mandated protections for players have been ironclad.

In August, Washington State receiver Kassidy Woods, who opted out because he has the sickle cell trait, was allowed to keep his scholarship but removed from the team when Coach Nick Rolovich told Woods it would be “an issue” that he was aligned with a player rights’ movement. Utah State Coach Gary Andersen, before he was fired after an 0-3 start, said there was a reason none of his players had opted out. “It’s not an option,” he told reporters. “If you opt out, you’re not with us.”

Yet “Great American Institution” that is rotten to the core.

Div 3 sports are a profit making institution, and they should be treated as such.

Nope, No Coup Attempt Here

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It’s every day that the President of the United States calls the Republican members of a county canvassing board just to wish them well.

Also, it’s every day that the President of the United States calls the Republican leaders of a state legislature to lobby them about appointing their own electors.

We can make all the jokes we want about the efforts of his Evil Minions™ dissolving into a, “Nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putridity,” but this is an attempted coup, and should be confronted as such:

President Trump has invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet him in Washington on Friday, according to a person familiar with those plans, as the president and his allies continue an extraordinary campaign to overturn the results of an election he lost.

………

Trump lost Michigan by a wide margin: At present, he trails President-Elect Joe Biden in the state by 157,000 votes. Earlier this week, the state’s Republican Senate majority leader said an effort to have legislators throw out election results was “not going to happen.”

But the president now appears to be using the full weight of his office to challenge the election results, as he and his allies reach out personally to state and local officials in an intensifying effort to halt the certification of the vote in key battleground states.

………

Trump’s team appear to be increasingly focused on Michigan as a place where Republican officials — on the state’s Board of Canvassers and in the legislature — might be persuaded to overturn the results.

Earlier this week, Trump called a member of Wayne County’s Board of Canvassers after a contentious meeting in which she first refused, and then agreed, to certify election results from the state’s largest county. She subsequently released an affidavit seeking to “rescind” her vote for certification — a move that the secretary of state’s office said was impossible.

Legal experts condemned the president’s actions, saying he was trying to use the power of his office to alter the vote.

“To bring the weight of the White House and the presidency onto an individual county canvassing board commissioner about what to do with certification is an incredible assault on the democratic process,” said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. “No question about that.”

Joanna Lydgate, the national director of the Voter Protection Program, said that “there is no basis in fact or law for failing to certify the election.”

………

“It changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County,” he said. Wayne County includes Detroit, the state’s heavily Democratic, majority-Black largest city.

Also on Thursday, Trump’s efforts seemed to have gained some traction, with the news that Michigan’s GOP leaders appear willing to meet with him.

The Detroit News reported that the state GOP legislative leaders who plan to visit the White House on Friday are Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield.

………

In Michigan, the high-water mark for Trump’s efforts so far came Tuesday night, during an hours-long meeting of the Wayne County board of canvassers. The board’s two GOP members voted against certifying the county’s results, which overwhelmingly favored Biden. But then, after three hours of angry comments from the public, the two GOP members changed their minds and voted to certify the results.

………

Palmer and Hartmann said they had agreed to certify Wayne County’s results on the condition that they be audited by state authorities, to resolve small errors in the counts of voters at some Detroit precincts. The number of votes affected is believed to be in the hundreds, far less than Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan.

………

Supervisors in rural Mohave County, a Republican stronghold bisected by the Grand Canyon, were set to canvass their county vote at a public meeting on Monday. Instead, they decided to delay their vote and take it up again on Nov. 23 — the deadline for certification.

The supervisors agreed that they didn’t question whether the results in their own county were accurate. Instead, one GOP supervisor said, they wanted to show solidarity with the president’s challenges elsewhere.

“It has nothing to do with our results,” Supervisor Hildy Angius said in explaining her vote. “It’s more of a big picture sort of thing.”

The big picture is called “Seditious Conspiracy,” and it is a felony.

Anyone with two brains cells to rub together and the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie knew that the Republicans were willing and able to resort to coups after the 1998 impeachment and the 2000 Florida debacle.

They view the Democratic Party as completely illegitimate, and because of this they feel justified in using corrupt means to seize power.

Once again, I will quote Robert Graves putting words into Germanicus Caesar’s mouth, with the Republicans fulfilling the role of the Teutonic Tribes:

Spaniards can be impressed by the courtesy of the conqueror, French by his riches, Greeks by his respect for the arts, Jews by his moral integrity, Africans by his calm and authoritative bearing, but Germans are impressed by none of these things. They must be struck into the dust, struck down again as they rise. Struck again while they lie groaning, while their wounds still pain them; they will respect the hand that dealt them.”

—Germanicus Caesar, Roman general
(15 B.C.- 19 A.D.)

You Know How Indian Workers Sometimes Beat Their Bosses to Death?

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If the American workforce were less compliant, this would be happening at the Tyson pig processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, where managers had a betting pool as to how many employees would get Covid-19.

Honestly, it probably SHOULD be happening:

A wrongful death lawsuit tied to COVID-19 infections in a Waterloo pork processing plant alleges that during the initial stages of the pandemic, Tyson Foods ordered employees to report for work while supervisors privately wagered money on the number of workers who would be sickened by the deadly virus.

Earlier this year, the family of the late Isidro Fernandez sued the meatpacking company, alleging Fernandez was exposed to the coronavirus at the Waterloo plant where he worked. The lawsuit alleges Tyson Foods is guilty of a “willful and wanton disregard for workplace safety.”

………

Fernandez, who died on April 20, was one of at least five Waterloo plant employees who died of the virus. According to the Black Hawk County Health Department, more than 1,000 workers at the plant — over a third of the facility’s workforce — contracted the virus.

The lawsuit alleges that despite the uncontrolled spread of the virus at the plant, Tyson required its employees to work long hours in cramped conditions without providing the appropriate personal protective equipment and without ensuring workplace-safety measures were followed.

The lawsuit was recently amended and includes a number of new allegations against the company and plant officials. Among them:

  • In mid-April, around the time Black Hawk County Sherriff Tony Thompson visited the plant and reported the working conditions there “shook [him] to the core,” plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19.
  • John Casey, an upper-level manager at the plant, is alleged to have explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms of COVID-19, telling them to show up to work even if they were exhibiting symptoms of the virus. Casey reportedly referred to COVID-19 as the “glorified flu” and told workers not to worry about it because “it’s not a big deal” and “everyone is going to get it.” On one occasion, Casey intercepted a sick supervisor who was on his way to be tested and ordered him to get back to work, saying, “We all have symptoms — you have a job to do.” After one employee vomited on the production line, managers reportedly allowed the man to continue working and then return to work the next day.
  • In late March or early April, as the pandemic spread across Iowa, managers at the Waterloo plant reportedly began avoiding the plant floor for fear of contracting the virus. As a result, they increasingly delegated managerial authority and responsibilities to low-level supervisors who had no management training or experience. The supervisors did not require truck drivers and subcontractors to have their temperatures checked before entering the plant.
  • In March and April, plant supervisors falsely denied the existence of any confirmed cases or positive tests for COVID-19 within the plant, and allegedly told workers they had a responsibility to keep working to ensure Americans didn’t go hungry as the result of a shutdown.
  • Tyson paid out $500 “thank you bonuses” to employees who turned up for every scheduled shift for three months — a policy decision that allegedly incentivized sick workers to continue reporting for work.
  • Tyson executives allegedly lobbied Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds for COVID-19 liability protections that would shield the company from lawsuits, and successfully lobbied the governor to declare that only the state government, not local governments, had the authority to close businesses in response to the pandemic.

………

The lawsuit claims that while Tyson has repeatedly claimed that its operations needed to remain open to feed America, the company increased its exports to China by 600% during the first quarter of 2020.

They didn’t care, because it wasn’t Wypipo at risk, it was “Mexicans”, and who cares if they die.

These people need to go to jail for a long, long time.

Kill it With Fire

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In response to the anti-trust lawsuit filed against it, Google will no longer give favorable placement to media outlets that use its AMP HTML dialectt.

This is a good thing.

First, AMP sucks, second, it was an invitation for Google to violate user privacy and extend its ad and search monopolies, and third, AMP sucks:

Four years after offering special placement in a “top stories carousel” in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring.

“We will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results,” Google said in a blog post.

The company had indicated in 2018 that it would drop the preference eventually. Last week’s announcement of a concrete timeline comes less than a month after the Department of Justice called Google a “monopoly gatekeeper to the internet” in a lawsuit alleging antitrust violations and as pressure mounts on officials in the European Union, which has already fined Google more than $9 billion for antitrust violations.

“I did always think AMP posed antitrust concerns,” said Sally Hubbard, author of the book “Monopolies Suck” and an antitrust expert with the Open Markets Institute. “It’s, ‘If you want to show up on the top of the search results, you have to play by our rules, you have to use AMP.’ ”

………

Whatever prompted the timing of the change, some news sites are relieved that they won’t have to keep using Google’s preferred mobile standard.

“We are encouraged to see Google beginning to outline a path away from AMP,” Robin Berjon, head of data governance at The New York Times, said in a written statement in response to questions from The Markup. “It’s important Google addresses the core challenge with the format, so that it is no longer a requirement for news products and performance ranking.”

News publishers and others have been griping about AMP for years. Some called it Google’s attempt to exert the same kind of control over the larger web that Facebook exerts over posts in its closed system.

That’s because AMP is more than just a set of formatting rules. Once a website sets up an AMP page, Google copies it and stores it on Google servers. When users click on the link for an AMP page in search results—or its news reading app—Google serves up that cached version from its servers.

“AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other websites for the benefit of Google,” read a 2018 open letter signed by more than 700 technologists and advocates. “At a scale of billions of users, this has the effect of further reinforcing Google’s dominance of the Web.”

………

In an analysis published by The Markup earlier this year of 15,269 popular searches on Google, we found that AMP-enabled results appeared often, taking up more than 13 percent of the first results page. Google took another 41 percent of the page for its own products.

………

As the news industry struggled over the past decade, with dropping newspaper subscription rates and ad revenue and plateauing online traffic leading to massive job losses, many publishers adopted AMP in hopes that it would help their bottom lines. Most of the roughly 2,000 members of the News Media Alliance, a trade organization that represents newspapers, use it.

“They don’t really feel there is a choice,” said Danielle Coffey, the group’s general counsel and senior vice president.

Her opinion is widely shared.

“We essentially have a coercion by Google upon publishers to allow people to host their content,” said Andrew Betts, a former member of the Technical Architecture Group at the international web standards organization W3C, who has written about his concerns with AMP. “And publishers who decide they don’t want that to happen because they want to serve their own content, thanks very much, will not ever appear in the first set of search results.”

………

And AMP sometimes causes issues that publishers lack the power to fix on their own. In one prominent example, publishers discovered there was no way to allow users to opt out of having their data sold, a requirement under the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect this year.

Talk about burying the lede.

AMP allows Google to take control of user data from media outlets.

Now we know why Google pushed it so hard, they wanted to slurp up more user data.

Oh Lindsey………

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Last week, I wrote about reports that Lindsey Graham was pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out mail-in ballots from counties with large minority populations using signature matching as a pretext.

It appears that there was at least one other witness to this:

………

In an interview Monday with The Washington Post, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, accused the senator of trying to pressure him into tossing out legally cast ballots. And Tuesday, after Graham mistakenly told reporters he had spoken with secretaries of state in Arizona and Nevada, those officials rejected that assertion.

“I have not spoken to Senator Lindsey Graham or any other members of Congress regarding the 2020 election,” Barbara Cegavske, the Nevada secretary of state, said in a statement. Cegavske and Raffensperger are Republicans.

 ………

Old friends and colleagues issued warnings Tuesday that there is a line Graham cannot cross with state election officials.

“If all he’s trying to do is get information, people are entitled to do that. If he’s trying to influence the way they perform their duty, that becomes a bit problematic,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former state attorney general.

In Georgia, state officials showed additional irritation Tuesday with Graham’s intrusion into their world. Gabriel Sterling, a senior staffer in the secretary of state’s office, held a news conference to explain what he heard on the call between Raffensperger and Graham.

“What I heard were discussions of absentee ballots — if there were a percentage of signatures that weren’t truly matching, is there some point where we could go to court and throw out all the ballots,” Sterling said.

Such an action would have disenfranchised many legally cast ballots.

(emphasis mine)

This is not a good look for you, Mr. Graham.

 

Yeah, This Is Appalling

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Talk about burying the lede.

 In a Washington Post story about Republicans pressuring the (Republican) Secretary of State to throw out legal ballots, we find this bit of horror from Lindsay Graham:

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

(emphasis mine)

The road that Graham was speeding down was, “Invalidate all the mail in ballots from counties with lots of black and brown people.”

This has been a core Republican value since (checks notes) before John Roberts worked at the Reagan White House.

The party of Abraham Lincoln is now the party of  Jefferson Davis, and one of their most important values is, “Stop n****** from voting.”

I do not know how you find common ground with that.

Again, I invoke Robert Graves’ paraphrase of Germanicus Caesar.

H/t Atrios. 

Mr. Koch, Would You Please Dine on Excrement and Expire?

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So now, Charles Koch is apologizing for funding the Tea Baggers and creating a hyperpartisan political atmosphere.

F%$# you.  Just f%$# you, and your fortune, which was made building refineries Stalin.

I get it:  Now you want to buy Democrats.

F%$# you:

The billionaire Charles Koch, who has funneled millions into the GOP and conservative movements, reportedly expressed misgivings over how that money had fueled excessive partisanship.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Douglas Belkin published Friday, Koch spoke about his new mission of unification across partisan lines.

He also shared with The Journal parts of his new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” in which he said he regretted his partisanship and the divisions it fostered.

“Boy, did we screw up!” he wrote, according to The Journal. “What a mess!”

Koch and his brother David, who died last year, were major players in the rise and shaping of the tea party. The brothers founded the conservative organization Americans for Prosperity in 2004.

In her 2015 book “Dark Money,” the New Yorker writer Jane Mayer tracked how they used their fortunes to amass political influence and further a libertarian agenda.

If there is any justice in the world, Charles Koch will be mauled to death by bears in Grafton, New Hampshire.

About Bloody Time

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The Philadelphia City Council has finally apologized for bombing its own citizens and allowing a city block to burn to the ground. 

It would have been nice if some of the people behind those decisions had actually faced consequences for their actions:

The Philadelphia City Council this week formally apologized for the decision in 1985 to drop an improvised bomb on a rowhouse occupied by the MOVE separatist group, a desperate action that resulted in a fire that killed 11 people and destroyed 61 homes.

The resolution, approved on Thursday, marked the first time that the city had formally apologized for the action. The measure, which also calls for an annual day of remembrance on May 13, the anniversary of the bombing, was sponsored by Jamie Gauthier, a city councilwoman who grew up near the West Philadelphia neighborhood where the bombing happened.

Ms. Gauthier recalled watching the aftermath of the bombing on television as a child, and said that the neighborhood was only now starting to fully recover from the devastation.

“There have been divisions in our city between police and community for decades, and I think if we had done the true work of acknowledging what happened with MOVE and with other acts of police violence, and we had really worked on not only the acknowledgment but building better relationships and working towards reconciliation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the place we are now,” she said in an interview on Friday.

“It was always striking to me that we did this, that our city did this and that no one ever was held accountable,” she added. “I thought that was unconscionable.”

People should have gone to jail and lost their jobs, but a 11 people, including children, were murdered, and a whole block was wiped out, and no one cared because they were black.