The nakedly partisan goals were to reinforce the idea that we cannot have a better society, and to shut down one of the more popular signature Biden program.
The fact that it will also have the effect of pulling billions of dollars out of the economy every month, making a recession, and a Republican victory next November, is just gravy:
In striking down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program, the Supreme Court ignored one of the most basic principles of law: When the text of a law is clear, it must be followed unless it is unconstitutional.
A federal statute, the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act), explicitly authorizes the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify” student loan obligations. That is exactly what President Biden did in his loan forgiveness program, but the court, ruling 6-3, decided that he lacked authority under the law to take this step, which would have helped more than 40 million people.
………
Two lawsuits were filed challenging this action. One was brought by two individuals who did not qualify for relief under the Biden program. The Supreme Court unanimously found that they lacked standing to sue because striking down the Biden program would not benefit them.
The other lawsuit was brought by Missouri and five other conservative states. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, none of these state governments would suffer any injury from the Biden student loan forgiveness program. In fact, just last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas and Louisiana lacked standing to challenge the Biden administration’s change in immigration policy. The court in that immigration law case said that a state cannot sue the federal government just because of an ideological disagreement with the president’s policies.
Based on that principle, the court should have thrown out Missouri’s suit as well. Yet Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the conservative majority, said the state could sue even though Missouri itself would suffer no costs from the Biden program. Another public agency, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority — which is legally and financially independent from the state — would incur some costs, but those costs don’t affect the state treasury. And that agency was not part of the lawsuit.
The court said that did not matter. Instead, Roberts invoked the “major questions doctrine,” the principle that a federal agency cannot act on a major question of economic or political significance unless it has clear direction from Congress. Roberts said whether the Secretary of Education can give this loan relief is a major question and that Congress was not sufficiently specific in authorizing such relief.
The major questions doctrine is recent, and made up full cloth, and it is little more than a back door to reinstate the Lockner era, where no government, federal, state, or local, had the power to regulate minimum wage, hours,etc.
But the statute says the secretary of education has authority to “waive or modify” student loan obligations. It is the heart of the law, and hard to imagine clearer language than that.
In the striking down the Biden administration’s action, the court ignored the statute’s plain language. If Congress wants to rewrite the law because it doesn’t like the Biden relief, it can do so, but that’s not the role of the court.
As I have said before, this is little more that corrupt partisan political hackery.
More broadly, the court’s reliance on the “major question” doctrine is hazardous. Nowhere is “major question” defined, and by raising it in this case, the court opens the door for challenges to government regulations of all sorts, including health and safety and environmental regulations.
The aforementioned Lockner Era.
This is corrupt and partisan, and it will only get worse unless the court sees a real threat to its power and its prestige.
Pack the court, ignore the court, or publicly state, "Let Justice Roberts enforce his decisions."
Also, investigate the whole judiciary, which has been packed by corrupt partisan ideologues for the past 40 years, as well as Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society's emoluments directed toward federal judges generally and toward the Supreme Court in particular.
As has been obvious since Bush v. Gore in 2000, there are no principled conservatives on the court, just corrupt hacks.
So, a key measure of inflation, personal-consumption expenditures, (PCE) has hit a two year low, indicating that inflation continues to moderate.
Confronted with these facts, I have no doubt that the Federal Reserve will continue to raise rates aggressively, because of the institutional imperatives of this organization, and a general desire by the forces of finance to keep wages low and workers in precarity:
Consumer prices and spending rose more slowly in May, but the Federal Reserve likely remains on track to raise interest rates in July amid recent signs of healthy economic activity.
The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the personal-consumption expenditures price index, rose 3.8% from a year earlier, its lowest reading in two years, the Commerce Department said Friday.
Household spending rose 0.1% in May but was flat when adjusted for inflation, a possible sign of flagging economic growth. Americans spent more on services such as healthcare and air travel, and less on goods such as autos.
………
So-called core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy categories, rose 4.6% in May from a year earlier, down slightly from 4.7% in April. Economists see core inflation as a better predictor of future inflation than overall inflation.
Senior Fed officials have focused attention this year on prices for a subset of services that exclude energy and shelter. They think these labor-intensive services could show whether wage pressures from tight labor markets are passing through to consumer prices, especially because they have expected price increases for housing and goods to slow.
That reading rose 0.2% in May from the prior month and 4.5% from a year earlier, according to Wall Street Journal calculations. The reading rose at a 3.9% annualized rate over the past three months, down from 5.3% over the three months before that.
The issue here is a public health catastrophe that has eliminated something in excess of 2% of the work force, and an economy dominated by monopolies and oligopolies that results in very little price discipline.
Addressing this as excess demand overheating the economy is a stupidity.
This is in spite of stopping evidence that the inflation is not given by excess demand not increasing wages, but rather by the increased ability of large businesses to raise proceed in the absence of meaningful competition.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
“Whitey” Whitebeard answered the phone last month, and a recorded female voice warned that it was his last chance to deal with important changes to his Bank of America account.
......
Whitebeard has a bad habit of talking in circles. That is by design. Whitebeard is a digital contraption that only sounds human. He is the creation of Roger Anderson, a real-life 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., who employs chatbots and AI to frustrate and waste the time of telemarketers and scammers.
......
Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls, using chatbot inanities about TV remotes and the like to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4, the OpenAI software, to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate responses. Once ready, the AI text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.
......
Anderson takes pleasure in foiling them. He began his war on telemarketers nearly a decade ago, he said, after one called the family’s landline and said a bad word to his son. He started with an answering machine that said “Hello” a few times before hanging up.
Anderson has since rolled out his weapons of mass distraction. He has posted conversations between man and bot, some lasting as long as 15 minutes before the telemarketer hangs up.
The posts are part of Anderson’s own marketing. He has several thousand customers paying $24.99 a year for use of his call-deflection system, called Jolly Roger. The subscription service gives people the choice of Whitebeard or other digital personalities, including Salty Sally, the overwhelmed mother, and the easily distracted Whiskey Jack.
My guess is that this involved some, "Because I'm the mommy, that's why," explanations by Maye Musk:
The potential bout between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has set the world on fire! What started as an innocent humorous tweet is now raging into a possible fight between two of the world’s top CEOs.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are revolutionaries in their own right. While one is bringing massive changes to the world via Tesla and SpaceX, the other has changed the world virtually with his inception of Facebook. Hence, there aren’t many who will turn away from the contest. However, one person who seemingly has no interest in the potential billion-dollar bout, is Musk’s mother, Maye Musk.
There have been multiple instances where Maye has called the fight off. Her recent Tweets reflect this. She mentioned her son will not be engaging in any ‘cage fights’ as she has canceled them herself.
Any better on whether Elon pleaded with his mother to do this?
Zuck has actually trained in Jiu-Jitsu and MMA, and he makes an effort to stay in shape.
As I have noted many times, studies have shown that extremely high remuneration actually produces worse performance, so I find this an unalloyed good:
Los Angeles voters will decide next spring whether to clamp down on pay for hospital executives, capping their total wages and other compensation at $450,000 annually, after the Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to put the proposed measure on the March 2024 ballot.
The L.A. ballot measure is backed by a union representing healthcare workers, which argues pay for hospital executives has been excessive and out of line with the mission of providing affordable care.
SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West contends that hospital executives should not be making any more than the total compensation of the president of the United States, which the ballot measure states is currently $450,000.
………
The Hospital Assn. of Southern California called the proposal “deeply flawed” and argued that it would make it harder for Los Angeles hospitals to recruit and retain top talent, who would instead opt to work at healthcare facilities in other cities.
Yeah, the top talent, who have never diagnosed a patient, performed a surgery, or even mopped a ward's floor. They are indispensable, because ……… Capitalism?
………
After supporters of the measure succeeded in gathering enough signatures, council members had the option of either putting the proposal on the ballot or simply adopting it. The council voted 10 to 0 to send the proposal to the ballot for voters to decide, with Councilmember John Lee recusing himself as a board member at West Hills Hospital.
………
The proposed measure would cap executive compensation for a range of top officials, including CEOs, chief financial officers, executive vice presidents and administrators, at privately owned hospitals and their affiliated clinics, skilled nursing facilities and residential facilities for the elderly located in the city of Los Angeles.
The cap would not apply to any medical professionals whose “primary duties” are providing medical services or direct care to patients.
………
The annual cap would apply not just to wages, but a range of compensation for Los Angeles hospital executives including paid time off, bonuses, travel, housing payments, stock options and severance.
SEIU-UHW said at least 22 executives would be affected by the measure, but the number is likely higher because its analysis of publicly available information did not include for-profit hospitals. It is now pursuing similar measures in the cities of Chula Vista and La Mesa, Saldaña said.
………
It has spotlighted pay packages exceeding$1 million annually for executives at hospitals and health systems such as Cedars-Sinai, where the top executive received more than $6 million in compensation through the medical center and related organizations in a recent year, according to tax filings.
Cedars-Sinai said in a statement that setting its executive compensation involves “an assessment by outside, independent experts,” and that if the ballot measure passed, “we would be unable to recruit and retain clinical, academic and management leaders who have made us a world-renowned academic medical center.”
These, "Outside, independent experts," are neither outside nor independent. These boards are comprised of other executives whose own pay is similarly effected, or consultants whose contracts are dependent on those executives whose pay they are determining.
But wait, there's more:
………
The latest proposal to curb executive pay comes as the hospital industry has sought to fend off $25-an-hour healthcare worker wage measures that are backed by SEIU-UHW. An L.A. measure championed by the union was put on hold after hospital groups successfully pushed for a referendum.
The California Hospital Assn. has also been fighting a state bill, SB 525, that would hike wages to at least $25 an hour in coming years for workers at a range of healthcare facilities and agencies, including hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, clinics and home health agencies.
The people getting these multi-million dollar salaries are not supermen as conceived by Rand or Nietzsche, they are parasites who have gamed the system to benefit themselves.
This means that tens of billions of dollars in payments may have to be refunded:
Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant’s online-ad business.
Google’s YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page’s main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren’t skipped.
Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page’s main content, on sites that don’t meet Google’s standards for monetization, among other violations.
Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal.
………
Some ad buyers who have reviewed the research say they want their money back.
“This is an unacceptable breach of trust by YouTube,” said Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at ad agency UM Worldwide. “Google must fix this and fully refund clients for any fraud and impressions that failed to meet Google’s own policies.”
………
Among the major brands whose Google video-ad placements weren’t in line with the promised standards were Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Samsung, Sephora, Macy’s, Disney+ and The Wall Street Journal, according to Adalytics. It also affected ads for government agencies, including Medicare, the U.S. Army, the Social Security Administration, and the New York City municipal government.
“CMS is concerned with reports of invalid ad placements by YouTube,” said a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
YouTube accounts for 8.3% of U.S. digital-video ad spending, according to research company Insider Intelligence. Marketers feel obligated to advertise on YouTube because of its size, several ad buyers said.
………
Ad placements appeared on low-quality sites that trafficked in misinformation or “clickbait” content, as well as those that appeared to publish pirated content, contrary to the promises of the Google Video Partners program, the researchers found.
You cannot run the numbers on this, because we don't know the total turnover on YouTube ads, nor do we know the portion of these ads that are purchased through this program, but Google Video Partners and its predecessor Google Preferred have been around since 2015, so it is pretty clear that the numbers can run into the 10 figure, and perhaps the 11 figure range.
This is not a surprise. As I have noted before (with a focus on the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™), see also here, here, and here, the internet giants are not just unethical and evil, they have been engaging in systematic fraud.
Now is the time to frog march senior executives out of their offices in handcuffs .
Original here, but since Tiktok Autoplays, I moved it to Youtube
This is an epic prank.
I really hope that the Secret Service does not get up the originator's ass over this, because one side of this looks an awful lot like legitimate US currency.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
—Terry Pratchett, in response to in response to a statement from an interviewer that fantasy was, "Regarded as less than serious fiction"
And now he's almost certain to be on the City Council.
Yusef Salaam, a political novice known for being wrongfully convicted in the “Central Park 5” rape case over three decades ago, declared victory late Tuesday in Harlem’s high-stakes City Council primary election, triumphing over two longtime lawmakers from the storied neighborhood.
With more than 97% of votes counted, Salaam was leading his top contender, Assemblywoman Inez Dickens, by more than 2,500 ballots in the Democratic primary for the neighborhood’s 9th Council District, according to unofficial tallies released by the city Board of Elections. The third contender in the race, Assemblyman Al Taylor, trailed behind Dickens by more than 1,000 ballots, the tallies show, putting Salaam in the lead with just over 50% of the vote share.
If Salaam’s lead stays above the 50% threshold when all is said and done, he’ll secure victory without having to go through the ranked-choice process, in which voters’ secondary choices are added to the mix until a candidate nets a simple majority and is crowned the victor.
No official call had been made in the 9th District race as of shortly before 11 p.m.
Hopefully, he will make Mayor Adams' life miserable.
Understand this is not truly good news, this is just a temporary respite.
Unless and until the arrogance and politicization of the federal judiciary in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, we are in a world of hurt:
In a major election-law decision, the
Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that although the Constitution gives
state legislatures the power to regulate federal elections, state courts
can supervise the legislature’s exercise of that power. By a vote of
6-3, the court rejected the so-called “independent state legislature
theory,” holding that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not violate
the Constitution when it set aside a congressional map adopted by the
state’s legislature.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, in an
opinion joined by two of his conservative colleagues, Justices Samuel
Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Thomas would not have reached the “independent
state legislature theory” question at all. Instead, he would have
dismissed the case as moot – that is, no longer a live controversy.
The reason that Thomas argued that the case was moot was that, following an orgy of PAC spending in North Carolina, the State Supreme Court was flipped from D to R, and they reheard and reversed themselves..
The dispute began as a challenge to a
congressional map adopted by that state’s Republican-controlled
legislature in early November 2021. Democratic voters and non-profits
argued that the new map was a partisan gerrymander – that is, it was
drawn to favor one political party at another’s expense. In particular,
they contended, although the state is roughly divided between Democrats,
Republicans, and unaffiliated voters, the new map likely would have
given Republicans 10 out of 14 seats in the U.S. House of
Representatives.
In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause,
the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts cannot consider claims of
partisan gerrymandering. But the 5-4 decision by Chief Justice John
Roberts noted that states could still address partisan gerrymandering in
their own laws and constitutions. In February 2022, the North Carolina
Supreme Court (which at the time had a 4-3 Democratic majority) ruled
that the new map violated a provision in the state constitution
guaranteeing free elections. The state supreme court barred the state
from using the new map in the 2022 elections, and the trial court later
adopted a new map, drawn by Republicans and Democrats split the state’s
congressional seats 7-7.
The argument that this is moot is a transparent attempt to prevent a precedent that calls the interdependent state legislative theory complete and utter bullsh%$, because it makes it more difficult for them to bring over two more justices at a later date.
Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.
A little clarification to those of you not familiar with the role of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB): They have no direct role in drafting regulations, and they are forbidden by law from enforcing any regulations.
The NTSB is limited to investigating incidents, and recommending changes.
The federal agency which is responsible for enforcing these regulations is the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and they have left the drafting of standards to the rail industry trade group the Association of American Railroads (AAR), with foreseeable, and disastrous, results:
Freight railcar inspections are happening less often and are not as thorough as in years past due to staff cuts, time constraints and regulatory loopholes, a union official testified Friday during a federal hearing to examine the reasons behind a fiery train derailment in Ohio.
The National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report that an overheating wheel bearing likely caused the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern derailment that sent a plume of toxic black smoke into the sky near East Palestine, Ohio. Several tank cars were damaged in the crash, and officials decided that five of them containing vinyl chloride needed to be blown open to release the chemical and prevent an explosion.
It’s not clear whether an inspector would have been able to catch that the bearing was failing because it is sealed within the railcar’s axle. No inspector was even given a chance.
Jason Cox with the Transportation Communications Union testified Friday during the second day of the NTSB hearing that the railcar that caused the derailment wasn’t inspected by Norfolk Southern even though it passed through three railyards where qualified inspectors were working.
Cox said the lack of inspections reflects changes Norfolk Southern has made since 2019 to slash the ranks of car inspectors and other employees, and that the company increasingly uses a loophole in federal regulations to rely on train crews to complete inspections instead of experts trained to do that work. He said train crews look at just 12 points on a rail car instead of the 90 to 105 points a carman checks.
………
Members of the NTSB questioned the wisdom of letting the railroad industry largely self-regulate — the Association of American Railroads trade group sets recommended standards — but [Senior Vice President, AAR Safety & Operations Michael] Rush said federal regulators have input on the group’s rules.
"Have input," yeah, right.
That means that industry lobbyists take senior FRA officials out to dinner before doing whatever the hell that they want.
So, almost through the Beltway, and a Metro train passed overhead.
Charlie said, "Oh look, it's my beloved," referring to the train.
When I noted that he was feeding stereotypes, he is on the spectrum, he said, "I can't not be into the stereotype that Autistic people are into trains, because because I am an Autistic person who is really into trains. I am conflicted though, given the history of Jewish people and trains."
Short version is that Prigozhin has been complaining about the Russian war effort being too mild, and that his mercenaries in the Wagner Group were not receiving enough support from the military.
Then the elements of Wagner Group marched on Moscow, with a larger group Chechen fighters in hot pursuit.
Then suddenly, it was all called off, Prigozhin is heading to Belarus, and elements of Wagner that were not marching toward Moscow will have their contracts taken over by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
I think that the Russian military wanted to take over control of the Wagner Group in the Ukraine, and the entire affair was INTENSE negotiations over the price of the buyout.
Last July, Alito was feted in Rome by Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which has in recent years joined the growing ranks of conservative legal activists who are finding new favor at the Supreme Court – and forging ties with the justices. The group’s legal clinic has filed a series of “friend-of-the-court” briefs in religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020.
After the high court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome to deliver a keynote address at a gala hosted at a palace in the heart of the city. It was his first known public appearance after the decision.
At the start of his speech, he thanked the group for the “warm hospitality” it provided to him and his wife, which, he later said, included a stay at a hotel that “looks out over the Roman Forum.”
During various parts of the address, he gleefully mocked critics of his ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion. What really “wounded” him, the conservative justice said, was when Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, “addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare ‘the decision whose name may not be spoken’ with the Russian attack on the Ukraine.”
………
Stephanie Barclay, the Religious Liberty Initiative’s director, confirmed to CNN that the group paid for Alito’s trip to Rome last year.
Alito can't claim that he did not know who these people were.
In other news, it appears that Amy Coney Barrett sold her house to a member of the RLI, Brendan Wilson, who is described as, "adjunct professor of law with responsibility for the transactional component of the Religious Liberty Clinic.
It should be noted that the home sold for more than the asking price of $899,900, it sold for $905,000.
It's only $5,100, but it is also clearly the equivalent of a dope dealer "Giving a taste" to a prospective customer.
If she plays ball, and does not go off the reservation, she can see the sort of swag that Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch have seen.
It appears that Justice Barrett is a quick learner,
Philadelphia firefighters riding aboard Engine 38 sailed across a section of I-95 Friday, reopening the East Coast’s main expressway. The ride came just 12 days after a blazing gasoline tanker-truck crash destroyed a bridge over the northbound Cottman Avenue exit ramp.
“Over the past 12 days, the eyes of the nation have been on Pennsylvania. We’ve shown them what our grit, our determination, are all about. We showed them good government in action,” Shapiro said at a news conference on the temporary six-lane roadway over I-95, moments before traffic once again began flowing.
………
State officials initially estimated it would take until early July to reopen the road to the public. But a cautious timeline, coupled with vigorous federal support, led to a quicker reopening.
PennDot decided to build a temporary roadway by filling in the gap with aggregate made of recycled glass and paving over the top of the massive pile. The approach allowed the highway to reopen sooner and, officials hope, will help relieve traffic congestion in the Northeast Corridor.
Six 11-foot-wide lanes — three in each direction — opened at noon. The first civilians to drive the northbound lanes honked their horns, and some waved at the workers in hard hats, public officials, and others on the southbound side, marking the occasion with a news conference.
So, why does it take 20 years and 12 billion dollars to at a subway line?
The Federalist Society has institutionalized corruption, and in response, the Supreme Court's conservatives justices have made rulings retroactively making this corruption legal.
I do not believe that there is anyone in tech with more backpfeifengesicht than Elon Musk.
To be fair, I think that there is a case to be made for Zuckerberg having killed more people, the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ has had VERY prominent roles in ethnic conflicts and ethnic cleansing that have caused thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands to become refugees, but this match, should it occur, will not effect the actions or policies of either.
I just want Musk to be left sprawled out on the mat, spitting out bloody chicklets:
Two of the world's most high-profile technology billionaires - Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg - have agreed to fight each other in a cage match.
Mr Musk posted a message on his social media platform Twitter that he was "up for a cage fight" with Mr Zuckerberg.
Mr Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, then posted a screenshot of Mr Musk's tweet with the caption "send me location".
"The story speaks for itself," a Meta spokesperson told the BBC.
Mr Musk then replied to Mr Zuckerberg's response with: "Vegas Octagon."
Hell, I might even splurge on the PPV for the fight.
Greene is right, you know, Lauren Boebert is a little bitch.
Green is a little bitch as well.
The messy feud between two of MAGA world’s biggest stars burst into public view on Wednesday, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” to her face on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The angry exchange came as the two lawmakers have been swiping at each other over their competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden. But tensions came to a head on Wednesday after Boebert leveraged a procedural tool to force a vote on her own impeachment resolution within days—undercutting Greene, who had offered her own resolution, but not with the procedural advantages of forcing a vote.
Greene apparently cursed out Boebert while the House was voting Wednesday afternoon, as the two spoke in a center aisle of the House floor; part of their interaction was captured on C-SPAN’s cameras.
………
According to two of the sources, Greene then stood up and alleged that Boebert “copied my articles of impeachment,” to which the Colorado lawmaker fired back that she hadn’t even read Greene’s resolution.
“I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you. But you’ve been nothing but a little bitch to me,” Greene told Boebert, according to a source who witnessed the exchange. “And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to cosponsor them.”
The name-calling was confirmed by another GOP lawmaker and another source who witnessed the exchange.
I'm just going to talk about the ProPublica article, because there is no way that I could possibly beat this epic take-down.
Short version:
Alito was invited on a fishing trip in Alaska by a hedge fund billionaire, Paul Singer, who has reportedly had business before the court.
He was comped his time at the tony fishing lodge, $1000.00/night.
He was flown up on a private jet, charter cost, $100,000.00.
Alito never reported on this.
Alito never recused himself on cases involving billions.
Uber Lobbyist Leonard Leo and Federalist Society organized this.
Paul Singer has contributed millions to the Republican party.
"On the last evening, a member of Alito’s group bragged that the wine they were drinking cost $1,000 a bottle, one of the lodge’s fishing guides told ProPublica."
Antonin Scalia was taking the same sorts of gifts before he died.
This sort of friendly bribery is how the right wing movement keeps their right wing justices on the reservation.
It also explains why the Supreme Court has been so aggressive in gutting anti-corruption law, they know that under the old rules, they would be frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs.
A California man who drove a stun gun into the police officer Michael Fanone’s neck during one of the most violent clashes of the January 6 riot was sentenced on Wednesday to more than 12 years in prison.
Daniel “DJ” Rodriguez yelled, “Trump won!” as he was led out of the courtroom where the US district judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him to 12 years and seven months behind bars for his role in the attack on Congress.
Only two other January 6 defendants have received longer prison terms after hundreds of sentencings for Capitol riot cases.
The judge said Rodriguez, 40, was “a one-man army of hate, attacking police and destroying property” at the Capitol.
“You showed up in DC spoiling for a fight,” Jackson said. “You can’t blame what you did once you got there on anyone but yourself.”
Here's hoping that they are putting him in the worst prison in the system.
Short version: in response to ongoing threats against volunteer mods by Reddit management, the moderator of the popular r/GIFS and r/pics held a poll:
But hell hath no fury like a Redditor being jacked around by clueless
pointy-haired bosses, and the mods struck back. Given the clear (yes,
Tim Rathschmidt) threat of replacing of striking mods, possibly
through a sketchy “voting” process to remove, as Huffman ridiculously
called them, “the landed gentry, two of the biggest striking subreddits
held a vote, just like Huffman wanted. Okay, well maybe not
“just like” he wanted. Instead, r/GIFs and r/pics held a poll on whether
they should “return to normal” or “only allow images featuring John
Oliver.”
Let’s just say that Huffman’s belief that the average Redditor just
wanted things to return to normal showed a profound misunderstanding of
the average Redditor’s desire for funny chaos over helping a company
make money. Here’s how the vote on r/GIFs went:
And then, John Oliver sent in pix:
This is so f%$#ing awesome.
Also, chasing VC and IPO bucks is always a losing proposition.
I'm not really prepared to say much beyond this, except to say that I am trying to figure if he is a schlemiel or a schlimazel. He could be both.
Hunter Biden agreed with the Justice Department on Tuesday to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accept terms that would allow him to avoid prosecution on a separate gun charge, a big step toward ending a long-running and politically explosive investigation into the finances, drug use and international business dealings of President Biden’s troubled son.
Under a deal hashed out with a federal prosecutor who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and be sentenced to probation.
The Justice Department also charged Mr. Biden but, under what is known as a pretrial diversion agreement, said it would not prosecute him in connection with his purchase of a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was using drugs. The deal is contingent on Mr. Biden remaining drug-free for 24 months and agreeing never to own a firearm again.
The agreement must still be approved by a federal judge. Mr. Biden is expected to appear in court in Delaware in the coming days to be arraigned on the misdemeanor tax charges and plead guilty.
Needless to say, the Republicans will use this as an excuse to ramp up their investigations, because that's what they do.
Faced with clear and convincing evidence of wrongdoing, Garland still had to
be shamed into investigating document mishandling, false electors, conspiring
on the insurrection, tax fraud, pressuring etc., because he did not want to be
seen as taking a political act, even though covering up for Trump is a
political act, and a corrupt one at that.
I get that he wants to increase the respect that the DoJ is held to, but his
job is to to protect the people of the United Sates of the America.
Hours after he was sworn in as attorney general, Merrick Garland and his deputies gathered in a wood-paneled conference room in the Justice Department for a private briefing on the investigation he had promised to make his highest priority: bringing to justice those responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
………
But according to a copy of the briefing document, absent from [Acting US Attorney for Washington, DC Michael] Sherwin’s 11-page presentation to Garland on March 11, 2021, was any reference to Trump or his advisers — those who did not go to the Capitol riot but orchestrated events that led to it.
A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.
A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.
This is cowardice, it should not be rewarded.
In November 2022, after Trump announced he was again running for president, making him a potential 2024 rival to President Biden, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
On June 8, in a separate investigation that was also turned over to the special counsel, Smith secured a grand jury indictment against the former president for mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Trump was charged with 31 counts of violating a part of the Espionage Act, as well as six counts arising from alleged efforts to mislead federal investigators. If Trump had not announced his running for President, Garland would not have appointed Jack Smith, and we would still not see any movement toward charging Trump. ………
[Assistant Director of the FBI DC field office Steven] D’Antuono, who was interacting with lawmakers and reporters, told colleagues: “Everybody keeps asking, ‘Where the hell is the FBI?’”
The answer they heard did not instill confidence. Top FBI aides told D’Antuono and Sherwin that Wray wanted to stay on as Biden’s FBI director. They said they would not put the top boss “out there” — in the public eye — because they feared any public comments might spur Trump to unceremoniously fire him.
It might be a good time to fire Christopher Wray too.
Cravenly caving to a lame duck President is a pretty good indication that he is unsuited to the job.
………
But a group of prosecutors led by J.P. Cooney, the head of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, argued that the existing structure of the probe overlooked a key investigative angle. They sought to open a new front, based partly on publicly available evidence, including from social media, that linked some extremists involved in the riot to people in Trump’s orbit — including Roger Stone, Trump’s longest-serving political adviser; Ali Alexander, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot; and Alex Jones, the Infowars host.
………
In February 2021, Cooney took his proposal to investigate the ties with people in Trump’s orbit directly to a group of senior agents in the FBI’s public corruption division, a group he’d worked with over the years and who were enmeshed in some of the most sensitive Jan. 6 cases underway.
According to three people who either viewed or were briefed on Cooney’s plan, it called for a task force to embark on a wide-ranging effort, including seeking phone records for Stone, as well as Alexander. Cooney wanted investigators to follow the money — to trace who had financed the false claims of a stolen election and paid for the travel of rallygoers-turned-rioters. He was urging investigators to probe the connection between Stone and members of the Oath Keepers, who were photographed together outside the Willard hotel in downtown Washington on the morning of Jan. 6.
………
Axelrod called a meeting for the last week of February with Sherwin, D’Antuono, Abbate and other top deputies. Cooney wasn’t there to defend his plan, according to three people familiar with the discussion, but Axelrod and Abbate reacted allergically to one aspect of it: Cooney wanted membership rolls for Oath Keepers as well as groups that had obtained permits for rallies on Jan. 6, looking for possible links and witnesses. The two saw those steps as treading on First Amendment-protected activities, the people said.
Axelrod saw an uncomfortable analogy to Black Lives Matter protests that had ended in vandalism in
………
Some in the group also acknowledged the political risks during the meeting or in subsequent conversations, according to people familiar with the discussions. Seeking the communications of a high-profile Trump ally such as Stone could trigger a social media post from Trump decrying yet another FBI investigation as a “witch hunt.” And what if the probe turned up nothing? Some were mindful, too, that investigating public figures demanded a high degree of confidence, because even a probe that finds no crime can unfairly impugn them.
All who assembled for the late February meeting were in agreement, with Axelrod making the final call: Cooney’s plan would not go forward.
………
About the same time, attorneys at Main Justice declined another proposal that would have squarely focused prosecutors on documents that Trump used to pressure Pence not to certify the election for Biden, The Post found.
Officials at the National Archives had discovered similarities in fraudulent slates of electors for Trump that his Republican allies had submitted to Congress and the Archives. The National Archives inspector general’s office asked the Justice Department’s election crimes branch to consider investigating the seemingly coordinated effort in swing states. Citing its prosecutors’ discretion, the department told the Archives it would not pursue the topic, according to two people with knowledge of the decision.
The Justice Department didn’t expound at the time on why they turned down the elector probe, but the department made clear its strategy on the riot. Investigators would rely on the traditional method for prosecuting organized crime cases — rolling up of smaller criminals to implicate bigger ones.
To make it work, however, Sherwin began agitating that the government would need a hammer — a charge that would fit the historic nature of the crime and potentially carry decades in prison — to leverage rioters to tell everything they knew about the planning.
On Feb. 19, Sherwin signed an indictment charging nine Oath Keepers with conspiring to obstruct a government proceeding. In meetings, he instructed his top deputies to rapidly draft a superseding indictment charging some of them with seditious conspiracy and present it to DOJ headquarters so they could weigh applying this novel charge.
………
Sherwin had announced he would step down, making way for Biden to nominate a new U.S. attorney, but he felt so strongly about the seditious conspiracy approach that it figured into his briefing for the new attorney general on Garland’s first day on the job.
Sherwin emphasized that most of the rioters were “stand-alone” actors who got caught up in the mob mentality. He said he was worried prosecutors risked getting bogged down trying hundreds of defendants and recommended the government plead out hundreds of lesser Jan. 6 cases. He stressed that the department should focus on the planners and leaders of the attack and consider using the little-used charge of attempting to violently overthrow their government.
Garland thanked Sherwin but did not reveal his thinking on seditious conspiracy, according to two people familiar with the meeting. It would become the norm in Garland’s buttoned-down Justice Department to share information on only a need-to-know basis. ………
Before returning to Miami, Sherwin agreed to tape an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
Sherwin suggested to CBS that investigators had obtained enough evidence to prove some rioters engaged in sedition. “I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements,” he said.
……… Garland’s top deputies were livid, and the attorney general himself was visibly upset, several people familiar with his reaction said. The attorney general, who was painstaking in preparing his own public remarks, was especially angry at Sherwin for speaking off the cuff. In the hearing with Mehta, John Crabb, chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office, said it appeared that “rules and procedures were not complied with” regarding the television interview, and that Sherwin had been referred to the department’s internal affairs office for an ethics probe. Sherwin later told people he thought he’d had the department’s support to tape the interview.
Sherwin heard from a close Justice Department ally that Garland and his deputies now felt boxed into the seditious conspiracy charges — or to tough questions if they didn’t bring them.
Oh the poor delicate f%$#ing flowers. They might have to f%$#ing do their f%$#ing jobs.
………
A permanent replacement was slow in coming, leaving some prosecutors describing the investigation as “rudderless” throughout the summer of 2021. Near the end of July, Biden nominated Graves, a lawyer in private practice who had once led the office’s fraud section.
During that time, Justice officials continued to have conflicting views over whether to pursue people in Trump’s orbit. The debate reached the deputy attorney general’s office.
Monaco, 55, had begun her career as a staffer in Biden’s Senate Judiciary Committee, and had herself worked as a federal prosecutor in the D.C. office. Monaco later rose to be the chief of staff to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and subsequently was President Barack Obama’s homeland security adviser. By design, conflicts that arise between the U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI or other branches of the Justice Department are managed by the deputy attorney general’s office.
………
Some prosecutors even had the impression that Trump had become a taboo topic at Main Justice. Colleagues responsible for preparing briefing materials and updates for Garland and Monaco were warned to focus on foot soldiers and to avoid mentioning Trump or his close allies.
Late that summer, members of the team leading one of the most high-profile parts of the bottom-up probe into members of the Oath Keepers became frustrated, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors wanted to charge Stewart Rhodes, the group’s founder, and several lieutenants with seditious conspiracy. But by fall, the decision remained in limbo. Prosecutors had put Rhodes in their sights since February, when they first referred to him as “Person One” in court records, but still hadn’t arrested him.
“The agents kept asking, ‘What’s going on?’” recalled one of those familiar with the case. “They were ready to pick up Rhodes.”
While FBI agents and line prosecutors wanted to move forward with the charge, a decision was delayed in part because of wariness and debate among some officials inside Monaco’s and Garland’s offices about the risk of sedition charges being overturned on appeal. On top of that, the department still lacked Senate confirmation for two of Biden’s nominees — for U.S. attorney in D.C. and an assistant attorney general for national security, the key supervisors over the investigation.
If you are unwilling to prosecute, or even investigate a crime unless it is a slam dunk, you should not be a prosecutor in traffic court, much less Attorney General.
And that investigation of phony electors?
A new prosecutor on the case, Thomas Windom, wanted to investigate, and got stonewalled by the D’Antuono, so he turned to, "Discreetly inquire if another agency might help: the U.S. Postal Service inspector." (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")
………
Behind the scenes, federal prosecutors in Michigan who received Nessel’s referral were waiting to hear from Monaco’s office about how Main Justice wanted to proceed. National Archives officials were dumbstruck; the Justice Department was suddenly interested in the fake electors evidence it had declined to pursue a year earlier.
One person directly familiar with the department’s new interest in the case said it felt as though the department was reacting to the House committee’s work as well as heightened media coverage and commentary. “Only after they were embarrassed did they start looking,” the person said.
Again, we see a steadfast refusal to even investigate until public and Congressional pressure reached a fever pitch.
To quote Atrios, "I'll just say that efforts to not look "political" are, in fact, political."
To quote Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." (Hence the video posted above)
It appears that the latest attempt by Republicans to create a society in their own image, by which I mean cruel and small, is their Jihad against
universal free school lunches.
I'd argue that Republicans have some sort of social imperative to be schmucks, but as I have said many times, a schmuck has a head.
States across the country are moving to provide universal free school meals to all our children. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to stop them from doing just that.
The Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) on Wednesday released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party boldly declares its priority to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, from the School Lunch Program. Why? Because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”
This behavior is short-sighted, stupid, and self destructive.
Yet more evidence that Frank (The composer, not the political scientist) Wilhoit's observation is true, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
The Speaker of the North Carolina House
has been sued for alienation of affection, which means that he is accused f%$#ing someone else's wife and causing
their divorce. (It is a tort where you sue the person for destroying
your marriage for whacking said spouse's porcupine.)
It gets better. The woman (A straight Republican? How odd!) was
executive director of the N.C. Conference of Clerks of Superior Court, which
makes her a public official, and there are reports that he used his position
to coerce her into, among other things, group sex, using the threat of
defunding the conference.
Just to be clear, these are only allegations, and has not been proven in court nor has any detailed information been released to the public yet.
A lawsuit against one of North Carolina’s top Republican leaders, House
Speaker Tim Moore, claims he had a years-long affair with a married woman,
using “his position as one of the most powerful elected officials” in the
state to “entice” her into an “illicit relationship.”
“This was
more than the ordinary dalliance of an unfaithful spouse and an unscrupulous
paramour,” the lawsuit says.
Scott Lassiter, a former Apex
councilman, is suing Moore and seeks more than $25,000 in damages. Among
other claims, the suit accuses Moore of “alienation of affection.” North
Carolina is one of
a small number of states
that allow spouses to sue people for wrecking marriages, The News &
Observer previously reported.
The lawsuit claims that Lassiter’s wife, Jamie Liles Lassiter,
the executive director of the N.C. Conference of Clerks of Superior Court,
hoped her “acquiescence” to Moore’s demands would benefit her employer. It
claims that Moore “aggressively pursued a sexual relationship” with her.
………
The
lawsuit says that Moore’s conduct “revealed a perverse form of symbiosis in
which he persuaded her to engage in degrading acts to satisfy his desires,
recognizing that Mrs. Lassiter hoped her acquiescence to his demands would
result in Defendant Tim Moore supporting favorable action for the
organization she represents.”
The conference, created in 2006 by the legislature, consists of the 100 elected clerks from across the state, according to the
state’s
Judicial Branch’s website.
The executive director and staff “serve as a resource for the clerks in key
areas of court administration” and ”act as a liaison on behalf of all
elected clerks of Superior Court to both governmental and non-governmental
stakeholders,” the website states. ………
According to the court
documents, after hearing rumors, Scott Lassiter “surveilled” Liles Lassiter
in December, finding she had dinner with and spent hours with Moore.
Scott Lassiter said he confronted his wife, who told him that
she could not end her relationship with Moore for fear it would result in
losing her job and retaliation. The lawsuit also claims that Scott Lassiter
confronted Moore at a Biscuitville restaurant in Raleigh and Moore asked him
if there was anything he could do for him, “implying that he could use the
power he held as Speaker in some way to benefit Plaintiff.”
The
case alleges Moore convinced Liles Lassiter “to engage in degrading sexual
acts with him, including group sexual activity with others over whom he had
power or influence.”
The case is also filed against a “John Doe,”
an unidentified individual who “conspired” with Moore. The case documents
have an exhibit claiming to be a photo of this person on Scott Lassiter’s
front porch without authorization.
It should be noted here that this is a schadenfreude rich environment, particularly given that there have been a number of attempts to repeal this archaic practice in North Carolina which have died in committee, indicating (at least) an ambivalence by Speaker Moore toward abolition of this law.
Given that these markets exist almost entirely separately from the massive conglomerates that make up agribusiness in the United States, it begs the question, how do they compete with these massive economies of scale?
Actually, they deliver comparable (and better) product for less because there are no economies of scale. The agricultural behemoths do not make money by delivering less expensively. They make money by using their scale to dictate prices.
To put it bluntly, they are able to extract monopoly rents, and it is only by virtue of government subsidies, both agricultural subsidies that favor large agribusiness concerns and salutary neglect of US antitrust laws:
Produce prices at your local Chinatown are likely a fraction of what they cost at other supermarkets, and if you've wondered why, you're not alone. In an investigative report for the Wall Street Journal reporter Anne Kadet admits she always assumed the low prices were a reflection of subpar produce. But a deeper investigation of New York's Chinatown with author Valerie Imbruce led her to the opposite conclusion, and reveals the hidden truths behind the neighborhood's fruit and vegetable supply chain.
Imbruce, who's researched the Chinatown produce economy for over a decade, is the author of From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown's Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace. In the Journal she distills to Kadet the real reason Chinatown can keep prices low: "Chinatown's 80-plus produce markets are cheap because they are connected to a web of small farms and wholesalers that operate independently of the network supplying most mainstream supermarkets." While most of the rest of New York's markets get their produce from the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, Chinatown sellers work directly with small neighborhood warehouses. Since they're operating in close geographic proximity, they can get fresh produce throughout the day from wholesalers, and therefore don't need a store with refrigeration or a lot of storage space.
Ms. Isaac, a teacher’s assistant, lives way up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, but she is one of the many New Yorkers who frequent Chinatown for fruits and vegetables. “The food is fresher,” she said, “and Chinatown is way cheaper.”
I never gave Chinatown’s crowded produce markets a chance; I figured the prices were cheap because the selection is all C-grade bok choy and yesterday’s bananas.
Wrong again! I toured the markets with Valerie Imbruce, an economic botanist who spent more than a decade researching the community’s produce supply chain. She even wrote a book on the topic, “From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace.”
Her discovery: Chinatown’s 80-plus produce markets are cheap because they are connected to a web of small farms and wholesalers that operate independently of the network supplying most mainstream supermarkets.
No one there is paying the multimillion dollar salaries of big AG CEOs, and so you find better, and cheaper produce.
What you find is a bit more variable, so one day, there might be a surfeit of strawberries, and the next none at all, but in terms of the bottom line, price, it is clearly a more efficient system.
It's almost as if cutting the MBAs out of the process makes things run more efficiently?
Manganese nodules at the bottom of the deep sea contain a wealth of valuable metals that are vital to the electronics and steelmaking industries. Accordingly, these sectors and many countries have pinned their hopes on deep-sea mining to meet the growing demand for raw materials like cobalt and rare-earth elements.
In a study just released in the journal Scientific Reports, experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute show that such activities could not only have ecological impacts, but also pose health hazards, for example, in connection with the industrial mining and processing of the nodules. According to their findings, in some cases, the radioactivity of radium-226 in the nodules exceeds the safe limit defined in the German Strahlenschutzverordnung (Radiation Protection Ordinance) 100- to 1,000-fold.
Large areas of the ocean floor are covered with polymetallic nodules and crusts. The potato-sized manganese nodules can be found in all oceans, especially in the Pacific Ocean, at water depths between 4,000 and 6,000 meters. Formed over millions of years, they contain valuable metals like copper, nickel, cobalt and rare-earth elements—in other words, a range of elements required for the manufacture of electronic products like computers, smartphones, batteries, magnets, motors and high-tech components.
I don't expect meaningful mining of manganese modules in my lifetime.
This is not a surprise, the dysfunction of the MPD is a common knowledge in the Twin Cities.
The only question is what, if anything, will be done. My money is on nothing at all being done:
The Minneapolis Police Department routinely used excessive force and discriminated against Black and Native American people in the years before one of its officers killed George Floyd, federal authorities said Friday.
In an 89-page report that followed a more than two-year federal civil rights investigation, the Justice Department excoriated the Minneapolis police force as an agency that put officers and local residents at unnecessary risk, failed to act upon repeated warnings about biased behavior and countenanced the “systemic problems” that gave way to Floyd’s death in 2020.
The report’s release came a little more than three years after Floyd, a Black man, was filmed gasping for air while pinned down by Derek Chauvin, a White police officer in Minneapolis, on Memorial Day in 2020. Floyd’s death helped ignite nationwide protests over policing and social and racial injustice, and Chauvin was convicted of murder the following year.
The Justice Department launched its civil rights investigation immediately after he was convicted. Appearing Friday at a federal courthouse in Minneapolis, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the investigation’s results and depicted Floyd’s death not as an isolated episode, but instead a tragedy enabled by the deep-rooted issues within the Minneapolis police.
………
Garland said the Justice Department, the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police had agreed in principle to negotiate toward a federal consent decree — a court-approved reform order that can be used to ensure changes within a local law enforcement agency.
The MPD should not be a part of the negotiations on the consent decree. They work for the city of Minneapolis, not the other way around.
………
The Justice Department report presented a dire portrayal of the Minneapolis department as a place where officers use force recklessly, including against people who criticized or questioned them; face little to no accountability for allegations of wrongdoing; and patrolled the streets with “deficient and inadequate training.”
Investigators concluded that they “have reasonable cause to believe that” the city of Minneapolis and its police department “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution and federal law.”
………
A lack of accountability is presented in the report as a pervasive problem for the Minneapolis police, and one that directly contributes to the other issues highlighted in the report, the Justice Department said. The Minneapolis police “accountability system is fundamentally flawed,” the report said, calling it “an opaque maze.”
………
The Justice Department’s findings echoed repeated claims made by residents over the years about the Minneapolis police, and they also are similar in many ways to a state investigation that concluded last year that the department was riddled with unnecessarily aggressive behavior and lacking oversight.
John Eastman is not happy his disciplinary hearing before the California bar is being live streamed. See below. You will recall that Eastman concocted a wacko theory on how to overturn Trump’s defeat. Eastman is undoubtedly among the targets of the January 6 special counsel. https://t.co/QETHmAyDjz
This is John F%$#ing Dean expressing disbelief at the level of stupidity and corruption
Here is a picture, in case the Tweet goes away
John Eastman, Clarence Thomas' former law clerk, whose cockamamie legal theories, and lies about the facts contributed mightily to the January 6 insurrection, is facing a disbarment hearing starting on Tuesday.
One measure of just how weird the whole thing is is that this hearing will be live streamed:
This couldn’t happen to a more deserving schmuck (sic) than John Eastman. His disbarment hearing before the State Bar of California may be live streamed. He, of course, is trying to couch himself as a victim and that is simply not working at all.
I've said this before, and I will say it again: learn your Yiddish. A schmuck has a head. (Putz is more generic, a schmuck is specifically uncircumcised)
I like how this judge thinks. Whether the State Bar will do it, I have no idea.
Eastman, more than anybody, did more damage to this republic than any one person. It was his brainstorm to have the “alternate” slate of electors, who like “alternative facts” had no business being involved in the vote counting process. It was total fraud and a clever scheme to pull off a coup d’etat. The man is not a lawyer. He doesn’t have the ethics to continue to practice law.
And frankly, I hope that Jack Smith gets around to indicting him.
Maybe Eastman didn’t literally defecate in the Capitol, but he certainly defecated on the integrity of our elections process and on ideals that we hold dear.
If anybody deserves to be disbarred, it’s this guy.
The times listed are Pacific time, if you want to tune in.
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