Damn

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) has been hospitalized for a stroke.

Sen. Chris Murphy is being hospitalized following a stroke, an aide to the Connecticut Democrat said Sunday.

“Yesterday afternoon, Senator Murphy started experiencing numbness in his arm while at his son’s hockey game. He was taken to a local hospital, where it was discovered he had experienced a stroke,” Allison Herwitt, Murphy’s chief of staff, said in a statement.

“He was transferred to Johns Hopkins for further monitoring and is responding well to treatment. The doctors are encouraged by his progress, he is awake and alert, and we are optimistic he will make a full recovery,” she added.

Go Utah?

Normally, I am not a fan of the state government of Utah.

Generally, when something newsworthy comes from Salt Lake City, it is bone-headed reactionary bullsh%$.

That being said, I approve of Utah going postal on Kalshi for illegal gambling in the state.

Utah is escalating its legal battle with prediction market platform Kalshi.

Utah Attorney General Derek Brown filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Kalshi, several of its subsidiaries, and two financial trading firms that work with the company, accusing them of violating the state’s anti-gambling laws.

In the lawsuit, the state compares Kalshi to a “back-alley gambling den,” arguing that the company facilitates bets and takes a percentage of the money that’s bet on its platform.

Utah is asking a court to block Kalshi from offering wagers in the state. It also wants the company to use a court-approved geolocation service to prevent Utah residents from placing bets on the platform. And the state is seeking to recover millions of dollars the company allegedly made from illegal gambling. According to the lawsuit, Kalshi has collected an estimated $30.6 million to $61.2 million in fees from wagers placed by Utah users.

Utah is the latest state to take legal action against Kalshi as the company and rival Polymarket face a growing wave of lawsuits over allegations that they are operating illegal gambling businesses. 

………

The Trump administration, meanwhile, seems to be backing prediction markets, with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) pushing back against states trying to regulate the industry.

………

In Utah’s case, the state argues there is little difference between Kalshi’s event contracts and traditional gambling. 

More of this.

I Like This

Turn About is Fair Play

At a city council meeting, someone opposing the construction of data centers played the loud noise emitted to the council members, who found this noise unbearable, but since they won't live next to the data center, they are still likely to approve the projects.

A fiscal court meeting in Carroll County, Kentucky grew contentious when local residents started playing the sound of a data center to county officials. Spoiler: they didn’t seem to like it.

As local news station WHAS11 reported last week, Carroll County is the planned location for two separate data center projects, each of which will likely be around 800 megawatts and will overtake hundreds of acres of Kentucky land. At that size, the data centers are considered hyperscalers.

“I believe they talked about 800 megawatts, so it is a hyperscale unit,” Scott Nab, a magistrate on the fiscal court, told WHAS11 of one of the projects. “It’ll be multiple buildings. It’ll spread over 1,000 acres when completed.”

As the news station notes, a data center of that size would consume the equivalent of 560,000 average homes.

Nab is among the data centers’ proponents, arguing that data is the industry of the future. Local residents of the rural region, however, are pushing back. One of their strategies? Subject county officials to the horrible, 24/7 screech that large data centers emit. 

This is not a bad 

Vote Blue No Matter ……… Never Mind

So the losing candidate in the Michigan US Senate Democratic Party Primary has endorsed the Republican in the race because she wanted the winner, Abdul El-Sayed, to condemn an ad that he had nothing to do with.

In related news, the bulk of her congressional staff resigned and condemned her.

Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, in an extraordinary rebuke of her party’s nominee on the eve of the midterm elections.

Her endorsement came in a video posted to X after she attended an event with Rogers at the predominantly Black Perfecting church in Detroit on Sunday. Stevens’s endorsement was the culmination of an escalating feud between the former primary rivals – primarily over support for Israel – that has roiled one of the most fiercely contested Senate contests of the cycle.

The endorsement was met with immediate pushback from Democrats, who condemned Stevens for her “betrayal”.

Actually, that was noted Israel-hater Chuck Schumer, who called her endorsement a, "Despicable betrayal."

It appears that this was precipitated by members of the Michigan Democratic Party establishment, most notably Debbie Dingell, told her to stop grand-standing and STFU.