Of course, we know employees have only the best interest at heat for their workers, but I'm thinking about marketing radio blocking gloves to these folks:
Britain’s biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security. UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK. The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data. ……… The TUC [Trades Union Congress] is worried that staff could be coerced into being microchipped. Its general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “We know workers are already concerned that some employers are using tech to control and micromanage, whittling away their staff’s right to privacy. “Microchipping would give bosses even more power and control over their workers. There are obvious risks involved, and employers must not brush them aside, or pressure staff into being chipped.”
This goes hand in hand with the plethora of surveillance cameras that make the UK the most surveilld society in the world.
It wasn’t a coincidence that moments after Nancy Pelosi promised progressive House leaders more power in the next Congress, a host of liberal groups announced they were supporting her for speaker.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who is expected to co-chair the House Progressive Caucus next year, left a Thursday night meeting with Pelosi in the Capitol and proclaimed that her members would have more seats on powerful committees and more influence over legislation.
………
Pelosi's overtures also speak to progressives’ growing influence in the Democratic Caucus. The Progressive Caucus will increase its membership by at least 20 members next year, and comprise about two-fifths of the caucus. Its leaders intend to use those numbers to boost their power and agenda — starting first with committee assignments and leadership positions, then expanding into legislation.
………
Thursday's meeting with Pelosi included Jayapal and current Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Mark Pocan (D-Wis.). One request to which Pelosi agreed was to give the Progressive Caucus proportional representation on what lawmakers call the “A committees”: the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services and Intelligence committees.
………
The group leaders also registered their concerns about “pay-go” rules with Pelosi. Under those rules, certain bills cannot be considered if they aren't paid for. Progressives have long run on policy positions that would be expensive, from "Medicare for all" to free college tuition. Pelosi didn’t make any commitments, but she promised to bring those rules up for debate.
Good move. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, "If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."
While I do not think that Trump is the sharpest tool in the shed, I think that he understands that he just threw a spanner into the speaker selection among the Democrats.
Does anyone think that this wasn't deliberate sh%$ stirring:
President Donald Trump waded into the Democratic House leadership battle again Saturday morning, throwing his weight behind the woman he’s spent the last few months demonizing: Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
Trump tweeted that he could get the longtime leader of the Democratic caucus “as many votes as she wants in order for her to be Speaker of the House” — a position that requires the votes of the majority of House members, not the majority of the party.
Democrats, set to take over the House for the first time in eight years after the midterm elections swept in a “blue wave,” are in the midst of deciding what they want to do with the majority and who they want to lead it. No other Democrat has officially announced a bid for the speakership, but a vocal group of anti-Pelosi members are agitating for a change.
I alway wondered how Albert Shanker ended up being the man who destroyed the 20th century world.
Well, this New York Times Op/Ed provides context for both that joke, as well as a for the war on teachers and unions that some among liberal "education reformers" have engaged in for years.
The short version is that in 1968, there was a majority black school district set up in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Brooklyn), and one of their first actions was to fire some white teachers for being white, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Shanker's union, went on strike, arguing, IMNSHO correctly, that arbitrary hiring and firing makes unionization is meaningless or impossible.
Shanker won, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board lost, and teachers' unions became the bête noire of the liberal education reform community. (Conservatives and Republicans have always been opposed to labor unions generally, and teacher unions specifically)
On Nov. 17, 1968, Albert Shanker, a tough Queens-bred union president, stood next to New York City’s patrician mayor, John Lindsay, to announce a settlement to a crippling teacher strike that had thrown a million students out of New York City public schools for weeks on end. The divisive strike laid bare long simmering tensions within American liberalism over unions, education and race. Almost a half-century later, the evolution in liberal attitudes that the strike symbolized created vulnerabilities that a very different son of Queens, Donald Trump, exploited in his rise to the presidency. By the late 1960s, after years of frustration with vicious white resistance to school integration, many African-American leaders supported the creation of a black-controlled local school district in the low-income Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The idea was that the district would hire more minority schoolteachers in order to provide role models for students and adopt a curriculum that was culturally affirming. A firestorm erupted, however, when the local school board (then known as the governing board) sent a telegram to 19 unionized educators indicating that the board “voted to end your employment in the schools of this district.” The list included 18 white educators and one black teacher, mistakenly included, who was immediately reinstated once the error was discovered. A hearing by a retired African-American judge hired by the board, Francis Rivers, found that there were no credible charges against the teachers. But Rhody McCoy, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local superintendent, told The New York Times, “Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in the city. The black community will see to that.” To protest the terminations, teachers throughout the city began a series of strikes shutting down the nation’s largest school system from early September through mid-November. ……… To begin with, Shanker believed he had no choice but to call a strike to protect his members from arbitrary dismissal. If an employer — of whatever race — had the right to dismiss unionized employees without due process, why have a union? Shanker understood that conservatives didn’t believe in collective bargaining rights and due process. But wasn’t it a bedrock liberal principle, he asked, for workers to have a right to organize and protect themselves from arbitrary actions by their employers? Shanker and Rustin also thought it was important to fight for integrated schools and noted that “community control” was originally the slogan adopted by white parents in Queens who opposed desegregation. Shanker supported the creation of the nation’s first nonselective magnet schools to foster integration and cited the 1966 Coleman Report, which found that low-income students achieved at much higher levels in socioeconomically integrated schools than in those with concentrated poverty. Settling for community control of segregated schools was wrong, Rustin argued. The idea was, as he put it, “the spiritual descendant of states’ rights.” ……… Instead, to improve teacher diversity, Shanker worked hard to unionize teacher aides and to negotiate a stipend for them to go back to school, get their college degrees and become teachers themselves. Over time, more than 8,000 paraprofessionals became teachers, providing the largest single source of minority teachers in New York City. When the third and final strike was settled, the community control effort was gutted. Shanker won among broader public opinion, but lost among liberals. Many progressives dismissed Shanker, a cerebral former graduate student in philosophy, as a madman, as a well-known joke from the era suggests. In Woody Allen’s 1973 science fiction comedy, “Sleeper,” Mr. Allen’s character wakes up two centuries in the future to find that that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.” More generally, over the subsequent 50 years, the Lindsay/Bundy/Carmichael worldview would largely prevail over the Shanker/Rustin/Harrington approach among progressives. In the years since Ocean Hill-Brownsville, many upper-middle class liberals have demonstrated a lukewarm attitude toward unions. When Democrats held majorities in Congress under presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the progressive coalition failed to prioritize labor law reforms to give unions a fair shot at surviving. Likewise, those same Democratic administrations largely avoided the fight to support school integration, favoring instead spending more money for high-poverty schools. And at the federal level, Democrats have largely adopted the view articulated by Bundy and others involved in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict that race could be an explicit factor in hiring decisions. The shifts on unions, school integration and race-conscious decision-making that the 1968 teachers strikes symbolized are not unrelated to the disastrous election in 2016, a calamity from which progressives only partially recovered in 2018. A strong labor movement, an integrated public school system and a legal commitment to equal treatment of individuals by race all help make authoritarian white nationalism less appealing. But the reduced progressive commitment to these critical bulwarks helped clear the way for a demagogue.
This does provide at least a partial explanation of the moral vacuity of the modern education reform, as well as the disastrous abandonment of the labor movement by the modern Democratic Party.
Seriously? There has been nothing but since the East India Company became the furst trans-national firm:
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence told leaders of Southeast Asian nations on Thursday that there was no place for “empire and aggression” in the Indo-Pacific region, a comment that could be interpreted as a reference to China’s rise. ……… The prime minister of Singapore later said that Southeast Asian countries did not want to take sides when pulled in different directions by major powers, but that one day it may have to. Leaders at the ASEAN meetings this week heard warnings that the post-World War Two international order was in jeopardy and trade tensions between Washington and Beijing could trigger a “domino effect” of protectionist measures by other countries. “Like you, we seek an Indo-Pacific in which all nations, large and small, can prosper and thrive – secure in our sovereignty, confident in our values, and growing stronger together,” Pence said. “We all agree that empire and aggression have no place in the Indo-Pacific.”
This week, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi unveiled a list of new procedural rules that her caucus intends to implement when the next Congress is seated. Most of these measures are unobjectionable “good government” reforms. But one of them would create a new — and all-but-insurmountable — obstacle to the passage of many of the policies that the Democratic Party claims to support.
The rule, proposed by Pelosi and Massachusetts representative Richard Neal, would “require a three-fifths supermajority to raise individual income taxes on the lowest-earning 80 percent of taxpayers.”
………
Alas, there are several problems with this argument. For one thing, while progressives are committed to increasing the discretionary income of the bottom 80 percent, that does not necessarily mean keeping their tax rates frozen at historically low levels. Currently, for much of the American middle class, health-insurance premiums function as a steadily rising tax. A bill that required those households to pay a new, smaller monthly sum to the government — so as to fund a single-payer system that would actually reduce their cost of living by delivering radically cheaper health-care services — could hardly be called regressive. And the same can be said for legislation establishing universal child care, paid family leave, or any other program aimed at easing the middle class’s financial burdens by dramatically expanding the public sector’s ambitions. Equating support for middle-class families — with opposition to increasing their tax rates — is a conservative project, which Democrats have no business advancing. If the party wishes to establish structural barriers to policies that would hurt the middle class, why not require a three-fifths majority to cut Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security?
………
All this would be a bit less problematic if the Democratic Party had overcome its allergy to deficit spending (and/or accepted Modern Monetary Theory as its personal truth). But it hasn’t: In addition to forbidding tax increases on the bottom 80 percent, Pelosi has vowed to honor the “pay as you go” rule, which requires the House to fully finance any and all new government spending.
Taken together, these two requirements could make Medicare for All impossible to pass out of the House. ………
In the best case, Nancy Pelosi has decided to throw her lot with the Wall Street Bob Rubin Democrats, and in the worst case, she has been in Washington, DC for so long that she has lost touch with reality.
I am not stating that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is not a human being, I am saying that he is an immature spoiled child who lacks the maturity to be a fry-cook, much less the de-facto absolute ruler of 33 million people
The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month, contradicting the Saudi government’s claims that he was not involved in the killing, according to people familiar with the matter. The CIA’s assessment, in which officials have said they have high confidence, is the most definitive to date linking Mohammed to the operation and complicates the Trump administration’s efforts to preserve its relationship with a close ally. A team of 15 Saudi agents flew to Istanbul on government aircraft in October and killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate, where he had come to pick up documents that he needed for his planned marriage to a Turkish woman. In reaching its conclusions, the CIA examined multiple sources of intelligence, including a phone call that the prince’s brother Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, had with Khashoggi, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence. Khalid told Khashoggi, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post, that he should go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to retrieve the documents and gave him assurances that it would be safe to do so. It is not clear if Khalid knew that Khashoggi would be killed, but he made the call at his brother’s direction, according to the people familiar with the call, which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence.
Multiple sources tell CNN that a much-anticipated United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities in Yemen and for Saudi Arabia to allow humanitarian aid to reach millions of starving people was "stalled" this week after the resolution's sponsor, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, met face-to-face with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Two sources said the crown prince "threw a fit" about the resolution. Two other sources with knowledge of the discussion didn't go so far as to describe the crown prince as angry, though they didn't deny he was annoyed.
Seriously, what the f%$# is wrong with this guy?
This is what end-stage royal inbreeding looks like.
Mira Ricardel, who fell out with the First Lady when she attempted to extort seats on her Africa junket, has left the building:
Top National Security Council official Mira Ricardel is exiting her post after an extraordinary, high-profile clash with first lady Melania Trump.
The White House said in a statement Wednesday that Ricardel will “transition to a new role within the administration,” but did not specify her new job.
“The president is grateful for Ms. Ricardel’s continued service to the American people and her steadfast pursuit of his national security priorities,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The announcement capped off a tense day of speculation about Ricardel's future after the first lady's office took the unusual step of publicly calling for her ouster. It appears to be a compromise solution, since national security adviser John Bolton reportedly fought to save Ricardel, his top deputy.
The Trump White House is truly a complete sh%$ show.
Seriously, this is the most uselessly self absorbed thing that has happened in Washington, DC in at least the past 3 months, and I am including toxic narcissistic Donald Trump in this equation:
The Congressional Black Caucus passed a vote of no confidence in Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez on Wednesday, the latest sign of lingering bad blood between lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the Democratic Party’s top official.
According to CBC members, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, started a debate over the national party’s superdelegate policy, which led to a motion of no confidence in Perez, who took over the DNC in February 2017.
CBC members described the debate as “heated” and “controversial.” CBC Chairman Cedric Richmond (D-La.) said members “felt that the DNC pitted them against their constituents.”
“So now if they want to be a delegate, they have to run against their constituents who want to be delegates, and it’s an unfair proposition,” Richmond told POLITICO. “We don’t want to run against our constituents, so the caucus had made its position known. … It speaks for itself.”
The DNC in August voted to dramatically diminish the power of superdelegates — elected officials and party activists who are free to vote for any candidate at the presidential nominating convention. The new rule bars superdelegates from voting on the first presidential nominating ballot at a contested national convention.
Seriously, I can think of no better example of the self-serving egocentric arrogance than this crap.
Neel Kashkari is suggesting that firms complaining about worker shortages should try paying more to get more of this currently scarce resource:
Companies should try digging in their pockets if they're looking to find workers for unfilled jobs, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said Tuesday.
With the unemployment rate falling to its lowest level in 49 years, there are nearly 1 million more job openings than available workers, according to the Labor Department. Even though payrolls have been growing at a solid clip, complaints persist from companies that they are having a hard time finding qualified workers to fill positions because of a skills gap.
Kashkari, though, said he doesn't completely buy the argument that there aren't enough bodies out there.
"I oftentimes hear businesses saying I just can't find the workers that I need," the central bank official said during a conference on immigration in his home district. "Now, I'm not entirely sympathetic with that view, because I've been saying you should try paying more, and you may be able to attract more workers."
This is literally the first time that I've ever heard a mainstream economist acknowledge this basic fact.
It appears that Trump is in the thrall of the House of Saud just as much as his 3-4 predecessors:
The White House is looking for ways to remove an enemy of Turkish President Recep Erdogan from the U.S. in order to placate Turkey over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to two senior U.S. officials and two other people briefed on the requests.
Trump administration officials last month asked federal law enforcement agencies to examine legal ways of removing exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen in an attempt to persuade Erdogan to ease pressure on the Saudi government, the four sources said.
The effort includes directives to the Justice Department and FBI that officials reopen Turkey's case for his extradition, as well as a request to the Homeland Security Department for information about his legal status, the four people said.
………
"At first there were eye rolls, but once they realized it was a serious request, the career guys were furious," said a senior U.S. official involved in the process.
………
The secret effort to resolve one of the leading tensions in U.S.-Turkey relations — Gulen's residency in the U.S. — provides a window into how President Donald Trump is trying to navigate hostility between two key allies after Saudi officials murdered Khashoggi on Oct. 2 at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul.
It suggests the White House could be looking for ways to contain Erdogan's ire over the murder while preserving Trump's close alliance with Saudi Arabia's controversial de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
………
Erdogan, meanwhile, has kept the pressure up by leaking pieces of evidence and repeatedly speaking out to accuse Prince Mohammed of orchestrating the murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and outspoken critic of the Saudi leadership.
………
Erdogan has for years demanded the U.S. send Gulen back to Turkey. The Turkish leader accuses the elderly cleric of being a terrorist who was behind a failed coup against Erdogan's government in 2016. After the coup attempt, Ankara made a formal request to the U.S. for Gulen's extradition.
………
Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. for almost two decades, denies any involvement in the failed coup in Turkey in 2016. A one-time ally of Erdogan, he's become an influential cleric with a wide network of followers known as "Gulenistas." His movement includes a host of nonprofit organizations, businesses and schools, in the U.S., as well as South Africa.
So, Erdogon is using the US's desperation to make the uproar about Saudi misdeeds go away to secury policy concessions.
So not a surprise, and it is not a deviation from prior US foreign policy, but it does show that the US policy with regard to both Turkey and the House of Saud are miserable failures.
One of the losers in Tuesday’s election is the charter school movement, which lost a big and reliable advocate when Republicans gave up control of the majority to Democrats in the State Senate, both sides said.
“There’s no question it’s going to be challenging,” said Robert Bellafiore, a consultant who works with charter schools. He also was part of the team under former Gov. George Pataki that authorized charter schools in 1998.
The strongest backer of charter schools now is Democratic Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who wields extraordinary power in crafting state budgets under New York law.
………
“This is a moment for charter schools,” said Andy Pallotta, president of New York State United Teachers, which has opposed expansion of charter schools and seeks greater transparency of their operations. “I think they lost their influence in the Capitol.”
Senate Democrats wouldn't say what their plans are for charter schools or if the new majority would support any expansion.
Here's a thought for New York Democrats: Pass a law that requires that charter schools to be subject to the state Freedom of Information Act. (FOIA)
Any time someone does a deep dive into charter school operations, corruption and malfeasance are always uncovered, so making it easier for parents, journalists, and activists to peruse their books will result in greater accountability.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attempted to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to start a conflict with Hamas in Gaza as part of a plan to divert attention from the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, sources inside Saudi Arabia have told Middle East Eye.
A war in Gaza was among a range of measures and scenarios proposed by an emergency task force set up to counter increasingly damaging leaks about Khashoggi's murder coming from Turkish authorities, according to sources with knowledge of the group's activities.
The task force, which is composed of officials from the royal court, the foreign and defence ministries, and the intelligence service, briefs the the crown prince every six hours, MEE was told.
It advised bin Salman that a war in Gaza would distract Trump's attention and refocus Washington’s attention on the role Saudi Arabia plays in bolstering Israeli strategic interests.
The fact that this plan was even discussed says a lot about the relationship between the Israeli PM and the prodigal son of the House of Saud says a lot about the dysfunction of the current Israeli leadership.
While I understand why people oppose Nancy Pelosi as speaker, the demands of the Democrats in the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus (Spoiler, they have never solved a single problem) are forcing me to defend Nancy Pelosi.
They are trying to get Pelosi to precapitulate to the Republicans, which should come as no surprise, it's been their act since the days of the Carter administration.
The ironic thing is that Pelosi has been aggressively placing right-wing Democrats in safe seats for years:
Nine centrist House Democrats are throwing another hurdle in the path of top party leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as she sprints toward the speaker’s gavel.
It’s not an unexpected obstacle: The nine are members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group formed to promote bipartisanship whose members agreed in September to condition their votes for any speaker candidate on support for a package of rules changes meant to improve how the House operates.
In a letter sent to Pelosi on Tuesday, the nine Democrats reiterated that their speaker votes are on the line and asked for a “written, public commitment” to their proposals by Friday.
………
The reforms range from making it easier to get amendment votes to ending the ability of a single disgruntled lawmaker to force a vote on ousting a sitting speaker. The centerpieces of the effort are mechanisms that would streamline the process of considering bills with broad bipartisan support on the House floor — at the price of eroding the power of the majority party’s leadership to control what gets put up for a vote.
Signing the letter are Reps. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), Tom O’Halleran (Ariz.), Jim Costa (Calif.), Kurt Schrader (Ore.), Daniel Lipinski (Ill.), Darren Soto (Fla.), Stephanie Murphy (Fla.), Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) and Vicente Gonzalez (Tex.).
This bit of snark further down is prize:
The Problem Solvers, whose efficacy has been in question, could represent more of a speed bump than a roadblock for Pelosi, who is facing a more serious uprising from a group of Democratic incumbents and incoming freshmen who are demanding new party leadership.
I don't want Nancy Pelosi to be speaker, but these jamokes are not interested in good governance, they just want to make sure that Democrats are hamstrung so that they won't be forced to vote against things like card check or single payer.
Primary these folks, and start with some seriously invasive opposition research.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) has been forthright about what he believes are the root causes of mass shootings. A few months ago, he blamed gun violence on children’s access to smartphones, video games and psychotropic drugs.
Most recently, he blamed society’s obsession with a specific genre of violent entertainment.
Mass shootings point to deep cultural problems, Bevin said, particularly in a society that consumes daily doses of violence through the media. He acknowledged tying zombie shows to gun violence might be perceived as “trite and simplistic.” But, he argued, American culture is “inundated by the worst things that celebrate death,” including the forms of entertainment young people consume.
“These are drips, drips, drips on the stones of the psyches of young generations that are growing up in a society that increasingly said this is normal and okay,” he said. “And eventually, some of those young minds are not going to be able to handle it.”
I'm beginning to think that Matt Bevans is looking to take over Tom Cruise's role as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder II: Yokels in Yemen.
Ramón Rivera had barely gotten his olive oil business started in the sun-swept Alentejo region of Portugal when Europe’s debt crisis struck. The economy crumbled, wages were cut, and unemployment doubled. The government in Lisbon had to accept a humiliating international bailout.
But as the misery deepened, Portugal took a daring stand: In 2015, it cast aside the harshest austerity measures its European creditors had imposed, igniting a virtuous cycle that put its economy back on a path to growth. The country reversed cuts to wages, pensions and social security, and offered incentives to businesses.
The government’s U-turn, and willingness to spend, had a powerful effect. Creditors railed against the move, but the gloom that had gripped the nation through years of belt-tightening began to lift. Business confidence rebounded. Production and exports began to take off — including at Mr. Rivera’s olive groves.
“We had faith that Portugal would come out of the crisis,” said Mr. Rivera, the general manager of Elaia. The company focused on state-of-the-art harvesting technology, and it is now one of Portugal’s biggest olive oil producers. “We saw that this was the best place in the world to invest.”
At a time of mounting uncertainty in Europe, Portugal has defied critics who have insisted on austerity as the answer to the Continent’s economic and financial crisis. While countries from Greece to Ireland — and for a stretch, Portugal itself — toed the line, Lisbon resisted, helping to stoke a revival that drove economic growth last year to its highest level in a decade.
The EU is dominated by Germans, and German economic philosophy, which has not changed since their disastrous policies during the Great Depression, which created the most brutal economic downturn in all of Europe and rise of the Nazis.
Here's hoping that Merkel's successor doesn't stake their political career on inflicting pointless misery on fellow EU members the way that she did.
A judge just responded to Rick Scott's demands to shut down the vote count in Florida, and it was an emphatic no:
A Leon County circuit judge is expected to issue an order today extending the deadline for recounts in Palm Beach County on state races in question to Nov. 20, about five days after the original 3 p.m. Thursday deadline.
The order would include extending the recounting of votes in the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Bill Nelson and Gov. Rick Scott, the governor's race between Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum, the race for agriculture commissioner between Democrat Nikki Fried and Republican Matt Caldwell, and the race for state House District 89 between Democrat Jim Bonfiglio and Republican Mike Caruso.
The extension comes out of a lawsuit filed by Bonfiglio, who is losing to Caruso by 37 votes. Bonfiglio told The Palm Beach Post on Tuesday afternoon that he was in a conference call with circuit Judge Karen Gievers around 1 p.m. during a case management conference concerning the lawsuit he filed to extend the deadline to allow time for a recount in his race.
Bonfiglio, the former mayor of Ocean Ridge, said he asked the judge to extend all the races or put his race first since his race would require less time to recount. He said the judge decided to extend all the races.
The state will doubtless try to appeal to the federal courts, and I have no idea how that will turn out, but for right now, I am enjoying the schadenfreude.
First lady Melania Trump demanded the ouster of National Security Adviser John Bolton’s top deputy, Mira Ricardel, on Tuesday as reports swirled about an imminent shakeup of President Donald Trump’s administration.
“It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House,” Melania Trump’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement in response to a question about reports the first lady had sought Ricardel’s removal.
Ricardel, Bolton’s top deputy, clashed with the first lady’s staff after threatening to withhold National Security Council resources during Melania Trump’s trip to Africa last month unless Ricardel or another NSC official was included in her entourage, one person familiar with the matter said.
So basically she tried to shake down the first lady so that she could go along on a junket with her.
I guess that she wanted to go on safari, but if the alleged behavior is true, Ricardel's behavior is beyond the pale, which would be typical of anyone who is a John Bolton protege.
It’s rare for first ladies to publicly intervene in West Wing staffing decisions, but when they do the clashes usually turn out badly for the aides involved. In what was probably the highest-profile such incident, President Ronald Reagan ousted his chief of staff Donald Regan in 1987 after he crossed Nancy Reagan.
It should be noted that Nancy Reagan did not PUBLICLY CALL FOR REGAN'S FIRING, and Melania Trump just DID.
……… Melania Trump said in an ABC News interview during her Africa trip she had told her husband that people she didn’t trust worked for him. Asked what happened to those people, she said: “Well, some people, they don’t work there anymore.” ……… While Bolton likes her, according to Trump administration officials, Ricardel is widely disliked among other White House staff. She’s regarded as inflexible and obsessed with process, which some officials complain has complicated coordination between the NSC and cabinet agencies.
Basically, she's an incompetent and insufferable ass, which explains why John Bolton wanted her as his deputy, he sees himself in her.
A Dutch cheese company tried to claim that it had a monopoly on the taste of a cheese spread. The Court of Justice of the European Union weighed arguments from two competing food producers, and decided on Tuesday that a taste cannot be copyrighted. Taste is “an idea,” rather than an “expression of an original intellectual creation,” the court ruled. And something that cannot be defined precisely cannot be copyrighted, it ruled.
The case was brought in the Netherlands, but it had been referred to the European court to make a ruling that would apply across the bloc. Levola Hengelo, a Dutch food producer, had sued Smilde Foods, another Dutch manufacturer, for infringing its copyright over the taste of a cheese spread.
The Levola product, known as Heks’nkaas, or Witches Cheese, is made of cream cheese and herbs and vegetables including parsley, leek and garlic. Smilde’s herbed cheese dip, which contained many of the same ingredients, was called Witte Wievenkaas, a name that also makes reference to witches. It is now sold as Wilde Wietze Dip.
Levola argued that the taste of food, like literary, scientific or artistic works, can be copyrighted. The company cited a 2006 case involving Lancôme, the cosmetics company, that had accepted in principle that the scent of a perfume could be eligible for copyright protection.
………
Well, there was no cheese tasting. But it agreed with Smilde that the taste of the cheese could not be defined with enough precision and objectivity to make it clear to other companies where they might be overstepping the mark.
………
To be protected by copyright, a work must be an “expression” of an original intellectual creation.
“Copyright isn’t supposed to be used to stop the spread and use of ideas,” said Joshua Marshall, an intellectual property lawyer at the European law firm Fieldfisher. “The taste of a leek-and-garlic cheese is really an idea.”
Copyright is supposed to "promote the progress of science and useful arts," not to be used as an anti-competitive weapon to be used against competitors.
IP naturally has an anti-competitive effect, but that is a cost of the promotion of creativity, not a benefit.
Representative Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat and former social worker, scored a groundbreaking victory in the race for a Senate seat in Arizona, defeating her Republican opponent after waging a campaign in which she embraced solidly centrist positions.
Ms. Sinema’s victory over Martha McSally, a Republican congresswoman and former Air Force pilot, marks the first Democratic triumph since 1976 in a battle for an open Senate seat in Arizona. Ms. Sinema takes the seat being vacated by Jeff Flake, a Republican who is leaving the Senate after repeated clashes with President Trump.
Ms. Sinema’s victory guarantees the Democrats at least 47 Senate seats. Republicans control 51, with two still undecided: Florida, where there is a recount, and Mississippi, where there is a runoff.
Unfortunately, Sinema is a Blue Dog, (literally) so I would not expect her to be particularly helpful in implementing any sort of Democratic Party agenda, but hopefully, she will be better than Jim Manchin.
Case in point, Midlothian, Illinois, where an armed security guard subdued a suspect, and was promptly shot by police:
It began in a way gun advocates have suggested would curtail violence. A gun comes out. Shots are fired. A “good guy with a gun” steps in to help before police can respond.
The tidy theoretical doesn’t account for the chaotic unknowns when police arrive and can’t tell a “good guy” with a gun from a “bad guy” with a gun.
The theory turned to grim reality at Manny’s Blue Room Bar in Robbins, Ill., outside Chicago early Sunday.
Police shot and killed the good guy. Jemel Roberson, 26, was working security.
“Everybody was screaming out, ‘He was a security guard,’ and they basically saw a black man with a gun and killed him,” witness Adam Harris told WGN.
I expect nothing but crickets from the NRA over this, because their underlying reason for existence is their advocacy for the ability of white people to shoot black people whenever they see fit.
Two-time Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will mount a third bid for the White House, longtime Clinton adviser Mark Penn wrote in an op-ed published Sunday by The Wall Street Journal, predicting that the former first lady and secretary of state is readying a "Hillary 4.0" campaign for 2020.
In the Journal op-ed, Penn, an adviser and pollster to the Clintons from 1995-2008, and former New York City politician Andrew Stein wrote that in a 2020 run, Clinton would reinvent herself “as a liberal firebrand." The twice-failed presidential candidate would not “let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House," they wrote.
Although she has routinely shot down talk of a 2020 run, Clinton said in an interview earlier this month that "I’d like to be president" after answering "no" when asked whether she wanted to run for president again.
Please, someone make it stop.
Another Clinton run is like making Mary Mallon your caterer at your son's Bar Mitzvah.
Basically it allows individuals and business to make claims that are not true, so long as it is in a context where the fact that is propaganda is clear.
So, (sorry Kurt Russel) when a car dealer says that they have miles of cars, it's OK, or when you say that a horror movie wopn't scare you, it will f%$# you up for life, or that the beer you drink will lead you to hook up to the Swedish bikini team, it's OK. (Also Joe Isuzu)
On the other hand, making specific verifiable misstatements, for example, claiming that your car gets 100 mpg when it get 12 mpg, is false advertising and fraud.
If you’ve ever wondered how businesses can get away with making transparently false or deceptive claims about themselves or their products — “The Best Tasting Juice in America,” Wrigley’s gum is “for whiter teeth, no matter what,” etc., etc. — the answer is an all-purpose legal dodge known as the “puffery” defense.
Simply put, judges and regulators have ruled that when a business makes a claim that is either vague or so obviously inflated that people simply won’t believe it, that’s “puffery,” and not actionable in court.
Wells Fargo, which is struggling to rebuild its reputation for integrity after a string of scandals involving consumer rip-offs, is testing the limits of the “puffery” defense. In a legal filing last week aimed at getting a shareholder lawsuit dismissed, the company asserted that statements that the bank was working to “restore trust” among its customers and “trying to be more transparent” about its scandals — statements made by its chief executive, Tim Sloan — were, well, just puffery.
………
“This is just another example of corporate actors making statements to the market, and then trying to avoid liability for the representations they made,” says Darren Robbins, the San Diego lawyer bringing the shareholder suit.
If it sounds like a strange thing for a bank to say when it’s trying to present itself as a paragon of rectitude — in essence, “We can’t be sued because no one believed us anyway” — just wait. It gets stranger.
………
The lawsuit at issue concerns a scandal that erupted in public in July 2017, when it became known that for years Wells Fargo had been charging auto loan borrowers for unnecessary insurance on their vehicles. The lawsuit seeks class certification for all investors who bought the company’s stock from Nov. 3, 2016 — when Sloan announced at an investors conference that he was “not aware” of any undisclosed scandals in sales practices — through Aug. 3, 2018, the day before the bank formally disclosed the auto-loan issues in an earnings report.
………
Regulators are justifiably furious. In April, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency folded in the auto loan case with an investigation of improper fees Wells Fargo charged to mortgage applicants, and penalized the bank $1 billion for both. It was one of the largest bank fines in history.
………
What about Wells Fargo’s repeated assurances that it is moving heaven and earth to be more transparent and regain customers’ trust?
That’s where “puffery” comes in. The defense most commonly arises in connection with advertising, as when the Federal Trade Commission investigates whether an advertising claim is deceptive. Over the years, courts have given businesses ever more latitude to make extravagant claims.
Ultimately, puffery has become defined as “advertising claims that ordinary consumers do not take seriously, as the Harvard Business Review observed a few years ago. But if that’s so, then what’s the point of advertising?
A couple of things here that are important to note:
They were making statements about THEIR OWN BEHAVIOR, and explicitly stating that they would not do things that would put them in regulatory crosshairs ever again, and that they would pursue bad actors in their firm and remove them.
This was not an advertisement. IT WAS A STATEMENT TO SHAREHOLDERS, and as such was a deliberate omission of material facts about the health of the company.
Just try them, convict them, and make them forfeit all their ill gotten gains, and be done with it.
Before you ask, I know that Batman is DC and not Marvel, and that he was created by Bob Kane (Eli Katz) and Bill (Milton) Finger.
I'm just doing a bit of light hearted trolling, as Lee did at the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, when, at the end of the comic, Lee and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) wrote themselves in as gate crashers given the heave-ho by Nick Fury.
It's Lee and Kirby doing what every reader of that issue wanted to do: Get thrown out of the superhero wedding of the year.
Batman crying is a sort of an homage to Lee's sometimes mischievous sense of humor.
In case you are wondering, Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber), Kane, Kirby and Finger were all Jewish.
In a quick perusal of comic book artists of that era, it appears that the only one who wasn't Jewish was Steve Ditko, whose religion was unclear, but given his Czech origins, he was probably born Catholic.
Injunction denied. That’s the decision Monday from a Broward Circuit Court judge at an emergency hearing involving a lawsuit filed by Florida Governor Rick Scott, asking to impound ballots and machines at the Broward Election office. Instead of granting the injunction, Judge Jack Tuter suggested the addition of three additional armed Broward Sheriff’s Deputies at election headquarters who do not report directly to Elections Supervisor Dr. Brenda Snipes, like other deputies do. Judge Tuter allowed the attorneys to meet privately and come up with a plan that everyone could agree on and when court reconvened, all sides agreed to the suggested plan of three additional deputies. One will monitor cameras, one will monitors USB drives that contain votes and the third will be a supervisor who the other two report to. They will not report to the supervisor’s office. Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s U.S. Senate campaign filed two new lawsuits Sunday, one demanding law enforcement impound and secure voting machines, tallies and ballots in Broward and Palm Beach counties any time they were not actively in use.
I get that the Republicans define vote fraud as, "Whenever I lose," and I am glad that the judge saw through that bullsh%$.
The only illegal voting in Florida that I am aware of is actually in heavily Republican Bay County, which allowed some voters displaced by Hurricane Michael to vote via email.
Most of America's 9,000 7-Eleven stores are owned by franchisees, many of them immigrants; the owners' contracts with 7-Eleven corporate allows the company to pull their franchises if they violate US law.
The current CEO of 7-Eleven is Joe DePinto, a West Point grad who got the job in 2005 and has spent his tenure slowly tightening the screw on franchisees, demanding business practices that return more profit to corporate HQ at the expense of the independent operators. As the franchisees have felt the sting, they've fought back, suing the company over DePinto's policies.
DePinto has become legendary for his dirty tricks campaign to get rid of his least-favored franchisees, from hiring private eyes to making secret recordings.
Now the franchisees allege that DePinto has started snitching on his own franchisees to ICE, directing government immigration raids against 7-Eleven stores. If these franchise owners are found to have illegally hired undocumented immigrants, DePinto can cancel their franchise agreements and kick them out of the business and take over their stores.
Obviously, some 7-Eleven stores have probably hired illegals, but using INS to settle scores so that you can cheat your franchise holders?
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized for the government’s decision in 1939 to turn away a ship full of Jewish refugees who had escaped Nazi Germany. “Today I rise to issue a long-overdue apology to the Jewish refugees Canada turned away,” Trudeau said Wednesday in a speech to Parliament Canada denied asylum to the 907 German Jews on board the MS St. Louis when it arrived on its shores. Cuba and the United States also denied entry to the refugees and, after they returned to Europe, about one-quarter of those on board died in the Holocaust. “In 1939, Canada turned its back on 907 Jewish refugees, deeming them unworthy of a home, and undeserving of our help. Today, I issue an official apology on behalf of the Government of Canada to the passengers of the MS St. Louis and their families for this injustice,” he said in both English and French. “While decades have passed since we turned our backs on Jewish refugees, time has by no means absolved Canada of its guilt or lessened the weight of our shame,” he said.
Words now are cheap.
I'm not sure how to make things right, or if it is even possible, but hopefully some lessons learned.
Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema opened up a lead Saturday night over Republican rival Martha McSally in the U.S. Senate race in Arizona as officials count mail-in ballots, raising the prospects of Democrats winning a long-held GOP seat. Sinema now leads McSally 49.51 percent to 48.15 percent, according to results provided by election officials at 7 p.m. Eastern time Saturday. The two congresswomen were separated by 28,673 ballots cast statewide, with a Green Party candidate lagging far behind. More than 2.1 million votes were cast. The contest is to replace retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, one of the more outspoken Republican critics of President Trump. Without any evidence, President Trump suggested foul play in the Arizona vote count in a tweet on Friday: “Just out — in Arizona, SIGNATURES DON’T MATCH. Electoral corruption — Call for a new Election? We must protect our Democracy!” the president tweeted. In response, Flake tweeted: “There is no evidence of ‘electoral corruption’ in Arizona, Mr. President. Thousands of dedicated Arizonans work in a non-partisan fashion every election cycle to ensure that every vote is counted. We appreciate their service.”
It's still not certain, Arizona has a large proportion of vote by mail ballots, but it looks promising, though Sinema has recently been very Blue Dog, so she is the definition of winning poorly.
Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner has formally ordered a machine recount in three statewide races: U.S. Senate, Governor and Agriculture Commissioner. “I hereby order the canvassing boards responsible for canvassing [the three races] to conduct a machine recount of the votes cast in the race,” reads an order from Detzner sent to elections supervisors in all 67 Florida counties. Separate orders were sent for each race subject to a recount. The Secretary of State’s office also sent procedures to be followed for the machine recount. Totals as of 12:30 on Saturday shows Republican Senate candidate Rick Scott leading incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson by 12,562, Republican Gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis beating Democrat Andrew Gillum by 33,684 votes, and Democratic Agriculture Commissioner candidate Nikki Fried ahead of Republican Matt Caldwell by 5,326 votes. All three races fall within the 0.5 percent margin to trigger a statewide recount. For now, only a machine recount has been orders and that remains the focus of elections officials.
Once again, I do find it odd that every time we examine elections in the Sunshine State, EVERY error cuts in favor of the Republicans.
It has been known for some time that the Vampire Squid (Goldman Sachs) was heavily involved in the the Malaysian government's fabulously corrupt 1MDB sovereign wealth fund.
Years before Goldman Sachs Group Inc. arranged bond deals now at the heart of globe-spanning corruption probes, the firm’s then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein personally helped forge ties with Malaysia and its new sovereign wealth fund, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Blankfein was the unidentified high-ranking Goldman Sachs executive referenced in U.S. court documents who attended a 2009 meeting with the former Malaysian prime minister, the people said. The meeting was arranged with the help of men who are now tied to the subsequent plundering of the 1MDB fund, according to U.S. court documents unsealed last week.
………
The high-level gathering laid the groundwork for a relationship that would prove profitable for the investment bank. Since then, the use of $6.5 billion that Goldman raised for 1MDB has sparked investigations across several nations, and entangled the U.S. bank in a high-profile corruption probe
This is not a surprise.
Laundering ill-gotten gains is a major profit center for big finance, but their involvement in 1MDB is downright criminal.
In fact, they were doing so well before the repeal, because the FCC didn't have time to find and fine them.
Capitalism at its finest:
US cellphone networks are all throttling video to some extent, providing lower-quality stream to their customers, and some are purposefully undermining Skype as an alternative to their services.
That’s the upshot of a ten-month study by Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science set up to see what impact, if any, the end of net neutrality rules had had only ordinary users.
On the pure question of whether the FCC's decision toscrap its own rules has changed cellphone operators' behavior, the answer is no, they haven't – they were throttling before and they have continued to do so.
However, the authors note that such throttling was actually banned under the previous rules. So it was likely the case that there was not enough time for the FCC's enforcement department to clamp down on that behavior before the rules were rescinded.
As to the throttling itself, intriguingly it is not consistent across video providers or operators, suggesting that there may be deals between certain mobile phone networks and certain video streaming companies to let their videos pass through unthrottled.
And if that's the case, then of course there is a pressure point that cellular networks can use to extract money from video companies – which is exactly what net neutrality advocates are concerned about. But there is no smoking gun as such.
Demand and supply
It could be that the throttling is activated to tackle network congestion: as available bandwidth is consumed by people streaming and downloading stuff over the airwaves, operators may limit speeds to ensure an even level of quality-of-service for everyone in a particular cell, neighborhood, or city.
What is worrying, though, is the fact that some mobile operators are throttling a clear competitor in the form of Skype. Sprint seems to be the worst offender but Boost was also seen to be throttling the voice-and-video streaming service.
FYI, Boost is Sprint, in the US at least, so the rat-f%$#ery is actually from the same company.
Rule one of telecommunications and last-mile connectivity providers are that they contemptible greed-heads who need to be kept on a short leash.
Bill Gates believes the world needs better toilets.
Specifically, toilets that improve hygiene, don’t have to connect to sewage systems at all and can break down human waste into fertilizer.
So on Tuesday in Beijing, Mr. Gates held the Reinvented Toilet Expo, a chance for companies to showcase their takes on the simple bathroom fixture. Companies showed toilets that could separate urine from other waste for more efficient treatment, that recycled water for hand washing and that sported solar roofs.
Two points:
Toilets need to be more reliable than you average machine.
Bill Gates only qualification to be an "expert" s that he's obscenely rich, which something profoundly f%$#ed up about our society.
This sounds like it will make the F-35 debacle look like the Skunk Works:
Very little has changed in the configuration and performance of airlifter and air-refueling aircraft since the mid-1950s. Lockheed Martin’s C-5A dramatically expanded payload volume in 1968, and Boeing’s C-17 introduced a strategic airlifter with the ability to make short takeoffs and landings on unprepared runways. Besides those improvements, the U.S. Air Force’s mobility mission has been almost untouched by the survivability requirements that drove radical changes to the design and operation of fighters, bombers and intelligence-gathering aircraft in the last half-century. As Air Force planners now embark on the early stages of a process to acquire a new class of refuelers and airlifters over the next two decades, there is a clear emphasis on designs that overcome the vulnerability of existing aircraft to detection and interception. That potential shift in the requirements follows a new strategy of air warfare that transforms the role of mobility aircraft from a purely supporting one to an active part in combat operations as forward-based command-and-control nodes and even strike platforms.
And in case you are wondering just how far overboard the USAF is planning to go, have a slice of this guaranteed winner in the next bullsh%$ bingo competition:
It is a transformation that senior Air Force officials are still trying to socialize with the community of cargo and tanker crews. Underscoring the unfolding transition was a key theme of Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein’s address at the Airlift Tanker Association (ATA) annual conference on Oct. 26. “I had the chance to fly the KC-46 a few weeks ago,” Goldfein said before several hundred ATA members. “But what I strapped on was not an aircraft. What I flew was a node in our future network, [with] computing capacity that we can connect at the speed of light to other platforms, sensors and weapons to bring creative solutions to the fight.”
If they are at this level of complete bullsh%$ at this stage of the program, this presages a Death Star sized debacle.
And it now appears that soon to be former Texas judge Glenn Devlin is the most Florida man judge in all of Texas, whichis remarkable, because he had to beat out the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which has assumed facts not in evidence in order to execute a guy.
Devlin was defeated for reelection, largely because he had a policy of sending an inordinate number of black and brown children to juvie.
After losing his bench in a Democratic sweep, Harris County Juvenile Court Judge Glenn Devlin released nearly all of the youthful defendants that appeared in front him on Wednesday morning, simply asking the kids whether they planned to kill anyone before letting them go.
"He was releasing everybody," said public defender Steven Halpert, who watched the string of surprising releases. "Apparently he was saying that's what the voters wanted."
In court, prosecutors voiced their concerns about the seemingly indiscriminate release of those accused of everything from low-level misdemeanors to violent crimes.
………
In total, at least seven kids were released, prosecutors said, including four facing aggravated robbery charges.
………
The longtime Republican jurist — whose seat was among 59 swept by Democrats in Tuesday's election — is one of two juvenile court judges in Harris County whose track records favoring incarceration contributed heavily to doubling the number of kids Harris County sent to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department in recent years, even as those figures fell in the rest of the state.
Houston Chronicle investigation last month found that Devlin and Judge John Phillips accounted for more than one-fifth of all children sent to the state's juvenile prisons last year. The two jurists not only sent more teens to juvenile prison, but they also sent them younger and for less-serious offenses than the county's third juvenile court, where Judge Mike Schneider presides.
……… With the dust still settling from a massive shake-up in the local judiciary, Devlin showed up for Wednesday's detention hearing docket apparently ready to surprise. ……… Criminal justice advocates, however, were critical of the decision.
"Judge Devlin appears to be abdicating the basic responsibility of any sitting juvenile judge," said Elizabeth Henneke of the Lone Star Justice Alliance, a group that works to get young people out of the justice system and into treatment programs.
It being Twitter, some asshat with the name of Jo Offord took exception, and in a since deleted Tweet, replied, "Harry, brave young men died so that idiots like you would have the freedom to spout your rubbish. Be more respectful."
A former U.S. Marine machine gunner who may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder burst into a Thousand Oaks bar packed with college students late Wednesday night, tossed a smoke bomb into the crowd and opened fire, authorities said.
Eleven people were killed, in addition to a sheriff’s sergeant responding to the scene who was gunned down by the assailant minutes later. ………
The suspected gunman, Ian David Long, was found dead of a gunshot wound in a back room at the bar. The amount of blood inside the bar made it difficult to tell whether he shot himself or was killed by law enforcement, Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said. ……… The bar’s patrons also frequent the Stagecoach country music festival in
Indio, and some were also survivors of the mass shooting at the Route
91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas that left 58 dead last year.
This was not a slip of the tongue. This was a not particularly subtle appeal to supporters of the racist National Front, because he is concerned that his policy of f%$#ing the average French worker like a drunk sorority girl will lead to a further rise Marine Le Pen which would threaten his hold on power.
It is a chickensh%$ move from a chickensh%$ politician:
Something tells me that this was not caused by Trump suddenly "discovering" that Session is an unrepentant racist:
Senior Republicans led a chorus of public warnings that the special counsel Robert Mueller must be allowed to continue his Russia investigation after Donald Trump finally fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
As Trump replaced Sessions with a senior aide, Matthew Whitaker, a critic of Mueller’s inquiry, Senator Susan Collins was amongst the first Republicans to warn: “It is imperative that the Administration not impede the Mueller investigation … Special Counsel Mueller must be allowed to complete his work without interference.”
Mitt Romney, who won the race on Tuesday to become a senator for Utah, aimed his first broadside at Trump, tweeting: “It is imperative that the important work of the Justice Department continues, and that the Mueller investigation proceeds to its conclusion unimpeded.”
Yeah, like the Mueller investigation is going to be unimpeded.
If I were Mueller, I'd find a pumpkin in which to stash a memory stick of his work to date.
Please don't rehabilitate Jeff Sessions because Trump fired him, he remains an evil racist demagogue.
This blog is a place to put my stream of consciousness thoughts about life, politics, technology, and cats.
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I find that if I wait until year's end I miss stuff from earlier in the year.
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