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FOCUS: So I Called Trump a Dotard First. I Won't Be Suing Kim Jong-un. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Sunday, 24 September 2017 10:33 |
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Pierce writes: "I am glad that I am in general good
health - albeit sans gallbladder - because, were I really sick, what's
going on in Congress right now would probably kill me where I stand."
Kim Jong-un. (photo: Getty Images)
So I Called Trump a Dotard First. I Won't Be Suing Kim
Jong-un.
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
24 September 17
 am glad that I am in general good health—albeit sans gallbladder—because, were I really sick, what’s going on in Congress right now would probably kill me where I stand. In case you missed it, on Friday afternoon, John McCain announced that he would be standing up his BFF Lindsey Graham and the latter’s dog’s breakfast of a healthcare bill. If McCain is sincere, and who the hell knows at this point, then the Graham-Cassidy-Johnson-Heller-Pol-Pot healthcare bill is as dead as Kelsey’s nuts. From CNN:
"I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal," the Arizona Republican said in a statement. "I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will (affect) insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won't be available by the end of the month, we won't have reliable answers to any of those questions."
This also lets Lisa Murkowski off the hook, and it makes it more likely (for the moment) that a general flight away from the bill will occur. (What would be the point now of, say, Rob Portman’s voting for it? Of course, we said that the last time, too.) I wish I felt confident that this was the end of things for a while, but I’m not. I think even a bipartisan fix to the Affordable Care Act is likely to put people’s lives in peril. And since that’s been only a tangential concern to the congressional majorities in Washington, it’s unlikely that will change after they get their heads handed to them again.
OK, here’s the thing. Any regular at the shebeen knows how much fun we all have with Irish pejoratives and arcane English. So we were pretty happy when Kim Jong-un cracked open what apparently was a 1922 edition of the OED and called the president a “dotard.” Of course, we sometimes forget what we say in the shebeen and so it came as some surprise that we had gotten there back in May, long before young Kim dug it out.
He's not up to the job. This should be obvious by now. The most innocent explanation for the president*'s actions is that he's a blundering dotard who can't stop himself from destroying democratic institutions and from tripping over federal statutes.
I’m not going to push him on the west Asian rights to it. My old grandmother always said never to make trouble for chubby little men with bad haircuts, nerve gas, and nuclear weapons. But if he calls the president* an omadhaun, he’s hearing from my lawyers.
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WWOZ Pick to Click: “Alligator Crawl” (Freddie Keppard): Yeah, I still pretty much still love New Orleans.
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Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is North Korea, playing Chile to a 1-1 draw in the 1966 World Cup. The “deserved equalizer” was a real, well, rocket. Looks like it was a pretty good game, although the fans in Middleborough look like they had something better to do that day. History is so cool.
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The discovery upon autopsy that Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriots tight end who killed himself in his jail cell, had the symptoms of CTE is going to be more than simply a fountainhead of bad red hot sportz takez. His family is planning to sue just about every institution that hired him to play the game, and every institution tasked with overseeing them. I predict quick settlements because nobody wants this to proceed to discovery, but the teams and the governing bodies had better D up here, because, as the Hernandez case proves, CTE sufferers don’t exclusively kill themselves, and there are going to be hundreds more of them as the years go by.
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Drip.
Also, drip, drip, drip. From USA Today:
According to the FBI, as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned or targeted by Russia. There's no evidence of votes changed. But given the stakes, some state agencies that run elections are trying to curb any further interference prior to mid-term elections in November. Their tool of choice: Ensuring systems can't be hacked, and if they are, making those breaches immediately obvious. To do this, some are taking the unusual move of rewinding the technological dial, debating measures that would add paper ballots — similar to how many Americans voted before electronic voting started to become widespread in the 1980s.
Good idea, except, in the highlighted section, the newspaper misspelled “obvious.”
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Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Popular Science? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
But first…
Per usual, fossilized feces came to the rescue.
As we hope it will in Congress. But we continue.
See, it wasn’t just decayed plant matter that these paleontologists found—it was shellfish too. And that seemed a little weird, given that these animals were thought to be strict herbivores. It might also seem odd if you have a mental image of crustaceans as exclusively marine in nature. Were these ornithiscians harvesting mollusks from the sea floor? Were there bird-hipped diving dinos that sold their fishy goods in exchange for rotten wood snacks? Sadly, no. Ancient crustaceans also lived on land, often in or on decaying trees, where land-dwelling creatures were free to munch on them. It’s possible that these shellfish were only ingested accidentally, when the dinos tried to eat delicious old logs. It’s more likely, though, that it was intentional. These crustaceans weren’t tiny little buggers that could have been swallowed like a pill—each was somewhere between 20 and 60 percent of the width of an ornithiscian mouth. It would be hard to not notice something of that size. That fact, combined with the sheer number of poops found to contain crustacean shells, means that these dinos were probably going after the protein intentionally.
I am glad there are good people doing this work. I am glad I am not one of them. Dinosaurs lived then to make us—and them—happy now.
The Committee knew that the post about the interesting people with whom Camp Runamuck has staffed the Department of Agriculture would be a deep vein of prime USDA snark. Top Commenter Dona Sirk didn’t disappoint. Wonder if he pass the USDA inspection? Ham bone, pork loin, Ground Round. I’m giving you exactly 15 months to stop making meat jokes about Sam Clovis. I’m serious here but, in the meantime, here are 70.01 Beckhams to keep you company. I’ll be down here all weekend. I should have some interesting things to report on Monday. I’m on this here panel on Sunday. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, and don’t call anyone a dotard because Kim’s lawyers are on speed-dial and those stubby fingers can really move, folks.
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Russia's Interference in Our Election Was an Unprecedented Attack on Our Democracy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Sunday, 24 September 2017 08:35 |
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Reich writes: "Facebook today announced that it's
turning over information on 3,000 political advertisements bought
through Russian accounts to congressional investigators."
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Russia's Interference in Our Election Was an
Unprecedented Attack on Our Democracy
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
24 September 17
 acebook today announced that it's turning over information on 3,000 political advertisements bought through Russian accounts to congressional investigators. Earlier this month the social media platform revealed that a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin created at least 470 fake accounts on the site and purchased $100,000 in political advertisements targeting U.S. voters ahead of the election. Facebook also plans to continue to investigate the extent of Russian interference.
The information could have big implications for Trump and his associates. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has also obtained a search warrant to review Facebook's records. In order to obtain a search warrant, Mueller had to prove to a judge that there's good reason to believe a crime was committed on the site by foreign operatives. If anyone within the Trump campaign was aware of the criminal activity, they could be charge with aiding and abetting a crime. Mueller and congressional investigators will now review the records for any suspicious connections.
Russia's interference in our election was an unprecedented attack on our democracy, and anyone who aided in their efforts needs to be held accountable.
What do you think?
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Tom Price Sure Knows a Lot About Waste, Fraud and Abuse |
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Sunday, 24 September 2017 08:33 |
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Excerpt: "In recent years, few members of Congress were
as outspoken as Republican Tom Price on the urgent need to bring
discipline to what he called Washington's 'reckless spending.' It seems
Mr. Price, formerly a congressman from suburban Atlanta and now
secretary of health and human services, was studying that culture all
too carefully."
Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: HHS Inspector General Is Investigating
Price's Travel on Private Charter Planes
Tom Price Sure Knows a Lot About Waste, Fraud and Abuse
By Editorial, The Washington Post
24 September 17
N RECENT years, few members of Congress were as outspoken as Republican Tom Price on the urgent need to bring discipline to what he called Washington’s “reckless spending.” It seems Mr. Price, formerly a congressman from suburban Atlanta and now secretary of health and human services, was studying that culture all too carefully.
Last week, Mr. Price spent roughly $25,000 on a private charter jet for a round-trip journey from Washington to Philadelphia, according to a detailed report in Politico. The same trip on a commercial flight, leaving at nearly the same time, would have cost less than $1,000 per ticket. Amtrak makes the trip twice every hour during the day at an even lower price — and D.C.’s Union Station is about an eight-minute drive from Mr. Price’s office. On the speedy Acela, the trip takes 90 minutes. Taking into account travel to the airport, Mr. Price might very well have saved not just thousands of dollars by taking the train, but also time.
The back-and-forth trips to Philadelphia were among at least two dozen such flights Mr. Price took since May, at a likely cost to taxpayers in the range of $300,000, Politico reported. Mr. Price seems to think it’s his birthright to use private charter planes to jet around the continental United States.
After Democrats expressed outrage — Republicans, those avatars of prudent stewardship of taxpayer dollars, were mostly mum — a spokeswoman for Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson told The Post that Mr. Price’s travel will be the subject of an investigation.
An HHS spokesman defended Mr. Price’s travel arrangements as justified by his “extremely demanding schedule.” Poor fellow! As if Washington were not amply stocked with people as busy as the self-important Mr. Price, most of whom somehow scrape by on commercial transportation. The Obama-era HHS secretaries who preceded Mr. Price, Kathleen Sebelius and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, with very few exceptions, flew commercially around the continental United States. They also had “extremely demanding schedules.”
Mr. Price previously attracted notice for commending police in West Virginia after they arrested a reporter who had the temerity to intrude on his sublime sense of serenity by asking him a few questions about health-care policy as he walked through the State Capitol; he said the arrest was justified because the questions had not been posed in a news conference. Alarmingly for Mr. Price’s well-being, the charge against the reporter was dropped.
Mr. Price for years styled himself as a warrior against waste, fraud and abuse. By excelling at waste and abuse, he seems determined to prove himself the fraud.
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Facebook's Ad Scandal Isn't a 'Fail,' It's a Feature |
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Sunday, 24 September 2017 08:32 |
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"What does it take to advertise on Facebook to people
who openly call themselves 'Jew haters' and want to know 'how to burn
Jews'? About $10 and 15 minutes, according to what the investigative
nonprofit ProPublica recently uncovered."
Facebook. (photo: Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
Facebook's Ad Scandal Isn't a 'Fail,' It's a Feature
By Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times
24 September 17
 hat does it take to advertise on Facebook to people who openly call themselves “Jew haters” and want to know “how to burn Jews”? About $10 and 15 minutes, according to what the investigative nonprofit ProPublica recently uncovered.
After much outcry over this revelation, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, called the anti-Semitic ad targeting “a fail on our part,” promised to put more human reviewers in place, and said the company “never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way — and that is on us.”
Some of Facebook’s users may find it even harder to accept what happened. How could the site that we use to keep in touch with friends and family, share baby pictures, and keep up with politics and volunteer work be made so easily to cater to the interests of Nazis?
READ MORE
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epresentative John Conyers and Senator Bernie Sanders have introduced the most important legislation I have ever seen. It may not pass in my lifetime, but it will save lives when it does. 
