Patterico's Pontifications

3/5/2021

Weekend Open Thread

Filed under: General — Dana @ 8:55 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Here are a few news items to chew over. Please feel free to post anything that might be of interest to readers. Remember to include links.

First news item

California governor seems determined to help the Recall Newsom campaign:

California’s health department on Thursday started recommending that residents “double mask” to better protect from the spread of the coronavirus.

While the state doesn’t require wearing two masks over each other, Gov. Gavin Newsom said people who use cloth face coverings are encouraged to do so.

“We are encouraging people basically to double down on mask wearing, particularly in light of all of what I would argue is bad information coming from at least four states in this country,” Newsom said. “We will not be walking down their path. We’re mindful of your health and our future.”

Second news item

CDC eases COVID restrictions at migrant shelters:

The Centers for Disease Control is allowing shelters handling child migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border to expand to full capacity, abandoning a requirement that they stay near 50% to inhibit the spread of the coronavirus, Axios has learned.

…The fact that the country’s premier health advisory agency is permitting a change in COVID-19 protocols indicates the scale of the immigration crisis. A draft memo obtained by Axios conceded “facilities should plan for and expect to have COVID-19 cases.”

American parents and their children still at home have questions:

While it states in its opening paragraph that children have been less affected by the coronavirus than adults, the memo makes clear its recommendations are only in response to rising numbers of migrant children — and don’t apply to other group settings.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

The Biden administration is offering to reimburse local officials and nonprofits in Texas who are helping migrant families released from U.S. border custody by testing them for COVID-19 and providing them with shelter, according to a Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by CBS News.

But Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has rejected the proposal, alleging it amounts to an “illegal immigration program.”

The DHS memo says that qualified state, local and tribal agencies would be reimbursed for sheltering and COVID-19 testing of migrant parents and children who have been released from Border Patrol custody. It reasons that extended stays in U.S. Border Patrol facilities “are not conducive to the health and well-being of migrant families and adjacent communities.”…

Abbott said in a statement to CBS News that Texas would “not aid a program that makes our country a magnet for illegal immigration.”‘

Third news item

“Could raise constitutionality concerns?” Ya think???:

A bill that would require new cellphones and tablets sold in Utah to come with activated pornography filters won final approval in the state Legislature, although some lawmakers argued the proposal is unworkable and could raise constitutionality concerns.

Several years ago, Utah lawmakers passed a resolution that declared pornography a “public health crisis” and recognized the need for education, prevention, research and policy changes to control a “pornography epidemic.” Last year, legislators approved a bill to require that all pornography in Utah come with a warning label.

This year’s legislation, sponsored by South Jordan Republican Susan Pulsipher requires every new mobile device and tablet sold in Utah after Jan. 1, 2022, to have adult content filters turned on at the time of purchase. Pulsipher has said this requirement will assist parents who want to protect their children from harmful online content but don’t have the technological know-how to block it from their devices.

Fourth news item

Another red state toys with the First Amendment:

Texas governor Greg Abbott said Facebook and Twitter are leading a “dangerous movement to silence conservative voices and religious freedoms” as he backed a state bill Friday that would allow any Texans temporarily removed or banned from Facebook or Twitter to sue the social media companies in order to get reinstated.

“Big tech’s efforts to censor conservative viewpoints is un-American, and we are not going to allow it in the Lone Star State,” Abbott said.

Texas state Senator Bryan Hughes, who sponsored the bill and spoke along with Abbott, said that all the state wanted to do was protect the freedoms of its citizens. “We don’t allow a cable company to cut off your television because of your religion,” Hughes offered as a justification for the proposed law.

Fifth news item

A bit too on the nose:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo had someone else take his mandatory workplace sex harassment training course for him — then signed off on it as if he’d taken it himself, accuser Charlotte Bennett says in a bombshell new interview aired Friday night.

Sixth news item

Biden approves:

The President supports the compromise agreement, and is grateful to all the Senators who worked so hard to reach this outcome. It extends supplemental unemployment benefit into September, and helps the vast majority of unemployment insurance recipients avoid unanticipated tax bills. Most importantly, this agreement allows us to move forward on the urgently needed American Rescue Plan, with $1400 relief checks, funding we need to finish the vaccine rollout, open our schools, help those suffering from the pandemic, and more.”

Some party members less than happy:

“We obviously are now ultimately sending money to less people than the Trump administration,” Omar said. “This is not the promise that we made… Ultimately it is a failure when we compromise ourselves out of delivering on behalf of the American people and in keeping our propositions.”

Keilar asked, “You’re saying that Trump wanted to deliver more in the way of checks for Americans than Biden?”

“Yeah,” Omar said.

“The last checks that we were able to send had given, you know, 17 million more people than we will ultimately do with the caps now. And that, you know, is going to be something that we’re going to have to explain, and I don’t know if many of us have a logical explanation on why we are delivering less than what the Republicans were willing to compromise us on delivering on to the American people,” she added.

“We’re not going to be able to blame Republicans for our inability to deliver on the promises that we made.”

Seventh news item

Eight vote “no”:

One of President Biden’s top policy goals, an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, suffered a big setback Friday when eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus voted against it….Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Sen. Tom Carper, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Sen. Angus King (I-Maine)

Eighth news item

Republican Party restores tarnished image by focusing on what matter most:

Miscellaneous

Down to the bone in the Valley of Vision:

Lord, High and Holy, Meek and Lowly,

Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision,
where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights;
hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory.

Let me learn by paradox
that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.

Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells,
and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine;

Let me find thy light in my darkness,
thy life in my death,
thy joy in my sorrow,
thy grace in my sin,
thy riches in my poverty,
thy glory in my valley.

Making sure you leave the joint with a smile:

Have a good weekend.

–Dana

283 Responses to “Weekend Open Thread”

  1. Hello.

    Dana (fd537d)

  2. Texas governor Greg Abbott said Facebook and Twitter are leading a “dangerous movement to silence conservative voices and religious freedoms” as he backed a state bill Friday that would allow any Texans temporarily removed or banned from Facebook or Twitter to sue the social media companies in order to get reinstated.

    Well, hang on. As a certifiable right-wing nut-job I am never big on the idea of using the courts to harass companies whose terms of service you don’t like — but you know what? — given the ridiculous state of tort law these days and given the degrees to which social media companies are quite willing to bully the people whose opinions they don’t like, I’m not going to sweat Texas giving them a bad time. You think this is a case of a partisan state AG spending taxpayer resources going after a private company who should be protected from harassment? Well, where were you when California, New York, and other states where going after fossil fuel companies?

    JVW (ee64e4)

  3. As for the third news item, there are so many people in Utah who think that if they can just keep their kids–and adults, too, for that matter–in a bubble, everything will be okay.

    Guess what? For many of those kids, when they get their first taste of freedom they go ape-sh!t wild.

    As somebody who grew up in that culture, I now shudder at the whole notion of marrying somebody first, and then discovering if you are compatible at living together.

    norcal (01e272)

  4. Ha! Now I see talk on a BYU chat board about Utahns going out of state to buy their phones, just like they come to Nevada to gamble!

    I can’t link it, because it’s behind a pay wall.

    norcal (01e272)

  5. Having the parental controls automatically on is silly. And really, how many parents are out there at this point who can’t figure out how to turn them on?

    IANAL but I think that Texas’ law probably wouldn’t survive a legal challenge and I think Zuck might have more money than Texas should he want to fight.

    Nic (896fdf)

  6. Best comment from that board:

    One thing I really hate about lawmakers

    They seem to think unless they’re coming up with new laws to protect ourselves from ourselves, they aren’t doing their job.

    norcal (01e272)

  7. Hi Nic,

    How’s work at the school circus? 🙂

    norcal (01e272)

  8. I really, really hate raccoons. They damage my little koi pond and eat my fish. Motion sensors don’t work. Nor do those automated sprayers; the awful trash pandas like showers, apparently. They get past electric fencing with ease. I am seriously considering a grate that put down at night over the pond.

    I don’t want to kill them. I just want them to leave my yard alone. Awful little beasts.

    Simon Jester (28086e)

  9. I know a woman who had the same problem. She had her sons pee all around the koi pond. Then she complained about the smell!

    norcal (01e272)

  10. I think any porn filters or blocks would not only be seen as a direct challenge to every teenage boy, but with a little perseverance would be undone. Adults tend to underestimate just how remarkably tech savvy kids are today. It’s a challenge for school I.T. techs to keep up with high schoolers successfully getting behind blocks on school computers, so I can only imagine that, with time and privacy, how much easier it would be to find a work-around at home.

    Dana (fd537d)

  11. Simon Jester,

    That’s too bad. A grate or wire mesh sounds like a smart idea. We have a lot of them around here, too. I think they’re awfully cute, but I am also aware that they can be nasty and vicious when it comes to food. I’m reminded of the giant, brazen ones that would go after New Yorkers a few years back if they tried to keep them from their trash cans.

    Lol, norcal.

    Dana (fd537d)

  12. @Norcal@7 Hi norcal,

    My staff is angry hornets. The district is breaking part of the contract agreement that they signed with the teachers in order to get access to the start pre-April 1st money and they told the parents before they told the teachers AND told the parents that the teachers had agreed when no one had even told the teachers yet. I think the DO must’ve gotten a lot of blowback because they are doing a ton of damage control but, at the same time, they are still sending out communications to the parents that are blaming teachers for things they don’t have responsibility for and are um overly rosy in their ideas of what return to school will be like. Some of our teachers ARE our parents and it isn’t like they are keeping these communications secret from their co-workers so not only is the staff mad about being blamed, but is mad about the inaccurate picture the district is presenting which will result in the parents yelling at the teachers. Very Angry Hornets.

    Most of them did manage to get their first vaccine shots last week though, so there’s less anxiety about that part of things.

    Nic (896fdf)

  13. Well said, Dana.

    The funniest part is when Mormons try to squelch things so fervently, and all kinds of unintended consequences happen.

    Porn addiction is a real problem in Utah. Why? Because it’s so forbidden!

    There’s a running joke in Mormon culture about how wild the bishops’ daughters are.

    norcal (01e272)

  14. @Simon Jester @8 They are very smart critters (and my bet for the next sentient species if we manage to wipe ourselves out). Good luck!

    Nic (896fdf)

  15. @12 Hmm. I wonder if it was a calculated move by the district office to cause the parents to put pressure on the teachers.

    I’m glad they’re getting their shots.

    I have been greatly relieved since my mom got her shot. A year ago, I thought the virus would be coming for her.

    I’ve heard of families moving from California to Utah so that the children can attend school. Some do it so their kids can play high school sports. Seems like a lot to go through to me.

    norcal (01e272)

  16. @Norcal @15

    Oh, it almost certainly was a calculated move by the DO and the teachers know it and are, um, quite vocal about it.

    My parents got their sets of shots and are in the clear now too. Which I am very relieved about. I’m glad your mom is good to go!

    I moved around quite a bit as a kid and I can’t say I would recommend moving a kid in the middle of (probably) high school. If you have kids that have good, established friend groups, disrupting those by moving can cause things to go downhill very quickly.

    How’s the car? Is the weather good enough for cruising yet? 😛

    Nic (896fdf)

  17. Nic,

    Now you’re talking my language!

    I’m in love with this car. You should hear the growl when it starts up. It sounds much more ferocious than my 2007 Mustang GT. It has 460 horsepower as opposed to 300 for the 2007, and yet it gets the same or slightly better gas mileage on the highway! This might be because the newer Mustangs have 10-speed automatic transmissions. I thought long and hard about what color I wanted, and decided on Velocity Blue. It’s the prettiest shade of blue I’ve ever seen. Photos don’t do it justice. It has to be seen in person.

    I find driving so fun now. The other day I just drove it around town. No destination. Reno has a road called McCarran Boulevard that circles the city. In the daytime it can take an hour to do a lap. I did it at night, so it was only 36 minutes.

    There are three stereo options on the Mustang. I got the top one. It sounds wonderful as I’m cruising.

    I’ve never had satellite radio before, but this car has a one-year subscription included with it. I love getting crystal-clear reception wherever I go. On my drive across the country I listened to a lot of Howard Stern. He’s entertaining, and I didn’t get tired listening to him because he doesn’t dispense a lot of heavy information, if you know what I mean. Yes, he can be vulgar, but I realized that he feels an important niche in society, because people need an outlet from polite, formal culture.

    I’m leery of driving it “over the hill”, as we say here in Reno. It means going to California. I’ve been caught off guard by weather in the Sierras before. I’m planning a trip to Utah sometime in the spring. I had to remind my mom that spring is a three-month period that ends in June. I gotta nip that stuff in the bud, before my mom starts telling people I’ll be there at the end of the month. 🙂

    norcal (01e272)

  18. fills, not feels

    norcal (01e272)

  19. It only took a month for Biden to make a mess at the border. Tell us, Biden fans, how Trump did nothing. Tell us how you don’t own it. Pathetic.

    JF (3efb60)

  20. JF,

    There are trade-offs, to be sure. I’m a hawk on immigration, but the mess at the border pales in comparison to Trump’s kiss-my-ring corruption, cult of personality, Big Lie about the election, and attempted coup.

    norcal (01e272)

  21. @Norcal@17 Sounds like a great time. I definitely wouldn’t recommend driving down the hill this weekend. It’s pouring outside my window right now so the Sierras are probably a mess or will be shortly.

    Nic (896fdf)

  22. I double mask because so many at convenience stores don’t wear any face covering. Unfortunetly in my state it is illegal to pepper spray people who don’t wear masks.

    asset (5de508)

  23. I read How the Grinch Stole Christmas to my daughters so many times when they were little that I have it memorized, even now, when they’re 32 and 29.

    “Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot,
    But the Grinch, who lived just North of Whoville, did not! . . . .”

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  24. What’s cheesecake in Utah, anyway? Above the knee and/or sleeveless?

    I know one couple was being prosecuted because they let their eleven-year old see the stepmom’s bare breasts. And I have read, by a writer claiming to be a Mormon, that a Mormon married couple could go all their life without seeing each other nude.

    nk (1d9030)

  25. norcal wrote:

    One thing I really hate about lawmakers

    They seem to think unless they’re coming up with new laws to protect ourselves from ourselves, they aren’t doing their job.

    Alas! This isn’t limited to legislators. It seems that every business school graduate believes that he must Change Something, frequently, or he’s going to be seen as not doing his job and get fired.

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  26. Mr Jester wrote:

    I really, really hate raccoons. They damage my little koi pond and eat my fish. Motion sensors don’t work. Nor do those automated sprayers; the awful trash pandas like showers, apparently. They get past electric fencing with ease. I am seriously considering a grate that put down at night over the pond.

    I don’t want to kill them. I just want them to leave my yard alone. Awful little beasts.

    It was January of 2001, around 6:30 in the morning at the concrete plant. A mother raccoon and her babies had gotten in the dumpster, looking for food, and couldn’t get back out. The dumpster had a few inches of very cold water in the bottom, and would have soon killed the babies. I fetched a 2 x 6, and put it down in the dumpster, as a ramp, which mom and all of her babies then used as a path out.

    All except for one, that is. So the loader operator, who had rubber boots on, borrowed my welding gloves — because raccoons have sharp teeth — climbed into the dumpster, and picked up the baby, setting him halfway up the ramp, so that he finally got the idea. Mama was sitting on the concrete wall just a hair higher than the top of the dumpster, watching the whole thing, and seemed to realize what was going on. Baby got to the top, and then mama took them all toddling away.

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  27. To the degree that the means of communication are privately-owned, those owners impose usage filters, and the ownership becomes consolidated, the first amendment is a dead letter. A government, which has the power to prevent such concentration, but does not, is complicit in the censorship.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  28. A commenter who is an asset to this blog wrote:

    I double mask because so many at convenience stores don’t wear any face covering. Unfortunetly in my state it is illegal to pepper spray people who don’t wear masks.

    Which raises the obvious question: were it not illegal, would you use chemical weapons against someone not wearing a mask?

    If Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) had asked Kentuckians to wear face masks to slow the spread of COVID-19, I would have willingly complied. Had Mr Beshear, seeing that the General Assembly passed new laws to rein in his claimed ’emergency’ executive authority, gone along with the new state laws, and asked the state legislature to approve extensions of his executive orders, I wouldn’t be so pissed off. Had the Governor tried to work out his differences with the legislature, as Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd asked him to do, I wouldn’t be so upset.

    Instead, the Governor responded, “See you in court,” showing his utter contempt for democracy. No, he ordered Kentuckians to wear masks, and just stated that Kentucky will not be repealing its mask mandate anytime soon.

    Am I upset? Hell, yes, I am, totally pissed off, actually shaking with rage.

    The virus has produced a slew of petty dictators, governing by decree, with the American sheeple laying down and saying, “It is good.”

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  29. If it were Chicago, I would ask which alderman’s wife spouse has the local franchise for installing the approved parental control filter.

    (And, no, I am not exaggerating. There is Commerce Clause case they (used to) teach in law school where the Secretary of State imposed a specific kind of mudguard on trucks and he owned the only factory that made them.)

    nk (1d9030)

  30. Mr M wrote:

    To the degree that the means of communication are privately-owned, those owners impose usage filters, and the ownership becomes consolidated, the first amendment is a dead letter. A government, which has the power to prevent such concentration, but does not, is complicit in the censorship.

    At what point do these huge private companies become public utilities? Attempts at government regulation of the internet — net neutrality, anyone? — are pushing the various providers toward utility status.

    If Joe Schmuckatella was a hard core racist, a Klansman, would the telephone service providers in his area be allowed to deny him telephone service because he might call someone and say something racist, or even urge some sort of racist action?

    There are issues here, because no one doubts that The New York Times is not required print every OpEd submission made to them, but the internet has allowed anyone who wishes to publish whatever he wants.

    If Gab and Parler can ever begin to reach the same number of people as Twitter and Facebook, I might see it differently. If President [shudder!] Biden had his tweets published on Parler and Gab as well, it could be said that he is communicating with everyone equally.

    Censorship is never the answer. And if Twitter and Facebook can command so much of the internet, they would seem to run afoul of monopoly laws.

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  31. At what point do these huge private companies become public utilities?

    At the point where
    1)they use the government’s eminent domain power to take private property for their tracks, stations, towers, poles, and lines, and
    2) they are the only ones allowed to do that.

    nk (1d9030)

  32. Our Windy City barrister wrote:

    At what point do these huge private companies become public utilities?

    At the point where
    1)they use the government’s eminent domain power to take private property for their tracks, stations, towers, poles, and lines, and
    2) they are the only ones allowed to do that.

    We have competition for electric service, telephone and internet providers, using existing lines. Cable television, which is frequently a monopoly in a given area, is being slowly supplanted by services like DirecTV, which transmits via satellite. Given that such competition exists, your second point does not seem to be met.

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  33. Jonah takes an interesting and (of course) entertaining look at the history and current state of blogging

    I don’t want to go all Marshall McLuhan here, but the medium [Twitter] really has become the message. There are young journalists who think reading Twitter is like covering a beat. “Look at how wrong so-and-so was.” “Look who ‘destroyed’ what’s-his-name.” People, including politicians, think a persuasive argument is defined by a tweet that goes viral among people who already agree with you—or, worse, that goes viral among people who think you’re an idiot. Because when that happens, it’s proof you “owned” or “triggered” the libs or the cons.

    Read the whole thing…

    Dave (1bb933)

  34. We have competition for electric service, telephone and internet providers, using existing lines. Cable television, which is frequently a monopoly in a given area, is being slowly supplanted by services like DirecTV, which transmits via satellite. Given that such competition exists, your second point does not seem to be met.

    And? What you’re talking about is laws that order public utilities to allow third-party piggybacking. The public utility phone and electric companies are still the only ones that have stations, towers, poles, and lines and eminent domain power to install them and maintain them.

    nk (1d9030)

  35. What you guys are really saying is that because McDonald’s is so successful, it must include Bubba’s Possum-On-A-Stick in its menu and sell it to nudists, if Bubba asks.

    Sorry, goodwill alone does not make a successful business a public utility except in a socialist system, or maybe a national socialist system.

    nk (1d9030)

  36. About the Utah porn filter news item: I understand and agree with the need to protect kids from viewing porn. That’s a no-brainer. But I also believe that is the parents’ job. However, here is a red state whose government is basically attempting to do the parents’ job for them. How is that being self-reliant and assuming responsibility? Having the state come in and play parent is just another day of the week ending in Y for the Democrats but not typically a Republican move.

    Dana (fd537d)

  37. Also, if one orders their tablet from Amazon, at what point in the assembly-delivery line is the filter installed? Which company produces the filters, and are they are a faith-based company contracted by the state of Utah and stand to make bank from the contract? Did they lobby for this bill?

    Dana (fd537d)

  38. “Listen, I need all Jewish people on deck, brother.”

    Charles Barkley, talking with Jimmy Kimmel about his daughter’s wedding

    The whole segment was hi-larious.

    Paul Montagu (77c694)

  39. I want to talk about GOP Leader McCarthy and his silly reading of Green Eggs and Ham (which was not on the list of books that the Seuss Foundation decided to stop publishing). Do current members of the Republican Party see this as a viable way to bring back those who have left the Party, or to draw in new members? Of course, there are culture wars. But is this really that?

    It is very hard for me to take seriously anyone who supported an immensely corrupt demigod for four years and was too afraid or too worried about his own political futures to stand up to him and yet takes a stand on something that is really inconsequential when it comes to the state of the nation. And is certainly not going to cost him anything to take this stand. No risk involved, whatsoever. And as Tapper asks: Why not show, on the House floor, the unquestionably racist illustrations from the actual Dr. Seuss books the foundation has decided not to contain publishing?

    The GOP was unwilling to stand up to and hold accountable a wholly corrupt narcissist when he was in the Oval and even now, still see him as the head of the Party, but the Party is more than willing to fundraise off of the Dr. Seuss kerfuffle. Is this a Party worthy of respect?

    Dana (fd537d)

  40. Jesse Jackson did Green Eggs and Ham way better than McCarthy.

    Paul Montagu (77c694)

  41. Right now, the GOP has nothing to offer except commiseration for petty grievances. They are largely irrelevant and they will remain irrelevant for as long as their policy is “Timor Trumpis conturbat me”.

    nk (1d9030)

  42. they have control over who can vote in large swaths of flyover country mr nk

    thats not irrelevant

    Dave (1bb933)

  43. They are very smart critters (and my bet for the next sentient species if we manage to wipe ourselves out)

    It will probably be the crows. They can do complex problem solving and they have an understanding of elementary physics.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0)

  44. F.B.I. Finds Contact Between Proud Boys Member and Trump Associate Before Riot

    WASHINGTON — A member of the far-right nationalist Proud Boys was in communication with a person associated with the White House in the days just before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.

    Location, cellular and call record data revealed a call tying a Proud Boys member to the Trump White House, the official said. The F.B.I. has not determined what they discussed, and the official would not reveal the names of either party.

    […]

    The Justice Department has charged more than a dozen members of the Proud Boys with crimes related to the attack, including conspiracy to obstruct the final certification of President Biden’s electoral victory and to attack law enforcement officers.

    In court papers, federal prosecutors have said groups of Proud Boys also coordinated travel to Washington and shared lodging near the city, with the intent of disrupting Congress and advancing Mr. Trump’s efforts to unlawfully maintain his grip on the presidency.

    The communication between the person associated with the White House and the member of the Proud Boys was discovered in part through data that the F.B.I. obtained from technology and telecommunications companies immediately after the assault.

    Court documents show F.B.I. warrants for a list of all the phones associated with the cell towers serving the Capitol, and that it received information from the major cellphone carriers on the numbers called by everyone on the Capitol’s cell towers during the riot, three officials familiar with the investigation said.

    The F.B.I. also obtained a “geofence” warrant for all the Android devices that Google recorded within the building during the assault, the officials said. A geofence warrant legally gives law enforcement a list of mobile devices that are able to be identified in a particular geographic area. Jill Sanborn, the head of counterterrorism at the F.B.I., testified before a Senate panel on Wednesday that all the data the F.B.I. had gathered in its investigation into the riot was obtained legally through subpoenas and search warrants.

    Hang ’em high.

    Dave (1bb933)

  45. they have control over who can vote in large swaths of flyover country mr nk

    you mean to say ‘that ain’t hay’, mr. Dave?

    nk (1d9030)

  46. Jonah’s article that Dave linked brings up some interesting points. These two comments jumped out

    “much of the right is more interested in how the Times covers the news than the news it delivers…..Commenting intelligently and quickly on actual news is pretty hard. Finding fault in others is much easier—and more fun.”

    I agree it’s tough…and that it naturally devolves to my-side-is-always-right takes that generally don’t add much to the discussion of issues that may have subtle grays….or require actual thoughtful and nuanced evidence.

    “They just know socialism is good or bad because the people they hate are for it or against it.”

    Blogging should boldly build ideas. Tweets are like posting the provocative title of a blog article…assuming your team will fill in the necessary details….and your enemies will take it completely out of context. It always seems lazy and intended for the lowest possible form of communication. Would we really be much worse off if Twitter suddenly just…went…..away?

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  47. “Why not show, on the House floor, the unquestionably racist illustrations from the actual Dr. Seuss books the foundation has decided not to contain publishing?”

    That was my first thought. My sensitivity threshold is pretty high….but I’m also not an Asian being adversely caricatured. Does the publisher have a point or is it more of the reasoning that now gives us the marvelously ridiculous “Washington Football Team”? The offending books aren’t going away…aren’t being banned per se. They are an interesting window to those times….and attitudes….but the question is how do little kids process these “racist” depictions? Is the target audience the kids or 60-year-old men taking a walk down memory lane?

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  48. Dana: “Why not show, on the House floor, the unquestionably racist illustrations from the actual Dr. Seuss books the foundation has decided not to contain publishing?”

    That was my first thought. My sensitivity threshold is pretty high….but I’m also not an Asian being adversely caricatured. Does the publisher have a point or is it more of the reasoning that now gives us the marvelously ridiculous “Washington Football Team”? The offending books aren’t going away…aren’t being banned per se. They are an interesting window to those times….and attitudes….but the question is how do little kids process these “racist” depictions? Is the target audience the kids or 60-year-old men taking a walk down memory lane?

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  49. Right now, the GOP has nothing to offer except commiseration for petty grievances.

    Yep. Ronald Reagan would have had witty yet withering quips which would have mocked the left’s obsession with these superficial issues, yet today’s GOP knows nothing but to blow them up into the centerpiece of their strategy for returning to power. I don’t think that’s going to be a winning campaign.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  50. Texas governor Greg Abbott said Facebook and Twitter are leading a “dangerous movement to silence conservative voices and religious freedoms” as he backed a state bill Friday that would allow any Texans temporarily removed or banned from Facebook or Twitter to sue the social media companies in order to get reinstated.

    Heyyyyy Abbott!!! Changin’ the subject again??

    Freeze ’em out and pulling the plug woks every time, eh, dummy.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  51. It looks like the Senate just passed the virus relief bill, 50-49. So when the filibuster gets really inconvenient, the Senate creates complex kludges, like reconciliation bills, to get around them. I hope they figure out more ways of hollowing out filibusters, if that’s what’s needed to keep Manchin happy.

    Victor (4959fb)

  52. A parasite wants a healthy host, too. The GOP was in the bloom of health in 2016. Now it’s in the infirmary.

    I kind of suspect that it will be a race of who ditches whom. The GOP ditching Trump, or Trump ditching the GOP for greener pastures. Or just out to pasture.

    What greener pastures, you ask. Well, the LGBTQ Equality Act now wending its way through Congress. If it passes, Trump could just well be the next Miss Universe.

    nk (1d9030)

  53. It looks like the Senate just passed the virus relief bill, 50-49.

    Budget bills have never been subject to filibuster. As I blogged yesterday, the Senate parliamentarian forced Democrats to drop the $15/hour minimum wage because she ruled that this sort of legislation was not part of the budgetary process.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  54. Jonah Goldberg is irrelevant.

    Glorious.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  55. Also regarding the vote on the $1.9 trillion bill, did Chuck Schumer just accidentally admit that Obamacare has been a complete failure?

    “This bill will deliver more help to more people than anything the federal government has done in decades,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said just before the final vote. “It is broader, deeper and more comprehensive in helping working families and lifting people out of poverty than anything Congress has seen or accomplished in a very long time.

    No, I don’t think he intended to denigrate Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment, he was just being his usual blowhard self. But I do think it’s kind of funny.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  56. If advocating double masking helps the recall effort, then the people who join the recall effort because of it are idiots.

    Wearing two cloth masks, or a cloth mask over a surgical mask, whenever you can’t wear an N95/KN95, is recommended by the CDC and has been for about three weeks. Members of the medical community, and the virology research community, started calling for it in early January. It’s been my household’s policy, adopted under the advice of a housemate who is a PA and a housemate who is a lab scientist working on cancer vaccines, since about late January.

    It’s a response to a change in the situation.

    Cloth and surgical masks don’t stop all aerosols. They filter out a large percentage, and that used to be enough.

    But B1117 and B1351 (the UK and South African variants), and probably P1 (although there’s less data on that) are associated with a heavier viral load, which means *each aerosol which isn’t filtered has a higher likelihood of carrying virions than before and the ones which carry virions carry more of them*.

    The virus mutated in a way that made the existing masking protocol less effective, and now we need a new one.

    It sucks. But it’s what happens when a virus is allowed to evolve.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  57. 8 – Simon Jester
    A well trained Dog will work. The dogs in the barn kept all the trespassers at bay.

    mg (8cbc69)

  58. The Texas bill would make it impossible for a social media site for abuse victims to exclude someone who wants to come in and speak in abusive ways; the abuser could then turn around and sue for reinstatement, because the exclusion is based on his expression of his viewpoints, the thing that the law specifically protects.

    It’s the biggest assault to freedom of association in my lifetime, and if it isn’t thrown out by the courts, it would mean the end of the open internet.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  59. Can’t imagine why a club full of multi-millionaires would support keeping the minimum wage at $7.25/hr. Let’em eat French’s yellow– pass the Grey Poupon, eh, gang. And they wonder why the castle was stormed.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  60. Budget bills have never been subject to filibuster.

    By never, do you mean since the 1970’s? Can you cite to provisions or history that made bills regarding the budget in the Senate exempt from the possibility of being filibustered prior to the invention of the reconciliation process in 1974?

    Victor (4959fb)

  61. As I blogged yesterday, the Senate parliamentarian forced Democrats to drop the $15/hour minimum wage because she ruled that this sort of legislation was not part of the budgetary process.

    The Dems could have overruled the parliamentarian’s decision with a simple majority vote, but they didn’t.

    Dave (1bb933)

  62. Right now, the GOP has nothing to offer except commiseration for petty grievances.

    You were saying?

    An amendment from Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Al.) aimed to block some federal funds to schools that allow students to participate in athletics programs based on their gender identity as opposed to their biological sex. Democrats joined with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to block the attempt.

    Dave (1bb933)

  63. That was my first thought. My sensitivity threshold is pretty high….but I’m also not an Asian being adversely caricatured.

    AJ_Liberty, that’s one point for sure. The other is if you personally owned a book like that and decided not to publish it, what business is it of the House of Representatives?

    I get the GOP’s origin being anti-federalist, in that some things like slavery kinda cross the line a little, but it’s evolved to limited government, and now to whining about how the government isn’t doing enough to shut down freedom related to relatively silly stuff. It’s amusing until you realize there are serious problems in the world that the democrats don’t want to address, and the GOP failed to address.

    The only people who understand this situation and cheer are people who want the USA to fail completely. We are in a state of dysfunction.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  64. Dave,

    I predict that the D’s will get exactly no credit for obeying the norm of not overriding the parliamentarian but will instead have to get a lot of crap from the far left that they Didn’t Even Try. But I’d guess that Manchin probably wouldn’t have accepted it anyway. And given how the vote on Bernie’s amendment went 48-52, it didn;t matter anyway.

    An addendum to my prior comment about the filibuster and budget bills. I dont’ know if the filibuster was a factor when the reconciliation process was originally invented. Perhaps not, though I’d be surprised if nobody in the Senate was noticing. My primary point is that right now it operates a pressure release for the filibuster, ensuring that at least some substantive bills get passed, thus giving the R’s room to stonewall against making any other changes to the filibuster. It’s a kludge, still. I can’t really think of any political theory that suggests budget bills and lifetime appointments to the federal bench should operate on simple majority votes, but that ordinary legislation requires super majorities.

    Victor (4959fb)

  65. I would not want to be a parent in this day and age. Remember having to go the store and actually pay someone for newdie mags in the brown paper bag, and everyone eyeing you. Chance of being seen by the minister’s wife. Now. Click and Bob’s your uncle. Or your pizza delivery guy, if you’re into that.

    JRH (52aed3)

  66. I predict that the D’s will get exactly no credit for obeying the norm of not overriding the parliamentarian but will instead have to get a lot of crap from the far left that they Didn’t Even Try.

    But reading between the lines, there is a reason they didn’t try that hard. They put on a show, but is a double of the min wage the right move when small business just went through the last year, in a world that is totally unstable?

    A relative of mine, who does not support her own household at all, doesn’t own a car, doesn’t have education, is still getting through high school, just got her first job. She’s excited not because she will be able to support herself, but because it’s a new, important experience. I’m not sure her services are actually worth twice as much money as she will be paid. On the other hand, there are plenty of careers where people earn so little they are on lots of government assistance, so we’re just subsidizing highly profitable business.

    In other words, the far left’s treatment of this issue was ineffective. If they did get $15 they would ask for $30. They know robots will replace workers, take away those crappy jobs that teach patience and discipline. They don’t value that work. They want kids to borrow money that goes to higher ed, then demand forgiveness of debt, and enter a world where politicians compete on the basis of who hands out the checks.

    Those who pay their bills and have little debt, just work hard, they feel like suckers when Joe Biden’s administration speaks. It took someone as bad as trump to make Biden viable, and the democrats act like they have a mandate to ban voter ID and immigration law. It’s just going to lead to more twitter grade discourse, dumber leaders, more insurrection attempts, more racism, more pain.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  67. I would not want to be a parent in this day and age. Remember having to go the store and actually pay someone for newdie mags in the brown paper bag, and everyone eyeing you. Chance of being seen by the minister’s wife. Now. Click and Bob’s your uncle. Or your pizza delivery guy, if you’re into that.

    JRH (52aed3) — 3/6/2021 @ 11:15 am

    In my pocket is almost all knowledge, answers to all questions, and I don’t want to hand it to my kids because people really do suck.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  68. @39. CindyLou Tedtoo read it on our dime to waste Senate time. A children’s book. Sheeesh. The effort to blame children literature for adult failings is… childish.

    Recall back in the day the kerfuffle raised when Columbia’s library of Three Stooges shorts initially began airing on broadcast television. These comedy films were made for theater going audiences decades earlier, not for kiddie TV. So there was a bit of an uproar when young, TV generation kids began slapping each other and poking each other in the eyes. It drove The Boys to do the talk show circuit and demonstrate how they did it w/o hurting each other.

    Classic cartoons– an art form no less- again made for theater screening from earlier eras– are often tagged ‘offensive’ — setting aside the “high standards” seen in today’s “South Park” — yet they helped get an entire cable TV network started– and even build vacation theme parks to enrich adults. Ever seen WB’s Bugs Bunny do blackface or whack-a-Jap during WW2 times? Or Disney’s Donald Duck ‘heil’ right in der Fuehrer’s face??! And why were Heckle & Jeckle and Daffy Duck black anyway? Funny stuff when viewed in the proper context of their times– and not haughty hindsight.

    Threatening book banning over the likes of Seuss– or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Catcher In The Rye or GWTW is just activism in search of work. Could it be that idle hands truly are the Devil’s workshop? 😉

    “… when correctly viewed; everything is lewd; I can tell you things about Peter Pan- and the Wizard of Oz- there’s a Dirty Old Man…” – Tom Lehrer

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  69. At what point do these huge private companies become public utilities?

    That is not the question I asked. Most of these copmpanies own no physical connections between people — the entire idea of the internet is packet-switching being better than circuit-switching.

    Communications is (mostly) separate from hardware. But effective communications in a digital age requires the ability to “speak” in existing public fora, and these are largely controlled by companies that have been adopted by myriad users.

    Ideally these would be competitive, independent and open, with zero government intervention but the reality is that none of these things are true. Some speakers are locked out of some (or all) fora. New services that those speakers attempt to create — for themselves — are deplatformed by large companies that serve as the underlying infrastructure because they do not approve of the messages these folks send among themselves.

    And government tolerates this and at times encourages services to engage in subject-matter censorship. They even use the hanging sword of anti-trust enforcement to get these large services’ attention. When Congress calls communications CEOs into hearing to discuss what people are saying on their networks, the pretense of private control evaporates.

    Sure, the NY Times, or Patterico’s blog, is not required to allow any and every post. But they do not comprise any noticeable portion of the public’s attention. Facebook, Twitter, etc are different. Amazon Web Services is WAY different.

    Now, I am not a fan of Parler, or those who spread stupid, wrong, no good and hateful “information” to each other and the public. But I agree with Voltaire, who would be rightfully irate at what does on today. That a former President of the United States is locked out of all social media ought to be the canary in the coal mine, not something to celebrate.

    It is not OK to say “but you can go down to Hyde Park and speak at Speaker’s Corner” and think you are defending free speech.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  70. Shorter: If speech you despise is blocked from spreading, you should be as upset as if it were speech you found critically important.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  71. I predict that the D’s will get exactly no credit for obeying the norm of not overriding the parliamentarian but will instead have to get a lot of crap from the far left that they Didn’t Even Try.

    They probably won’t get credit for the self-restraint. To me, Biden was using the Parliamentarian as an excuse to not raise the minimum wage, not for any particular principle, but because it would hurt small business. It was a way for him to say to the AOC wing, “Look, we tried, but that dang Parliamentarian wouldn’t let us do it, and we’re trying to follow the rules without all this malarkey.”

    Paul Montagu (77c694)

  72. The Dems could have overruled the parliamentarian’s decision with a simple majority vote, but they didn’t.

    Yeah, considering that seven of them voted against the $15/hr amendment, the writing was on the wall that that they wouldn’t overrule the parliamentarian.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  73. I would not want to be a parent in this day and age. Remember having to go the store and actually pay someone for newdie mags in the brown paper bag, and everyone eyeing you. Chance of being seen by the minister’s wife. Now. Click and Bob’s your uncle. Or your pizza delivery guy, if you’re into that.

    JRH (52aed3) — 3/6/2021 @ 11:15 am

    Absolutely. I suspect every generation says this when they are through their own parenting years, and have recovered from said years and take a look around.

    Dana (fd537d)

  74. > They know robots will replace workers, take away those crappy jobs that teach patience and discipline.

    what we do when a huge percentage of the jobs we currently depend on are replaced by robots or AI is a serious question for the next generation. personally, I think the options are either a UBI or a society in which a small number of people live luxurious lives while everyone else works 12+ hours a day at pointless and economically marginally useless jobs, just to be able to stay alive.

    But we’re going to have to go through a lot of agony before we adopt a UBI, because a UBI flies in the face of our most cherished beliefs.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  75. @28 If it were legal I would politely ask them to back off. I would then point my pepper spray at them and again warn them you are threatening my life. BACK OFF!

    asset (44da98)

  76. I think the options are either a UBI or a society in which a small number of people live luxurious lives while everyone else works 12+ hours a day at pointless and economically marginally useless jobs, just to be able to stay alive.

    jeez

    I think we can do better than that. The problem is tough to solve, but I’d first raze all universities with giant awesome bulldozers and start over with something that isn’t tethered to taj mahal campuses that export chemical engineers and inspire man-childen to borrow $100,000 to ‘study’ poetry therapy at the campus coffee shop.

    There is so much work to do! the idea we just ran out of it, and therefore we should follow Trump’s lead and demand checks from benefactors is a surrender. In the long term, it does mean we lose the great fight against our nation’s enemies. it means we lose human rights. Maybe not for another 200 years, but it’s clear as day.

    The issue is education. Instead of student loan forgiveness, we should just create a free option that is completely online (internet should be more like a utility too). No paper books, all texts on some kind of wikipedia type website, all classes are tough enough that you can’t get a B without trying, all tests proctored, no semester model or any other other obsolete holdover concepts, so it’s no problem to enroll in a class while working 60 hours a week or working while caring for kids, etc. This program should only offer actual education. History, philosophy, english, economics, but when I say that, I mean the real classes, not the fluff. Majors should be strategically created. Medical fields, engineering, programming. Each of these fields should terminate in an appropriate length of paid apprenticeship. It’s an investment like an interstate highway that would create things we can’t predict.

    Granted, a robot dog can flip a hamburger or I can do it for $8 an hour. We could indeed afford to use America’s great wealth and knowledge to coast for several generations as we basicaly live like the people in Wall-E. It’s not living. This reminds me of when I asked my pastor why his description of heaven, where there are no problems to solve, sounds pleasant to him? It sounded miserable to me in a way that’s beyond my ability to articulate.

    Utopia is not a good objective. Centrally planned utopia certainly isn’t, given how terrible political leaders are. I never got the paper check with Donald Trump’s name on it, but you get the point I’m sure.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  77. What’s cheesecake in Utah, anyway? Above the knee and/or sleeveless?

    I know one couple was being prosecuted because they let their eleven-year old see the stepmom’s bare breasts. And I have read, by a writer claiming to be a Mormon, that a Mormon married couple could go all their life without seeing each other nude.

    nk (1d9030) — 3/6/2021 @ 6:22 am

    You nailed it, nk. Because Mormon underwear goes to the knee and has sleeves (albeit short), above the knee and/or sleeveless is a racy look. Some Mormons milk this state of affairs by playing tennis on Saturday morning (Mormon underwear is not required for sports and exercise), and afterwards making a subtle transition to doing yardwork. Oops, I just forgot!

    Regarding your last point, my cousin told me a story about what she heard at church one Sunday. She said a lady spoke to the congregation about how all of her children had been conceived through garments (Mormon term for church underwear)!

    norcal (01e272)

  78. As for the minimum wage issue, I just saw this satirical comment on a BYU sports board, where things other than sports are frequently discussed. I can’t link it because political posts on that board are behind a pay wall.

    I don’t get the pushback on minimum wage.

    Step one: raise minimum wage to $15. Main concern is businesses will have to fire people to make payroll. That is fixed with…

    Step two: government bans layoffs. Businesses are not allowed to lay someone off without government approval – government will ensure layoffs are deserved and not due to higher minimum wage. Main concern is businesses will then go out of business which is fixed with…

    Step three: businesses are not allowed to go out of business as long as they can show evidence of a safe environment for workers and customers. When the business runs out of money, the government will review the business to ensure they meet or exceed government dictated “safety” standards. If they do, they receive government funds. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be in business anyways. The business owner would be taxed at 90% of their net worth, those funds would go to the now unemployed former employees as “severance” to allow them time to go find a quality, government approved business.

    This is not hard.

    norcal (01e272)

  79. They are an interesting window to those times….and attitudes….but the question is how do little kids process these “racist” depictions? Is the target audience the kids or 60-year-old men taking a walk down memory lane?

    After this happened I dug out my childhood copies in the basement, I looked at the currently published versions and they’re edited a bit.

    The originals weren’t overly racist, but it was kind of cringe-y. In the same pelican case were original Disney Song of the South book, laserdisk (I think I have one of those in another box), and record, so I broke them out and read the book while listening to the record…boy…there’s a reason that is never going on Disney+. I mean I loved it when I was a kid, but WOW.

    Now, as problematic as it is, the original original Uncle Remus stories that it was based on are in there too, and the comparison is literally night and day, Disney softened it up 98%, and those were supposed to be enlightenment at the time.

    We donated a bunch of school text books from the South to the Underground History Museum when my dad died, he’d collected all of these trash history books published in the 30s-50s. When people today complain about the fake history being pushed hard by the “christian” nationalists, it’s bad, but it’s like comparing hitting yourself with a hammer in the thumb vs the head (choose), bad vs really really really bad.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  80. Too funny:

    Former president Donald Trump has sent a cease-and-desist letter to at least three Republican organizations demanding they stop using his name and likeness to fundraise, two Trump advisers confirmed Saturday.

    The letter, which was first reported by Politico, was sent to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Representatives for the three groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment or for copies of the letter Saturday.

    The article goes on to say the President-reject is worried that some of the money raised might be used to support the handful of representatives and senators who voted to impeach him.

    Dave (1bb933)

  81. Regarding your last point, my cousin told me a story about what she heard at church one Sunday. She said a lady spoke to the congregation about how all of her children had been conceived through garments (Mormon term for church underwear)!

    My neighbors moved to SLC, South Jordan, a few years ago, and the one thing they bring up constantly is how much their Mormon friends talk about sex, like 15yo’s kind of giggly and naïve, and they’ve got kids, so it’s not like they don’t know how the parts work.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  82. That’s right, Klink. It’s also why people complained about how Romney talked like he just stepped out of the 1950s.

    Speaking of which, both Romney and my mother served two-year Mormon missions in France. (In my mom’s case, she also spent time in Belgium and Switzerland.) My mom returned from her mission and then majored in French at BYU. She became a school teacher. She taught French and English.

    It wasn’t until about 15 years ago, well after she had retired, that she became aware of the common meaning of “menage a trois”. I’m not kidding. She knew those words individually, but was unaware of the sexual connotation. My brother and I howled when we became aware of this. In fact, I think my brother may have been the one who enlightened her. Good times.

    norcal (01e272)

  83. By the way, Klink, the first high school I attended was in South Jordan, Utah.

    norcal (01e272)

  84. Mr Liberty wrote:

    Dana: “Why not show, on the House floor, the unquestionably racist illustrations from the actual Dr. Seuss books the foundation has decided not to contain publishing?”

    That was my first thought. My sensitivity threshold is pretty high….but I’m also not an Asian being adversely caricatured. Does the publisher have a point or is it more of the reasoning that now gives us the marvelously ridiculous “Washington Football Team”?

    I do take efforts to refer to the team as the Redskins at appropriate opportunities.

    Dr Seuss was born in 1904, and he wrote children’s books — among other things — which were perfectly acceptable at the times in which he wrote them. He was a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, and was what passed for a liberal Democrat at the time, but none of that is good enough for today’s ‘woke.’

    It was just a couple of days ago that Turner Classic Movies showed Gone With the Wind, and the channel felt it had to add disclaimers and apologists for airing the Best Picture of 1939. Until a decade or so ago, people seemed to be mature enough to accept that the film was appropriate within the context of the time depicted and the time made, but not anymore.

    When the woke are trying to cancel George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, you know that the woke are ridiculous.

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  85. which were perfectly acceptable at the times in which he wrote them.

    Suppose that video technology had existed during the Roman Empire, and graphic films of Christians being crucified, brutally tortured, and devoured by lions in the arena had been recorded for the entertainment of the Emperor and his aristocratic friends, and preserved to the present day.

    Would you deride anyone who tried to get NetFlix to stop selling them as “woke”, since they were perfectly acceptable at the time they were made?

    Dave (1bb933)

  86. The inauguration passed with no problems. The impeachment trial was held with no major protests. Now the (alleged) March 4 assault on the Capitol turned out to be a nothing. So, with none of the disruptions against which the National Guard and all of those fences were supposed to protect having happened, what have the Capitol Police done? Why, they’ve requested a sixty day extension of the National Guard’s mission!

    I read somewhere that the ‘rescheduled’ assault on the Capitol is now on for March 20th, but can’t find a link. When that doesn’t happen, will the left claim that it didn’t happen because the Guardsmen were there, and therefore they need to be kept in DC, or will someone figure out that maybe, just maybe, they were never going to happen anyway.

    We’ve reached the point at which a few hackers can start some internet chatter for ‘intelligence’ to pick up, to gin up more paranoia, and keep DC looking like the capital of a banana republic.

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  87. Dave wrote:

    which were perfectly acceptable at the times in which he wrote them.

    Suppose that video technology had existed during the Roman Empire, and graphic films of Christians being crucified, brutally tortured, and devoured by lions in the arena had been recorded for the entertainment of the Emperor and his aristocratic friends, and preserved to the present day.

    Would you deride anyone who tried to get NetFlix to stop selling them as “woke”, since they were perfectly acceptable at the time they were made?

    Yeah, I would. Given that we already have films out there which depict similar violence, even if that violence is faked, I don’t see what difference you extreme example makes.

    There are (purported) snuff films out there. There are films showing catastrophic accidents resulting in deaths, car chase films, broadcast live, which occasionally end when the malefactor encounters a tree or bridge abutment at fatal speeds.

    It has been said that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. Does not attempting to cancel history do just that?

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  88. OK, what about the tapes of the Emperor’s violent orgies with young children?

    Fair game for Disney+?

    Dave (1bb933)

  89. Dave, you’re conflating things that are currently illegal (putting people to death, child molestation) with things that are perhaps highly insensitive but certainly not illegal. No doubt that the woke will soon get around to criminalizing hurt feelings, but for the time being the comparison falls short.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  90. So, with none of the disruptions against which the National Guard and all of those fences were supposed to protect having happened, what have the Capitol Police done? Why, they’ve requested a sixty day extension of the National Guard’s mission!

    The Chinese have a saying: Once bitten by a snake, one is afraid of rope for the next ten years.

    norcal (01e272)

  91. Fair game for Disney+?

    Depends on what the “+” is for.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  92. @93 🙂

    norcal (01e272)

  93. When the woke are trying to cancel George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, you know that the woke are ridiculous.

    I think they’ve moved on to Lincoln now.

    Can JFK, MLK and LBJ be far behind?

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  94. I find it ironic that the folks who champion the suppression of speech they dislike are also shouting “Fascist!” the loudest.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  95. Dave, you’re conflating things that are currently illegal (putting people to death, child molestation) with things that are perhaps highly insensitive but certainly not illegal

    Legality or illegality is beside the point. Many (most?) modern films and dramatic TV shows depict the law being broken in one way or another.

    The Dana Who’s Not Dana took the position that Asian parents should silently acquiesce in having their children exposed to art that demeans their race, because it was once “OK” to demean Asians. It seems indefensible to me.

    Dave (1bb933)

  96. I find it ironic that the folks who champion the suppression of speech they dislike are also shouting “Fascist!” the loudest.

    And it’s like mirror images on the left/right, they want the government to do stuff to make things illegal that are constitutionally protected, in most cases using the same unconstitutional mechanism. I’m generally dubious about slippery slope (ugh, I actually thought about that word when I wrote it) arguments, but this seems to be a rain and Kentucky jelly soaked near vertical slope. The correct answer is steer clear.

    If the private company, FaceTuble or the Geisel estate want to do something with their property, fine, I can choose to support, or not, their product. Unless they’re doing something specifically to a protected class, inserting more government is a bad idea.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  97. If the Geisel Estate is so hung up on those six books being racist, why don’t they just surrender the copyright and let the books go into the public domain? Retiring them, while still retaining the rights, strikes me as a bit of a cop-out.

    JVW (ee64e4)

  98. Former president Donald Trump has sent a cease-and-desist letter to at least three Republican organizations demanding they stop using his name and likeness to fundraise,

    Hey, hey, what did I say?

    nk (1d9030)

  99. @99. It’s an old marketing ploy. They won’t be retired long— maybe 5 years or so… then expect a ‘Seuss On The Loose – The Banned Boxed Set’ in the stores for Christmas -perhaps exclusively at Macy’s — or Walmart— by 2025. Recall the ‘limited edition’ Disney releases some years back [on VHS no less] then “back in the vault.”

    Back in NYC, did a marketing project for DC Comics some years ago regarding ‘special edition’ and ‘limited edition’ runs of comics along w/in-store POP [point of purchase] marketing. Part of the report noted ceiling space wasn’t being used for retailing but the most astounding thing was talking w/customers who were buying up hundreds of dollar worth of “limited edition’ ‘collector edition’ comics. Some of those people actually believed they would finance a college education for their kids with them. Of course the market was flooded w/the material and being ‘new-‘ not going to be worth much at all for resale.

    Those titles now have a self-created $eu$$ cache. Somebody at Geisel Enterprises has some savv marketing smarts.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  100. @ Col. Klink,

    After this happened I dug out my childhood copies in the basement, I looked at the currently published versions and they’re edited a bit.

    The originals weren’t overly racist, but it was kind of cringe-y. In the same pelican case were original Disney Song of the South book, laserdisk (I think I have one of those in another box), and record, so I broke them out and read the book while listening to the record…boy…there’s a reason that is never going on Disney+. I mean I loved it when I was a kid, but WOW.

    I can relate. I remembered having the book Little Black Sambo. Yikes.

    Dana (fd537d)

  101. @86.It was just a couple of days ago that Turner Classic Movies showed Gone With the Wind, and the channel felt it had to add disclaimers and apologists for airing the Best Picture of 1939.

    Watched that. It was a peculiar intro to be sure, but then, times change. It does seem odd finding the need to explain it though– any more than explaining the hate depicted in ‘Destination: Tokyo’ or the misplaced glory in the more recent homage to the Old South- ‘Gettysburg.’ My late grandmother experienced hate and rage due to her German relatives during WW1. But she despised Asians- chiefly Japanese– and from her POV, for a very good reason: December 7, 1941. And she carried that mind set well into the 1980s- and to her grave. No items ‘Made In Japan’ were ever in her home— and by the late 1960s, that was becoming a difficult habit to follow. When her TV set finally needed replaced, we tried to tell her they were all pretty much made in Japan or Korea. As youngsters, we never quite understood it– but then we didn’t live through the war begun at Pearl Harbor. Today, it’s 9/11– and Arabs aren’t exactly being embraced w/a forgive an forget attitude either.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  102. I can relate. I remembered having the book Little Black Sambo. Yikes.

    Me too. But as kids, we didn’t see it as a racial thing– just another storybook.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  103. Bugs Bunny Nips The Nips. It will make up, all by itself, for all the censored Seuss content.

    nk (1d9030)

  104. “We obviously are now ultimately sending money to less people than the Trump administration,” Omar said. “This is not the promise that we made…

    Not outspending a drunk sailor on leave has them wondering “What does our party stand for, anyway?

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  105. And it’s like mirror images on the left/right, they want the government to do stuff to make things illegal that are constitutionally protected, in most cases using the same unconstitutional mechanism

    So, if I don’t want to serve black folk in my restaurant, that’s OK? Oh, wait there’s a law saying that if I’m in business and selling stuff to the general public I have to take all comers.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  106. Re: Seuss

    I guess I draw an important distinction between removing from the market those specific works that contain demeaning depictions, which seems reasonable, and removing *all* of Geisel’s portfolio because he produced a few such works, which isn’t reasonable under the circumstances.

    Dave (1bb933)

  107. Me too. But as kids, we didn’t see it as a racial thing– just another storybook.

    Neanderthal thinking.

    Dave (1bb933)

  108. So, if I don’t want to serve black folk in my restaurant, that’s OK? Oh, wait there’s a law saying that if I’m in business and selling stuff to the general public I have to take all comers.

    It’s almost like I said.

    Unless they’re doing something specifically to a protected class, inserting more government is a bad idea.

    Guess what a protected class is.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  109. DCSCA,

    I think Arabs have kind of grown out of that most reviled group status, of one of the quirkier successes of the Trump era. Several factors may account for this:

    1. Lack of a large scale attack on US soil, the last major incidents were in 2016 (Pulse and some Somali freakouts, 1 in St. Cloud, Mn and another in Columbus OH), Strong Horse effect?
    2. Border shenanigans and BLM
    3. The charm offensive of MBS and appearance of “middle east peace”
    4. the military as a % of the general population during the GWOT lower than at full mobilization of World War II. Not as much “Nip this/Nip that” in earshot conversations. I once told Narciso MLB pitcher and 1/2 Japanese 1/2 Iranian Yu Darvish (now a Padre) would have been treated as bad as Jackie Robinson had he debuted in 1980 instead of 2012.

    You are in San Diego, #4 might explain things, but also in SoCal in general the Persians and other similar groups dont generate very much ire. In fact up in LA , “middle easterners” have been drafted into Whitedom with regard to the school reopening debate.

    urbanleftbehind (2cf6a7)

  110. @109. Speaking from experience yet again.

    Always wrong. Never in doubt.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  111. @12. It’s a latent thing and the stereotypes toward them has lingered even before 9/11.

    Revisit ‘Back To The Future’… Libyans were the bad guys.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  112. @105. From 1944:

    The Film Daily called the eight-minute short “good fun” and gave the following synopsis:

    “Bugs Bunny, cast away on a Pacific isle, thinks the setting ideal until he finds his paradise infested with Japanese soldiers. How he single-handedly exterminates the enemy makes for a laugh-filled few minutes of typical Bugs antics, off-screen remarks and action in this Technicolor cartoon produced by Leon Schlesinger.”

    ‘Course Elmer Fudd has always been a metaphor for conservatives. 😉

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  113. The Dana Who’s Not Dana took the position that Asian parents should silently acquiesce in having their children exposed to art that demeans their race, because it was once “OK” to demean Asians. It seems indefensible to me.

    Rape of Nanking; Pearl Harbor– pretty indefensible.

    Still haven’t boned up on your Truman.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  114. @91. Draw your own conclusions; Disney was often criticized for his two-dimensional depictions yet embraced as wholesome ‘family’ entertainment. It seems ‘the context of the times’ is always left out of the equation when evaluating these materials w/hindsight. ‘Mad Men’ perfectly nailed the business culture of the times and the depiction of women at work in that era. Should we ban it, too?

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  115. Guess what a protected class is.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0) — 3/6/2021 @ 5:42 pm

    Government sanctioned racism.

    NJRob (33e46f)

  116. Government sanctioned racism.

    So making it illegal to discriminate based on sex and race is sexism and racism because…it doesn’t allow you to express your racism as freely, or something?

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  117. Picking and choosing when it’s not allowed is. Look at all the cases Obama’s AG dismissed or when they refuse to prosecute because it’s not what they consider the protected class to mean.
    But you knew that already.

    NJRob (33e46f)

  118. Smaller government used to be a thing.

    NJRob (33e46f)

  119. Picking and choosing when it’s not allowed is. Look at all the cases Obama’s AG dismissed or when they refuse to prosecute because it’s not what they consider the protected class to mean.
    But you knew that already.

    Also that guy…what’s his name…Lincoln. You can feel all the hate in your heart you want, enforcing it on others, not so cool.

    Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

    “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

    “That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

    Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:

    Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

    And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

    And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

    And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

    And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

    In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

    Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

    By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  120. So that’s why they changed the lyrics to “My Old Kentucky Home.”

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  121. I do tend to agree that the Seuss heirs are, if not exactly eliminating the Pinto from the Ford line, might be removing the Edsel, and that’s about all there is to it. The zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, or, in Latin, o tempores or mores, other days other ways, is not something anyone can alter and pointless to complain about. Really, to be brutal about it, the only answer to those complaints is: “You have lived too long.”

    nk (1d9030)

  122. *o*r mores

    nk (1d9030)

  123. norcal,

    Your posts on Mormons have been illuminating. I have questions. But I won’t ask them.

    My neighbors moved to SLC, South Jordan, a few years ago, and the one thing they bring up constantly is how much their Mormon friends talk about sex, like 15yo’s kind of giggly and naïve, and they’ve got kids, so it’s not like they don’t know how the parts work.

    There’s something very innocent and unjaded about this. I like it. It’s kinda refreshing like a bit of a sweet spot in a sea of coarseness.

    Dana (fd537d)

  124. Actually, I have a book complaint of my own. I am reading the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, and whereas Kojima’s boxes are works of art, the cover drawings by Matt Wagner are horrid. What were the publishers thinking?

    nk (1d9030)

  125. “Smaller government used to be a thing.”

    It’s always a thing when Republicans are out of power.

    Davethulhu (6ba00b)

  126. There was minor kerfuffle when my very liberal school district was gifted Seuss books by Melania Trump. Some parents took issue with Seuss because of what they interpreted as racist history. Being Asian myself, I noted that Seuss had actually changed the wording and depiction in Mulberry street in response to criticism. It’s ok to be born in a different times, but it’s better to change with the times if those changes are for the better. I would hope we can all agree that depicting minorities in a less offensive ways is better.

    While I disagree with Seuss Enterprise from stopping publishing especially in the case of Mulberry Street, they are a private company that can choose what they do. Given that these books are for children, I think the most minor of edit would’ve been fine (this happens all the time with children’s books). The virtue signaling around the ceasing of publication is as pointless as McCarthy’s video. Both are directed at only people who already agree while doing nothing to actually engage and argue for a tolerant society. It’s culture war, and if you want to win that you actually need to engage with people who disagree.

    tla (34ebeb)

  127. In a new series, TCM takes a look at ‘problematic’ classics
    Loving classic films can be a fraught pastime. Just consider the cultural firestorm over “Gone With the Wind” this past summer. No one knows this better than the film lovers at Turner Classic Movies who daily are confronted with the complicated reality that many of old Hollywood’s most celebrated films are also often a kitchen sink of stereotypes. This summer, amid the Black Lives Matter protests, the channel’s programmers and hosts decided to do something about it.

    The result is a new series, “Reframed Classics,” which promises wide-ranging discussions about 18 culturally significant films from the 1920s through the 1960s that also have problematic aspects……..

    “We know millions of people love these films,” said TCM host Jacqueline Stewart, who is participating in many of the conversations. “We’re not saying this is how you should feel about ‘Psycho’ or this is how you should feel about ‘Gone with the Wind.’ We’re just trying to model ways of having longer and deeper conversations and not just cutting it off to ‘I love this movie. I hate this movie.’ There’s so much space in between.”
    ……….
    The goal of “Reframed Classics” is to help give audiences the tools to discuss films from a different era and not just dismiss or cancel them. And Stewart, for her part, doesn’t believe that you can simply remove problematic films from the culture.
    …………
    Related:
    These are the 18 ‘problematic’ classic films TCM will examine in a new series
    ………
    Along with screening 18 classics, TCM hosts will discuss what the network calls the “troubling and problematic” aspects of the much-loved flicks, which were released in the 1920s through the 1960s. “The goal is never to censor, but simply provide rich historical context to each classic,” the network said in a statement.
    ………
    Stewart and fellow hosts Ben Mankiewicz, Dave Karger, Alicia Malone and Eddie Muller will take turns participating in roundtable introductions that touch on the history and cultural context of the films. They will also prep new viewers about moments they might find upsetting.
    ……..
    ……..the movies that will be “Reframed” once a week through the end of this month, beginning each Thursday at 5 p.m. Pacific. This is one situation where it’s good to be a night owl or own a DVR, because the films run one after the other — and even overnight.

    March 4
    “Gone With the Wind”
    “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”
    “Rope”
    “The Four Feathers”

    March 11
    “Woman of the Year”
    “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”
    “Gunga Din”
    “Sinbad, the Sailor”
    “The Jazz Singer”

    March 18
    “The Searchers”
    “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
    “Swing Time”
    “Stagecoach”
    “Tarzan, the Ape Man”

    March 25
    “My Fair Lady”
    “The Children’s Hour”
    “Psycho”
    “Dragon Seed”
    >>>>>>>>>>>>
    I’m surprised they aren’t showing Birth of a Nation, probably the most important and controversial film ever made.

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  128. Well said, tla.

    Dana (fd537d)

  129. “I think the most minor of edit would’ve been fine”

    Agree. I wonder why it wasn’t tried…..though in some sense, edits for political correctness could quickly get out of hand…like Thing 1 and Thing 2

    AJ_Liberty (a4ff25)

  130. Unless they’re doing something specifically to a protected class, inserting more government is a bad idea.

    So, wait, dividing people up into “protected” and “fair game” is something you think government should do? This I gotta hear. Based on who government likes this year?

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  131. Is Psycho considered “problematic” because it is an insult to the cross-dressing community? It’s been a long time since I saw that movie; what other elements about it might have raised the ire of the crybullies?

    JVW (ee64e4)

  132. Your posts on Mormons have been illuminating. I have questions. But I won’t ask them.

    BYUTV is on our cable system; they =bleep= dialogue in movies…

    so John Wayne never swears.

    It’s =bleeping= hilarious.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  133. So, wait, dividing people up into “protected” and “fair game” is something you think government should do?

    Protected classes are race, religion, sex, etc.

    Not any particular instance of those.

    Dave (1bb933)

  134. 134.Is Psycho considered “problematic” because it is an insult to the cross-dressing community? It’s been a long time since I saw that movie; what other elements about it might have raised the ire of the crybullies?

    Consider the context of the times when it was made and released: 1960.

    The opening scene alone was risqué for the day.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  135. Protected classes are race, religion, sex, etc.

    Why is religion protected but politics not?

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  136. @124. The zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, or, in Latin, o tempores or mores, other days other ways, is not something anyone can alter and pointless to complain about.

    Yeah.

    Who the hell had ever heard, let alone listened to, Scott Joplin for half a century until ‘The Sting’ hit theaters in the early 70’s and Ragtime hit the big time again.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  137. Why is religion protected but politics not?

    I’ll be happy to read the part of the text of the constitution or bill of rights that addresses political parties, but I think this does it pretty well.

    The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

    Or

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  138. Well, there is the famous case of Alfred Packer:

    Stand up yah voracious man-eatin’ sonofabitch and receive yir sintince. When yah came to Hinsdale County, there was siven Dimmycrats. But you, yah et five of ’em, goddam yah. I sintince yah t’ be hanged by th’ neck ontil yer dead, dead, dead, as a warnin’ ag’in reducin’ th’ Dimmycratic populayshun of this county. Packer, you Republican cannibal, I would sintince ya ta hell but the statutes forbid it.[9]

    nk (1d9030)

  139. Why is religion protected but politics not?

    The short answer is that the laws weren’t written to include politics.

    There could be a number of reasons for that.

    For one, it’s historically rare (political discrimination in the south was really race-based).

    Second, a requirement to treat all political viewpoints equally might violate the free association and free speech guarantees of the First Amendment; courts have held the government must tread most carefully when political expression is involved.

    Third, the basis of the protection of race, religion and sex reflects a social consensus that no one group of these is inherently better than another. A strong argument could be made that political views are not “created equal” in the same way.

    Finally, discrimination on the basis of politics *by the government* is already understood to be unlawful.

    Dave (1bb933)

  140. his name was alferd mr nk

    Dave (1bb933)

  141. The opening scene alone was risqué for the day.

    Right, but what’s TCM’s beef against the movie sixty years later?

    JVW (ee64e4)

  142. Decrying ‘cancel culture,’ state senator seeks to make political affiliation a protected class
    ……..
    State Sen. Melissa Melendez (R-Lake Elsinore) has introduced two bills: the first, which she has dubbed the Diversity of Thought Act, would make political affiliation a protected class under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act; the second would amend the state’s education code and require schools to counter bullying on the basis of a student’s political beliefs, much as schools are compelled to root out bullying on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation.

    If the first bill becomes law, it would be illegal to deny someone a job or withhold housing on the basis of that person’s political affiliation. Landlords could not evict someone solely because of his or her political beliefs; banks and other lenders would be barred from denying someone financing on the basis of his or her politics.

    It is unclear if anyone in the state has been evicted or denied a mortgage because of political convictions.
    ……..

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  143. 144-Right, but what’s TCM’s beef against the movie sixty years later?
    From the first link in post 130:

    For “Psycho,” which will be airing on March 25, the hosts talk about transgender identity in the film and the implications of equating gender fluidity and dressing in women’s clothes with mental illness and violence. It also sparks a bigger conversation about sexuality in Alfred Hitchcock films.

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  144. Dr. Seuss Books Are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts
    ………
    ……… Last year, more than 338,000 copies of “Green Eggs and Ham” were sold across the United States, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks the sale of physical books at most retailers. “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” sold more than 311,000 copies, and “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” — always popular as a high school graduation gift — sold more than 513,000 copies.

    “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” one of the six books pulled by the estate, sold about 5,000 copies last year, according to BookScan. “McElligot’s Pool” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” haven’t sold in years through the retailers BookScan tracks. Putting the merits of the books aside, removing “Green Eggs and Ham” would be a completely different business proposition from doing away with new printings of “McElligot’s Pool.”
    ………..
    No doubt these numbers influenced the decision to no longer publish the selected titles. If the were written by somebody else, they would have been pulled long ago.

    Generally, I am against applying 21st century standards to historical persons, incidents, or art. They are creatures of their times, and banning what happened in the past is a denial of history and culture. I agree with TCM’s approach, it is better to talk about the context of films rather than banning them. The same can be said about books, politicians, and history.

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  145. 144. Oh, it’s not a ‘beef’ –it’s a marketing ploy to draw in fresh viewers (hopefully younger ones) and keep old films relevant in the context of our changing times. And a chance to draw out talk about creative methods around censorship and foibles from earlier times– even pre-code. You know, the WC Fields ‘Godfrey Daniels’ and ‘Ethiopian in the fuel supply’ sort of thing. Gives them a chance to air blackface films, discuss clever dialogue usage and gayish films amidst the ‘cancel culture’ times. Surprised ‘Calamity Jane’ w/Doris Day singing ‘Secret Love’ isn’t on the list — but it is ‘Doris Day Month’ on TCM as is so it’ll get aired anyway.

    For decades these film libraries were all but dead assets, costing studios a mint to store and only useful when edited and packaged around commercials for suitable broadcast to squeeze some ROI out f them. Then home video/DVDs, etc., took off and the firms got great five-year licensing deals from dumb studio brass for pennies on the dollar before the likes of TCM came along in 1994– the carrier cost now part of your cable package.

    DCSCA (f4c5e5)

  146. norcal,

    Your posts on Mormons have been illuminating. I have questions. But I won’t ask them.

    Dana (fd537d) — 3/6/2021 @ 7:19 pm

    Send me an e-mail. I assume you can see my e-mail address. I’ve been meaning to ask you about old commenters at Cathy Seipp’s blog anyway.

    norcal (01e272)

  147. Insulting a police officer could become a crime in Kentucky

    A Senate committee advanced a bill Thursday enhancing punishments for crimes related to rioting, including a provision making it a crime to insult or taunt a police officer to the point it could provoke a violent response.
    ……..
    (The bill includes) language making a person guilty of disorderly conduct — a Class B misdemeanor with a penalty of up to 90 days’ imprisonment — if he or she “accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.”
    ……..
    (Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, ……..lead sponsor of Senate Bill 211 stated) that officers have to be able to react to disrespectful behavior, or else riots will escalate.

    “In these riots, you see people getting up in officers’ faces, yelling in their ears, doing everything they can to provoke a violent response,” Carroll said. “I’m not saying the officers do that, but there has to be a provision within that statute to allow officers to react to that. Because that does nothing but incite those around that vicinity and it furthers and escalates the riotous behavior.”
    ……….
    (Corey Shapiro, an attorney with the ACLU of Kentucky) also criticized a provision in SB 211 making a person who “knowingly provides supplies to a riot that can be used as weapons or dangerous instruments” subject to a riot-in-the-second-degree charge, a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 12 months in jail.

    Under a broad application of the provision, Shapiro feared police could arrest individuals on such a charge if they provided water bottles on a hot and sunny day if such bottles were later thrown at police.
    ……….
    The bill now goes to the full Senate, where it could be passed as early as next Thursday, though not much time will remain in the 30-day session to also make it through the House.
    >>>>>>>>>>

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  148. How’s everyone enjoying “open borders” Joe having people swarm the border and bringing in the virus unchecked and unstopped.

    Good times, right?

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  149. Good times, right?

    NJRob (eb56c3) — 3/6/2021 @ 11:21 pm

    No. Not good times. But, I’d rather have a cold (Biden) than a cancer (you know who).

    norcal (01e272)

  150. How is criticizing Thomas Jefferson “canceling” him? Or for that matter Lincoln, an admittedly racist man who did many difficult and excellent things towards emancipating slaves, most importantly by warring with the slave holders.

    Why isn’t it possible to criticize the racism while celebrating the emancipation? Is it so difficult to have two thoughts at the same time, to see people as they are, warts and all?

    Victor (4959fb)

  151. Fricking govna of New York should have used the medical ship that was placed at his doorstep. But no. Now we have a bimbo hashtag alert to hide the china flu fraud. Love you democrats.

    mg (8cbc69)

  152. How’s everyone enjoying “open borders” Joe having people swarm the border and bringing in the virus unchecked and unstopped.

    Trump supporter very concerned about spread of the virus!

    Good times indeed.

    Dave (1bb933)

  153. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/nothing-says-america-is-back-like-taking-someones-job-away

    Marty Jorgensen likes to fish for walleye, hunt for elk and deer, and give a pheasant a good chase every once in a while. He doesn’t just dabble in the great outdoors — he is the great outdoors.

    The 61-year-old Havre, Montana, native who grew up on a farming ranch said he cannot do any of those things if the land he cherishes is scarred by seeping pollution coming from pipelines or the water is corroded by leaks coming from underground; he explained the plants and critters the game ingests would be too contaminated to risk eating the animals he hunts to put food on his table.

    “As a pipeline contractor, we built this work with pride, with safety and quality,” he said. “It’s a different world than it was 50 years ago, and we take that into account. We know how to protect the environment and make the landowners pleased with the way we leave the land and their property.”

    It is an attitude that underscores his stridency about the precautions put in place by the company and the industry he has been working in for over 30 years. In short, what happens here means more to him than any bureaucrat or activist living 1,800 miles from his home in Montana.


    Jorgensen said the cancellation of the XL pipeline project was devastating to his industry.

    “It’s a loss of over 700 jobs for employees and subcontractors to us,” he said. “Basically, a thousand jobs per spread if you include TC Energy jobs. This is a major setback for our company this year.”

    Jorgensen added that beyond the 700 jobs directly affected, there are thousands of other jobs at risk.

    “All the jobs and opportunities in the communities along the pipeline route,” he explained. “All of those towns and private entities and motel owners and parts shops and whatever, tire shops, gas stations, were all going to have received a huge economic gain from this project. I mean, it’s devastating through the whole corridor from the beginning to the end.”

    It is estimated that the state of Montana alone will lose approximately $58 million in annual tax revenue.

    So, what does that mean to the people of the state and for six county governments, five of which are designated high-poverty areas? It means they will lose their single biggest property taxpayer.

    When you lose your tax base, that means money for schools and public services dry up, any economic development evaporates, and the areas start to look like the Rust Belt did in the 1980s when manufacturing moved to Mexico and, eventually, China.

    That happened because of lopsided trade deals. This is happening by our own government.

    The impact is the same: People are forced to move, generations of families are broken up, communities start to fall in despair, and the people left behind struggle with falling in despair themselves.

    But Orange Man tweeted mean things.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  154. Churchill Work Owned by Angelina Jolie Brings $11.5 Million at Christie’s
    ………
    The work, “Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque” (1943), sold for 8.3 million pounds, or about $11.5 million, with fees — a record for an artwork by Churchill, who was a keen amateur painter.

    Churchill gave his Impressionist-style painting of a sunlit Marrakesh with the Atlas Mountains in the background to Roosevelt in 1943, as a birthday gift, after a pivotal World War II meeting in Casablanca to discuss long-term strategy. Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to stay on an extra day in North Africa. Marrakesh was a much-loved subject for paintings by Churchill.
    ……….
    The work proved to be the star lot of Christie’s evening auction of Modern British Art in London. Estimated to sell for about $2.09 million to $3.49 million, it was acquired by an undisclosed telephone buyer. The same telephone buyer bought two other Churchill paintings in the sale, including the landscape “Scene at Marrakech,” dating from about 1935, for $2.6 million.

    The previous auction high for a painting by Churchill had been $2.75 million in 2014, for “The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell,” dating from 1932, showing the garden of the politician’s country home in Kent.
    ………..
    The painting had a trifecta of star status: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Jolie.

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  155. So let me draw an analogy:

    The country has cancer. In desperation, the people sought a cure. Let’s just say it was chemotherapy*. The worst side-effects were realized in collateral damage to parts of the body.

    The new cry was “this treatment has got to stop!” And so the new treatment was to return to a previous way of life. And here we are.

    *I chose chemo over, say, snake-oil, because there were real, not imagined, benefits to the body.

    felipe (484255)

  156. On top of this harsh chemo was the fact that the proscriber of the treatment owned stock in the company that produced the chemo, whose directors were racists, white males who also were stockholders in the company who produced the chemo that had saved some other patients, but not all.

    It was pointed out that the one who proscribed this chemetherapy had also promised outrageous results that no credible person would ever claim. There were many past patients who hated their treatment at the hands of this person and so it was decided that the company that produced the chem product would be boycotted so that no one would ever-again be subjected to it. The end.

    felipe (484255)

  157. Polls, Polls, Polls…….

    AP/NORC: President Biden’s Honeymoon Continues
    ………

    Seventy percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic – the issue for which he receives the highest marks. Forty-four percent of Republicans support his handling of the pandemic, more than any other issue.

    Fewer Americans, 55%, have a positive view of his handling of the economy. Biden’s relative weakness on the economy is a reversal compared with former President Donald Trump, for whom the economy was long his strongest issue. Still, Trump’s highest rating for handling of the economy was 56% in AP-NORC polls, and his overall approval rating never exceeded 43%.

    Americans continue to be less negative about the direction of the country than they were during the Trump Administration. Forty-eight percent say the country is heading in the right direction and 51% think it is heading in the wrong direction. But the public still has a negative view of the national economy: 37% describe it as good, but 63% say it is poor.
    ………

    Fabrizio/Lee: DeSantis and Pence tied in new poll of Trump voters

    ……..
    A new survey from GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio, who was a Trump pollster in 2020, has DeSantis and Pence neck-and-neck in a distant second place behind Trump, who is the top choice for a narrow majority of GOP primary voters.

    But when Fabrizio combined the results with Trump voters’ second choices, DeSantis and Pence were tied with 22 percent, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz coming in a close third, with 19 percent.
    ……..
    Among the other names included in the poll with Trump on the ballot, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley snagged 6 percent while Utah Sen. Mitt Romney received 5 percent. With Trump included, Cruz received 3 percent and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio got 2 percent.

    Others, including South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) as well as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, received 1 percent. Florida Sen. Rick Scott received zero percent.
    …….

    Monmouth: Public Wants Stimulus Checks More Than GOP Support for Plan

    ………
    Biden currently holds a 51% job approval rating, down slightly from the 54% mark he held in late January. His disapproval rating has climbed to 42% from 30% just days into his term. The shift comes as more Americans form an opinion of the new president, with “no opinion” going from 16% in late January to 8% now. Biden gets a 91% approval rating from Democrats (similar to 90% in January) and an 80% disapproval rating among Republicans (up from 70%). Independents are now divided at 43% approve and 48% disapprove, compared with their net positive rating (47% to 30%) of Biden in January.

    The poll also finds the job rating for Congress at 30% approve and 59% disapprove and views of the nation’s trajectory at 34% who say it is headed in the right direction and 61% saying it is on the wrong track. Both ratings were slightly better in January: 35% approve to 51% disapprove for Congress and 42% right direction to 51% wrong track for the country. The prior poll’s results were a historical high in eight years of national polling by Monmouth. While the current ratings have declined, they remain on the higher end of the range across which they have fluctuated since 2013.

    Just over 6 in 10 (62%) Americans support the $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus package currently making its way through Congress, while 34% oppose it. Strong support registers at 35% of the public while strong opposition stands at 23%. Overall support for the plan comes from 92% of Democrats and 56% of independents, but just 33% of Republicans.
    Most Americans are satisfied with one key component of the package – the $1,400 per person payments to individuals and families who meet certain income levels. A majority (53%) say this amount is about right. Another 28% would like to see larger payments and just 14% want smaller payments.
    ………

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  158. HA! auto-mistake “prescribe”, not proscribe! there’s a lesson there, I think.

    felipe (484255)

  159. The country did not have cancer in 2016.

    Dave (1bb933)

  160. “That happened because of lopsided trade deals”

    I’m going to push back on this…..or link an article from a few years back to do the heavy lifting….It’s from a Berkeley economist, but his arguments about trade and manufacturing are insightful, historical, and fact-based….and largely non-ideological….he hits both the Sanders and Trump protectionism….as well as Clinton’s flip on TPP. Bottom line is that NAFTA, bringing China into the WTO, and deals like TPP are not the main cause of manufacturing jobs leaving the U.S…..these are things we simply want to believe….

    https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/24/14363148/trade-deals-nafta-wto-china-job-loss-trump

    AJ_Liberty (a4ff25)

  161. Seeing the company, that produced the hated treatment, suffer massive revenue loss that resulted in a catastrophic fall in stock price, which further impoverished the once-wealthy stockholders, was most satisfying to behold. Incidentaly, the new treatment, which included a return to the liberal enjoyment of the finer things in life, was well received by the previously suffering parts of the body. This happy result was consensually regarded as proof of the wisdom in reversing course – especially as it was also noted that “everyone else is doing it.”

    felipe (484255)

  162. Right, Dave. No one has cancer until it is officially diagnosed, right? Especially when one has recourse to a second, third, fourth…..opinion.

    felipe (484255)

  163. The impact is the same: People are forced to move, generations of families are broken up, communities start to fall in despair, and the people left behind struggle with falling in despair themselves.

    But Orange Man tweeted mean things.

    NJRob (eb56c3) — 3/7/2021 @ 6:01 am

    No intelligent person who has been here for the last 4 years can honestly reduce the opposition to Trump as objecting to his twitter feed. Biden’s economic policy is part of the price we pay for a president that isn’t fatally corrupt, purely dishonest, and willing to tear apart our country with on lies about election fraud that sooth his ego.

    Time123 (89dfb2)

  164. “That happened because of lopsided trade deals”

    I’m going to push back on this…..or link an article from a few years back to do the heavy lifting….It’s from a Berkeley economist, but his arguments about trade and manufacturing are insightful, historical, and fact-based….and largely non-ideological….he hits both the Sanders and Trump protectionism….as well as Clinton’s flip on TPP. Bottom line is that NAFTA, bringing China into the WTO, and deals like TPP are not the main cause of manufacturing jobs leaving the U.S…..these are things we simply want to believe….

    https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/24/14363148/trade-deals-nafta-wto-china-job-loss-trump

    AJ_Liberty (a4ff25) — 3/7/2021 @ 6:53 am

    AJ, In general I think Vox does a poor job of reporting because their bias pushes them into motivated reasoning from time to time. That said, I think the original research here is pretty accurate. I’d add to it that the GOP under Trump completely failed to reverse or even show this trend in his first 3 years.

    Time123 (daab2f)

  165. Good diagnosis felipe. Thank you for your remarks.

    NJRob (02bc9c)

  166. If the Geisel Estate is so hung up on those six books being racist, why don’t they just surrender the copyright and let the books go into the public domain? Retiring them, while still retaining the rights, strikes me as a bit of a cop-out.

    JVW (ee64e4) — 3/6/2021 @ 4:04 pm

    JVW, there were six children’s books with images that are racist and offensive by today’s standards. Together they sold about 5,000 copies last year. For the most part no one was reading these stories. The publisher said they weren’t going to keep printing this books. This is a horde of crybullies getting a popular work canceled. This is a publisher pulling unpopular titles and admitting that some of the artwork is offensive. Also, I haven’t seen anyone arguing the the author was a wildly racist or hateful man. Every discussion of him I’ve seen from the left acknowledges that the images in question were common place for their time.

    This isn’t cancel culture. This is normal publishing business with some brilliant conflict marketing.

    Time123 (daab2f)

  167. But Biden is fatally corrupt, dishonest and willing to tear apart the country on lies based on fraud and calling his political enemies awful names. See his remarks on neanderthals.

    NJRob (02bc9c)

  168. Oh biden’s not doing a great job uniting, but are we really complaining about him saying ‘neanderthal’ right after scoffing that people had a problem with Trump’s mean words (where he often went after an opponent’s family or lied that the whole election was stolen)?

    Biden doesn’t have to do a great job to come across well in comparison. Trump was defending Putin in 2020 after that huge hack was revealed. He took his side against the USA. His supporters say I need to prove it was about some 1973 real estate deal to show Trump was helping Putin out? Nah, Trump helped Putin our every day he was in office and it wasn’t a secret.

    This is why binary choice politics are harmful. Biden doesn’t have to aspire to be better than garbage. Trump didn’t aspire to be better than Hillary (garbage). Everyone takes the bad stuff they are fully aware of for their guy and rolls their eyes and starts pointing out garbage on the other side. Let’s have some self-respect as a country. Or you’re gonna end up Kamala’d

    Dustin (4237e0)

  169. But Biden is fatally corrupt, dishonest and willing to tear apart the country on lies based on fraud and calling his political enemies awful names. See his remarks on neanderthals.

    NJRob (02bc9c) — 3/7/2021 @ 9:55 am

    So far he’s much much better in comparison to Trump. Maybe later he’ll launch baseless attacks on the electoral process and send a mob to Capital but so far so good.

    Saying we didn’t need Neanderthal thinking was a mistake on Biden’s part. The GOP base is hypersensitive to insult and he should have known that any slight, no matter how mild, would be extremely damaging to them. When you’re dealing with fragile people you have to be very careful with your words.

    Time123 (89dfb2)

  170. “willing to tear the apart the country on lies based on fraud”…Really? I can think of only one recent president for whom that was true.

    Victor (4959fb)

  171. But Biden is fatally corrupt, dishonest and willing to tear apart the country on lies based on fraud and calling his political enemies awful names. See his remarks on neanderthals.

    NJRob (02bc9c) — 3/7/2021 @ 9:55 am

    It is funny that you complain he used the word ‘Neanderthal’ so shortly after reducing opposition to trump as ppl not liking his twitter feed. 😀

    Time123 (89dfb2)

  172. But Biden is fatally corrupt, dishonest…

    This is like comparing the gushing of a garden hose to the gushing of a waterfall. It’s a bogus and dishonest comparison. FTR, I didn’t vote for Biden.

    Paul Montagu (77c694)

  173. Time, the author is a UC Berkeley economics professor, not a VOX opinionator/reporter. Again, he steers left of me in terms of monetary policy….but the analysis of trade is mainstream. No one applauds factories shutting down…and the widening gap between white collars and blue collars generally….but people do transition and catch up. The government has a role there that we need to think about.

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  174. AJ, I think the analysis is correct, I just needed to do some throat clearing about Vox. Free trade makes nations richer but those riches are not distributed evenly. Some method is necessary to keep smooth out ‘short term’ impacts to keep them in the 10-20 year range and not the multi-generational time frame. Neither political party has demonstrated they have a great solution.

    Time123 (89dfb2)

  175. NJRob (02bc9c) — 3/7/2021 @ 9:54 am

    You are welcome. I wish you, and everyone in our modest little online community, a happy and blessed Sunday.

    felipe (484255)

  176. 169. Time123 (daab2f) — 3/7/2021 @ 9:54 am

    Every discussion of him I’ve seen from the left acknowledges that the images in question were common place for their time.

    They were stereotypes on purpose. the book probably has alot of non-ethnic stereotypes.

    This isn’t cancel culture. This is normal publishing business with some brilliant conflict marketing.

    if they had just discontinued them. then eBay would not have forbidden their re-ale, but then they would be criticixed for not making the full corpus available for sale.

    You know there’s a book that maybe somebody could gin up opposition to: ‘You’re Only Old once’ It in effect, disparages doctors and hospitals.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gTJUndsBtI

    Louder but a child’s voice : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbQEtUhjAgA

    Review with quotes:

    https://www.timegoesby.net/weblog/2013/12/youre-only-old-once.html

    Criticism of medicine is a high priority for cancellation this year. Even the ayatollah had a tweet removed because he said that Pfizer vaccine was bad (and that therefore its importation into Iran is forbidden) and they don’t remove anything from the Ayatollah because he’s a top government official.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  177. I do think Biden’s being divisive, including the stupid neanderthal comment, and ramming through a bill when the GOP did seem to offer a pretty decent compromise. Just because Trump has been defended for being much more divisive doesn’t really mean Biden is doing a good job. He really isn’t.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  178. “they don’t remove anything from the Ayatollah because he’s a top government official”

    That and the whole fatwa…cut your head off thing

    AJ_Liberty (ec7f74)

  179. But Biden is fatally corrupt, dishonest and willing to tear apart the country on lies based on fraud and calling his political enemies awful names. See his remarks on neanderthals.

    NJRob (02bc9c) — 3/7/2021 @ 9:55 am

    So corruption, dishonesty, divisiveness and calling people awful names are now to be considered very bad things again — whereas for the past 4+ years it was only “deranged” people and snobby elitists who objected to them.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0)

  180. Just because Trump has been defended for being much more divisive doesn’t really mean Biden is doing a good job.

    True. It’s just that Trump defenders have greatly lowered the bar for what should be considered acceptable, and have set themselves up to look like rank hypocrites when they complain about dishonesty and divisiveness now.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0)

  181. 181. AJ_Liberty (ec7f74) — 3/7/2021 @ 10:52 am

    “they don’t remove anything from the Ayatollah because he’s a top government official”

    That and the whole fatwa…cut your head off thing

    But they step in when he attacks the Pfizer vaccine.

    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-iran-supreme-leader-covid-19-vaccine-misinformation

    Twitter has removed a tweet from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in line with the platform’s latest policy against misinformation surrounding COVID-19 vaccines, after he claimed the United States’ and other western nations’ coronavirus vaccines are “completely untrustworthy.”

    But that’s maybe more because they had just done it to Trump.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  182. ramming through a bill when the GOP did seem to offer a pretty decent compromise.

    Admittedly I didn’t follow this super closely, but the “compromise” I recall being offered was less than 1/3 the size of the Dem package.

    If so, it doesn’t seem like a very serious effort.

    Dave (1bb933)

  183. 185 Dave,

    You’re right, the compromise offered by Senator Collins was significantly less than 1/3 of the proposed bill. And there was no guarantee she’d get any other Republican senators to come along with her. So instead of dicking around for months trying to get her to budge a hundred billion or so, losing time, to perhaps no real purpose, the Democrats just did what a majority of the American population elected them to do – pass a bill that the majority of the population favors.

    When Biden starts each day spouting off on twitter, I’ll worry about his divisiveness.

    The good news of the day is that Manchin is openly indicating a willingness to reform filibuster rules so as to make filibusters more difficult. So there’s some hope for America.

    Victor (4959fb)

  184. Actually, I was just thinking. Is there an example in Trump’s 4 years of his working really hard to get Democratic agreement on a bill, seeking bipartisan compromise? I can’t think of any, but I am hopelessly blinded by my partisan filters. The best example that comes to mind was his mild reform of criminal process, which had Democratic support and which he relentlessly hyped ever afterwards.

    But perhaps some of his supporters on this blog can tell me what I’m missing.

    The larger point, by the way, would be that there seems to be an inclination that only Democrats are to be faulted for not seeking bipartisan compromise, but that R’s usually get a pass.

    Victor (4959fb)

  185. Bipartisanship is overrated.

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  186. Admittedly I didn’t follow this super closely, but the “compromise” I recall being offered was less than 1/3 the size of the Dem package.

    If so, it doesn’t seem like a very serious effort.

    Dave (1bb933) — 3/7/2021 @ 11:16 am

    I think it was, but I definitely am more concerned about the insane inflation that’s coming. You realize that when Teslas and bread both cost twice as much, that’s a bigger problem for poor people, right?

    This is a particularly annoying issue to discuss because the GOP spent so much money recently, and I was against it then too.

    The GOP bill was a good one, perhaps imperfect, but it did the popular things, got some help to families similar to the dem bill.

    Ideally I’d say just don’t have another bill, get businesses open, and cut unemployment benefits. I don’t say that out of a ‘bootstraps’ mentality but because we really are setting ourselves up for severe economic decline.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  187. Support for Covid-19 Vaccine Passports Grows, With European, Chinese Backing
    ………
    China is working toward launching certificates that will declare a person’s vaccination status or recent test results, according to its foreign ministry. Similarly, the European Commission plans this month to present proposals for a “digital green pass” for EU citizens, which will specify if someone has been vaccinated, and if not, carry details of their test results.
    ………
    Last week, the U.K. said it, too, was looking at the pros and cons of digital passports, after initially ruling them out.

    The Biden administration hasn’t said if Covid-19 vaccinations will factor into U.S. travel requirements. The U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t yet issued guidance on the issue and says there are no established international standards for vaccines or documentation of vaccination.
    ………
    Many disease experts and the World Health Organization are wary of vaccine passports on the grounds that it remains unclear if vaccinated individuals can or can’t still spread the virus. Governments, though, are increasingly coming around to the idea as a potentially useful tool to underpin the post-pandemic economic recovery.
    ……….
    For their supporters, vaccine passports would allow a resumption of business travel and tourism, helping economies laid low by the pandemic to get back on their feet. Many countries have in the past year slapped outright bans on incoming travelers, and many still impose onerous testing and quarantine requirements for visitors and returnees.

    Among the idea’s strongest advocates are airlines and tourism-dependent countries, which are pushing to normalize international travel as much as possible by summer.
    …….
    The WHO has so far declined to support a vaccine travel certificate, saying it needs more information. At root are two issues: Immunologists still don’t know how easily vaccinated people can unwittingly spread the virus, though early indications suggest such a risk may be low.

    Secondly, some WHO leaders have expressed concern that allowing vaccinated people to travel freely while maintaining border closures and mandatory quarantines for others could be discriminative: 75% of all doses administered so far have been in just 10 countries, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in February.
    ………

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  188. Is there an example in Trump’s 4 years of his working really hard to get Democratic agreement on a bill, seeking bipartisan compromise?

    Mr “I alone can fix it” isn’t a big fan of give-and-take. Insiders have said that he didn’t want to hear alternative points of view even when they came from within the administration or from other Republicans.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0)

  189. Experiment in guaranteed income leads to more work and better health, analysis shows
    More than two years after a group of residents from a northern California city first started receiving monthly cash payments with no-strings attached, the results of the public policy experiment are in: guaranteed basic income — designed to create an income floor — works, according to an analysis of results from the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED).
    ……….
    Researchers found that compared to a control group, those Stockton residents who received regular payments experienced less income volatility each month, were more able to secure full-time employment, were better parents and partners, and even saw improvements in their health and overall well-being. In other words, a simple monthly stipend led to upward economic mobility.
    ……..
    The $500 removed material barriers to full-time employment and created capacity for goal-setting and risk-taking. So what this means, practically speaking, is that there are a lot of folks out there who were eligible for full-time employment, but literally could not take a single shift off of work to apply for a new job,” said Amy Castro Baker, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the program’s economic analysis.
    ………
    “We know financial strain can kind of get into the body, especially for folks that are under extreme financial strain for a long period of time,” said analysis co-author Stacia West, and assistant professor at the University of Tennessee. “What we see is that the treatment group reports significantly less complications related to emotional health, well-being. They have more energy, they have less fatigue, they have less bodily pain than compared to the control group.”

    Rip Murdock (6d8c0f)

  190. NJ Rob, I get that you object to the ‘Neanderthal’ comment, but from where i’m coming, it’s *mild*.

    The people who are refusing to wear masks in public are, in my view, attempted murderers.

    There’s a huge number of us who have worn masked and distanced and stayed home for a year now who look at the people who have refused to do these things as being personally responsible for extending the length of time the crisis lasts and producing a large chunk of the deaths, and we’re pretty much all *furious*. That fury isn’t about partisanship, it’s about people being unwilling to make sacrifices for the common good and therefore demonstrating that they simply don’t give a damn about their fellow man.

    The fury isn’t going to go away when the pandemic ends.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  191. Aphrael, my local HEB is going to be requiring masks (when our governor cancelled the unenforceable mask law, that put the decision on businesses).

    My particular HEB was in the news for giving all its food away when the power failed during the big snowstorm (making the cash registers fail). It’s a legitimately special grocery store that has its act together.

    The rage I’m seeing about the mask rule from locals on social media is incredible. They are demanding neighbors ‘be a man’ and go into the store without a mask, just to see if HEB does anything (they won’t). Veterans saying the mask is a terrible discrimination against their disabled status. It’s sad how quickly these people have turned against their own community over an issue that I associate with being a Trump supporter.

    All politicians politicize things, but this is ridiculous. These people are giving up a whole facet of their identity over to make sure they align with Trump. Respecting your elders, your community, making sure businesses have a say in how they operate, that’s supposed to be normal.

    Unfortuantely, your rage towards those who made the pandemic worse is returned, probably many times over, for reasons that are too stupid to ever argue your way out of.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  192. https://medium.com/surviving-covid-19/we-hate-you-now-d0fca14e3b82 says it better than I do.

    > Unfortuantely, your rage towards those who made the pandemic worse is returned, probably many times over, for reasons that are too stupid to ever argue your way out of.

    Oh, i’m sure that’s true, sadly.

    Rather than bringing us together, this natural disaster has *cemented* our divisions. Long-term I see seperation into two or more different countries with “ethnic” (eg, political tribal) cleansing as the *most likely* outcome, maybe a generation hence.

    Because this rift isn’t going to heal and likely isn’t healable.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  193. As a person very much of Nor/west European descent and so a person relatively likely to be carrying some Neanderthal DNA, I am insulted that some of my possible v. distant ancestors were compared to people who can’t manage basic safety precautions. Although… I guess they did have some survival limiting thought patterns and behaviors, since they are now extincts. So….

    Nic (896fdf)

  194. True. It’s just that Trump defenders have greatly lowered the bar for what should be considered acceptable, and have set themselves up to look like rank hypocrites when they complain about dishonesty and divisiveness now.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0) — 3/7/2021 @ 11:00 am

    Follow your own words. You keep whining about Trump when the current president is being divisive, derogatory and exactly what Trump supporters said he would be: a radical leftist. Own your words.

    NJRob (c0ada1)

  195. The $9,000 price was set by the Public Utilities commission in Texas, not any market process. It also lastd for more than a day than it should have, by its own terms (it was supposed to be used when the alternative was rolling blackouts)

    That price is per megawatt hour, meaning $9.00 a kilowatt.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  196. But Biden is fatally corrupt, dishonest and willing to tear apart the country on lies based on fraud and calling his political enemies awful names. See his remarks on neanderthals.

    NJRob (02bc9c) — 3/7/2021 @ 9:55 am

    Surely, NJRob, a man with your intelligence can see why it’s awfully hard to take his comment seriously when there was so much time spent defending Trump. The description above is an accurate description of Trump. Perhaps the difference is, Trump didn’t just call political enemies awful names – he called event hose he hired as the “best and the brightest” awful names. Even those who came to his defense time and time again, ended up being called awful names by him. I have yet to see this with Biden.

    Dana (fd537d)

  197. Nobody understands why masks work in reducing the total caseload, and nobody bothers to explain because they don’t understand themselves.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  198. @ aphrael,

    There’s a huge number of us who have worn masked and distanced and stayed home for a year now who look at the people who have refused to do these things as being personally responsible for extending the length of time the crisis lasts and producing a large chunk of the deaths, and we’re pretty much all *furious*. That fury isn’t about partisanship, it’s about people being unwilling to make sacrifices for the common good and therefore demonstrating that they simply don’t give a damn about their fellow man.

    I have been thinking about in light of Christianity. I have concluded it is impossible to come away from reading the Gospels and not wear masks whenever we are around those not in our households. To not, for whatever reason, is simply selfishness. And that is in diametrical opposition to living the Christian life. So it really bothers me when alleged Christians (and typically these are Trump supporters. Not always, but often.) refuse to mask-up because their freedoms are allegedly being infringed upon. I don’t believe that putting one’s *political views* above the physical needs of those around us, including our neighbors, is a reflection of Christ’s relationship with us.

    Dana (fd537d)

  199. Rip Murdock (6d8c0f) — 3/7/2021 @ 12:28 pm

    More than two years after a group of residents from a northern California city first started receiving monthly cash payments with no-strings attached, the results of the public policy experiment are in: guaranteed basic income — designed to create an income floor — works, according to an analysis of results from the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED).

    You can’t say that because the experiment is different than what would be if this was implemented.

    1) The money is supplemental – and it it doesn’t take much extra money to substantially help people. but if everybody got it all the time it wouldn’t be extra money. if a basic income was granted the amount should be raised every year.

    2) Only some people got it – which means it did not raise rents and other costs. Used cars did not cost more for instance.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  200. 187. Victor (4959fb) — 3/7/2021 @ 11:31 am

    Actually, I was just thinking. Is there an example in Trump’s 4 years of his working really hard to get Democratic agreement on a bill, seeking bipartisan compromise? I can’t think of any, but I am hopelessly blinded by my partisan filters. The best example that comes to mind was his mild reform of criminal process, which had Democratic support and which he relentlessly hyped ever afterwards.

    Why is the First Step Act not a good example?

    Actually, in that case, Donald Trump (or rather Jared Kushner) had to work hard to get Republican support for the bill.

    https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-first-step-act-became-law-and-what-happens-next

    The FIRST STEP Act initially stalled in the Senate amid opposition from a right-wing minority faction led again by Cotton. And, critically, time was running out in the legislative session, making Republican leaders balk at spending precious floor time on the bill. But another series of compromises quieted opposition from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and garnered support for the bill from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the majority whip, clearing the path for an easy floor vote. After that change and continued pressure from Trump, Grassley, the Koch Brothers, and constituents in Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced in mid-December that he would bring up the bill for a vote before the end of the year, during the lame-duck Congress.

    Longtime opponents of reform like Cotton still had a chance to block the bill: They could run out the clock. But a series of procedural shortcuts allowed McConnell to bring the bill to the floor by essentially slotting the text of the bill into another piece of legislation that was already eligible for Senate consideration. And so another hurdle was cleared.

    But one more remained. During the amendment process for the FIRST STEP Act, Cotton and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) pushed for a series of “poison pill” amendments that would have unacceptably weakened the bill and split the bipartisan coalition supporting it, just at the moment of passage. But those amendments ultimately failed to materialize in the final bill, which cleared the Senate by an overwhelming 87-12 margin. Not a single Democrat voted against the bill, and Republican opponents of reform were relegated to a small minority. Next, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) cleared the way for quick consideration of the bill in the House of Representatives — and sent it to President Trump’s desk just before Christmas. The president signed the bill on December 21. [2018]

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/us/politics/jared-kushner-criminal-justice-bill.html

    The day after President Trump announced his support for a bipartisan criminal justice overhaul bill in the Roosevelt Room, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, arrived in the Oval Office to give him a dose of political reality. He was not going to bring the bill to the Senate floor until next year, Mr. McConnell told the president.

    Mr. Trump called for his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the administration’s driving force behind the bill, to join the meeting and hear the news himself. As Mr. Kushner entered the Oval Office, Mr. McConnell joked that he felt like he had heard from everyone Mr. Kushner knew.

    “That’s not true,” Mr. Kushner replied, according to administration officials. “I have a lot more people.”

    And he did.

    Because Mr. Trump agreed that the bill had to wait, according to administration officials, Mr. Kushner enlisted Vice President Mike Pence to explain to the president that waiting until next year, when a House controlled by the Democrats would then vote on the bill, would most likely result in a version that he would not like. Mr. Kushner called Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan Murdoch and Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director who is now a senior executive at Fox, to release a statement backing his bill.

    Mr. Kushner also appeared on “Hannity” on Fox News in an effort to make clear to the president’s base and Republican senators on the fence that even Sean Hannity, the hard-right host, was supportive of it.

    The bill’s advocates say Mr. Kushner’s efforts were part of the reason Mr. McConnell reversed course, announcing that the Senate would vote on the bill next week. But even more important was his ability, over a course of years, to make Mr. Trump comfortable with the need for criminal justice overhaul in the first place….

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  201. Nobody understands why masks work in reducing the total caseload, and nobody bothers to explain because they don’t understand themselves.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac) — 3/7/2021 @ 1:35 pm

    Yeah real mystery why a physical barrier would slow and limit the travel of physical material. It’s just impossible to figure this complex scenario out.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  202. I think most people who are asymptomatic will in normal circumstances (not staying a long time in poorly ventilated situations with uninfected people) not give anyone a serious case. The problem occurs because of this.

    Let’s call case levels A B C and D with D being the most serious before hospitalization. (and a D maybe will lead half the time to hospitalization or worse)

    A D person can transmit a serious case to people closely around him but can also transmit A cases to many people far away. That can start a train or chain of transmission. An A case gives rise to B cases and B cases to C cases and C cases to D cases. (not necessarily this exactly or even that it takes exactly four. But that’s the essence of why contact tracing doesn’t work with Covid.)

    In each iteration – say A -> B -> C and so on – the disease gets a little further advanced before it gets beaten back and the next person infected starts from a more advanced point.

    Now A cases – or even minus A cases – amount to a vaccination – a potentially rather dangerous vaccination compared to a real one even though the vaccination makes someone feel worse for a day than maybe your A or B cases.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  203. Dustin (4237e0) — 3/7/2021 @ 2:00 pm

    Yeah real mystery why a physical barrier would slow and limit the travel of physical material. It’s just impossible to figure this complex scenario out.

    It does, but the kind of mask and how they are warn matters.

    Commonly it probably reduces the number of viral particles in the air by about 50%. This is valuable.

    Of course, 50% of 0 is 0.

    Even without masks subclinical cases probably don’t usually create serious cases in the next iteration.

    They never describe how serious a case is transmitted but it has to work the way I outlined A -> B -> C -> D with each successive case being worse than the previous one.

    Get a lot of mild cases to stay together in the same place, especially day after day, ad you get serious cases.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  204. Sammy,

    I agree that in that instance Trump (though apparently much more actively Kushner) did do some work to put together a bipartisan majority in favor of the bill. So it counts. I disparaged it though, because it’s actually the single instance I can think of, and again there’s little evidence that trump was the motive force, or did much work for it. Also, I don’t think the bill was very significant. Sure it was a First Step. So far as I can tell there was never much effort to do a second step.

    Victor (4959fb)

  205. 158. felipe (484255) — 3/7/2021 @ 6:32 am

    *I chose chemo over, say, snake-oil, because there were real, not imagined, benefits to the body.

    It’s a good example because chemotherapy is often a really rotten idea that doesn’t work but better than snake oil.

    Why not Dr Gil Lederman 212-CHOICES. He cured Jimmy Carter.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  206. You keep whining about Trump when the current president is being divisive, derogatory and exactly what Trump supporters said he would be: a radical leftist.

    I’m not “whining” about Trump. I’m noting the weirdness of Trump defenders suddenly deciding it’s terrible for a president to be “divisive, derogatory,” etc., after 4-5 years of taking a radically different view.

    It’s one thing to criticize Biden on policy. It’s quite another to criticize him on things that Trumpers routinely said were totally irrelevant, or even virtuous, when the subject was Trump. It’s just an open announcement of having no intent to be at all consistent in the standard of judgment.

    Trumpers who complain that “Biden is divisive and derogatory” should be laughed out of court.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0)

  207. Gov. Andrew Cuomo had someone else take his mandatory workplace sex harassment training course for him — then signed off on it as if he’d taken it himself, accuser Charlotte Bennett says in a bombshell new interview aired Friday night.

    That was in 2019. Charlotte Bennett knows that because she was there.

    The New York Post writes:

    Bennett’s explosive claim that the governor had an aide complete his sex-harassment training for him directly contradicts what he said on Wednesday.

    When asked by a reporter if he had taken the mandatory training, Cuomo simply said, “The short answer is yes.”

    But if you carefully parse Cuomo’s response to that question – that the “short answer” is that he did take the training – there’s no contradiction. It is completely possible – and likely too – that he has taken the sexual harassment training by now.

    Charlotte Bennett had that “interview” with Andrew Cuomo with the recorder turned off on June 5 or 6, 2020. When she didn’t seem to be a good prospect for him, Cuomo asked her to find a girlfriend for him. and also for some help in using some features of an iPhone. The next day he asked her about what progress she was making. She told him she was working on it. (The chronology is a bit unclear. maybe readng or hearing her original CBD Bews interviews, broadcast on Thursday night and Friday morning, would make ckearer what took place on what day)

    It took her about a week to file a complaint, and she met on June 30 meeting with Cuomo’s chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, and special counsel Judith Mogul and his. She told them he didn’t want a big investigation. They told her that’s OK because she went to them before anything serious happened and it was just grooming. Now the question I would have is: How was this grooming? But it was apparently because he was nice to her for a year before and didn’t yell at her – and alternating between being screaming or abusive and apologizing and being very nice is typical abusive behavior she said.

    For them to say this was grooming there must have been regular occurrences of situations with women.

    By the way, Cuomo’s office had a (maybe informal) do-not-yell-at list. State Senator Liz Krueger was on it. Otherwise pretty much anybody he or his staff interacted wit got yelled at and threatened eventually. Mayor Bill de Blasio got told to fire particular people (he didn’t)

    Charlotte Bennett got reassigned, as she had asked, and left state employment in November. Her original job with Cuomo, which lasted about a year was executive assistant an health policy adviser. Her new Job from July through about November was called Health policy director and she was in an office on the other side of the Capitol building where she would not interact with the governor when he was in Albany (his main office is maybe the one in New York City)

    You think she might have something to say about Covid and nursing home or was she just decoration?

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  208. Dave wrote:

    Re: Seuss

    I guess I draw an important distinction between removing from the market those specific works that contain demeaning depictions, which seems reasonable, and removing *all* of Geisel’s portfolio because he produced a few such works, which isn’t reasonable under the circumstances.

    I just checked my amazon account, and it seems that I can still get Mein Kampf, with a large choice of editions and translations, The Communist Manifesto, and several different editions of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. I am highly offended. I can get the Anarchists Cookbook, which includes instructions for making crude bombs.

    But Dr Seuss? Heaven forfend!

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec)

  209. I am highly offended.

    The Dana in Kentucky (0562ec) — 3/7/2021 @ 2:43 pm

    Yeah we know, man.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  210. I just checked my amazon account, and it seems that I can still get Mein Kampf, with a large choice of editions and translations, The Communist Manifesto, and several different editions of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. I am highly offended. I can get the Anarchists Cookbook, which includes instructions for making crude bombs.

    So are you arguing that it’s a problem that the private publishers choose to continue to publish them, or that a different publisher has chosen to not publish other ones?

    Since it’s their property, it’s up to them and since it’s your money, you can continue to buy Mein Kampf to your heart’s content.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  211. Dana (fd537d) — 3/7/2021 @ 1:40 pm

    I agree, Dana. Wearing the mask, in the light of Christianity, is an act of Charity. Catholics are not only excused from attending Mass, when they are sick, but are obligated to take precautions against infecting others – even in “normal” times.

    felipe (484255)

  212. The overwhelming majority of Seuss’s works are available on Amazon.

    Most of the ones the owner of the copyright withdrew from publication are still available at absurd prices.

    In any sane world, pre-WW2 era Dr. Seuss works would *already be in the public domain*, just as are Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto, and could be republished by anyone who thought they could make money doing so.

    But we’ve decided that things shouldn’t go into the domain for a ludicrously long time, and as a result, Seuss’s estate still owns the copyright in these books, and *they* have decided to withdraw them from publication. Not Amazon. Not a state government. Not the federal government. The people who own the copyright.

    Why are y’all turning this decision by the copy right holder into a cause celebre about politicians and middlemen doing the wrong thing?

    aphrael (4c4719)

  213. @aphrael@215 We didn’t decide that copyright should last a gazillion years, Disney did. They don’t want Mickey in the public domain so they keep paying politicians to move the goal posts.

    Nic (896fdf)

  214. Why are y’all turning this decision by the copy right holder into a cause celebre about politicians and middlemen doing the wrong thing?
    aphrael (4c4719) — 3/7/2021 @ 3:29 pm

    This is the money shot. Well stated, aphrael.

    felipe (484255)

  215. Nic: Congress, acting on our behalf, made that decision. It was a bad decision then, and it remains a bad decision, but given that that’s the law, the copyright holder has full power here.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  216. Dana, at 201: it’s inappropriate for me to hold an opinion about what is required by Christianity, so I will accept your analysis. 🙂

    aphrael (4c4719)

  217. Surely, NJRob, a man with your intelligence can see why it’s awfully hard to take his comment seriously when there was so much time spent defending Trump. The description above is an accurate description of Trump. Perhaps the difference is, Trump didn’t just call political enemies awful names – he called event hose he hired as the “best and the brightest” awful names. Even those who came to his defense time and time again, ended up being called awful names by him. I have yet to see this with Biden.

    Dana (fd537d) — 3/7/2021 @ 1:35 pm

    That’s a strawman argument Dana. There were very few on here defending his personality. His policy, when worthy, was justifiably defended. It’s been nonstop harping on his tweets and responses to his personality for the past 5 years, but it’s policy that harms people. Biden’s first month and a half have harmed people more by encouraging people to flood the border, by increasing costs on oil and natural gas as well as our dependency on foreign hostile nations for our energy needs, by destroying jobs, than Trump would’ve done.

    So if you want to continue to focus on former President Trump’s personality, go right ahead. But the real harm being done to this nation now is by President Biden.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  218. It’s one thing to criticize Biden on policy. It’s quite another to criticize him on things that Trumpers routinely said were totally irrelevant, or even virtuous, when the subject was Trump. It’s just an open announcement of having no intent to be at all consistent in the standard of judgment.

    Trumpers who complain that “Biden is divisive and derogatory” should be laughed out of court.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0) — 3/7/2021 @ 2:23 pm

    Not in the slightest. It’s calling out your own hypocrisy where you constantly criticized Trump for his aggressive demeanor and insulting words, but are ignoring Biden doing the same. Then when it’s mentioned by others, you resort to “but Trump” as if that excuses Biden’s derogatory actions. If you want to claim you believe you voted for the lesser of two evils, go right ahead. But if you are defending Biden or making excuses for him, that’s something else entirely.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  219. But we’ve decided that things shouldn’t go into the domain for a ludicrously long time, and as a result, Seuss’s estate still owns the copyright in these books, and *they* have decided to withdraw them from publication. Not Amazon. Not a state government. Not the federal government. The people who own the copyright.

    Why are y’all turning this decision by the copy right holder into a cause celebre about politicians and middlemen doing the wrong thing?

    aphrael (4c4719) — 3/7/2021 @ 3:29 pm

    The reason they did so was outside pressure, specifically from the usual special interest groups and all they are doing is increasing pressure to ban speech they don’t like. You can start with the SPLC if you want a specific group that was targeting Seuss. Then you can look at all their other attacks on free speech as well as their hate list that caused an ill man to shoot up a Christian workplace.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  220. > It’s calling out your own hypocrisy where you constantly criticized Trump for his aggressive demeanor and insulting words, but are ignoring Biden doing the same.

    The difference in degree here is so large that it’s absurd. Biden’s insulting words aren’t even remotely in the same ballpark.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  221. They guy repeatedly bashed the families of his political opponents. I just don’t see how Trump gets a pass because it’s “totally irrelevant” as his policies are so glorious, but Biden is getting grief from the same folks.

    Trump Jr had a video today where he yammers on and on and on about Cuomo’s sleazy behavior. The whole time I’m imagining that trump Jr’s defining moment in life, why he’s such a weirdo, probably is that his mom swore out those painfully detailed affidavits about his dad brutally raping her.

    I get it though. Character doesn’t matter because if the dems win it’s all over for America, etc etc, he fights because he’s such a bad wild dude, whatever. It’s nonsense. He’s weak. Trump had the chance to actually get the job done. Instead he made Biden electable, practically inevitable.

    someone with no loyalty to the GOP or the democrats with four years as president could make a lot of amazing deals, cut through the BS. Voter ID combined with universal registration? Limited mail-ballots, but federal holidays for weekend elections. Security walls where needed at the border. Expanded wide gates for law abiding immigrants. Firing lots of people from the federal government. Cutting the fat from the military. Etc etc. I can think of a million ways Trump could have angered GOP loyalists but at the end of his term been a great leader.

    Instead, he wanted to milk that caravan, wanted to fight about masks like he’s 11 years old. His character is at the heart of his failure.

    But he’s the past. NJRob is actually on the money with Biden’s failings. The border is a big mess, much worse than a couple months ago, and there’s no accountability for the harm that will do. Biden’s not trying to be a uniter at all. And everything he does is responded to with an easy, fun slam on Trump. I get it. I love slamming Trump. but it’s not the way to a better government.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  222. We didn’t decide that copyright should last a gazillion years, Disney did. They don’t want Mickey in the public domain so they keep paying politicians to move the goal posts.

    The Constitution says “a limited time.” Now, one could say that “a million years” is a limited time, but any judge who agrees should be impeached. What IS a limited time? Even “longer than a human lifetime” seems suspect.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  223. Article I, Section 8:

    “[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

    The point of the grant is to produce works for the Public Domain. Were one to challenge a further extension before this Court, there are two good arguments: 1) Not a limited time any more, being longer than all human lifespans, and 2) it is a Taking from the Public Domain and a breach of the implied contact (we grant you this monopoly for X years and after that it belongs to The People).

    Those that produce works under such a rule, and benefit from the copyright cannot later say “We want a new deal” when it’s time to pay the piper. The only proper answer from The People is “Why should we?”

    Note: Lawrence Lessig, who no doubt has forgotten more about the law than I will ever know, thought he’d appeal to the leftists (Eldred v Ashcroft) with a 1st amendment argument, but lost 7-2 convincing only Stevens and Breyer.

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  224. Does anyone have a problem that the leader of the dissidents in the United States is barred from expressing his thoughts on most media platforms? Never mind what you might think about Trump, that is what he is right now, and that is what the power structure is doing to him.

    Yay, freedom!

    Kevin M (ab1c11)

  225. expressing his thoughts on most media platforms?

    What does that even mean? He’s free to publish a newspaper, set up a website. He doesn’t get to force people to use their private property however he wishes.

    Yay, freedom!

    Yeah, freedom…for all, not just “a dissident leader”, under the structure of the Constitution of the United States.

    Colonel Klink (Ret) (1367c0)

  226. Kevin M at 227. Nope, not in the least. He could have spent a tiny portion of his gold-plated toilet airplanes, Fifth Avenue penthouse playrooms complete with pony, Palm Beach mansions, prenup settlements, etc., etc., etc., money to have his own McDrumpfelschnitzelfacetwitterbookgram.

    nk (1d9030)

  227. When asked by a reporter if he had taken the mandatory training, Cuomo simply said, “The short answer is yes.”

    Actually, “Yes” is the short answer. Cuomo’s statement has an air of deception about it.

    Here is another Chinese saying: The more ink you use to describe something, the blacker it gets.

    norcal (01e272)

  228. Remember when Melania stayed in New York the first six months of the Orange Reign to force Trump to renegotiate the prenup? Her security detail alone cost the taxpayers $100,000 a day. Just a week’s worth of that would have kept the woman he let be executed in maximum security imprisonment for the rest of her life. …, and his horse too!

    nk (1d9030)

  229. @Kevin@27 (In normal times) If I go down to the mall and stand in the food court and scream rude things at people, what happens to me?

    Nic (896fdf)

  230. Kevin M — the man is spreading lies that undermine the legitimacy of the Republic. He is a clear and present danger to us all. Him being excluded from most media platforms is unfortunately *absolutely essential* for the protection of the country.

    I hate that we’ve gotten here.

    aphrael (4c4719)

  231. McDrumpfelschnitzelfacetwitterbookgram

    LMAO!

    norcal (01e272)

  232. I don’t buy “leader of the dissidents”, either. Leech of the dissidents maybe. Anyway, it looks to me, with those cease and desist letters he sent to the RNC, that he’s looking to dump the GOP before it dumps him.

    nk (1d9030)

  233. Can’t the Dems use his likeness to raise money against him?

    If so, how is the QOP’s use subject to a cease and desist order?

    Dave (1bb933)

  234. So if you want to continue to focus on former President Trump’s personality, go right ahead.

    Rob, it wasn’t Trump’s “personality” that horribly mismanaged CV19 and unnecessarily killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. It wasn’t his “personality” that added $1.9 trillion to our national debt on tax cuts that mostly benefited his tax bracket. It wasn’t “personality” that undermined our democracy by cheating on elections multiple times over.

    Paul Montagu (77c694)

  235. So where do guys stand on same-sex attraction?

    There was a kerfuffle earlier this week when a group of BYU students went up at night to the huge “Y” painted on the mountain looming over Provo, and used colored flashlights to make it appear as a rainbow Y. (The “Y” is for BYU.)

    Reactionary Mormons got their dander up over this, as you may expect. They can be roughly divided into two camps: Those who think gay people are sinners who choose to be attracted to their own sex, and those who concede that it’s not a choice, but insist that gay people just have to bear the cross of never having intimacy in this life, and wait until they can be “fixed” in the afterlife.

    I started a firestorm on an unofficial BYU sports board when I suggested that people stop calling it a “lifestyle”, because the word implies that gay people choose to be gay. I also took a pre-emptive shot at those who would suggest that it only becomes a lifestyle when gay people choose to act on their attraction. I said this was a trite and sanctimonious response from people sitting on their heterosexual, married, having-sex perch.

    Much to my delight, my post was not deleted by the moderators, and a slight majority of responders agreed with me. I see this as a positive development, even if it is motivated by the desire of BYU to join one of the major athletic conferences like the PAC-12 (will never happen) or the Big 12 (possible). The last time this was a possibility, people at Iowa State (Iowa State of all places!), a member of the Big 12, raised hell because of BYU’s policy on same-sex attraction. BYU’s policy is: you can be gay, but you can’t act on it. Some clever person referred to this policy as “Do Ask. Do Tell. Don’t Do”.

    norcal (01e272)

  236. If so, how is the QOP’s use subject to a cease and desist order?

    Letter. Not order. Big difference. No legal effect. If sent by a serious person, in an intellectual property dispute, you should contact the other attorney and if nothing else acknowledge that you got the letter. From a Trump attorney? Use the Cleveland Browns form of letter.

    nk (1d9030)

  237. “Biden’s first month and a half have harmed people more by encouraging people to flood the border, by increasing costs on oil and natural gas as well as our dependency on foreign hostile nations for our energy needs, by destroying jobs, than Trump would’ve done.”

    None of these things have happened. However, Trump’s “personality” gave us 500,000 dead from a pandemic.

    Davethulhu (6ba00b)

  238. Davethulu, I disagree with you on both sides of that analysys. There does seem to be a rush on the border because of Biden. Perhaps he isn’t intentionally encouraging it, with things like ‘reception centers’ and resuming the processing of illegal immigrants, but the problem is worse. he did change energy policy pretty sharply. And Donald Trump didn’t cause 500,000 deaths. He was awful in denying a crisis, which he mismanaged, which did have that many die, but even with perfect decisions on his part the death toll would have been high in America.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  239. You took the words out of my mouth, Dustin!

    norcal (01e272)

  240. Even my spelling?

    Dustin (4237e0)

  241. Nobody’s perfect, Dustin.

    norcal (01e272)

  242. It’s like something in my brain is broken though. I definitely need more sleep and less coffee.

    hope all had a good weekend.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  243. So where do guys stand on same-sex attraction?

    Personally, my strongest feeling is schadenfreude, directed at the Left Bank crowd, that what was avant garde is now bourgeois.

    nk (1d9030)

  244. 226. Kevin M (ab1c11) — 3/7/2021 @ 5:45 pm

    Note: Lawrence Lessig, who no doubt has forgotten more about the law than I will ever know, thought he’d appeal to the leftists (Eldred v Ashcroft) with a 1st amendment argument, but lost 7-2 convincing only Stevens and Breyer.

    I think he said his mistake was making an argument just on the law – the Supreme Court is afraid of making too dramatic changes with unknown consequences..

    Copyrights have started expiring again and Congress probably won’t extend them again. the lobbying argument was whipsawing copyright extensions in Europe and the United States using an extension in one place as an argument for an extension in the other.

    The Great Gatsby just went into the public domain.

    https://www.npr.org/2021/01/01/951171599/party-like-its-1925-on-public-domain-day-gatsby-and-dalloway-are-in

    (For a long time, copyright expired after 75 years, [actually 28 years with renewal possible for another 28 years] but in 1998, Congress extended the date of copyright expiration for works published between 1923 and 1977 to 95 years.)

    From 1978 on, it’s life of the author or authors plus I don’;t know how many years now.

    The movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) – the original black and white version – is in the public domain because somebody neglected to renew the copyright in 1973 or 1974.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  245. Dustin, thanks for the even handed response, let me see if I can address your points.

    “There does seem to be a rush on the border because of Biden. Perhaps he isn’t intentionally encouraging it, with things like ‘reception centers’ and resuming the processing of illegal immigrants, but the problem is worse.”

    I think it’s too early to tell. Despite his big talk, border apprehensions under Trump were about the same as under Obama. There’s not enough info to say at this point.

    “he did change energy policy pretty sharply.”

    What specifically? As far as gas prices are concerned, I brought this up in another thread: https://www.yahoo.com/now/why-gasoline-prices-rising-high-162200876.html

    “He was awful in denying a crisis, which he mismanaged, which did have that many die, but even with perfect decisions on his part the death toll would have been high in America.”

    You’re right about the actual number, of course. However, Trump politicized basic safety measures (mask wearing, large gatherings), he has blood of thousands on his hands.

    Davethulhu (6ba00b)

  246. Like with many things, depends on who you trust, and it’s easy to doubt news. I’ve seen good reports of sections on the border having huge jumps in arrests. It seems intuitive that this is true, but I am biased on this issue.

    Biden did cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, those leases in Alaska, paused offshore work and he’s made other statments showing he is no friend of that sector, I recall in the third debate. Granted, the weather did its damage too. I think he has a strategy to discourage fossil fuel use, and I think he wants its cost to go up. Most of the effect isn’t here yet, but the costs are up.

    However, Trump politicized basic safety measures (mask wearing, large gatherings), he has blood of thousands on his hands.

    You are right. It’s awful leadership and I could go on at length about how awful this is combined with the many ways trump eroded public trust and stability. I think blaming him for the total figure is going to polarize people, but it is inevitable.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  247. what was avant garde is now bourgeois

    Not in Utah. Not yet, anyway.

    norcal (01e272)

  248. @249 The thing about the Keystone shortcut, though, is that it already wasn’t going anywhere. It’s been mired in the Nebraska court system.

    So here are my thoughts on the Oil and Gas industry and really the Fossil energy sector in general. We subsidize those industries more than we do any other commercial sector except maybe agriculture. I think they are overly dependent on the government for direct hand-outs, cheap federal leases, and advantageous laws and regulations while they take our tax dollars and then take our money.

    Lets just look at cars and gas mileage as an example. It isn’t the auto makers or consumers we are advantaging by not raising the gas mileage standards (and don’t you tell me about cool engine size and acceleration, probably none of the rest you are driving a manual, which means that I can and do out accelerate all y’all with the practical Japanese engine in my sedan.). I use about 10 gallons of gas a week during normal times, so if you assume that CA gas prices are abt $4 a gallon, I spend roughly $2,000 a year on gas so $20,000 over the last 10 years. If my car got 40 m/p/g instead of 30, it would’ve saved me abt $5,000 over the last 10 years. How many cars have been purchased in this country in the last 10 years? Who would’ve benefited from demand and therefore prices going down. Who benefits from not raising the gas mileage standards? Who would’ve benefited from saving those thousands of dollars?

    I do not feel very sorry for the oil and gas industry.

    Nic (896fdf)

  249. which means that I can and do out accelerate all y’all with the practical Japanese engine in my sedan

    Just name the time and place. 🙂

    norcal (01e272)

  250. By the way, my V8 Mustang with 460 horsepower gets 28 miles per gallon on the highway. This blows my mind.

    norcal (01e272)

  251. @253 My mom would never hear the end of it if her cousin had to arraign me for drag-racing through Auburn (or anywhere else in Placer county). :P. I’ll concede that it’s possible that I might not be able to out accelerate a mustang, depending on the year.

    Nic (896fdf)

  252. It’s one thing to criticize Biden on policy. It’s quite another to criticize him on things that Trumpers routinely said were totally irrelevant, or even virtuous, when the subject was Trump. It’s just an open announcement of having no intent to be at all consistent in the standard of judgment.

    Trumpers who complain that “Biden is divisive and derogatory” should be laughed out of court.

    Radegunda (f4d5c0) — 3/7/2021 @ 2:23 pm

    Not in the slightest. It’s calling out your own hypocrisy where you constantly criticized Trump for his aggressive demeanor and insulting words, but are ignoring Biden doing the same. Then when it’s mentioned by others, you resort to “but Trump” as if that excuses Biden’s derogatory actions. If you want to claim you believe you voted for the lesser of two evils, go right ahead. But if you are defending Biden or making excuses for him, that’s something else entirely.

    NJRob (eb56c3) — 3/7/2021 @ 4:52 pm

    But Biden isn’t doing the same. He made a comment, Neanderthal thinking, that he shouldn’t have made. He didn’t say Abbot or any specific person was a Neanderthal, he hasn’t repeated the attack and he hasn’t doubled down or sent out surrogates to repeat the insult. He hasn’t be out telling his base repeatedly that his opponents are evil and want to destroy America. These are all things Trump routinely did.

    He said 1 stupid thing (there will for sure be more) and you’re acting as if that’s ‘the same’. It’s not. Also, he shouldn’t have said it. As I said before the GOP base is incredibly fragile and he needs to avoid offending them.

    You’re acting like the Antifa kid who tries to justify a riot by saying “cops speed and part illegally” so they’re not following the law either. At some point, a difference in degree is a difference in kind. You can say both things are wrong without saying both things are the same.

    Time123 (b4d075)

  253. No invention has done more to advance mankind than the internal combustion engine. It is humanity’s most faithful servant and very best friend. And the dinosaurs have been dead for 65 million years.

    nk (1d9030)

  254. https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/03/biden-admin-pleased-europeans-dropped-nuclear-censure-plan-against-iran/

    Everyone’s sure getting what they wanted from Biden. Especially China and Iran.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  255. https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/03/youtube-purges-trumps-cpac-speech-suspends-right-side-broadcasting-for-posting-it/

    And then of course there was this. The purges will continue until morale improves.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  256. Aw, for crying out loud, NJRob, you gone and made me link Trump. At YouTube:

    President Trump CPAC 2021 Full Speech I NewsNOW from FOX
    197,750 views• Feb 28, 2021

    nk (1d9030)

  257. When Biden’s neanderthal remarks cause a riot as thousands of sapienists surround neanderthals while Biden tells them to fight like hell, and eventually a few “people” die, then Biden will be like Trump.

    nevertheness, Biden is not an effective uniter. I don’t recall any of us saying Biden was going to do a great job. it’s that Trump was actively doing harm. Biden sucks at unity, Trump was generating division. Biden is ineffective at foreign policy. Trump was helping dictators as much as he could. It’s like hiring the fat, dopey security guard because you fired the one who was stealing. Yeah, the thief will definitely point out his replacement is a donut-eater. Trump has to be better than Biden at something before I care. And he just isn’t. Even on conserative stuff, Trump made it all pretty uniformly worse.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  258. Nk, yet again accusations of censorship and cancel culture turn out to be false after several seconds of fact checking. I searched also and found several

    Time123 (9f42ee)

  259. It would be easier to take the threat of cancel culture seriously if the people taking about weren’t so consistently wrong.

    Time123 (9f42ee)

  260. Sharyl Attkisson reports on the crisis along the southern border. The numbers of illegal immigrants are staggering, and the CBP is overwhelmed. There simply aren’t the manpower or the resources to stem the deluge.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/03/07/sharyl_attkisson_biden_administration_policies_have_already_sparked_a_crisis_at_the_border.html

    Attikisson writes that if the current surge continues, by the end of the year the number of illegal border crossers will exceed the total number of the last three years combined.

    Worse, those that are not returned to Mexico are not being tested for CoVid-19 as they are detained in refugee camps, while they await asylum. And children continue to be separated from their relatives. It’s a humanitarian disaster and a public health crisis.

    I don’t think the changes to immigration policy by the Biden administration is necessarily the cause of this deluge. Rather, it seems that once mean Mr. Trump was out of office, the migrants assumed they would be able to storm north unimpeded. However, Biden needs to get a handle on this problem before it gets out of control.

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)

  261. GG,

    It has to be based on expectations and not policy. But yes Biden needs to handle this. Trumps’ approach was cruelty and brutalism as a deterrent. Biden offered to find a different solution, well, he needs to do that.

    The night before President Biden’s inauguration, 102 people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador walked to a place where the border wall ends in Arizona, crossed into the US illegally, and gave themselves up.

    In just the last four months, border officials have intercepted and expelled more than 296,000 illegal border crossers.

    Time123 (dba73f)

  262. Trumps’ approach was cruelty and brutalism as a deterrent.

    And that is a bad strategy because we have this thing called “politics.” It was only effective to the extent that it’s scary for little while. It’s like if Biden were to deploy drones to blow up libraries in Dr. Suess books. Scary, effective, then instant reversal in political fortune and outcome.

    Trump actually knows that. He didn’t care about immigration, long term. He cared about getting elected. He wanted a caravan to rush the border in 2018. He wanted AOC flipping out in a parking lot.

    this is why conservatives should not miss Trump. We should instead focus on what we do now to rehabilitate issues. Fortunately, it’s not like the democrats are being even handed about anything.

    Dustin (4237e0)

  263. Nk,

    Are you saying RSBN’s video wasn’t purged and they weren’t suspended for a week? Because that would be breaking news.

    NJRob (26b7a4)

  264. Biden ended remain in Mexico and brought back catch and release. Yes, it’s due to Biden’s policies and the correct perception by illegals of what those policies are and will be, but Biden fans will be loathe to admit it

    JF (3efb60)

  265. I thought your point was that Trump’s CPAC speech was censored. I don’t even know what a RSBN is.

    nk (1d9030)

  266. I’ve never heard of RSBN before. They have old videos on youtube and the full version of Trump’s speech at CPAC is there as well.

    This part from your link might be true because it’s what they found

    I searched “Trump 2021 CPAC Speech” on YouTube.

    I found snippets of the speech, highlights, news reports on the speech, and outtakes from late-night shows.

    I cannot find Trump’s 2021 CPAC speech.

    But when i search the same terms the fourth link is a copy of the full speech available from Sky News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJTlo4bQL5c PBS, ABC and CNN also have the full speech on the first page.

    So the claim that Trump’s CPAC speech was purged is false.

    Time123 (36651d)

  267. Looks like RSBN got suspended for pushing conspiracy theories.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-channel-rsbn-conspiracy-theories-youtube-b1810982.html

    They’re still free to push them, but You Tube doesn’t want to be part of it.

    Time123 (f5cf77)

  268. Biden ended remain in Mexico and brought back catch and release. Yes, it’s due to Biden’s policies and the correct perception by illegals of what those policies are and will be, but Biden fans will be loathe to admit it

    JF (3efb60) — 3/8/2021 @ 10:26 am

    Do you blame Biden for things that happened before he took office?

    Time123 (36651d)

  269. Time123 (dba73f) — 3/8/2021 @ 8:46 am

    But yes Biden needs to handle this. Trumps’ approach was cruelty and brutalism as a deterrent. Biden offered to find a different solution, well, he needs to do that.

    There isn’t any, short of attracting them to some other country, such as Chile, and that would be gradual because of family already here.

    It’s either cruelty and brutalism or accept some more illegal immigration. Well, giving them a legal way to come – maybe by underbidding the coyotes – would help. You could even charge a higher price. people want to be legal. But there’d be opposition in Congress to that, too.

    There’s a tradeoff between the level of inhumanity and the level of illegal immigration. The more inhumanity, whether done by the United States or by Mexico, the less illegal immigration. The less inhumanity the more illegal immigration. This should be obvious. To Republicans as well. What Biden can be faulted for is not being prepared for the inevitable. It’s not a big problem. Or any real problem anyway. It’s a pretend problem.

    As for improving conditions in other countries, if that were possible (and the best way is encouraging Americans to retire there with guaranteed safety by the host government) that’s like cutting down on carbon emissions with the goal of affecting the weather.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  270. Sammy, I’m not sure i fully buy that. IIRC the big drop came with Trump convinced the Mexican government to stop letting / helping refuges from Central America pass through. I’ve seen other studies that show allowing a guest worker set up can have benefits as many people don’t want to move here, but do since because the risk at trying to cross.

    It definitely complicated, but that’s why Biden makes this big bucks. He wanted the job, he needs to fix it.

    Time123 (36651d)

  271. Time123 (36651d) — 3/8/2021 @ 11:30 am

    Sammy, I’m not sure i fully buy that. IIRC the big drop came with Trump convinced the Mexican government to stop letting / helping refuges from Central America pass through.

    No, it convinced Mexico to actively stop them. They made the journey more dangerous. They’re using a de facto erratic death penalty to deter illegal immigration to the United States. Obama actually did the same thing. Past a certain point you only deter illegal immigration by the death penalty.

    That’s what a wall does, too. Just the other day a car carrying over 20 people went through ahole in the wall, and drove on a highway and got hit b a car and many people were kiled because there were many people in the car, which normally seated eight, who didn;t wear seat belts. Actually two cars went through but the other didn’t get into an accident. he government response is to look for somebody to prosecute.

    I’ve seen other studies that show allowing a guest worker set up can have benefits as many people don’t want to move here, but do since because the risk at trying to cross.

    They can’t go back and forth.

    Why anyone except some politicians would think it is better that Hispanics don’t become citizens and vote is not too clear to me. I thought the idea was that they shouldn’t spend the money they made outside the United States. The whole thing is based on a crackpot economic theory. And they suddenly get concerned about possible lower wages.

    It definitely complicated, but that’s why Biden makes this big bucks. He wanted the job, he needs to fix it.

    He is fixing it actually, to the extent that it is within his power to do. I mean what he did is a fix. (It depends on how much you value avoiding directly or indirectly causing loss of human life.)

    What he isn’t doing is acknowledging that he prefers the new status quo to the old one.

    He is trying to make compromises with reality. He has got no serious plans to get any change in the law through Congress, except maybe by way of defeating a filibuster. I think they’ll go with forcing Republicans to do a talking filibuster and hoping that does it.

    And no ability to argue.

    Sammy Finkelman (09d1ac)

  272. Will Weisselberg turn on Trump?

    https://news.trust.org/item/20210307154443-9tyv8

    I don’t know, but you can bet Trump is worried that he will.

    Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1)

  273. Sammy,

    I know you don’t believe in borders, but they exist for a reason. No non-citizen has a right to come here. They can follow the laws or they can break the laws. They choose to break the laws and should be judged accordingly.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  274. The borders are a red herring. Most of the illegal aliens in this country are visa overstays.

    Nic (896fdf)

  275. Nah, that’s not true Nic.

    But even if it was, that doesn’t preclude my remarks. There are no “citizens of the world.” You need permission to enter the nation and overstaying a visa is illegal. If there were no borders, visa regulations wouldn’t exist.

    So thanks for trying to disregard my remarks by using the narrowest interpretation possible.

    NJRob (eb56c3)

  276. @NJRob@278 I wasn’t actually addressing your remarks directly, but the general idea of people being in the US illegally. If the topic of concern is people who are in the country illegally, then the border conversation is an ongoing distraction from solving the real problem. You can be concerned with the border all you want, but that doesn’t make much of an impact on the issue of having people in the country illegally or undocumented workers.

    If, however, your concern is solely that people are crossing the border not at the dedicated border crossings or not showing the appropriate documentation to cross the border then I can see how you felt like I wasn’t addressing the issue you are concerned with.

    Nic (896fdf)

  277. Nic, You’re incorrect about the absolute number, 42% of current illegal aliens are here as overstays. But overstaying is currently the most common method of illegal immigration.

    Time123 (b4d075)

  278. Looks like Trump’s 4th craziest supporter isn’t getting out ahead of trial

    (CNN)A federal judge ruled Monday that the so-called “QAnon shaman” who was charged in the Capitol insurrection is too dangerous to release and must stay in jail while his case moves forward.

    Judge Royce Lamberth said that Jacob Chansley was unrepentant and could plot further attacks against the US government if put on house arrest. He rebuked Chansley as having shown “a detachment from reality” by claiming his actions on January 6 were peaceful and harmless.
    “Defendant characterizes himself as a peaceful person who was welcomed into the Capitol building on January 6th by police officers. The Court finds none of his many attempts to manipulate the evidence and minimize the seriousness of his actions persuasive,” Lamberth wrote.

    Time123 (b4d075)

  279. 281. None of the people arrested in connection with the January 6 events are being released on any reasonable amount of bail, regardless even of age.

    Sammy Finkelman (3997eb)

  280. Sammy, That’s not true.

    NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — Robert Packer, the Hampton Roads man pictured wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt during the U.S. Capitol insurrection, was released on his own recognizance Wednesday, the same day he was arrested by the FBI.

    It may be broadly accurate or accurate on average but I haven’t seen good analysis of that. The extreme examples are the ones i expect to be highlighted in individual news stories.

    Bail is intended to ensure ppl show up for trial and aren’t a threat to the community and should be set as such. Most people should get a reasonable bail.

    Time123 (b4d075)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.1918 secs.