Downy woodpecker, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Downy woodpecker, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
© Getty Images.
House Republicans this week reinstated a procedural rule created in 1876 that allows lawmakers to cut the pay of individual federal workers down to $1, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
The Holman Rule allows members of Congress to propose amendments to appropriations bills that target specific government employees or programs in an effort to cut spending.
Under the rule passed this week in larger rules package, any such amendment that would target an employee or program would have to be passed by a majority of the House and Senate. That makes it unlikely, albeit possible, for lawmakers to reduce a federal worker’s pay.
Democrats and federal employees who worry about how President-elect Donald Trump could use it blasted the rule.
Resurrecting a very old rule is never good news, you know people are planning to do very bad things, and this has one hell of a chill factor:
“This is a big rule change inside there that allows people to get at places they hadn’t before,” he told reporters.
The new rule follows requests by the Trump transition team for lists of the names of employees involved in specific programs, such as Energy Department scientists who have worked on climate change.
The ability to legally reduce someone’s salary to a dollar is a good way to get rid of people, isn’t it? Or just using it as a threat, fall in line, or…
Via The Hill.
The Washington Post’s Express magazine used the symbol for masculinity to illustrate a report on a women’s march on Washington (Source: Washington Post Express).
No comment. Just the standard head shake.
Via Raw Story.
The GOP continues their plan to shred the Affordable Care Act, and toss it out the window, along with the health of most people here in uStates. They have not come up with any plan that is remotely effective, or which will not throw everything into absolute chaos. Physicians are quite alarmed, and have said as much, not that it seems to be having much impact.
People in general are quite alarmed over the so-called healthcare plans which have been fronted so far, but even that is not enough to alarm Trumpoids, who insist on staying stupid:
That said, some of these voters also said they didn’t think Trump and the GOP would really go through with enacting such plans.
“When told Mr. Trump might embrace a plan that included these elements, and particularly very high deductibles, they expressed disbelief,” writes the Times. “They were also worried about what they called ‘chaos’ if there was a gap between repealing and replacing Obamacare. But most did not think that, as one participant put it, ‘a smart businessman like Trump would let that happen.’”
Oh for fuck’s sake, what is it going to take for these people to wake the fuck up? Smart businessman? Please. This is the asshole who refuses to divulge his taxes, most likely because he does not have the money he claims he does, and he has a very long string of failures trailing behind him, like a filthy, mile long strip of toilet paper. Trump is a fraud, that’s what he’s good at, not business. You think he’s going to come to the rescue on healthcare? You should be trembling in fear, because there won’t be any healthcare. If you have health issues, see to them now.
Via Raw Story.
I came across this wonderful response to the phrase ‘man up’ thanks to Wisconsin senator Steve Nass, who is all manner of bent over a course at UW-Madison: “Unpacking Masculinity At UW-Madison” and seeks to address the ways “media, hook up culture, alcohol, violence, pop culture” create expectations of masculinity.
Sen. Nass was terribly alarmed, and fired off an email:
Sen. Steve Nass, a frequent UW System critic, sent an email to his fellow lawmakers on Wednesday entitled “UW-Madison Declares War on Men and their Masculinity — Not a Joke.” The email accuses UW-Madison of being part of a national liberal effort to rid male students of their “toxic masculinity.”
“Our friends at UW-Madison, not happy enough with labeling ‘whiteness’ as a societal problem, now are attacking another social ill …, Men and their masculinity,” the email says.
“The supposedly underfunded and overworked administrators at our flagship campus have scrapped (sic) together enough dollars to offer a six-week program open only to ‘men-identified students,” the email goes on. “In short, the highly paid leaders at UW-Madison now believe that Wisconsin mothers and fathers have done a poor job of raising their boys by trying to instill in them the values and characteristics necessary in becoming a Man.”
The email concludes by encouraging legislators to reform the UW System in the next state budget.
What Sen. Nass misses entirely is that a lot of young men are seeking paths through all the baggage hanging from the concept of masculinity so that they can be themselves, in happiness, in pride, and in security. Why that would be awful, when toxic masculinity is right there, after all, it’s worked for thousands of years, right?
I visited the course site, and it all looks good to me, I wish such courses were all over the place.
Via Associated Press and Raw Story.
Getty Images.
More than 50 Electoral College members who voted for Donald Trump were ineligible to serve as presidential electors because they did not live in the congressional districts they represented or held elective office in states legally barring dual officeholders.
That stunning finding is among the conclusions of an extensive 1,000-plus page legal briefing prepared by a bipartisan nationwide legal team for members of Congress who are being urged to object to certifying the 2016 Electoral College results on Friday.
“Trump’s ascension to the presidency is completely illegitimate,” said Ryan Clayton of Americans Take Action, who is promoting the effort. “It’s not just Russians hacking our democracy. It’s not just voter suppression at unprecedented levels. It is also [that] there are Republicans illegally casting ballots in the Electoral College, and in a sufficient number that the results of the Electoral College proceedings are illegitimate as well.”
[…]
It may be that the efforts to convince Congress to challenge the ratification of the 2016 Electoral College amounts to little more than a Hail Mary aimed at derailing a Trump presidency. As of late Wednesday, Clayton thought there would be House members willing to object to certifying the Electoral College vote, but he was less certain about finding a senator willing to go along.
But even if a challenge is mounted and fails, it underscores the illegitimate basis of Trump’s presidency and the deep opposition to it, and refutes the GOP’s outrageous claim that it has a mandate for dismantling government programs across the board.
“We have a list of 50 illegal electors,” Clayton said. “That puts Donald Trump below the threshold that he needs to be elected president. Let’s debate it in an open session. According to the Constitution, the Congress, if nobody wins on the first round of balloting, picks from the top three candidates. That will be Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Colin Powell.”
I won’t be holding my breath here, everyone knew that the Bush jr presidency was illegitimate, but it didn’t matter. I don’t think it will matter this time, either. This is, however, yet another reason to dismantle the electoral college.
Full story at Alternet.
From Giliell, click for full size!
© Giliell, all rights reserved.
from rq, click for full size! In order, Moss, Lichen, Birch, Japanese Lantern, Spindletree, Cedar. Oh, that Japanese Lantern! Beautiful.
© rq, all rights reserved.
Female Dark-eyed Junco. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Seth Johnson. Credit: youcaring.
Guess which one won? Yeah. I’ve had acute pancreatitis. To say it is excruciating is very close to an understatement. I made it a day and a half before gratefully surrendering to the hospital, and the most blessed relief of morphine, which is about all that can bring relief from pain that makes death look pretty damn good. The long trip to the hospital, I had a bowl, and was vomiting the whole way, faced washed with tears that wouldn’t stop leaking, bent double, unable to straighten up, couldn’t walk. My chest felt like it was going to explode, and I could barely breathe. It’s beyond unconscionable that adults allowed a child to endure this until death.
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A mother and a father in the west metro are facing child neglect charges following the March death of their 7-year-old son, whom officials say died of pancreatitis without medical attention because his parents had “issues going to doctors.”
Timothy and Sarah Johnson, of Plymouth, were charged by summons last week with one count of child neglect resulting in substantial bodily harm, a gross misdemeanor, in the death of their adopted son, Seth.
According to criminal complaints, the boy died on March 30, covered in bruises, after being found unresponsive on a vomit-covered mattress. An autopsy showed the child’s cause of death was acute pancreatitis and possible sepsis.
[…]
In the days before Seth’s death, his parents were out of town for a wedding, leaving their son in the care of an older sibling. The night they returned, the Johnsons found their son hardly moving and said he didn’t react when they “prayed for his health.”
The parents said the boy was barely able to eat two small bites of pizza. They decided to consider in the morning whether or not their son needed to see a doctor.
When the parents woke up, they found Seth unresponsive and called 911. The boy was pronounced dead a short time later.
I certainly hope Seth’s siblings have been removed, and neglect is not a serious enough charge for these disgusting assholes. Full story here.
A hatchling Protoceratops andrewsi fossil from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Credit M. Ellison/American Museum of Natural History.
Exciting new information about the reproductive life of nonavian dinosaurs.
For decades now, the drumbeat of dinosaur news has been their similarity to birds. They were warmblooded! They had feathers! And they’re still around, because birds are actually dinosaurs.
All true, but those that were nonavian dinosaurs, as they are now called, were not all beak and tweet. They were closely related to other living reptiles like crocodiles, and new findings about how long their eggs took to hatch bring that point home.
Scientists reported on Monday that by using a new technique on exceedingly rare fossils of unhatched dinosaur embryos, they determined that those embryos took twice as long to hatch as bird eggs of a similar size. The embryo of a large duck-billed dinosaur took at least six months to hatch, and the eggs of larger dinosaurs may have taken even longer.
The long incubation times complicate thinking about dinosaur behavior. While some kinds of dinosaurs may have tended their eggs and young, for others the difficulty of hanging around for most of a year to watch buried eggs would have been too much.
A days-old argument between two groups of people that escalated on Facebook led to a shooting Allen Tuesday night.
The Allen Police Department said that disagreement was between nine people from South Dallas and seven from Allen.
Sergeant John Felty said the Dallas group drove to a home on Hawthorne Drive near South Jupiter Road in Allen for a confrontation. He said it was about to end peacefully when someone fired shots.
“Well I can’t imagine what would be so important that it would end like this. It is a tragedy,” he said.
Four people were shot and taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Officers detained eight of the nine from Dallas and the other, who police believe fired the shots, is in custody.
“The good news is… if there is any good news in this… is that the people that are responsible for this are detained or in custody,” he said.
The fact that the shooting stemmed from a Facebook argument was not lost on authorities.
“We’ve had social media disagreements for quite some time but never to this degree where it turns into a shooting,” said Fenty.
Oh good. Great Americans are going to drag their guns out over FB arguments now. If this shit continues, there won’t be all that many people left to worry about, will there? I know how infuriating people can be, who doesn’t know that? Even so, grabbing a gun is not a good idea because someone on the internet pissed you off. If we start killing people on that basis, there really won’t be anyone left.
Via WBAP.
You can read about all this music, and more, at ICMN.