One final indignity for Trump

As if the other results were not bad enough for Donald Trump, we have the case of Juli Bricksman, a cyclist in Virginia, who in 2017 was being passed by the Trump motorcade and took the opportunity to flip him off.

She later explained why she did it.

“It was just sort of like, here I am on my bike. I’ve got nothing, right?” Briskman told the Guardian in November 2017. “This is pretty much the only thing I had to express my opinion. He wasn’t going to hear me through bullet-proof glass … So that was pretty much how I could say what I wanted to say, right?”

[Read more…]

Implications of yesterday’s election results

The US seems to be in perpetual election cycle mode. There were some state and local elections yesterday and the results were interesting. Much attention has been paid to the governor’s race in Kentucky where the incumbent Republican Matt Bevin narrowly lost 49.2-48.8% to Democrat Andy Beshear who has claimed victory even though Bevin has yet to concede. Kentucky is a solidly Republican state though Democrats have won the governorships before and indeed Beshear’s father was governor before Bevin. There may be a recount, though the Republican senate president has ominously threatened to use an obscure state law that has not been used for 120 years that says that the state legislature can decide the result of a ‘contested’ election. Since the legislature is Republican, we know how that will turn out. But if he does carry out that threat, expect to see furious legal challenges.
[Read more…]

Elizabeth Warren’s single payer health care plan

She has released her plan to provide universal health care coverage through a single payer system that will save ordinary people money by producing savings and charging rich people and corporations to pay for it. Naturally, this has aroused opposition from all those who benefit from the current system (hospitals, doctors, health insurance and drug companies). But it is also being criticized by other Democratic candidates such as Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg, all of whom represent the corporate-friendly Democratic party establishment.
[Read more…]

Grifters gotta grift: Marianne Williamson edition

Many of us assumed that vanity candidates for the presidency did so as a means to gain publicity for their other ventures. Tessa Stuart writes how erstwhile presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who thinks that it was collective prayer that caused Hurricane Dorian to veer away from the mainland, started hawking various seminars and other products offered by an entity she created called The Williamson Institute. (In case you were wondering, Williamson is still technically in the Democratic primary race though she did not qualify for the third and fourth debates and is unlikely to do so for the fifth.)
[Read more…]

When size matters

There has been a spate of teacher strikes across the country recently and just last week the teachers in the Chicago schools, one of the largest in the country, ended their 11-day strike. Like other teachers who went on strike, they were demanding better salaries, extra resources, and better working conditions but also calling for smaller class sizes. And they won a lot of their demands.

In addition to guaranteeing all CTU members a 16% raise over the life of the five-year contract, the offer invests $35 million in reducing class sizes – up $10 million from the city’s previous offer.

On staffing, the city’s offer guarantees that every school will have a nurse and social worker by 2023. The offer includes 120 new “equity positions” for highest-need schools – such as counselors, restorative justice coordinators and librarians – and additional staffing in bilingual and special education.

[Read more…]

8chan and the issue of speech on the internet

The website known as 8chan has served as a cesspool of bigoted and racist hate mongering for a long time in which posters seemed to be competing to see who could come up with the most offensive stuff, all while arguing that they were doing it ironically, ‘for the lulz’ as the kids say these days. They operated with impunity under the shield of free speech and things were going well for them (in terms of reaching their target audience) until three mass shooters in Christchurch (targeting Muslims), Poway, California (targeting Jews), and at a Texas Walmart (targeting Hispanics) posted their hateful manifestos on the website.

This proved to be too much for those companies that had been at least indirectly supporting the site and the internet security firm Cloudflare withdrew its support, thus enabling hackers to invade the site, overwhelm it, and shut it down. The creator of 8chan, an American who lives in the Philippines and seems to covet notoriety, vows to bring the site back in some form with a new name 8kun and different security firm backing it.

The NPR radio program On the Media had a fascinating 17-minute segment tying together 8chan, the people behind it, as well as Q and the QAnon conspiracy theories that spread its message via that site, and the problem of balancing free speech and deplatforming on the internet.

It raises some crucial questions: should tech companies stymie sites like 8chan? Can 8chan stay dead? And what happens to the dark content that flourished on the site — content like the QAnon conspiracy, whose purveyor vowed to only release definitive content on 8chan, lest his narrative gets drowned out by that of impersonators?

Appeals Court rules that Trump’s tax returns should be turned over to prosecutors

For whatever reason, Donald Trump has sought to hide his tax returns from public scrutiny. The grand jury convened by the district attorney for New York County had issued a subpoena to Trump’s accountants to hand over eight years of tax returns returns as part of its investigations. Trump’s lawyers had argued that he had presidential immunity that prevented the release of those documents even though they were for a period that was before he became president.

A US District Court had earlier ruled against him and just today the US Second Court of Appeals also ruled unanimously against Trump. The Appeals Court ruling drew heavily from the Supreme Court case involving Richard Nixon’s claims of presidential immunity and said that Trump’s immunity claims were invalid for many reasons, chief among which were that the documents were being sought from his accountants and not the president himself and only as part of an investigation, so the constitutional issue of whether a sitting president could be indicted did not arise.
[Read more…]

Behold! Democratic ‘centrism’ at work

[UPDATE: Akela Lacy has another article about how the Democratic party establishment is fighting hard to keep progressives off the Philadelphia city council.]

Ryan Grim writes that the ‘centrist’ wing of the Democratic party (i.e., Republican-light and right leaning people) represented by the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) is advocating a strategy in which the party sells out its labor and environmentalist supporters.

REP. CHERI BUSTOS, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is advocating internally for Democrats to wave through the House President Donald Trump’s renegotiated NAFTA, without any of the revisions demanded by labor unions and environmentalists — and despite concerns that it locks in high prescription drug prices.
…

The argument goes that those vulnerable Democrats would be able to demonstrate to constituents that while they may be pursuing impeachment, they are also willing to work across party lines with the president.

As Grim writes, this ‘strategy’ rests on questionable logic.
[Read more…]

Samantha Bee on Trump’s enablers

While Bee is correct that the Donald Trump’s framing of why Joe Biden tried to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired is wrong, the fact does remain that the hiring of Biden’s son Hunter to the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma and paying him $50,000 a month when he had no qualifications or experience in the gas business was definitely an attempt at using the Biden name to gain influence. It is part of the entire sleazy business of family members of major political figures cashing in on their connections. It is not necessary for the company to use Hunter Biden to get his father to do illegal things that are favorable for the company. They know that just having him on the board and on their letterhead gets them access to high levels in the US government. They can also use the name to get favorable treatment from other entities by showing that they have friends in high places.

The Bidens are not alone in this kind of sleazy practice. The Trump children have done this and are still doing it, as has Chelsea Clinton, Abby Huntsman, Meghan McCain, Liz Cheney, and Rand Paul, all of whom are the children of famous politicians.

So you are an atheist. Now what?

Over at stderr, Marcus Ranum has a great piece explaining why ‘movement atheism’ was inherently limiting and now appeals only to those (like Richard Dawkins) who have either no broader social justice goals and hence have nothing useful to say outside of condemning religion or (like Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, and the late Christopher Hitchens) are actively opposed to many of those goals.

Richard Dawkins has not had any thoughts about politics that are important enough to make him a footnote to a Cliffs’ Notes version of Plato, so he’s doing well sticking to the well-hoed field of atheism, where he can make arguments that would have elicited a yawn from Hume and an eye-roll from Voltaire.
…

Religion is a huge system of bullshit, and there are many sub-fields within religion, and anyone who wishes to can have a busy and productive life just attacking any one or maybe two of those sub-fields – in fact, I owe my perspective on movement atheism to Sam Harris and his shit-show posting about “Why don’t I criticize Israel?” [stderr] that made me realize that movement atheists simply do not have the chops to go after anything bigger and tougher than refuting religion.

What I’m saying is that folks like Harris, Dawkins, Shermer, Carrier, et. al., have found the place where they are as effective as they want to be, and they’re comfortable there. Oh, you want to argue about whether or not there’s evidence for the biblical jesus? That’s nice. Over in the deep end of the pool, they are arguing about whether there’s evidence that supply-side economics works and they’re trying to model what reparations for slavery might look like over the size of an economy like the United States’ and 400 years. Next up: what about the Indigenous Peoples? As far as I am concerned, the atheist movement hit its peak effort when a bunch of its stars stepped forward and then immediately fell all over themselves when they tried to express thoughtful opinions about politics.

You should read the whole thing.