Lurker > antfair

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What is this, a fair for ants?

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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://twitter.com/MarcusGreenWDRB/status/984939449661513728
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://twitter.com/AlSuraEnglish/status/984953410209353728
https://twitter.com/shearm/status/984954963393744901
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What is this, a fair for ants?

Curious which Speaker you guys expected. Those of you who pictured Newt Gingrich were correct

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/984243464538918912

I trust that Mr. Gingrich will now lend his voice in support of much-needed criminal justice reform, given his clear and principled opposition to raiding people's homes.
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://twitter.com/charliespiering/status/984467761165488130
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://twitter.com/VicBergerIV/status/984448587332382722

Very normal
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-05/supply-and-demand-does-a-poor-job-of-explaining-depressed-wages

The battle over the effects of minimum wages has been one of the most protracted and bitter fights in the history of empirical economics. Some researchers, such as David Neumark of the University of California-Irvine, continue to insist that pay floors kill jobs, and a few studies find negative effects. But a series of very careful, large-scale studies is finding that the minimum wage is as benign as its advocates have suggested.

One of these is a study by economists Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner and Ben Zipperer, which looked at state-level evidence and found no negative effect of mandated pay increases on employment. They found that minimum wage hikes tend to decrease the number of jobs just below the new cutoff, but increase the number above the line -- implying that the wage hike isnt killing jobs, but simply giving people raises.

Now, Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis, a pair of researchers from the U.S. Census Bureau, have an even more comprehensive study with even more detailed evidence. Looking at data on individual earners from 1991 through 2013 -- a very long time period -- the authors take careful account of factors like mobility and transitions into and out of the labor force. They find that minimum-wage increases tend to raise incomes for people at the bottom of the distribution, and that the effect doesnt fade with time. Meanwhile, they find that the probability of people losing their income entirely -- i.e., unemployment or dropping out of the labor force -- isnt significantly affected by minimum-wage increases.

This evidence is about as good as were likely to get, and it is likely to be highly persuasive. On his blog, my Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen wrote:

On the pro-minimum wage side, you should consider that those immediately affected by the wage hike do seem better off, and their higher income in the meantime may itself bring some efficiency-enhancing gains.

But the importance of this research goes beyond its implication for minimum-wage policy. Along with other research, its forcing us to rethink our basic understanding of how labor markets work.

The standard framework that economists traditionally used to understand job markets is just supply and demand, the theory taught to every introductory econ student. But since the 1990s, a steady drumbeat of empirical results has led to questions about that simple models usefulness.

First, economists found that even very large, sudden waves of low-skilled immigration didnt hurt the wages of native-born Americans, as the theory suggested should happen when theres a positive shock to labor supply. Adjusting the model to match this reality wasnt too hard. Economists just had to assume that immigration produces a positive shock to labor demand as well as supply -- immigrants buy things locally, creating jobs for the native-born.

But the minimum-wage effect posed more of a problem to the theory -- no matter how you slice it, price controls should lower employment in a competitive market. The likeliest reason that this doesnt happen is that employers have market power -- that its so costly and difficult for workers to find new jobs that they simply accept lower wages than they would demand in a well-functioning market. If employers have market power, modest minimum-wage rise will tend not to increase unemployment, because they force companies to move back toward the wage levels that would prevail if competition were working the way it should. In that model, a small increase in minimum wage could even increase the number of jobs.

New evidence is showing that employers have more market power than economists had ever suspected...

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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/noor-salman-pulse-massacre-wrong_us_5ac29ebae4b04646b6454dc2

Every mass tragedy begets a frantic search for answers, for a common understanding of what happened, for a narrative, and the 2016 Pulse massacre was no different.

Not long after Omar Mateen opened fire inside a bustling gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the media scrambled to understand his depraved actions. Almost overnight, a narrative emerged that until now has been impossible to dislodge: Mateen planned and executed an attack on Pulse because he hated gay people.

Lets say it plainly: This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people, Tim Teeman wrote in The Daily Beast. The massacre was undeniably a homophobic hate crime, Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic. Some speculated that Mateen was a closeted gay man. He was likely trying to reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture, James S. Robbins wrote in USA Today.

There was compelling evidence of other motivations. Mateen had pledged allegiance to the self-described Islamic State during the shooting, and explicitly said that he was acting to avenge air strikes in the Middle East. You have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of innocent people, he told a crisis negotiator over the phone while at Pulse. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. You get what Im saying?

But this was a tricky thing to get a handle on 49 dead and another 53 wounded, so many of them members of a historically marginalized and persecuted group. How could they not have been targeted? To say that the attack was not rooted in homophobia, one commenter wrote in USA Today, was to erase the LGBT community causing only more pain by invalidating their experiences.

Over the past two weeks in Orlando, Mateens widow, Noor Salman, was tried for having allegedly helped him plan his attack. The popular understanding of the Pulse shooting as a carefully targeted massacre was on trial as well. And in acquitting Salman, 31, on Friday, a jury also delivered a verdict on the story wed told ourselves about the killings: Wed gotten it wrong.

...

Salmans trial cast doubt on everything we thought we knew about Mateen. There was no evidence he was a closeted gay man, no evidence that he was ever on Grindr. He looked at porn involving older women, but investigators who scoured Mateens electronic devices couldnt find any internet history related to homosexuality. (There were daily, obsessive searches about ISIS, however.) Mateen had extramarital affairs with women, two of whom testified during the trial about his duplicitous ways.

Mateen may very well have been homophobic. He supported ISIS, after all, and his father, an FBI informant currently under criminal investigation, told NBC that his son once got angry after seeing two men kissing. But whatever his personal feelings, the overwhelming evidence suggests his attack was not motivated by it.

As far as investigators could tell, Mateen had never been to Pulse before, whether as a patron or to case the nightclub. Even prosecutors acknowledged in their closing statement that Pulse was not his original target; it was the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex. They presented evidence demonstrating that Mateen chose Pulse randomly less than an hour before the attack. It is not clear he even knew it was a gay bar. A security guard recalled Mateen asking where all the women were, apparently in earnest, in the minutes before he began his slaughter.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

Normal president stuff
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What is this, a fair for ants?

I'm not watching the video, but wasn't he more tongue-in-cheek mocking the questioner with that line?
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.twincities.com/2018/04/02/ralph-peters-why-i-left-fox-news/

You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room. A year and a half ago, you might have heard George Will discussing policy with a senator while a former Cabinet member listened in. Today, you would meet a Republican commissar with a steakhouse waistline and an eager young woman wearing too little fabric and too much makeup, immersed in memorizing her talking points.

This wasnt a case of the rats leaving a sinking ship. The best sailors were driven overboard by the rodents.

As I wrote in an internal Fox memo, leaked and widely disseminated, I declined to renew my contract as Fox Newss strategic analyst because of the networks propagandizing for the Trump administration. Todays Fox prime-time lineup preaches paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law.

Four decades ago, as a U.S. Army second lieutenant, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. In moral and ethical terms, that oath never expires. As Foxs assault on our constitutional order intensified, spearheaded by its after-dinner demagogues, I had no choice but to leave.

My error was waiting so long to walk away. The chance to speak to millions of Americans is seductive, and, with the infinite human capacity for self-delusion, I rationalized that I could make a difference by remaining at Fox and speaking honestly.

I was wrong.

As early as the fall of 2016, and especially as doubts mounted about the new Trump administrations national security vulnerabilities, I increasingly was blocked from speaking on the issues about which I could offer real expertise: Russian affairs and our intelligence community. I did not hide my views at Fox and, as word spread that I would not unswervingly support President Donald Trump and, worse, that I believed an investigation into Russian interference was essential to our national security, I was excluded from segments that touched on Vladimir Putins possible influence on an American president, his campaign or his administration.

I was the one person on the Fox payroll who, trained in Russian studies and the Russian language, had been face to face with Russian intelligence officers in the Kremlin and in far-flung provinces. I have traveled widely in and written extensively about the region. Yet I could only rarely and briefly comment on the paramount security question of our time: whether Putin and his security services ensnared the man who would become our president. Trumps behavior patterns and evident weaknesses (financial entanglements, lack of self-control and sense of sexual entitlement) would have made him an ideal blackmail target and the Russian security apparatus plays a long game.

As indictments piled up, though, I could not even discuss the mechanics of how the Russians work on either Fox News or Fox Business. (Asked by a Washington Post editor for a comment, Foxs public relations department sent this statement: There is no truth to the notion that Ralph Peters was blocked from appearing on the network to talk about the major headlines, including discussing Russia, North Korea and even gun control recently. In fact, he appeared across both networks multiple times in just the past three weeks.)

All Americans, whatever their politics, should want to know, with certainty, whether a hostile power has our president and those close to him in thrall. This isnt about party but about our security at the most profound level. Every so often, I could work in a comment on the air, but even the best-disposed hosts were wary of transgressing the party line.
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Basically he's only mad they're downplaying the Russia stuff, and not about the other things they've done for years
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-link-between-americas-lax-gun-laws-and-the-violence-that-fuels-immigration

The ready availability of guns in America is often discussed as a domestic-policy matter. But it is an international issue, too. Every year, guns that were initially sold in the U.S. are used in thousands of crimes in Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean, according to the Center for American Progress. Its estimated that some two hundred thousand American guns are smuggled across the southern border each year. The region thats been hit the hardest is Central America, where gun laws are relatively strict yet homicide rates are among the highest on earth. Gang wars, massive state corruption, and murderous criminal syndicates are to blame for the violence, but American firepower facilitates it. Unlike other forms of contraband, American weapons dont just pass through Central America but engulf it in storms of violence, Mark Ungar, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College and an expert in the regions gun violence, told me. This violence, in turn, has fuelled a refugee crisis. Since 2014, more than a hundred and fifty thousand unaccompanied immigrant children from countries in the region have fled to the U.S. seeking some form of asylum.

Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras do not have substantial gun industries of their own. The governments of these countries rely on imports from abroad to supply their militaries and security forces. Most of the guns otherwise in circulation on the street are illegal and unregisteredand many come from sellers in the United States. Seventy per cent of guns recovered by authorities in Mexico, for instance, were originally sold in the U.S.most of them in Texas, California, and Arizona, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Forty-nine per cent of weapons recovered in El Salvador came from the U.S., compared to forty-six per cent in Honduras and twenty-nine per cent in Guatemala. Harry Penate, an American adviser to the A.T.F. based in San Salvador, told The New Republic, I feel as bad about guns going into Central America and Mexico as good, hard-working Colombians feel about cocaine going into the U.S. There are at least seven hundred licensed gun dealers along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the illegal firearms trade in Mexico generates more than a hundred million dollars in annual revenue for U.S. gun makers.

To get guns across the border, traffickers often disassemble the weapons and stash them, in pieces, in other objects like microwaves, toys, or appliances. Criminal syndicates are usually behind the larger transactions. Crumpler, the man from Florida, sold his guns to a group of undocumented Hondurans living in Orlando, who received tens of thousands of dollars through wire transfers originating in Honduras to pay for the weapons. One of Crumplers buyers told him that, as he later put it, I was dealing with . . . the two largest gun-dealing families in Honduras. Other times, criminals carry weapons south in backpacks. Sometimes there are specific, small-scale missions that the gang members arrange to buy the guns easily in the U.S., and then travel back home, through Mexico, with them, Carlos Garca, an expert in the Salvadoran-American gang MS-13, told me. Weapons preferences vary. In Mexico, semiautomatic rifles are in high demandhalf of the guns from the U.S. recovered in the country are long guns, of the AR-15 or AK-47 variety. Central American gangsters like 9-millimetre handguns. A popular purchase from Crumplers trove was a semiautomatic pistol known, in the region, as a matapolicas, or cop killer, because it can fire armor-piercing bullets.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/976254136588034048
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/Zuckerberg saved -tens-of-millions-by-selling-facebook-stock-ahead-of-monday-decline-2018-03-19

Some guys have all the luck
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://twitter.com/igorbobic/status/976203928969900033
10 Dems voted to table: Coons, Cortez-Masto, Donnelly, Heitkamp, Jones, Manchin, Menendez, Nelson, Reed, Whitehouse

5 GOPers against: Collins, Daines, Lee, Moran, Paul.
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What is this, a fair for ants?

http://wapo.st/2pqPILV

As conspiracy theories swirled around the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, lobbyist Jack Burkman took the unusual step of launching his own private investigation. A man with military and security experience stepped up to help.

Now Burkman alleges that man, Kevin Doherty, nearly killed him.

Burkman, a conservative lobbyist who has also raised money for Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign official who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and protested gay athletes in the NFL, is used to controversy. But Dohertys arrest Saturday by Arlington County police on charges of malicious wounding and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony caps a saga stranger than Burkmans own conspiracy theories.

Its a horror story, Burkman, of Arlington, said in an interview Monday afternoon. He is still recovering after being shot several times and run over by an SUV last Tuesday.

Doherty briefly worked for Burkmans Profiling Project, which was formed to build a psychological portrait of Richs likely killer. While police have concluded Rich was likely shot during a random robbery, many conservatives have claimed he was killed as part of a political conspiracy. Burkman offered a six-figure reward for information on the shooting.

Burkman said Doherty presented an impressive resume ex-Marine, ex-special agent and did good work. But tension quickly developed. In Burkmans view, Doherty began speaking to reporters out of turn and tried to take over the investigation.

Doherty served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1990 to 1994, rising to the rank of sergeant, according to a spokeswoman for Manpower & Reserve Affairs.

He became somewhat angry because he thought the Profiling Project belonged to him, Burkman said. In July, he cut Doherty loose and sent him a cease and desist letter.

I just figured the matter was closed, Burkman said. But what happened is, I guess, he was simmering and simmering and simmering.

In February, Burkman had moved on to a new investigation. He had put out a call for whistleblowers in the FBI, offering $25,000 for any information exposing wrongdoing in the presidential election.

Soon, he thought he had hit the jackpot. A man reached out, describing himself as a senior FBI official with information about then-agency deputy director Andrew McCabe, who at the time was under an internal investigation for his handling of probes into Hillary Clinton. (On Friday, McCabe was fired, after an internal investigation found he had dealt improperly with the media and then lied about it. He has denied wrongdoing.)

His source dropped off two packets of emails under a cone in a garage at the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn, Burkman said.

I thought I had the story of the decade, Burkman recalled. His wife, Susan, was more skeptical. She warned him that she didnt think he was dealing with the FBI. But, he said, the emails looked super real, containing details about the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The last drop was supposed to be the big one the full inspector general report on McCabe, which still has not been released. Instead, when Burkman bent over to pull the papers out from under the cone, he was shot in the buttocks and thigh. As he ran out of the garage with his dachshund in his arms, he was hit by an SUV.

He said the car backed up to hit him again.

It looked like he was coming to kill me, Burkman said. But he said a woman watching from a window of the hotel screamed. A guard came running and the SUV sped off, Burkman said.

Burkman spent three days in the hospital. His dog, Jack Jr., was uninjured.

Police would not comment on Burkmans account of the incident.

Sure
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What is this, a fair for ants?

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/378881-democratic-leaders-pull-back-hard-line-immigration-demand

Democratic leaders are backing off of their demand that "Dreamer" protections be a part of the 2018 budget negotiations.

While House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders had hinged their support for last months budget caps deal on a commitment from Republicans to consider legislation salvaging the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, theyve signaled they wont hold a similar line heading into next weeks expected vote on an omnibus spending bill.

The apparent change in strategy has angered immigrant rights advocates in and out of Congress, who want the minority Democrats to use their rare leverage on the omnibus government funding package among the last must-pass bills of the year to secure protections for the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the country illegally as children.
We need a budget or spending measure that includes the Dream Act. Punto, Rep. Luis Gutirrez (D-Ill.) said last week.

Democratic leaders have kept the rhetorical heat on Republicans to stage a DACA vote, using every opportunity to press Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to bring the issue to the floor. But after Senate Democrats were blamed for a brief government shutdown over DACA in January and with Republicans likely needing scores of Democratic votes to pass the omnibus House leaders are not insisting that such a commitment accompany the 2018 spending package.

Instead, Democratic leaders want appropriators in both parties to drop all contentious riders for the sake of easing passage of the omnibus and preventing a government shutdown ahead of March 23, when funding expires.

I think thats probably the best policy for us to do, said Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the Democratic whip. Its also politically the most feasible way to get an omnibus passed.

Hoyer suggested the Democrats most effective tool in moving the Republicans to act on DACA is not withholding omnibus votes, but rousing pressure from the public, which polls show is overwhelmingly opposed to deporting the Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as minors.

Our best leverage is 90 percent of the American people 87 percent think this ought to be done, he said.

Rep. David Cicilline (R.I.), a co-chairman of the Democrats messaging arm, offered a slightly different assessment, predicting the only force likely to move GOP leaders on DACA is pressure from within their own conference.

The only likely scenario is that the Republican members of Congress who claim that they support the Dream Act put pressure on the Speaker to say we need to take some action on this, he said.

Yet Cicilline also acknowledged that Democrats have a unique opportunity to seek concessions on the omnibus, suggesting they should use it to force action on DACA.

There are many of us who think we have to use these moments when the Republicans need Democratic votes on an important piece of legislation to demand that some of our priorities be met, he said. And this is one of them.
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The strategy marks a shift from the debate over the caps deal just a few weeks ago, when Democratic leaders took a dramatic stand in opposing the budget bill to protest the Republicans' continued inaction on DACA. The day before the vote, Pelosi commandeered the chamber floor with a marathon eight-hour speech designed to highlight the Republicans refusal to take up any DACA legislation. The next day, 118 Democrats joined her in opposing a measure that many later hailed as a domestic-policy victory.

The strategic shift hasnt been overlooked by many liberal Democrats, particularly members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who continue to press party leaders to take a stronger stand on DACA as part of the omnibus debate.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/us/politics/baseball-tax-law-.html

As President Trump congratulated the Houston Astros for winning the World Series at a White House ceremony this week, he also heaped praise on himself and congressional Republicans for passing a sweeping tax cut last year. He hailed Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the Houses chief tax writer and an Astros superfan, as the king of those tax cuts.

What he did not mention is that the new tax law Mr. Brady helped draft, and which Mr. Trump signed, levies a large new tax on the Astros, and similar franchises across professional sports.

The law changed a corner of the tax code that mostly applies to farmers, manufacturers and other businesses that until recently could swap certain assets like trucks and machinery tax-free. But by adding a single word to the newly written tax code real the law now only allows real estate swaps to qualify for that special treatment.

That change is meant to capture more federal revenue, in order to partially offset reductions in business and personal income tax rates. It forces manufacturers, farmers and others to pay more in capital gains taxes, if they trade an asset for something more valuable. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the change will raise $31 billion over the next decade.

It also means that the Astros and other sports franchises could now face capital gains taxes every time they exchange or trade their highly paid players.

The provision is raising concerns and questions across Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, starting with: How do you value a player?

There is no fair-market value of a baseball player. There isnt, said Daniel R. Halem, the chief legal officer of Major League Baseball. I dont really know what our clubs are going to do to address the issue. We havent fully figured it out yet. This is a change we hope was inadvertent, and were going to lobby hard to get it corrected.

The N.B.A. is similarly perplexed. It sent teams an email earlier this month detailing the disruption of the trading system under the new law, but told executives it was still figuring out how to respond.

The confusion is only one of many side effects of the new tax law, which sped through the House and Senate in less than two months at the end of last year, resulting in a series of changes that were both intentional and inadvertent. Republicans say they werent trying to hamstring sports teams: The change in the like-kind provision, Senate staff members said, was simply an attempt to broaden the United States tax base.

But that is little consolation to the teams who now join restaurateurs, independent agriculture businesses and multinational corporations on a long list of entities affected by the law in ways they did not see coming, and who now face long odds to secure changes or clarifications.

Major League Baseball and N.B.A. officials expressed hope that Congress would revisit the provision, which is one of many parts of the law that could raise their taxes or hurt their revenues.

It is unclear how aggressively the Internal Revenue Service would enforce the provision with sports teams. Mr. Halem, of Major League Baseball, said the league was asking the Treasury Department for guidance on how to come up with valuations for tax purposes. If such a system was the intended result of the law, he said, then write some regulations, tell us what you mean.

I.R.S. officials declined to comment on whether the agency would issue future rulings on the tax treatment of sports trades. Treasury officials did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.

This is what happens when you hurriedly rewrite the tax code on napkins
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/16/rep-louise-slaughter-new-york-dies-88/431583002/
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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/16/17124288/mattis-theranos-board-trump

Secretary of Defense James Mattis is implicated in one of the largest business scandals of the past decades, described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an elaborate, years-long fraud through which Theranos, led by CEO Elizabeth Holmes and president Ramesh Sunny Balwani, exaggerated or made false statements about the companys technology, business, and financial performance.

Basically, their biotech startup was founded on the promise of faster, cheaper, painless blood tests. But their technology was fake.

Mattis not only served on Theranoss board during some of the years it was perpetrating the fraud after he retired from US military service, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the companys technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general. Holmes is settling the case, paying a $500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court.

Nobody on the board is being directly charged with doing anything. But accepting six-figure checks to serve as a frontman for a con operation is the kind of thing that would normally count as a liability in American politics.

But nobody wants to talk about it. Not just Trump and his co-partisans in Congress; the Democratic Party opposition is also inclined to give Mattis a pass. Everyone in Washington is more or less convinced that his presence in the Pentagon is the only thing standing between us and possible nuclear Armageddon.
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This scheme worked because Theranos was deeply tied in with the American political, business, and media establishment counting former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz as board members, and maintaining sufficient clout that Hillary Clintons campaign was unwise enough to schedule a high-profile fundraiser with Holmes months after the publication of Carreyrous expos.

But perhaps none of these elite supporters was as valuable as Mattis.

As the SEC complaint describes, a main element of the fraud was that Holmes, and Balwani claimed that Theranos products were deployed by the U.S. Department of Defense on the battlefield in Afghanistan and on medevac helicopters and that the company would generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014.

Holmes, the SEC alleged, knew, or was reckless in not knowing, that these statements were false and misleading. Its easy to see, however, why investors might be fooled about this because one of the companys board members, Mattis, joined Theranos in 2013 immediately after retiring from a long career of military service that concluded with a stint leading CENTCOM, the US combatant command that is responsible for, among other things, Afghanistan.

Mattis (who, obviously, has no expertise in medical testing) pushed for the military to use Theranos technology, but it was never actually used because it didnt work.

Nonetheless, as of December 2015, Mattis was still vouching for the company, telling the Washington Post that he had quickly seen tremendous potential in the technologies Theranos develops, and I have the greatest respect for the companys mission and integrity.
...
But by the time Mattis was selected to serve as Trumps secretary of defense in January 2017, the basic scope of the fraud was already well-known to the public thanks to diligent journalistic work. So was the fact that Mattis was not only earning $150,000 a year for his service on the Theranos board but was also involved in pro-Theranos advocacy while on active military duty.

He duly resigned from Theranos on January 5, 2017 by which time the company was already commonly described as embroiled in scandal by press reports but, remarkably, the whole affair didnt come up at his confirmation hearings.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

Also the sheriff sent an e-mail containing a bunch of racial slurs

http://reason.com/blog/2018/03/14/white-pride-email-circulated-among-missi

In the same Mississippi county that's currently being sued for running discriminatory, unconstitutional roadblocks in black neighborhoods, the now-sheriff forwarded a chain message about "white pride" containing a long list of racial slurs around the office.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Mississippi revealed the 2009 email, subject line "'White' Pride," in a tranche of exhibits that it says show a culture of casual discrimination and lax discipline. Current Madison County Sheriff Randy Tucker, who was elected in 2012, forwarded it to several of his Madison County colleagues.

The message is a sloppy chain message containing many common tropes among aggrieved white people, such as "How come there's no White History Month?"

Here's some of the lowlights:



[Note: one image not posted due to banned words within]

Last year, the ACLU and the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit against Madison County, alleging it has subjected its residents to more than a decade of brazenly illegal and discriminatory policingwarrantless home invasions, unconstitutional roadblocks that appear only in black neighborhoods, and aggressive "jump out" squads that target young black men doing nothing more than walking down the street.

At the roadblocks, deputies run licenses for outstanding warrants and court fines as well as look for probable cause to perform searches. They also in some cases stop pedestrians. The ACLU argues that setting up roadblocks for general crime control purposes violates the Fourth Amendment on its face, even without the added discriminatory element.

As Reason detailed in an investigation last year, black residents of Madison County, just north of the state capital of Jackson, have felt under siege from the local sheriff's department for generations, but they have been almost totally ignored by the county government.

"We've all had problems dealing with Madison County," Quinnetta Thomas, the wife of one of the suit's plaintiffs, told Reason. "My situation is one of the prime examples of how Madison County works. They stormed in and made us feel unsafe in our own home."

Thomas captured video of a Madison County sheriff's deputy with his hand around the neck of her husband, whose hands were handcuffed behind his back. According to Manning and Thomas, deputies barged into their home at 7 in the morning and demanded they sign a false witness statement about a nearby robbery.

In a press conference today, the ACLU of Mississippi and Simpson Thacher presented new statistical evidence showing black residents make up the bulk of arrests and citations issued by the Madison County Sheriff's Department.

Despite making up 38 percent of the population of the county, black residents accounted for 77 percent of all arrests, 76 percent of all arrests at roadblocks, and 72 percent of all citations.

The ACLU also says data turned over by the sheriff's department reveals that, on average, the per capita rate of police roadblocks in predominantly black census tracts in Madison County is double the rate in predominantly white census tracts.

"That data has been statistically studied and controlled for other factors, and we think it's overwhelming," Jonathan Youngwood, a lawyer at Simpson Thacher, said at the press conference.

In testimony from depositions in the case, several former sheriff's department employees said that they heard deputies using racial slurs and that the deputies in question were never disciplined.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

The baby's mother is being charged with negligent homicide for failing to secure the child seat
http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/crime_police/article_7ee096a6-1c03-11e8-ba78-839ee2f97bea.html

Just weeks after a Baton Rouge police officer was arrested on negligent homicide and accused of causing a crash that injured several people and killed a baby, the child's mother was also arrested on the same charge because police said she failed to properly secure the baby's car seat.

Brittany Stephens, 20, was arrested Tuesday after police found that her daughter's car seat was not secured and the straps were not adjusted correctly for the child's height, according to her arrest report. Police said the "lack of securing the seat to the vehicle and the loose straps are a contributing factor in the death" of the child and "show gross negligence" on the mother's part.

Stephens was not the driver but told officers she secured the car seat with the baby inside. Police spokesman Sgt. L'Jean McKneely said she was arrested because she "was the person responsible for the buckling of the car seat."

Stephens, of 3161 Winnipeg Drive, Baton Rouge, was booked Tuesday into Parish Prison on one count each of negligent homicide and seat belt violation.

The three other adults in the car with Stephens were also issued traffic citations Tuesday, McKneely said.

Breea Gross, 18, was driving when the crash occurred and was cited for driving without a license, seat belt violation and three counts of child safety restraint violation. Janice Gross, 40, was cited for allowing an unlicensed driver to drive her vehicle and seat belt violation. Seth Eames, 23, also cited for seat belt violation.

McKneely said there were more people riding in the vehicle than seats available.

The crash occurred around 8 p.m. Oct. 12, 2017, when a Baton Rouge Police officer driving his Corvette 94 mph while off duty struck the Nissan carrying the four adults and four children. Officer Christopher Manuel was driving north on Airline Highway and crashed into the passenger side of the Nissan, which was turning left onto Florline Boulevard at a green light.

All of the occupants of the Nissan were taken to the hospital. The one year old, Seyaira Stephens, later died of her injuries.

Manuel, 28, was arrested Feb. 16 on one count each of negligent homicide and speeding. Police said then that Manuel has been on paid administrative leave since the accident. He posted $15,000 bail and was released from jail the same day he was booked.

A blood test showed Manuel was not impaired when the crash occurred, according to Baton Rouge police.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III said Tuesday his office has not yet determined whether Stephens or Manuel will face charges, but prosecutors "will review all reports, charges and arrests and make the appropriate decisions based upon facts and law."

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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://twitter.com/yashar/status/968242634526547968
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What is this, a fair for ants?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/diaper-turning-point-usa-kent-state-student -conservative-youth-repulican-kaitlin-bennett-a8230021.html

One of Americas most prominent conservative youth organisations has been engaged for months in a bitter internal fight over a university student wearing a babys diaper.

Turning Point USA, the non-profit founded by conservative activist Charlie Kirk and funded by a roster of Republican mega-donors, is known for the performative stunts it uses to recruit new members on campus. Among other things, they have created a Professor Watch List for teachers who they claim discriminate against conservatives, and invited right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on college campuses.

However it was Free Speech Week at Kent State University last October, which featured one student dressed in a diaper, sucking on a pacifier in a playpen, that brought the group mass attention.

The stunt was meant to mock the idea of safe spaces protected areas on campus for members of marginalised groups by symbolising that only a baby would need one. Photos of the incident spread like wildfire online, where liberals and conservatives alike wondered why any adult would put themselves up for such a stunt.

What those poking fun online didnt know was just how much turmoil the incident caused inside Turning Point itself.

Just this month, the president and campus coordinator for Turning Point USA at Kent State University announced her resignation, claiming the national organisation had lied about the incident to the press and left her to clean up the fallout on her own.

As of right now, I am in disbelief at how I went from being so upbeat, enthusiastic, and passionate about this organisation to being disgusted, frustrated, and embarrassed to have invested my entire senior year into an organisation founded by a college dropout who hires some of the most incompetent, lazy, and downright dishonest people I have ever encountered, wrote former president Kaitlin Bennett in her scathing letter of resignation.
...
That's why the Kent State chapter decided to ridicule the concept of safe spaces as part of the Free Speech Week they organised. During one planning session, Ms Bennett said, a member of a fellow conservative organisation suggested dressing up as a baby, to show that safe spaces were meant for children.

According to Ms Bennett, the event itself went swimmingly. Other students thought the person wearing the diaper was so funny, she said, that they even stopped to point and laugh. At a speaking engagement the next day, Mr Kirk even congratulated her personally on the chapters activism.

Keep up the triggering, good job, she says he told her.

Over the next several days, however, it became clear that many, many more people found the stunt funny for all the wrong reasons. Commentators on the left passed around photos from the event online, ridiculing the student who donned a diaper for the event.

Turning Points released a statement condemning the incident, which read, in part: While we support all our chapters to do innovative and creative activism events, this event clearly crossed the line and delved into the very obscure and inappropriate.

The statement also claimed that the event was not approved by their regional director or field staff despite the fact that, according to Ms Bennett, both the regional manager and field director knew about the free speech week.
...
During their conversation, Ms Bennet says Mr Bowyer told her that the diaper incident was inappropriate because it gave the left a lot of ammo to take these pictures and make memes out of them.

Its not funny, Ms Bennet said the COO told her. Nothing about this is funny. Now every time Charlie [Kirk] tweets they tweet back pictures of him in a diaper.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/2/23/17044912/scott-pruitt-bible-oil-friendly-policies-evangelicals-environment

The Trump administration has used a variety of excuses to legitimize its record-setting rollbacks on environmental protections: calling global warming a hoax, or arguing that the economic consequences of increased regulation would outweigh their benefit.

The latest justification? The Bible.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, a media outlet that also seems to double as a propaganda arm of the Trump administration, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt said his Christian convictions led him to conclude that America should use gas and coal freely because natural resources exist purely for mans benefit.

The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that weve been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind, Pruitt told CBNs David Brody.

In that same interview, Pruitt condemned the weaponization of the EPA and criticized the environmental left for tell[ing] us that, though we have natural resources like natural gas and oil and coal, and though we can feed the world, we should keep those things in the ground, put up fences and be about prohibition.

Pruitts tenure at the EPA has been controversial. He was involved in persuading Donald Trump to leave the Paris climate accords and has spearheaded a number of rollbacks of Obama-era initiatives, including reversing the Clean Power Plan, as well as smaller repeals like on a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which has been shown to cause developmental problems in children. Hes also drastically reduced the number of fines the EPA has collected on businesses that break the law by making use of toxic or dangerous chemicals.

But as far as his biblical assertion goes, Pruitts words reflect a wider trend among American evangelicals, who largely have not embraced scientific thought on environmentalism or global warming.

While environmental advocacy is central to Pope Franciss papacy and the Church of England has recently launched a Shrinking the Footprint initiative (including a Lent Plastic Challenge encouraging parishioners to recycle more for Lent), American evangelicals in particular have long been wary of environmental causes. For example, a 2011 Lifeway survey found that 41 percent of Protestant pastors did not believe in global warming.

As I wrote in 2014 for the Atlantic, much of this stance is rooted in a very particular reading of Genesis 1:28 in the Bible. Referring to the creation of Adam and Eve, the Bible says: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

For many evangelicals, this idea of dominion is about mastery: Human beings have the right to take what they want from the earth, in terms of natural resources, without regards to how it might affect other species.

Likewise, many evangelicals interpret Genesis 3:16 in which Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, and God tells them, Cursed is the ground because of you [Adam]; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life as a sign that the relationship between man and nature is supposed to be combative, not conciliatory.

Thats why evangelical groups have, therefore, been historically resistant to environmentalist causes. Creationist lobbying groups frequently fund initiatives like the Louisiana Science Education Act, which mandates a balanced (and climate change-denying) approach to teaching environmental issues in public schools.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-22/trump-says-he-may-pull-immigration-enforcement-from-california

President Donald Trump said on Thursday hes considering pulling federal immigration enforcement agents out of California, which declared itself a so-called sanctuary state and limits local police cooperation with U.S. authorities enforcing the presidents immigration policies.

Frankly, its a disgrace, the sanctuary city situation, Trump said at the White House. If the administration were to remove Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from California, the state would be begging for them to come back, he said. Im thinking about doing it.

The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have been stepping up their fight against cities and states that limit their cooperation with federal authorities on immigration. The Justice Department last month demanded that almost two dozen cities, counties and states -- from New York City to California -- prove that theyre sharing information about people in the country illegally or risk subpoenas and cuts in public-safety grants.

Just last month ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan said he planned to send additional ICE agents and deportation agents into California in response to the states sanctuary policies.

California better hold on tight, Homan said on Fox News last month. They are about to see a lot more special agents, a lot more deportation officers.

California became a sanctuary state last October, along with several of its cities and counties. Under laws signed by Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, federal immigration officials must produce a warrant to gain access to California work sites, and the state bars employers from sharing confidential employee information such as Social Security numbers without a subpoena. State and local law enforcement officials cant use their resources to aid in federal immigration enforcement, but they also cant stand in their way.

The Trump administration says its a matter of maintaining public safety. Trump campaigned for the White House denouncing weak and foolish policies that he said let criminals into the country and then failed to deport them. Among cases he publicized was the death of Kathryn Steinle, who was shot in San Francisco in 2015 by an undocumented immigrant who had previously been deported multiple times.

In California, we protect all of our people from criminals and gangs, as well as dangerous assault weapons, Brown, the governor, said in a statement Thursday. We do our job Mr. President, you do yours.

A spokeswoman for ICE referred questions about ICE to the White House. A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, and the Department of Justice. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

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What is this, a fair for ants?

http://www.complex.com/life/2018/02/south-carolina-fining-people-for-sagging-pants

The ongoing battle to stop people from wearing saggy pants continues.

WLTX reports that the latest iteration comes from South Carolina lawmakers who are proposing House Bill 4957, a state-wide law that would make it illegal to show your skin or underwear "three inches below the crest of his ileum," which is one of the lowest points of the small intestine. If violated, people wearing sagging pants would not have have to face criminal or delinquent charges. Instead, they would be fined $25 for the first offense, $50 or three hours of community service for the second offense and $75 or six hours of community service for three or more offenses.

"It's unbecoming, it's unprofessional," said Democratic Representative Joe Jefferson, who's one of the bill's sponsors, to WLTX. "Now there's some misunderstanding. I understand that some people are assuming that if one is caught, then they won't be allowed to go to college, grants, loans, all these other opportunities will be taken away. That's not the case at all. This is just to prevent these fellas and giving them at least an obligation to realize that they're walking around and they're convincing others to follow them. That's not what it's all about."

The sagging pants laws are often criticized for targeting people of color but Jefferson claims that this isn't the case for them. "It's no more than a warning to allow these fellas to be more responsible," he said. "It is not just targeting African-American men. I see men of all races walking around with this same problem. It is just disingenuous, we should not have this. There ought to be a better way."

Since 2007, at least nine laws have been passed to deter people from showing their underwear in public. In Timmonsville, South Carolina, third-time offenders could pay up to $600 for sagging their pants while in Ocala, Florida, the sentence is stricter with a $500 fine or six months in jail if found sagging on city-owned property.

Aside from being dumb and pointless, are these lawmakers operating in 2006?
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What is this, a fair for ants?

bump
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What is this, a fair for ants?

http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/02/21/trailblazers-is-wipeout-meets-splatoon

Seems neat
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What is this, a fair for ants?