Drones are just so yesterday -

McConnell even managed to connect Schumer with Chinese Communists,  a clever move to incite rage in the easily manipulated racist core of the Republican Base:

"McConnell ... refused to co-operate with raising the debt limit, a step Democrats took repeatedly with Donald Trump in power. .....  McConnell insisted: “In light of Senator Schumer’s hysterics and my grave concerns about the ways that another vast, reckless, partisan spending bill would hurt Americans and help China, I will not be a party to any future effort to mitigate the consequences of Democratic mismanagement.”

By Jonathan Franklln @ NPR.org, Oct. 7

Attorneys general in 19 states and the District of Columbia filed an administrative complaint Thursday seeking to block U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's 10-year budget-cutting plan to have slower deliveries, more expensive mailing rates and reduced hours for post offices.

The complaint brought by the 20 attorneys general demands the Postal Regulatory Commission thoroughly review DeJoy's plan in detail before fully rolling out the proposed changes that will impact service nationwide.

The process would allow Postal Service customers to provide comments during a hearing before the commissioners [....]

Hoping to make money off pea brains!

Lawyers from top accounting firms do brief stints in the Treasury Department, with the expectation of big raises when they return.

By Jesse Druck & Danny Hakim @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 19, 2021

For six years, Audrey Ellis and Adam Feuerstein worked together at PwC, the giant accounting firm, helping the world’s biggest companies avoid taxes.

In mid-2018, one of Mr. Feuerstein’s clients, an influential association of real estate companies, was trying to persuade government officials that its members should qualify for a new federal tax break. Mr. Feuerstein knew just the person to turn to for help. Ms. Ellis had recently joined the Treasury Department, and she was drafting the rules for this very deduction.

That summer, Ms. Ellis met with Mr. Feuerstein and his client’s lobbyists. The next week, the Treasury granted their wish — a decision potentially worth billions of dollars to PwC’s clients.

About a year later, Ms. Ellis returned to PwC, where she was immediately promoted to partner. She and Mr. Feuerstein now work together advising large companies on how to exploit wrinkles in the tax regulations that Ms. Ellis helped write [....]

USA TODAY,Oct. 4, updated 2:30 pm

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have apparently all gone down in a major outage.

The social network and the Facebook-owned platforms all stopped working around 11:30 a.m. ET Monday morning according to the site Down Detector. The outage affects nearly 7 billion users between the three platforms.  

Users going to Facebook's site saw an error page or an onscreen message that said, "Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can." [....]

By Rob Ryser @ CtPost.com, Oct. 3

NEWTOWN - The parents of two first-graders slain in the Sandy Hook massacre have won a defamation lawsuit in Texas against conspiracy extremist and Infowars host Alex Jones, Scarlett Lewis, the mother of Jesse Lewis, and Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of Noah Pozner, will have their cases heard by a jury to determine damages. [....]

The parents, who each sued Jones for more than $1 million for claiming, among other things, that the 2012 slaying of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School was “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors,” had been battling with Jones in Travis County District Court for pretrial documents he had been ordered to turn over to them.

After warnings and sanctions, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled on Monday that Jones was in default [....]