'State of emergency' declared by Louisville police ahead of Breonna Taylor decision https://t.co/sm2Op5C0JZ
— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) September 21, 2020
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Bummer, bummer, bummer report @ WaPo, retweeted by Dr. Feigl-Ding: Coronavirus infection rates in Israel Spain and France have surpassed rate in U.S. Note Dr. Nouri says more cases than prior peak!
By Catherine Garcia @ TheWeek.com, Sept. 20, 9:42 pm
The Bobcat fire in Los Angeles County has grown to nearly 100,000 acres, and continues to threaten the historical Mt. Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains.
This is one of the largest fires ever recorded in the county; the biggest blaze, 2009's Station fire, burned 160,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest. The Bobcat fire is only 15 percent contained, and is moving through communities in the Antelope Valley, the Los Angeles Times reports. There are more than 1,600 firefighters on the scene, with some coming from as far away as New York.
"We're still in the thick of a good firefight," Andrew Mitchell, public information officer with the U.S. Forest Service, said on Sunday.[....]
There are 27 major wildfires now burning in California, the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said on Sunday. Since mid-August, blazes in the state have killed 26 people and destroyed more than 6,100 structures
Oh look here's somebody other than pseudonymous arta on dagblog saying the same thing
Fixating on the open Supreme Court seat will provoke a culture war.
Leaked documents involving about $2tn of transactions have revealed how some of the world's biggest banks have allowed criminals to move dirty money around the world.They also show how Russian oligarchs have used banks to avoid sanctions that were supposed to stop them getting their money into the West. It's the latest in a string of leaks over the past five years that have exposed secret deals, money laundering and financial crime [....]
Why is this leak different?
There have been a number of big leaks of financial information in recent years, including:[....]
The FinCEN papers are different because they are not just documents from one or two companies - they come from a number of banks. They highlight a range of potentially suspicious activity involving companies and individuals and also raise questions about why the banks which had noticed this activity did not always act on their concerns.
FinCEN said the leak could impact on US national security, compromise investigations, and threaten the safety of institutions and individuals who file the reports. But last week it announced proposals to overhaul its anti-money laundering programmes.The UK has also unveiled plans to reform its register of company information to clamp down on fraud and money laundering.
October 4th is Doomsday, the date when some of the mountain of evictions pending in New York courts can go forward. That date is a reminder that the threat of catastrophic, Depression-era homelessness is just around the corner.
Most tenants may be covered by a federal eviction freeze through the end of the year. Gov. Andrew Cuomo can issue a new executive order, or the New York Legislature can take up legislation to extend tenant protections, such as a bill to block evictions until a year after the pandemic state of emergency ends.
Either way, the arrears are stacking up, with no end in sight. As the moratoriums disappear, the evictions will increase. Eviction is not the answer. It does not help tenants cast from their homes and thrown deeper into poverty and at greater risk of the coronavirus. And it certainly doesn’t help property owners, who face a 5.1 percent vacancy rate in Manhattan. They have bills and mortgages to pay, too, but eviction is the only tool available to them.
We need a solution, such as serious investment from the federal government, a mechanism for rent forgiveness to assist the more than 100 million people nationwide at risk of eviction and cash-on-the-barrelhead relief for both renters and landlords. The $100 Billion Emergency Rental Assistance and Rental Market Stabilization Act, passed by the House of Representatives as part of the Heroes Act, offers hope to renters [....]
Some ways of talking about race and class are more effective politically. And not just with Hispanics. Op-ed by Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito; Haney López is the author of “Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections and Saving America.” Ms. Gavito is the president of Way to Win, a progressive electoral coalition.
See Twitter thread (some comments interesting too), starting with this Tweet:
By Matthew Boyle @ Bloomberg.com, Sept. 17
Walmart Inc. is rolling out sweeping changes to staffing in its U.S. stores just as the holiday crunch begins, bringing pay raises for some -- but not all -- members of a massive workforce that’s already been upended by the coronavirus pandemic.
In October, all of Walmart’s U.S. supercenter locations will switch to a new team-based model that the retailer has been testing over the past year and a half in many of its smaller stores. About 165,000 hourly staffers will see a raise, Walmart said in a memo outlining the move, which could influence other big employers of hourly workers to rethink their pay practices. But the program will also trim the ranks of leaders per store, and could prompt some to leave the retailer [....]
Looking for the roots of the city’s violent summer. By David Shipley @ Bloomberg.com, Sept. 17
In May, I went back to Portland, Oregon, my hometown. It was the week George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
Protests in Portland followed, as they did around the country. Unlike the rest of the nation, though, what began as peaceful and constructive political expression devolved into something else entirely. In fact, a cruel inversion took place over the summer: The proximate (and righteous) cause was increasingly buried by violence [....]
One video shows a man being pulled from a truck and beaten. It’s shocking enough, and then you realize that the scene is unfolding in the heart of downtown, and not in some frontier county, and that it goes on for 20-plus minutes without any sign of intervention. [....]
The boards cover Tiffany and Co., Zara, 7-Eleven and bunch of local stores — selling luggage, legal supplies, men’s suits — that have been around since I was a kid in the 1960s. Some of the wood is mottled composite, some of it is serpentine-grained, nearly all of it is covered with graffiti. The slogans signal how far things have gone off track; only a fraction of them refer to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or the other names Americans have been calling out for remembrance [....]
Well before it was enveloped in smoke, Portland was a city in retreat. Even its 110-year-old elk statue had gone into hiding.
Not that long ago, Portland had a visionary, progressive and capable government. It was activist in the best sense — it took action and managed change [....]
By Matt Naham @ LawandCrime.com, Sept. 18
The Associated Press reported on Friday that more migrant women had come forward and alleged that they did not agree to or fully understand gynecological surgical procedures. But the AP also said that its review of the matter “did not find evidence of mass hysterectomies as alleged in a widely shared complaint filed” by Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia.
In addition, per the AP [ensuing emphases ours] Priyanka Bhatt, a Project South lawyer involved in filing the complaint, said she included the mass hysterectomy allegations in the complaint to trigger an investigation of the claims:
- But a lawyer who helped file the complaint said she never spoke to any women who had hysterectomies. Priyanka Bhatt, staff attorney at the advocacy group Project South, told The Washington Post that she included the hysterectomy allegations because she wanted to trigger an investigation to determine if they were true.
- [....]
Makes for a very interesting case about alteration of video, as well as responsibility for retweeting an altered video:
The second woman appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg’s pointed and powerful dissenting opinions earned her late-life rock stardom. She tried to hang on until the people voted in a Democrat as president, and a Democrat controlled Senate, so she could retire with a suitable replacement. Remember, since 1988, Republicans have won the national popular presidential vote only once, in 2004. Yet due to the Senate being designed by the framers to protect slave state power, our Supreme Court members have been most often controlled by a Republican controlled Senate representing only a minority of the people.
McConnell will, of course, jam through a conservative with zero Democrat's votes. Even this close to an election for President.
The lesson for Democrats is, if Biden wins and Democrats win the Senate, get rid of the filibuster and move, move move on progressive legislation that cannot be tied up in the courts, and that will make a difference in the average person's life, forget worry about deficits.
Forget the wealth tax, a conservative Supreme Court super-majority will rule it unconstitutional.
Reform immigration and protect the DACA people. Raise taxes on the rich and corporations. Use federal funding to expand and mandate easier voter registration nationwide. Protect the environment, eliminate a President's ability to violate laws with a sham emergency. Pass the Green New Deal. Any other ideas?
Administration lawyers sad the Census Bureau has set its own "internal metrics and standards but that doesn't mean that they're judicially enforceable" in or by courts.
THIS is maximum GAMING THE SYSTEM , it makes Saddam's "oil for food" gaming look like grade school stuff.