Out of My Mind | Don’t Look Now; or Maybe Do
RBG: I’m not queen.
ACW: You’re not Queen Ruth?
RBG: I’d rather be notorious.
— An exchange between Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Judge Ann Claire Williams of the Seventh Circuit at “A Conversation with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” a recent speaking engagement hosted at the University of Notre Dame. This exchange took place after Justice Ginsburg acknowledged that she, alone, is not ruling alone like a queen on the Supreme Court bench. She much prefers her nickname, The Notorious RBG, to any royal title.
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I swear I’m trying to quit sexism, but ❤.
FBI Director James Comey advises:
Earlier this year, an image of Mark Zuckerberg’s desk emerged showing that he uses a piece of tape to cover the webcam on his MacBook Pro. While many mocked this security method by Zuckerberg at the time, the Facebook CEO now has some additional back up from someone who’s pretty security conscious: FBI director James Comey.
Speaking during a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Comey explained that putting a cover over webcams is one of the “sensible things” that everyone should be doing. Comey said that if you were to visit any government office, you would see that there are “little camera things” placed on all the computers that have lids. When the lids are closed, the camera is then blocked.
It’s a start. Of course, the best thing would be were we able to elect pols who understand and respect what’s good about America and get the intel services under control. Not easy, but possible with a great deal of work. However, neither Clinton nor Trump are the solution or even part of the solution. We have to fight for our freedom and to rid the system of the corrupters and their worthless puppets.
Edward Snowden and his allies have formally made the case that he should be pardoned by President Barack Obama.
He does. But it’s not that kind of world. It’s world we must fight for.
Like Saturn, the Reagan Revolution is eating its children, and it’s a spectacle to behold.
That’s what transpired last night when Intelligence Squared U.S. hosted its latest debate. T.P. Carney and Ben Domenech argued that Donald Trump is the natural result of a Republican party elite that perennially promises working-class whites the world and is shocked when those people stop trusting the party elites. On the other side, Jennifer Rubin and Bret Stephens argued that the Trump voters themselves are to blame.
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If only whatever happens, the party ends up as simply toxic.
Spoiler: How did the out of touch elite get empowered? By the votes of the base who, for decades now, have buying lies, lies, lies, fear and hate and ignoring that their choices have been failing them without exception.
Speaking of a piece of shit pol the masses repeatedly elect:
Again and again, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker flouted election laws to raise millions from some of the richest executives and biggest corporations in America, illegally laundering the money through the nominally independent, nonprofit Wisconsin Club for Growth — and now we have all the details, thanks to an enormous leak of documents that a Wisconsin judge ordered destroyed.
Can’t serve the people without engaging in self-enrichment, right?
Donald Trump has made it clear he will nominate Peter Thiel to the Supreme Court if he wins the presidency, Thiel has told friends, according to a source close to the PayPal co-founder.
Trump “deeply loves Peter Thiel,” and people in the real estate mogul’s inner circle are talking about Thiel as a Supreme Court nominee, a separate source close to Trump told The Huffington Post.
[snip]
In a 2009 essay, Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Part of the reason for that incompatibility, Thiel argued, was that women had gained the right to vote and that the government sometimes helps poor people.
“Since 1920,” he wrote, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
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That’s Deplorable Donnie for you: Doing deals with only the worst people.
The fight against legalized pot is being heavily bankrolled by alcohol and pharmaceutical companies, terrified that they might lose market share.
Established businesses must be served — what we elect pols to do. There’s the real capitalist democracy (see above) for you — we the people get to elect the capitalists’ whores. Awesome, right?
Insight from the ever-self-promoting and salesman supreme of the Iraq invasion, Colin Powell:
The e-mails also castigate Clinton aides for linking Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server during her tenure as secretary of state to Powell’s use of a private e-mail address while he held the same post.
But General, please explain the difference between what you did and what she did and why, in your case, it was okay. And, for that matter, why neither you nor Rice saw any need to require State to institute proper email policies.
It’s not quite the the cold war again. But when it comes to the Kremlin, US intelligence officials are anything but chill.
“Terrorism remains the top concern for American intelligence services, the official said, but recent directives from the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have moved Russia up the list of intelligence priorities for the first time since the Soviet Union’s collapse.”
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Not a problem. President Trump will lower it back down. Russia’s doing nothing that will adversely affect his businesses, so it’s all good. No problem here he can’t solve.
Meanwhile, Hillary has twenty questions for Deplorable Donald regarding his business ties.
The policies that get implemented in a thoroughly corrupt system:
An utterly cynical and deceptively marketed constitutional amendment is on the ballot in Georgia. It’s called the “Opportunity School District” because it’s about creating business opportunities for the charter school sugar daddies who contribute to the governor. Elite Republicans and Democrats too from the First Black President down to local mayors all want school privatization, so they’ve disguised their privatization amendment as something else entirely.
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Trump’s paid leave plan: Gotta make enough to take a deduction, to be financed by hypothetical yet unlikely savings. His plan is just words used to sound like a plan. It’s a crock.
Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has spent $3.6 trillion on wars. When you add in the amount of war funding that the departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security have requested for next year — and then the estimated costs of our present commitments to veterans — the overall price tag comes to $4.79 trillion….
Can’t get elected without exciting your base to pull deplorable shit like this:
A 69-year-old woman was cold-cocked outside a Trump event by one of the Republican millionaire’s supporters, reports ABC News — an attack so deplorable that cops plan to charge one of his violent rallygoers with a crime.
Of course, one would like to believe that someone truly presidential would chill his supporters. But not Deplorable Donnie.
Hey, look! A corporate media millionaire-asshole!
Panelist Mark Halperin, the co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics, said the revelations were troubling, but he was even more troubled by the prospect of foreign investments potentially disqualifying business leaders from running for president.
Yeah, problem. People with huge conflicts of interest possibly being somehow (how??) precluded from running for office.
Of course, modern pols are so corrupted maybe they should be precluded from running for office. Of course, if voters were motivated and able to be sufficiently informed and to vote accordingly, it would be something else.
Sad: $100M gift to charter high schools. Wasted money, maybe should go to where there are serious problems?
Kids say the darnedest things.
Deplorable Donnie Jr., who looks like he washes with santorum:
“If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now,” the nominee’s son added.
And they get so upset when they’re stopped from lying; in this case, the hideous Ivanka, who’s attractive only to thugs like her father.
A contractor for a telecom company — probably SBC Ameritech but I couldn’t even find legal papers to say exactly who it was — was digging a trench to lay fiberoptic cable near an apartment complex on the bank of the river. They notify this third-party agency whose job it is to get permission from the city to say it’s OK to dig. The water department in turn is supposed to mark the line. This agency contacts Flint’s water department, and gets no response. They in turn tell the contractor, yup! No problems! Go ahead and dig!
The contractor digging the trench punches a giant hole in a main sewage pipe running between the city and the treatment center. Just all the filth in the universe is leaping out of this pipe. You can’t shut it off. The only thing you can do is divert some of it to other sewer lines, including into Flint Township, and dump the rest of it directly into the river. So that’s what they did. It then took the city more than two days to patch the broken pipe. With raw sewage dumping into the river the entire time.
Why didn’t the water department respond to the request to mark the line, and why were they so slow to patch the pipe? Well! First of all, they were totally understaffed and underfunded. But what staff they did have, almost all of them, were diverted to work with GM on getting a brand-new engine plant ready at the complex on Van Slyke Road, making sure they had the proper hookups for water to use on their equipment and to treat their waste to go into Flint’s sewers.
Flash forward fifteen years later. The city switches from Detroit water to water from the Flint River. GM starts noticing that the new water is corroding its parts. It starts getting its water from Flint Township — the same system that handled part of the overage when the pipe was broken. But not at every plant — just this one engine plant.
This was one of the early signs that there were serious problems with the city’s water, and was also emblematic of how they were dealt with — piecemeal, under the radar (although it was known), satisfying important interests, neglectful towards the vast majority of people who were more deeply affected.
And damned if this GM plant that switched its water source isn’t the same GM plant Flint’s water department was helping get up and running fifteen years before when they should have been marking that sewage line.
And oh — that engine plant switched its incoming water to Flint Township. But it continued to dump its waste into Flint’s city sewage lines.