Dakinikat turned me on to the world of truck drivers who have cat companions along for the ride. Here’s an article that discusses the phenomenon. CharityPaws.com: Trucker Cats May Be The Coolest Cats!
For what it’s worth, having a pet is hard work.
Love is easy enough to provide while on the road – but food, water, space, and entertainment are all needs too, and sometimes hard to come up with.
In the case of dogs especially, playtime is the hardest need to fill for truckers. After several hour-long walks, a game of tug-of-war, and an afternoon in the sun spent playing fetch, who wouldn’t be tired? But for truckers this can be time consuming and delay important deliveries!
That’s why many truckers have turned to cats as the solution for those lonely road trips. Trucker cats are the coolest cats with their chill laid back personalities and ability to make truckers feel awesome. They also have some great hearing which is why the made it to our list of “what animal has the best hearing” list. Having a companion with good hearing on board can help you find critters that may sneak around while you are sleeping or even alert you to danger!
With most of their time spent on the road in a little truck cab, cats are the perfect companion for truckers– and here’s some of the best reasons why according to one trucker’s resource:
Cats are low-maintenance: they eat less than their canine counterparts, take up less room, and don’t need as much playtime.
They’re loving and affectionate: cats are just as sweet as any other animal, once they have a chance to warm up to you.
They’re obedient, and trainable: cats can do tricks and walk on leashes, with the proper time and training!
They’re protective: though not as scary as a dog, cats are perfectly capable of altering truckers if something looks, sounds, or even smells off.
Other reasons topping truckers’ lists include cleanliness, cuteness, and the fact that having a cat in a truck is a pretty good conversation starters. Some even say that having a feline friend is a constant reminder to drive and act safely during the long haul. They are also incredibly loyal as shown by the Room 8 cat – and having that kind of loyalty on the road will make any trucker feel amazing!
Read more at the link above.
Here’s a video about trucker cats, posted on YouTube by Cheezburger.
Long Read: Are Americans Experiencing Collective Trauma?
I want to call your attention to an excellent, but very long read in The New Republic by Anna Marie Cox: We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized. Subhead: “The pandemic. The mass shootings. Insurrection. Trump. We’ve been through so much. What if our entire national character is a trauma response?”
This is a very long piece, so I’m just going to give you some samples to help you decide if you want to tackle reading the whole thing.
As of last year, four in 10 Americans knew at least one person who died from Covid. This year, three in 10 Americans say they know someone who has been affected by an opioid addiction, and one in five knows someone who’s died from a painkiller overdose. In 2022, more than three million adults were displaced by some form of natural disaster—that’s more than three times as many displaced per year between 2008 and 2021. Last year, some cities saw a 50 percent increase in evictions over pre-pandemic levels. One in five knows someone who’s died due to gun violence; one in six has witnessed a shooting; 21 percent have been personally threatened by a gun. Half of Americans know someone personally who has experienced at least one of those events.
After Trump’s “grab her by” tape became public, calls to the national sexual assault hotline jumped up by 35 percent (as Michelle Goldberg observed, Trump was a walking trigger for assault survivors). During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, calls to the sexual assault hotline spiked 201 percent. Lockdown—the first two months of the pandemic—saw a rise in intimate partner violence of 101 percent, with the rate stabilizing at an increase of about 8 percent from pre-pandemic numbers as of 2022.
Another photo of Trucker cat Percy, by Paul Robertson
And then there are the frontline workers and “essential personnel,” those who risked their lives for our safety and comfort during the spring of 2020. I assume that we agree health professionals faced trauma (and may well still). There are 22 million of them in the United States, and after the pandemic, 55 percent reported experiencing burnout, and three in 10 said they were now considering leaving the profession. The 55 million essential personnel who worked through the worst days of Covid suffered a similar toll: A year into the pandemic, the American Psychiatric Association found that 34 percent of essential workers had been treated by a mental health professional, 80 percent had trouble over- or under-sleeping, and 39 percent said they were drinking more alcohol than they had before….
These are traumas at the individual level in numbers so large that they demand national attention because there are national consequences—think of the nationwide therapist shortage and “the Great Resignation.”
So, what if the reason so many people identify as trauma survivors is that they are? What if the horrors of the last seven years do translate into a nation that is suffering more than mere political dysfunction? What if the polarization, paranoia, conspiracism, and hopelessness that bog us down have a more holistic origin than structural malfunctions or individual malfeasance?
What if our entire national character is a trauma response?
Before you say “bullshit,” remember: Cynicism is a trauma response.
Next Cox explores expert opinions about the concept of “collective trauma.”
The origin of the academic study of “collective trauma” has been credited to Kai Erikson’s 1977 book, Everything in Its Path, an account of the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek flood in Logan County, West Virginia, five years prior, which killed 125 people and destroyed 550 homes in a small mining community. In the book, Erikson writes of grappling with “thousands of pages of transcript material, whole packing boxes full of it,” that confounded him “not because the material is contradictory or difficult to interpret but because it is so bleakly alike.” He found respondents echoing one another to a frustrating degree, so much so that “a researcher is very apt to conclude after rummaging through these data that there is really not very much to say.” Eventually, however, he came to believe that the uniformity itself was meaningful; the damage done at Buffalo Creek was something more than a mere collection of individual harms.
Collective trauma, he wrote, means “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.” Collective trauma happens in slow motion, “A form of shock all the same…. ‘I’ continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. ‘You’ continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But ‘we’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body.”
Trucker Abdirahman Abdul and Aisha
In other words, the defining characteristic of collective trauma—and what makes it almost impossible to self-diagnose—is that people who have been through it no longer believe in the integrity of their community. How does anyone see themselves as a traumatized collective if no one feels that they belong?
So, pull back to the macro level. For a moment, put aside your or anyone else’s individual experience. Think of the country itself as a patient.
In the past seven years, the country has sustained significant, repeated damage to its institutions. The courts, elections, law enforcement, and so on are its vital organs. Trump has been punching America in the kidneys since he first floated the idea of a “rigged election.” January 6 was a heart attack. The musculature that is the justice system, well, it was always spasmodic. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery shocked many white people into awareness of our already dysfunctional law enforcement apparatus, and then the Dobbs decision drove home how easily the rights that support us can be yanked away. Were we ever really as strong as we thought?
The country was already weakened by Trumpism when the pandemic attacked our nervous systems more than figuratively. It cut away at the millions of tiny threads that knit up our towns and cities. Think of the loose social ties that grow from just seeing the same people at the grocery store (or the office) every day—think of the mail. Our national proprioception—our awareness of where our parts are in relation to one another—deteriorated. Our creaky supply chain is another symptom of this disconnect. So is “you’re on mute.”
I won’t quote any more, but these excerpts are just from the introductory part of the article. Cox later demonstrates with examples how the notion of trauma can apply to our collective experience as a nation. There is so much in the piece, that I wonder if Cox is planning to turn it into a book.
I’m not sure how the MAGA world fits into this hypothesis, but after my reading about the traumas of Appalachia–from poverty, drugs, unemployment, and breakdown of families (see my Wednesday post), I wonder if an argument could be made that the attraction to Trump as powerful father figure could also have arisen out of trauma. At any rate, I highly recommend this article.
Citing threats against individuals former President Donald Trump has targeted, special counsel Jack Smith has asked a federal judge for a narrowly tailored gag order that restricts the 2024 presidential candidate from making certain extrajudicial statements about the election interference case brought against him.
A redacted copy of a government filing — released Friday, after an order from U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — comes in connection with the election interference case, one of four criminal cases the former president is facing, two of which are federal.
“The defendant has an established practice of issuing inflammatory public statements targeted at individuals or institutions that present an obstacle or challenge to him,” the special counsel’s office wrote.
Whispur and DanDan, photo by Whispurer on Reddit
The government said Trump “made clear his intent to issue public attacks related to this case when, the day after his arraignment, he posted a threatening message on Truth Social.”
Trump’s Aug. 4 post read: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
Trump, the office wrote, “has made good on his threat,” spreading “disparaging and inflammatory public posts on Truth Social on a near-daily basis regarding the citizens of the District of Columbia, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses.
“Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election, the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution—the judicial system—and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals—the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors,” the prosecutors wrote.
Naturally, Trump responded publicly to the filing:
At an event in Washington, Trump made his first public remarks on the filing by attacking Smith, arguing that the special counsel “wants to take away my rights under the First Amendment, wants to take away my right of speaking freely and openly.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, responded earlier Friday by calling the filing “nothing more than blatant election interference because President Trump is by far the leading candidate in this race.”
The federal prosecutors who charged former President Donald J. Trump with a criminal conspiracy over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election obtained 32 private messages from his Twitter account through a search warrant this winter as part of their investigation, court papers unsealed on Friday said.
Questions have lingered about what prosecutors were looking for in Mr. Trump’s Twitter account ever since it was revealed last month that the government had served the warrant on Twitter in January. In an earlier release of documents, prosecutors disclosed that they had obtained some private messages from Mr. Trump’s account but not how many.
The 32 messages, whose content has not been disclosed, were only a small fraction of the larger body of data that Twitter was forced to turn over under the terms of the warrant, the new court papers said. Much of the legal wrangling over the matter focused on the Justice Department’s demand that Twitter, purchased last year by Elon Musk and now known as X, not inform Mr. Trump of the search warrant.
Mr. Trump’s posts on the platform in the chaotic months after the election were mentioned several times in the indictment that the special counsel, Jack Smith, filed against him in Washington last month. What remains unclear is whether Mr. Smith’s team sought the warrant for Mr. Trump’s account merely to confirm that he had posted the messages that appeared in public, or whether they suspected that some private data in the account might also be important.
What were investigators looking for in the private messages?
The newly unsealed documents — an exhaustive record of the legal fight between Twitter and the Justice Department over whether to hide the execution of the warrant from Mr. Trump — added a few new details about what the government may have been seeking.
Waylon the Trucker Cat, photo by owner Nick
For example, the materials showed that prosecutors wanted to learn if there were other accounts that Mr. Trump had been logging into from the same internet address he used for his Twitter account, which during his presidency was a main channel for his public statements. But it was not clear whether looking for other accounts was merely a routine step or whether investigators had a specific reason to be asking.
The new materials — unsealed at the request of a coalition of news media organizations, including The New York Times — opened a broader window into the back and forth between the special counsel’s office and Twitter. The dispute touched on how to balance the government’s need to protect a sensitive investigation with the social media company’s desire to be transparent with its most famous user.
The documents were particularly sharp in describing Mr. Trump’s repeated attempts to obstruct federal inquiries — an argument that prosecutors used in securing permission from a judge in Washington not to tell the former president for months that they had obtained the warrant for his account.
In detailing Mr. Trump’s “pattern of obstructive conduct,” the new papers cited his attempts to interfere with the special counsel’s other inquiry — one in which the former president stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after leaving office.
The attorney for President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, who is facing felony gun charges, said Friday that the statute is “likely unconstitutional” and he expects “the case will be dismissed before trial.”
“On the facts, we think we’ll have a defense,” Abbe Lowell told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “Good Morning America.”
The younger Biden has been indicted by special counsel David Weiss on three felony gun charges, bringing renewed legal pressure on him after a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors imploded in recent months.
The conduct described in the indictment dates back to October 2018, when Hunter Biden procured a Colt Cobra 38SPL despite later acknowledging that he was addicted to drugs around that time.
While the criminal statutes cited in the indictment are clear — it is a crime to lie on a gun application form or to possess a firearm as a drug user – Hunter Biden’s attorney suggested that the charges could be unconstitutional, citing a recent appeals court ruling that drug use alone should not automatically prevent someone from obtaining a gun.
“The only change that has occurred between when they investigated [this alleged crime] and today is that the law changed,” Lowell said. “But the law didn’t change in favor of the prosecution. The law changed against it.”
With Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry on Capitol Hill, Lowell suggested that political pressure on prosecutors played into their decision, questioning the timing of the charges in light of revelations from whistleblowers about the investigation.
No kidding. The political pressure from right wing Congresspeople has been off the charts. And Special Counsel David Weiss himself was appointed by Bill Barr after political pressure from Donald Trump.
“History is also our best teacher. Yes, our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice. But can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now?” Jackson said at the church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Trucker cat, photo by abbenquesnel on flicker
“We have to own even the darkest parts of our past, understand them and vow never to repeat them. We must not shield our eyes. We must not shrink away lest we lose it all,” she said.
The justice didn’t invoke a particular case, but as a whole her speech nodded to efforts targeting the teaching of critical race theory in schools and books about the struggle for racial equality and other topics.
“If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” she said. “I know that atrocities like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive. But I also know that it is dangerous to forget them.”
At times, Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, drew a personal connection to the tragedy, in which a bomb exploded at the church on September 15, 1963, killing Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson. Nearly two dozen others were injured.
“As a mother of two young women who will always be my little girls, I can imagine no greater horror than to lose a child this way,” Jackson said.
“And even now, six decades later, the magnitude of that tragic loss weighs heavily on all of us because those girls were just getting started. They could have broken barriers. They could have shattered ceilings. They could have grown up to be doctors or lawyers or judges appointed to serve on the highest court in our land,” she added.
Read more at CNN.
That’s a sampling of today’s news. Feel free to discuss anything and everything in the comment thread.
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This year, workers across industries in the United States have increasingly walked off the job or threatened to do so. In July, tens of thousands of actors joined screenwriters on the picket line, bringing Hollywood to a halt. Meanwhile, a summertime strike of more than 300,000 United Parcel Service workers had seemed imminent before a deal was reached last month.
Now, another potentially large-scale strike has begun. After the United Auto Workers and the country’s largest carmakers were unable to agree on a new contract before Thursday night’s deadline, union members at General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis — which owns Chrysler, Jeep and Ram — have walked off the job.
About 12,700 workers began the strike on Friday, at plants in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. That’s a small portion of the unionized factories of G.M., Ford and Stellantis across the United States. But the union hasn’t ruled out a full-scale strike.
If all 150,000 of the U.A.W. members go on strike, nearly 460,000 workers will have walked off the job at some point over the course of this year, the highest level since 2018, another notable year for work stoppages.
Strike activity increased slightly in 2021 and 2022 after a lull during the coronavirus pandemic. Much of this can be attributed to a historically strong economic recovery, which has strengthened workers’ bargaining power, said Ruth Milkman, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and School of Labor and Urban Studies. “The single most important factor is the tight labor market,” she said.
Despite the recent uptick, overall union activity has fallen since the 1970s and ’80s, when the number of workers on strike in a year regularly surpassed 400,000.
Today’s news is the”UAW strike 2023 against Detroit automakers: Live updates, news from the picket sites.” This is reported by the Detroit Free Press.
The UAW declared a strike against Detroit Three automakers Thursday as contract talks failed to secure new labor agreements before the current deals expired at 11:59 p.m.
UAW President Shawn Fain announced the first wave of plants the union would strike if a new labor agreement was not reached before midnight: Ford Michigan Assembly Plant (Final Assembly and Paint only) in Wayne, Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio and General Motors Wentzville Assembly in Missouri.
The DFP has a number of exciting stories that analyze the impact of the strike on Michigan, the US, and the industry, including the many small suppliers to the Big 3 and the workers.
The UAW’s targeted plan for a possible strike could mean that some workers are on the picket lines making $500 a week in strike pay while others are on the assembly lines making their full wages.
Whether such a situation would breed contempt among workers would depend on the messaging from the United Auto Workers union, said Brett Miller, a labor and employment attorney at Butzel law firm.
“There may be some comfort if the union plans to start small and escalate the strike involving more members or it is making representations that the final result of the strike would be worth the sacrifice,” he said.
As to whether the union strikes a plant that supplies parts to another plant, thereby halting the second, non-striking plant’s production, the automaker could shut down that non-striking plant and essentially it would be a lockout for those workers at the non-striking plant.
Miller said that under the UAW constitution, those on strike or locked out could get strike pay. Generally, unemployment will not cover employees who are on strike, but there are exceptions, such as in New York and New Jersey.
The United Auto Workers union is on strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, the first time in its history that it has struck all three of America’s unionized automakers at the same time.
Workers on Friday walked out of three plants – one each from the Big Three automakers – in Missouri, Michigan and Ohio. Picketers were met with cheers from sign-waving union members.
The UAW referred to its targeted strike of three plants as a “Stand Up Strike,” which it called a strategic “new approach” to walking off the job.
“As time goes on, more locals may be called on to ‘Stand Up’ and join the strike,” the union told members. “This gives us maximum leverage and maximum flexibility in our fight to win a fair contract at each of the Big Three automakers.”
The UAW’s strikes began at GM’s Wentzville Missouri, which has 3,600 UAW members on its staff; Ford’s Michigan Truck plant in Wayne, Michigan, which will have 3,300 strikes; and Stellantis’ Toledo Assembly complex in Ohio, where 5,800 will be be on strike.
In all, fewer than 13,000 of the UAW’s 145,000 members walked off the job.
“These were chosen carefully by the UAW and reflect a strategy that will ensure a large number of suppliers and dealers are affected, while reducing the number of UAW workers that, at least initially, are on strike and receiving strike pay,” said Patrick Anderson. CEO of Anderson Economic Group.
Thousands of striking writers and actors staged a solidarity march through Hollywood Wednesday, culminating in a boisterous rally outside Paramount studios as the dual labor stoppages continue to halt movie and TV production.
The Writers Guild of America has been on strike since early May. The SAG-AFTRA actors’ union joined the writers on the picket lines in July. There have been some negotiations between the WGA and Hollywood studios in recent weeks, but still no indication a resolution is at hand. There has not been any word of talks between the studios and SAG-AFTRA.
On Wednesday morning, thousands of striking writers and actors gathered outside Netflix headquarters in Hollywood, then marched to Paramount studios on Melrose Avenue. Once there, a massive rally was held, featuring speeches and music performances — and forcing closures of streets surrounding the studio.
SAG-AFTRA billed the event as a solidarity march to send a message to studios that actors and writers are standing firm in their push for fair contracts.
“Thank you so much for showing up like this, this is an amazing turnout,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher told the crowd. “Your strength and your solidarity and your resolve is going to get us to the other side of this, and history is in the making right now. I know that this strike is not easy, in fact, it’s hard. It’s very hard. And with the passing of time its going to even get harder, but the reason why we had the largest strike authorization in our union history is because we stand at an inflection point.
My Granddad was around for the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 while he and Nana had two kids. My Dad was born the year after the strike.
According to Pencavel, many workers are feeling frustrated by seeing their wages suppressed in less competitive labor markets and by the loss of a voice (such as a trade union). Moreover, he argues, a low unemployment rate makes the timing right.
“Strikes tend to be more frequent and longer when workers have opportunities for other possibly temporary work, as indicated by a low unemployment rate,” Pencavel said.
…
Why are so many strikes happening now?
When it comes to measuring earnings inequality, economists tend to be relativists, that is, if all workers get the same x% increase in wages, economists usually conclude wage inequality has not changed. By contrast, many workers are absolutists and measure inequality in terms of absolute dollar differences in wages. This distinction helps to explain why economists are more inclined to accept certain earnings differences that workers do not. An example is provided by examining the U.S. household income and comparing the household whose income is near the top of the income distribution.
Specifically, the household whose income is at the 95th percentile with the household whose income is below the median (specifically at the 20th percentile). Approximately these two households experienced the same 9% increase in income between 2018 and 2019. Given the existing wide income distribution, this 9% increase in income constituted a $2,484 increase for the household at the 20th percentile and a $21,274 increase for the household at the 95th percentile. To the relativist, inequality has not changed; to the absolutist income inequality has increased.
Tending to be absolutists, workers are outraged at the earnings reported for certain managers and business owners. They see the system as basically unfair. Indeed, it is well documented that the share of the nation’s total income that is categorized as profits has risen and the share called wages has fallen.
Amazon workers strike to expose the horror behind ‘Black Friday’ sales The workers in Amazon warehouses in Europe sought to highlight atrocious working conditions, including Injuries from accidents, overworked employees collapsing unconscious on the floor, constant robotic surveillance and workers having to skip toilet breaks to avoid missing the targets. (2018)
There have been work stoppages also for workers in search of Union protection recently. Amazon and Starbucks have experienced nascent unionization efforts. This is an article from VOX that was published in May. “Why unions are growing and shrinking at the same time. Joining the picket line like it’s 1939.” This report was written by Rani Molla.
Based on the news lately, it would seem like unions are growing.
Staffers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced on Tuesday they had formed a union. This is after Starbucks workers last week reached 50 union wins across the country, and many more locations are slated to do so in the near future. According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), about 250 total Starbucks stores, representing nearly 7,000 employees, have so far petitioned to unionize. And last month, workers at an Amazon warehouse in New York City defied all odds by winning their first union battle against the second-biggest employer in the United States. People are successfully unionizing across the economy, from retail to tech, and their wins are leading to even more union interest. Petitions for union representation in the first half of 2022 are up nearly 60 percent from last year.
This raft of union organizing, unthinkable just a few years ago, is happening against a very favorable backdrop, including a tight labor market, record inequality, and a pro-union administration, which extends to the leadership at the NLRB, the organization tasked with running union elections and enforcing labor law. Meanwhile, public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965.
What we don’t know yet is whether these events are enough to meaningfully combat longstanding headwinds, from anti-union policy to the rise of gig work, that have caused union membership to decline for decades. Last year, amid a similar set of circumstances, the number of union members in the US went down by 240,000, leaving the rate of union membership at a low of 10 percent — half what it was in the 1980s. The pandemic has been a sort of double-edged sword for unions, giving people more reasons to organize and also causing union and non-union workers to lose their jobs.
It’s possible the psychic weight of union wins is bigger than their actual weight. A typical Starbucks only has 26 workers, and there hasn’t yet been public union activity at the vast majority of the company’s 9,000 corporate stores. After one Staten Island Amazon fulfillment center won its vote to unionize, a second sort center lost, and there are more than 800 Amazon warehouse facilities across the country.
It’s not clear where this will all net out. This year’s total union membership numbers won’t be available until the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases them early next year. Until then, we do know that a number of individual unions have been successfully bucking the trend in recent years by adding members. Labor organizers have done so by employing a variety of tactics, new and old, and could help other shops do the same. Labor experts laud unions’ efforts but say more is needed at a policy level to ensure these recent wins aren’t just a flash in the pan.
Democrats were quick to back working-class United Auto Workers in their strike against General Motors, delivering doughnuts and holding picket signs outside factories to show solidarity. It’s a union they long have aligned with politically.
There were no doughnuts from Republicans.
Led by President Donald Trump, GOP officials have largely avoided taking sides in the strike that threatens to upend the economy in Michigan, an election battleground, a year before the 2020 vote. Both here and nationally, most Republicans said little about the substance of the dispute beyond hope for a speedy resolution.
The muted response reflects the tricky politics of labor for Republicans.
Trump has made inroads with members of some unions, due partly to promises to get tough on trade and keep manufacturing jobs in the United States. The message pulled key voters away from their Democratic union bosses, who Trump argues are corrupt.
But a strike prompted in part over GM’s plan to close American plants highlights Trump’s unfulfilled promises on manufacturing and gives Democrats a chance to play up their union credentials.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren planned to show up on the picket line in Michigan on Sunday, with rival Bernie Sanders expected this coming week. Nearly all the candidates have tweeted support for the workers.
“Proud to stand with @UAW to demand fair wages and benefits for their members. America’s workers deserve better,” Joe Biden tweeted.
Trump is in a bind.
Backing the union would undermine Trump’s message that labor does not advocate for its workers and give a powerful Democratic force a boost before an election.
Siding with GM would call into question his promises to defend workers and he would risk getting blamed for economic woes in Rust Belt states he needs to win reelection.
I may be a Financial economist, but anyone in the field has had a healthy dose of Labor Economics at some point in their training. Classical labor theory suggests that everyone will be paid based on their contribution (productivity). It fails to account for the differences in salaries for women and minorities. It also underestimated how much the capital side would be given tremendous tax benefits as well as the bonuses and stock plans that are supposed to align management with the stockholders. Labor became the redheaded stepchild and was frequently overlooked in the rise of the service industry. Additionally, the investment in technology to replace workers has been intense, even pushing shoppers to self-checkout when it used to be a radical idea that you would pump your own gas.
Anyway, my bottom line is it’s about time that every person who actually does the work gets the pay, recognition, and benefits they deserve. Hope I haven’t been too wonky or too much of a history nut for you on my wonky thread. All I can say is my life was a lot better when I had a union bargaining for my terms of employment. It hasn’t been the same since. But then, I first taught at a community college where many of the instructors were in trades. I still shudder at the thought that your fundamental English Professor is paid far less than anyone in my field. I was active in the bargaining unit of my Union and was fascinated by the process. Also, the Union does make us strong.
I got a bit of a start this morning when I got an email from the town housing authority about preparations for hurricane Lee. The storm is supposed to impact the Boston area around 2AM on Saturday until 2AM on Sunday. The email provided links to find out if I’m in a evacuation zone. It doesn’t look like I am, but we are sure to get lots of rain and wind and we could lose power. I guess I’ll be watching the Weather Channel in the coming days.
We are already having catastrophic flooding in some parts of the state, because we have had so much rain and fog here for weeks on end. There are more thunderstorms coming tonight and tomorrow. The area with the worst flooding recently got more than 10 inches of rain. It is so humid in my apartment fthat everything seems damp, and food gets stale quickly. Of course, none of this can compare to the awful weather that Dakinikat has been experiencing throughout this summer.
Hurricane Lee continues to churn north as a powerful storm over the open ocean, retaining major hurricane status as of 8 a.m. Eastern. While the forecast will become clearer in coming days, the forecast track has shifted west over the last 24 hours, and a farther west track is looking increasingly likely at this point — which could mean growing concern in New England.
Hurricane-force winds could threaten Cape Cod, Downeast Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia by the weekend. Farther inland, tropical storm conditions are possible. Currently, the storm is set to spare the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic any adverse impacts.
A building on Water Street by Monoosnoc Brook in Leominster, collapsed when the brook flooded after 11 inches of rain fell on city. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
“There is an increasing risk of wind, coastal flooding, and rain impacts from Lee in portions of New England and Atlantic Canada beginning on Friday and continuing through the weekend,” wrote the National Hurricane Center. “Due to Lee’s large size, hazards will extend well away from the center, and there will be little to no significance on exactly where the center reaches the coast.”
Lee is a powerhouse hurricane. It still had 115 mph winds Wednesday morning, but its wind field was expanding. Think of an ice skater outstretching their arms while spinning — they would slow down, since they’re tracing bigger circles. Same thing with Lee. It’s now a bigger storm, but maximum sustained winds are diminishing some.
That expansion of Lee’s wind field will churn up cooler waters from below the sea surface, hastening the weakening of its winds. By Friday, it will also begin to transition into a nontropical storm, tapping into jet stream energy and changing it structure.
You can read about the three possible scenarios at the WaPo. The big problem for Massachusetts is that we have already had heavy rain for weeks. One town, Leominster, had to be evacuated. Other areas have significant flooding.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I haven’t been paying as much attention to political news as usual over the past couple of weeks, because I “went down a rabbit hole,” as Dakinikat calls it. First, I read a book by Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead. It is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, specifically in Virginia. The book deals with a number of issues, including social services and foster care of orphaned or abused children and the opiod crisis. Much of the book is actually painful to read, but Kingsolver is such a fine writer that I couldn’t put it down.
I have chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis, but it has never occurred to me to try to get powerful pain killers, because I am a recovering alcoholic and I have also experienced addictions to Valium and Percocet. I was prescribed tranquilizers beginning when I was about 19 or 20. I was given phenobarbital, then Lithium and later I took Valium for years.
I have paid so little attention to the story of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, that I didn’t know that the Sacklers made their fortune on Librium and Valium in particular. The withdrawal from Valium is very serious, but it’s nothing compared to Oxycontin, which further enriched the Sackler family and has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. people who were hooked on Oxycontin eventually turned to heroin and fentanyl.
After I finished Demon Copperhead, I wanted to learn more about the opiod crisis and what happened with Oxycontin. First I watched a very good (partly fictionalized) documentary on Netflix, called Painkiller. Yesterday, I watched another Netflix series called The Pharmacist, which takes place in New Orleans. To say I was shocked by these shows is a serious understatement. I had no idea that Purdue Pharma pushed their drugs with sophisticated ad campaigns targeting doctors, and even went so far as to hire young women to approach doctors and flirt with them in order to convince them to prescribe more and more of the drug. Now I’m reading the book Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is a history of the Sackler family, how they made their huge fortune, and how they laundered their reputations through philanthropy.
This is definitely a political issue, and a difficult one, because rich corporations and individuals are rarely held to account and are usually allowed to buy their way out of legal issues. The Sacklers have now lost their “good name” at any rate. Their names have been taken off the many art collections, museum wings, etc. that they paid for. But none of them has gone to jail. They were allowed to declare bankruptcy and pay billions in restitution, but be protected from further lawsuits. The DOJ had a problem with that and right now the case is on hold in the Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a challenge by President Joe Biden’s administration to the legality of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement, putting on hold a deal that would shield its wealthy Sackler family owners from lawsuits over their role in the country’s opioid epidemic.
The justices paused bankruptcy proceedings concerning Purdue and its affiliates and said they would hold oral arguments in December in the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling upholding the settlement. The Supreme Court’s new term begins in October.
Richard Sackler was head of Purdue Pharma during the marketing of Oxycontin.
Purdue’s owners under the settlement would receive immunity in exchange for paying up to $6 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits filed by states, hospitals, people who had become addicted and others who have sued the Stamford, Connecticut-based company over its misleading marketing of the powerful pain medication OxyContin.
In a statement, Purdue said it was disappointed that the U.S. Trustee, the Justice Department’s bankruptcy watchdog that filed the challenge at the Supreme Court, has been able to “single-handedly delay billions of dollars in value that should be put to use for victim compensation, opioid crisis abatement for communities across the country and overdose rescue medicines.”
“We are confident in the legality of our nearly universally supported plan of reorganization, and optimistic that the Supreme Court will agree,” the company added.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
At issue is whether U.S. bankruptcy law allows Purdue’s restructuring to include legal protections for the members of the Sackler family, who have not filed for personal bankruptcy.
Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019 to address its debts, nearly all of which stemmed from thousands of lawsuits alleging that OxyContin helped kickstart an opioid epidemic that has caused more than 500,000 U.S. overdose deaths over two decades.
I hope I’ve inspired a few people to learn more about this important issue. Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family single-handedly caused pain, heartache, and death to millions of people with Librium, Valium, and then Oxycontin, each of which they claimed were not addictive drugs. I can testify that Valium is definitely addictive. In the sober community, some refer to it as alcohol in pill form. Similarly, experts came to see Oxycontin as heroin in pill form. These people are monsters.
One more interesting link to the Sacklers: Rudy Giuliani stepped in to help them.
The new Netflix series “Painkiller” offers a fictionalized retelling of the rise of the powerful opioid OxyContin, depicting the real-life characters involved in manufacturer Purdue Pharma’s rapid ascent and subsequent downfall, including America’s most infamous mayor himself — Rudy Giuliani.
While certain aspects of the drama series have been embellished or altered amid the Hollywood treatment, Giuliani’s legal involvement in the Sackler family saga is rooted in reality.
The former New York City mayor and larger-than-life Trump ally helped Purdue Pharma continue to sell OxyContin even after federal prosecutors sought to make a case that the drug maker misled the public in claiming OxyContin was less addictive than other narcotics on the market.
Arthur Sackler made his fortune in the 1960s and 1970s by pushing the drugs Librium and Valium, claiming they were not addictive.
Purdue Pharma hired Giuliani back in 2002, representing the first client his consulting firm ever landed, The New York Times reported in 2007. Then-beloved as the mayor who saw New York City through the September 11 attacks, Giuliani was brought on to convince public officials that Purdue was a trustworthy company, according to the newspaper.
Giuliani emerges as a key character in “Painkiller” in the mid-aughts as fictional lawyer Edie Flowers, played by actress Uzo Aduba, is working on behalf of the US attorney’s office to bring a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma. Despite prosecutors’ best efforts, the office ultimately reaches a deal with Purdue, which sees the company plead guilty to charges of fraudulent marketing and misbranding of OxyContin.
Part of the reason the company was able to reach that agreement was thanks to Giuliani’s efforts as Purdue’s lawyer. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote the New Yorker article upon which the Netflix show draws heavily, reported that Giuliani originally tried to “scuttle the case.”
Later, however, Giuliani and the other Purdue lawyers went above lead prosecutor John Brownlee’s head to complain to James Comey, who was the deputy attorney general at the time, The Guardian reported.
That’s my post for today. Feel free to react to what I’ve written or to discuss the latest news. I couldn’t face writing about Trump today.
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The theories themselves are so well-worn that they have progressed all the way to memes: the common refrain that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”, once an earnestly communicated part of conspiracy lore, has now become so hackneyed that it is almost meaningless. But there are many others, which either tend to suggest that the US could have intervened but decided not to, or that it actually orchestrated the attacks itself.
At the same time, however, they borrowed from tropes and ideas that had existed for centuries before, and which have continued to prove popular in the decades since. For the most part, 9/11 conspiracy theories are the same as those that went before, and those that followed, with the nouns swapped.
Perhaps the most distinct facet about the 9/11 conspiracy theories is the way they were pushed through formats that are familiar now in everything from advertising to the arts. In 2005, as the early viral internet we know today was finding its feet – it was the year of the first Pepe the Frog drawing, the beginnings of “Chuck Norris facts” and the “Million Dollar Homepage” – there appeared a video known as Loose Change, a documentary that presented the central ideas of the 9/11 conspiracy theory in a way that sent it swiftly across the internet.
Korey Rowe, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who made the film with friend Dylan Avery after returning from those wars confused and disillusioned, has drawn a straight line from the film to the various conspiracy theories that surround us today.
“Look at where it’s gone: you have people storming the Capitol because they believe the election was a fraud. You have people who won’t get vaccinated and they’re dying in hospitals,” he told the Associated Press. “We’ve gotten to the point where information is actually killing people.”
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit Russia, both countries said Monday, and he is expected to hold a highly anticipated meeting with President Vladimir Putin that has sparked Western concerns about a potential arms deal for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
A brief statement on the Kremlin’s website said the visit is at Putin’s invitation and would take place “in the coming days.” It also was reported by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, which said the leaders would meet — without specifying when and where.
“The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un will meet and have a talk with Comrade Putin during the visit,” it said.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin and Kim will lead their delegations in talks and could also meet “one-on-one if necessary.”
The Justice Department is dropping its five-year-old criminal case against Bijan Kian, the former lobbying partner of Michael Flynn whom prosecutors had accused of illicit lobbying for Turkey during the 2016 US presidential election.
The move wraps up a long-running tangent of the Mueller-era Russia investigation that originally had been used as leverage to pressure Flynn. Investigators had looked into the Trump ally’s unregistered work for Turkey before becoming the US national security adviser, charged him with false statements and sought his testimony against Kian, then allowed his guilty plea and cooperation to unravel.
Kian’s case has wound through the courts for years. After his indictment in 2018, the Iranian-American businessman went to trial, with prosecutors planning on calling Flynn to testify against him to solidify their evidence of a connection between Flynn’s lobbying group and the government of Turkey.
But Flynn was already working on contesting own case with prosecutors—which he ultimately achieved with the agreement of then-Attorney General Bill Barr – and avoided being called to testify.
A jury in the Eastern District of Virginia voted to convict Kian on charges of conspiring to hide lobbying work for Turkey from the Justice Department and acting as an illegal foreign agent. Yet Judge Anthony Trenga threw out the verdict, citing insufficient evidence and other issues related to Flynn’s role in the lobbying effort. The judge found there wasn’t evidence that Kian agreed to act as a foreign agent for Turkey. The case then went into appeals, hanging in the criminal justice system for years.
In a court filing on Monday, the Justice Department told Trenga it sought to dismiss the charges against Kian, who is also known as Bijan Rafiekian.
“After carefully considering the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in this case and the principles of federal prosecution, the United States believes it is not in the public interest to pursue the case against defendant Bijan Rafiekian further,” prosecutors wrote.
The judge hasn’t yet formally dismissed the case but is expected to.
To better understand Trump’s enduring appeal, Popular Information spoke with Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Why talk to the biographer of a wrestling executive to understand Trump? McMahon is one of Trump’s closest associates and, Riesman reports, one of the few people whose calls Trump takes in private. McMahon, who inducted Trump into the WWE Hall of Fame, could be serving as something of a role model to Trump right now. How many other people beat federal felony charges in court, weathered multiple sex scandals (so far), and emerged wealthier and more powerful?
Perhaps more importantly, McMahon is the creator of neo-kayfabe, the blending of fact and fiction — and good and evil — until it is all impossible to distinguish. McMahon himself became the most popular character on WWE shows, assuming the character of the arch-villain Mr. McMahon. There is now little distinction between McMahon and his WWE persona.
In her book, Riesman makes the case that Trump’s political strategy is shaped directly and indirectly by McMahon. “For more than three decades, Trump has watched and admired Vince’s product,” Riesman writes. “He has been both host and performer at many of Vince’s wrestling extravaganzas, honing his abilities as a rabble-rouser. Through Trump, Vince’s wrestling-infused mentality has reached the highest levels of the American system.”
Popular Information spoke to Riesman about what McMahon and WWE wrestling can teach us about Trump’s continued popularity, Trump’s response to federal indictments, and whether Trump believes his lies about the 2020 election. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
On how some people on the left misunderstand Trump’s appeal:
What we have with Trump is a guy who a lot of people on the left misunderstand as being just loved by the people who vote for him. And I think the feeling is not just, “Oh, Trump is good and strong and loves people and is a good Christian.” Very often, people will approach Trump in the way that they approach what they call in wrestling a “tweener.” Somebody who’s not exactly good or not exactly evil, where they go, “Yeah, I don’t approve of all of his methods or the things he says, but he’s cool, and he gets the job done.” I think thinking in terms of face [a “good guy” in wrestling] and heel [a “bad guy” in wrestling] for Trump is too binary, because it’s too much in the old way of doing things. The old kayfabe, not the neo-kayfabe. Trump is not perceived just as a good guy or a bad guy.
On the wrestler who is most similar to Trump:
Stone Cold Steve Austin is the person who, more than anyone else, altered the way the wrestling public uses their protagonists. Because Steve Austin was billed as a heel. He was introduced as a bad guy. And they were pushing him hard as a bad guy. But the crowd was seeing all these evil acts and just eating them up. They were obsessed, and cheering for this horrible character who was doing awful things. And that’s a real sea change for wrestling that, and then it ends up being a sea change for the culture.
On how WWE primed a generation for Trump:
You can’t deny that millennial boys grew up watching Stone Cold Steve Austin, and then the Rock and Triple H, and all these other people in that mold. These are people who are not quite face, not quite heel, but beloved by the crowd, despite their evil acts. Millennial boys shaped their whole worldviews when they’re 11 to 15 around that sense of morality. Not: Is it good, or is it evil? Just: Is it exciting? Is it cool? That’s what the premium is placed on. And that’s true now in politics, too. Maybe it’s always been true in politics to a certain extent. But right now, the thing that grabs people to vote is very often just: Do I find this person entertaining, recognizable, iconic, or funny? As opposed to: Will this person do a good job in the elected office that I’m voting for them for? And wrestling turned that into a science.
Several college football fans flipped the bird to former President Donald Trump as he waved to a crowd from a private suite at the Iowa vs. Iowa State game on Saturday.
Trump, who received a sea of cheers during a visit to a fraternity house before the game, got the one-finger salute from a number of fans as he and other GOP presidential candidates were on hand to check out the state’s intense college football rivalry.
In his quest to uncover evidence of corruption by President Joe Biden, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has only managed to undermine his key allegations against the president, according to the committee’s top Democrat.
“Chairman Comer’s investigation has conclusively disproven the Republican allegations against President Biden,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Monday in a statement accompanying a report summarizing the committee’s work so far this year.
It’s a scathing document that portrays the Republican investigation as a transparent effort to create a false equivalence between Biden and former President Donald Trump, who faces four criminal trials for conduct during and after his presidency.
The main corruption allegations against Biden are that he participated in his son’s business deals with foreign nationals and that as vice president he twisted U.S. foreign policy to benefit a Ukrainian gas company that employed his son as board member. House Republicans have said they may launch an impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden based on the Oversight Committee’s material.
“Mounting evidence reveals that then-Vice President Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ that his family sold around the world to enrich the Bidens,” a spokesperson for Comer said Monday. “Then-Vice President Biden spoke over 20 times by speakerphone with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates, dined with corrupt oligarchs who funneled millions to Hunter Biden, had coffee with one of his son’s associates in Beijing, and may have engaged in a bribery scheme.”
Earlier this year, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) uncovered an FBI file indicating that a trusted source spoke to a Ukrainian oligarch who claimed to have bribed Joe and Hunter Biden. The source said the claim was characteristic of braggadocio among post-Soviet businessmen; Raskin has said FBI officials told him they assessed the material and found it not credible enough for a full investigation. (The bureau has declined to publicize its assessment.)
Oooooo. Real Russians. Now, for real Communists? Alright, this is from Red State, so I doubt it, but sheesh. What is with these people? “Communists Burn Flags Outside Jason Aldean Concert, but the Response Shuts Them Down.”
Some don’t wish us well today. They would like to see us taken down and defeated as a nation. There are those who despise the very principles upon which this nation was built. Over the weekend, the Revolutionary Communists showed up outside a Jason Aldean concert in Tinley Park, a suburb of Chicago, not only to bash him over his viral hit song but to slam America, burn the flag, and call for a Communist revolution. You can see a video of them burning American flags here.
So, I see no evidence of anything other than folks burning the US Flag in protest. Again, these folks love an excellent Conspiracy Plotline.
An ex-Secret Service agent who was feet away from John F Kennedy when the former president was shot dead has broken his decades-old silence to cast doubt on the single-bullet theory held by the commission which investigated the assassination.
In an interview published by the New York Times over the weekend, Paul Landis said that he long believed the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.
But, based on discrepancies between things he saw on the day of the assassination and the report from the commission, “I’m beginning to doubt myself,” Landis said. “Now I begin to wonder.”
Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s death is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Yet his remarks – coming about a month before he releases a memoir – differ from two written statements which he turned in shortly after the assassination, surely keeping one of the darkest chapters in US history shrouded in mystery.
Landis was on the running board of a car trailing the open-top limousine that Kennedy was riding when – as he tells it – he heard a barrage of gunshots and a bullet struck the president from behind. The Warren commission, convened to examine the investigation, concluded that one bullet then continued forward, striking fellow passenger and Texas governor John Connally in his back, thigh, chest and wrist.
As the New York Times noted, the main reason for that conclusion was because the bullet was found on a stretcher used to move Connally around a hospital afterward.
Enter Landis’s new interview and his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years. Landis told the New York Times that he was the person who discovered that bullet, which he remembers being stuck in the limousine seat behind Kennedy’s seat after the president had been brought to the hospital.
Landis also said he did not think the bullet went too deeply into Kennedy’s back before “popping back out” prior to the president’s removal from the car he was in. Worried someone would try to pocket it as a souvenir, Landis said he took the bullet and placed it next to a stretchered Kennedy.
“It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important,” Landis said. “And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it.”
And they say yellow journalism is dead.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Cat and Flowers, by Ruskin Spear, British, 1911-1990
There has been a terrible earthquake in Morocco, with hundreds of people dead. President Biden is attending the Group of 20 summit meeting in India. Back in the U.S., a Georgia federal judge said no to Mark Meadows’ request to transfer his case to federal court; and now Trump’s lawyers are scrambling to figure out a way for him to still do that. It’s not likely to happen. The 5th Circuit court of appeals reversed some of a previous ruling that hamstrung government agencies, but they still found that the Biden administration violated the first amendment in trying to influence social media companies. Finally, The New York Times has an interesting read about the former Mar-a-Lago IT guy who had turned on Trump.
The strongest earthquake to hit the country of Morocco in more than 120 years has left over 800 people dead and many thousands more trapped, missing, or injured.
The quake registered 6.8 on the Richter scale with the epicenter located in the Atlas Mountains and not far the city of Marrakesh where historic buildings—many built of mortar and stone not designed to withstand such tremors—collapsed and the streets filled with people overnight trying to flee the destruction and danger.
“The problem is that where destructive earthquakes are rare, buildings are simply not constructed robustly enough to cope with strong ground shaking, so many collapse resulting in high casualties,” Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, told the Associated Press. “I would expect the final death toll to climb into the thousands once more is known. As with any big quake, aftershocks are likely, which will lead to further casualties and hinder search and rescue.”
Morocco’s interior ministry put the initial death toll at 822 as of Saturday morning, with 672 injured, but both numbers are certain to rise. Though the stronger impacts were closer to Marakesh, the earthquake was felt across the country, including in Casablance, Essaouira, and the capital city of Rabat.
Large nations, including both the United States and China, sent their well wishes to the people of Morocco.
“I am deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation caused by the earthquake in Morocco,” said U.S. President Joe Biden in an overnight statement. “Our thoughts and prayers are with all those impacted by this terrible hardship.”
Biden said his administration as in contact with Moroccan officials and willing to send whatever help might be necessary. “We are working expeditiously to ensure American citizens in Morocco are safe,” Biden said, “and stand ready to provide any necessary assistance for the Moroccan people.”
NEW DELHI (AP) — President Joe Biden and his allies on Saturday announced plans to build a rail and shipping corridor linking India with the Middle East and Europe, an ambitious project aimed at fostering economic growth and political cooperation.
“This is a big deal,” said Biden. “This is a really big deal.”
The corridor, outlined at the annual Group of 20 summit of the world’s top economies, would help boost trade, deliver energy resources and improve digital connectivity. It would include India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Israel and the European Union, said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.
Sullivan said the network reflected Biden’s vision for “far reaching investments” that come from “effective American leadership” and a willingness to embrace other nations as partners. He said the enhanced infrastructure would boost economic growth, help bring countries in the Middle East together and establish that region as a hub for economic activity instead of as a “source of challenge, conflict or crisis” as it has been in recent history.
The prosecution of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for attempting to overturn the 2020 election will remain in Georgia state court, a federal judge ruled Friday as he turned down Meadows’ bid to move the case to federal court.
The decision is a victory for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ drive to bring former President Donald Trump, Meadows and 17 other defendants to trial under the state’s broad criminal racketeering statute for their roles in trying to help Trump cling to power.
“The Court concludes that Meadows has not shown that the actions that triggered the State’s prosecution related to his federal office,” U.S. District Judge Steve Jones wrote in his decision, while emphasizing that he was not ruling on the right of any other defendant to have the case against them moved to the federal system.
By Belinda Del Pesco
Jones, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, concluded that Meadows was not acting within the scope of his employment at the White House when he organized a Jan. 2, 2021 phone call where Trump pressed Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to declare him the victor in that state. Other actions that Meadows took, as described in a grand jury’s indictment last month, similarly fell outside Meadows’ official duties, the judge said.
“Meadows’s participation on the January 2, 2021 call was political in nature and involved the President’s private litigation, neither of which are related to the scope of the Office of White House Chief of Staff,” Jones wrote. “The Court finds that these contributions to the phone call with Secretary Raffensperger went beyond those activities that are within the official role of White House Chief of Staff, such as scheduling the President’s phone calls, observing meetings, and attempting to wrap up meetings in order to keep the President on schedule.”
By finding that Meadows acted outside the scope of his duties, Jones concluded that Meadows is not eligible for so-called “removal” — a procedure under federal law that allows federal officials to transfer a case from state court to federal court if the case is based on their official acts.
It’s now unlikely that any of the other people trying to move their cases to federal court–including Trump–will succeed. Meadows had the strongest case according legal experts.
Reacting to U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones late Friday ruling that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows may not have his election tampering case moved to a federal court, former Re[publican National Committee chair Michael Steele said that was a major blow not only to Meadows but also all of the other 18 Georgia co-conspirators facing RICO charges including Donald Trump.
As Steele put it, any hopes that defense attorneys might have had in the outcome of the Meadows hearing died a quick death.
Meadows’ attorneys had signaled that they hoped to move the case to federal court as a precursor to arguing that the case against him should be thrown out on grounds that as a former federal officer he’s immune from charges relating to his duties. And if a trial went forward in federal court, the jury pool would likely have been broader and slightly friendlier to Trump and his allies than one drawn only from Fulton County.
A federal court trial also would be unlikely to be televised, whereas the state court judge has already vowed to livestream all the proceedings.
Four other defendants in the Georgia case have also asked for the cases against them to be moved to federal court: former Justice Department official Jeff Clark and three pro-Trump activists accused of falsely certifying that they were presidential electors from the state. Those requests remain pending with Jones, and he said he was not pre-judging them as he turned down Meadows.
Nora Heysen (Australian, 1911-2003) – A Boy with his cat
A federal appeals court on Friday said the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment in some of its communications with social media companies, but also narrowed a lower court judge’s order on the matter.
The US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that certain administration officials – namely in the White House, the surgeon general, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – likely “coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content” in violation of the First Amendment in its efforts to combat Covid-19 disinformation.
But the three-judge panel said the preliminary injunction issued by US District Judge Terry Doughty in July, which ordered some Biden administration agencies and top officials not to communicate with social media companies about certain content, was “both vague and broader than necessary to remedy the Plaintiffs’ injuries, as shown at this preliminary juncture.”
The Biden administration had previously argued in the lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general claiming unconstitutional censorship that channels with social media companies must stay open so that the federal government can help protect the public from threats to election security, Covid-19 misinformation and other dangers.
n briefs submitted earlier this summer, the administration wrote, “There is a categorical, well-settled distinction between persuasion and coercion,” adding that Doughty had “equated legitimate efforts at persuasion with illicit efforts to coerce.”
The 5th Circuit left in place part of the injunction that barred certain Biden administration officials from “threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.”
“But,” the appeals court said, “those terms could also capture otherwise legal speech. So, the injunction’s language must be further tailored to exclusively target illegal conduct and provide the officials with additional guidance or instruction on what behavior is prohibited.”
So it’s some good news and some bad news if you care about disinformation on social media.
In a deep dive into the life of the key Donald Trump employee who has flipped on the former president and some of his colleagues who worked with him at Mar-a-Lago, the New York Times is reporting that Trump’s head of security made a fateful decision that helped out special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.
Composition with Cat on the table with striped tablecloth – Herdis Gelardi , 1951 Danish, 1916-1991
As part of their profile of IT manager Yuscil Taveras, the Times creates a moment-by-moment timeline where Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira contacted Yuscil Taveras to meet him “somewhere more private” to discuss deleting the surveillance video.
As part of their profile of IT manager Yuscil Taveras, the Times creates a moment-by-moment timeline where Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira contacted Yuscil Taveras to meet him “somewhere more private” to discuss deleting the surveillance video.
As the Times is reporting, “According to the indictment, which does not name Mr. Taveras but refers to him as ‘Trump Employee 4,’ Mr. De Oliveira led him through a basement tunnel to a small room known as an ‘audio closet,’ where Mr. De Oliveira delivered a message from Mr. Trump: ‘the boss’ wanted the footage deleted. Mr. Taveras rebuffed the request, prosecutors said in the indictment, but Mr. De Oliveira raised it again.”
Noting that Taveras once again denied the request, the report states that Taveras then reportedly confided to fellow employee Renzo Nivar about what had happened and days later alerted “a superior in Trump Tower.”
According to the Times, “One executive in New York, Matthew Calamari Jr., the Trump Organization’s corporate director of security, apparently became alarmed, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He alerted the company’s legal department, prompting a senior lawyer at the company to deliver a stern warning not to delete anything.”
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
It is important to note that 
A local L.A. ABC TV station reports that 
After I finished Demon Copperhead, I wanted to learn more about the opiod crisis and what happened with Oxycontin. First I watched a very good (partly fictionalized) documentary on Netflix, called Painkiller. Yesterday, I watched another Netflix series called The Pharmacist, which takes place in New Orleans. To say I was shocked by these shows is a serious understatement. I had no idea that Purdue Pharma pushed their drugs with sophisticated ad campaigns targeting doctors, and even went so far as to hire young women to approach doctors and flirt with them in order to convince them to prescribe more and more of the drug. Now I’m reading the book Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is a history of the Sackler family, how they made their huge fortune, and how they laundered their reputations through philanthropy.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today’s headlines also include a heavily armored train carrying the North Korean Dictator on its way to a meeting with Russia’s Putin. It’s like a 2fer day in Bond villains. 
Other Bond Villians in the news include the vile Ex-President Trump. Judd Legum from Popular Information writes this analysis. “
Well, it’s one possible hypothesis. Trump has another extravaganza ready for your TV viewing. The Daily Beast Reports that “
Oooooo. Real Russians. Now, for real Communists? Alright, this is from Red State, so I doubt it, but sheesh. What is with these people? “Communists Burn Flags Outside Jason Aldean Concert, but the Response Shuts Them Down.”
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