Florida State Seminoles

[hedge]

"But I guess it's all just Russian propaganda, eh Hedge?"

What the hell are you talking about??

[Tree]

I don't know but this was my greatest post over. I'm making my Costanza exit and will be back in a few months. Peace out, bitches.

[Jungle Rat]

Do you get work release this time?

[Jungle Rat]

I can just see Trump walking around with those 300 documents in hand mumbling, "Mine mine mine."

[Jungle Rat]

[Jungle Rat]

20220823_145805.jpg (107.96 KiB) Viewed 226 times

[hedge]

Lake Mead water shortage. Interesting pics...

https://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/News/Blo ... r-shortage

[hedge]

Farmers are depleting the Ogallala Aquifer because the government pays them to do it

https://theconversation.com/farmers-are ... -it-145501

[hedge]

China drought causes Yangtze to dry up, sparking shortage of hydropower

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... hydropower

[Jungle Rat]

If only there was a way to turn saltwater into fresh water.

[hedge]

Desalination was the cause of the catastrophic global weather event in The Day After Tomorrow...

[Jungle Rat]

I wish that was your funeral date.

[Tree]

So let's review. It's bad to have safety nets where a few bucks a day go to keeping people fed and sheltered because they get dependent on them. But it's okay to let a few hundred people take insanely large pieces of the pie while half the country lives paycheck to paycheck, then have these elites spend billions on shaping the political system even more so to their favor. God bless Capitalism.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... dium=email

Today’s big news is an eye-popping $1.6 billion donation to a right-wing nonprofit organized in May 2020. This is the largest known single donation made to a political influence organization.

The money came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics company executive, and the new organization, Marble Freedom Trust, is controlled by Leonard A. Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Leo has also been prominent in challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, climate change action, and so on. He announced in early 2020 that he was stepping back from the Federalist Society to remake politics at every level, but information about the massive grant and the new organization was broken today by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times.

Marble is organized as a nonprofit, so when Seid gave it 100% of the stock in Tripp Lite, a privately held company that makes surge protectors and other electronic equipment, it could sell the stock without paying taxes. The arrangement also likely enabled Seid to avoid paying as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the stock. Law professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, who specializes in philanthropic policy, told the New York Times: “These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans.”

This massive donation is an example of so-called “dark money”: funds donated for political advocacy to nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision, the Supreme Court said that limiting the ability of corporations and other entities to advertise their political preferences violates their First Amendment right to free speech. This was a new interpretation: until the 1970s, the Supreme Court did not agree that companies had free speech protections.

Now, nonprofit organizations can receive unlimited donations from people, corporations, or other entities for political speech. They cannot collaborate directly with candidates or campaigns, but they can promote a candidate’s policies and attack opponents, all without identifying their donors.

“I've never seen a group of this magnitude before,” Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, and Drew Griffin of CNN. “This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections.” Our campaign finance system, he said, gives “wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine.”

It’s an interesting revelation at this particular juncture, when the Republican Party is splitting over former president Donald Trump. Today, a Colorado state senator switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party because he refuses to support the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. “I cannot continue to be a part of a political party that is okay with a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election and continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen,” Kevin Priola wrote. “We need Democrats in charge because our planet and our democracy depend on it.” Priola has thrown in his lot with those Republicans like Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

Priola has voted with Democrats in the past, although he voted with the Republicans 90% of the time. His switch will make it more difficult for Republicans to retake control of the Colorado Senate. Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, tweeted that he was proud to welcome Priola to the Democratic Party. “We are a broad tent party, always seeking good ideas from the left and right to move CO forward. Senator Priola is a strong leader on climate issues & will hopefully be even more effective on the Democratic side of the aisle.”

In contrast, Sean Paige, former spokesperson for the Colorado Republican Party, tweeted: “Kevin Priola a Democrat? Who knew, LOL? That’s been an open ‘secret’ at the Statehouse since I worked there. He’s beyond just a big phony; he’s a squirrely and calculating opportunist. But I’m glad, for his conscience, that he finally came out of the closet.”

The new extremist Republican Party is driving away voters in part by this very sort of chaos. This afternoon, Trump’s lawyers asked a federal judge to stop the FBI from looking at the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago until a special master reviews them. But the filing appeared to have been less about the law than about asserting power over the Republican Party. While legal analyst Bradley Moss called it “just garbage” legally, it stated its political principle at the start: “President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run.”

The motion reiterated the arguments he has made since the search warrant was carried out; Moss mused, “[t]he more I read Trump’s motion, the more I am completely confused and shocked he got three lawyers to risk their law licenses by filing this thing.”

Then, this evening, it turned out that the motion was likely intended to distract attention from a new story dropping from Maggie Haberman, Jodi Kantor, Adam Goldman and Ben Protess of the New York Times, who reported that Trump took more than 300 classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago and that he went through the boxes himself in late 2021, meaning he was aware that he had taken classified documents out of the White House.

The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 150 classified documents in January 2022, including intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI. Worried by the sheer number of those documents, the Department of Justice moved to get the rest. In June, Trump’s aides turned over a few dozen more, and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document asserting that, to the best of her knowledge, all the classified materials had been returned. They had not, of course, and on June 22 the Justice Department subpoenaed the security video tapes from the area, which showed people moving the documents. Hence the search warrant, which the FBI executed two weeks ago, finding yet more documents, including some in a closet in Trump’s office. Some had the highest possible level of classification. It remains unclear whether any U.S. documents remain at Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile, according to Andrew Desiderio of Politico, members of the Gang of Eight—the leaders of the House and Senate from each party, and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees from both houses—want to know what was in those recovered files.

Finally, today, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he will be retiring from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he has led since 1984, in December. Fauci has served seven presidents, and after his work on HIV/AIDS, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Nonetheless, today’s Republicans have tried to deflect blame for the nation’s poor response to the coronavirus pandemic from Trump to Fauci. After the announcement of the 81-year-old’s retirement, Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) said: “It’s good to know that with his retirement, Dr. Fauci will have ample time to appear before Congress and share under oath what he knew about the Wuhan lab, as well as the ever-changing guidance under his watch that resulted in wrongful mandates being imposed on Americans.”

[eCat]

Lake Mead water shortage. Interesting pics...

https://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/News/Blo ... r-shortage

they have been talking about huge flood events being inevitable to Los Angeles due to climate change. I would hope that would fill up those reservoirs since we don't plan on doing anything about it as a nation

[innocentbystander]

So let's review. It's bad to have safety nets where a few bucks a day go to keeping people fed and sheltered because they get dependent on them. But it's okay to let a few hundred people take insanely large pieces of the pie while half the country lives paycheck to paycheck, then have these elites spend billions on shaping the political system even more so to their favor. God bless Capitalism.

there is no pie. Bezos is worth $100 billion or whatever, not one penny was taken from ANYONE ELSE

if there was a pie, then capitalism just makes the pie "bigger"

Problem with capitalism (at the moment) is the high IQ people get all the real money created for them. Fuck everyone else. IQ is where it is at. That is the information age.

[Jungle Rat]

[Tree]

So let's review. It's bad to have safety nets where a few bucks a day go to keeping people fed and sheltered because they get dependent on them. But it's okay to let a few hundred people take insanely large pieces of the pie while half the country lives paycheck to paycheck, then have these elites spend billions on shaping the political system even more so to their favor. God bless Capitalism.

there is no pie. Bezos is worth $100 billion or whatever, not one penny was taken from ANYONE ELSE

if there was a pie, then capitalism just makes the pie "bigger"

Problem with capitalism (at the moment) is the high IQ people get all the real money created for them. Fuck everyone else. IQ is where it is at. That is the information age.

Got some bad news for you IB. Bezos takes from others. He and folks like him drive down employee wages, strip benefit and retirement packages, wage war on unions, and even use their wealth to change laws so they can take a bigger piece of the pie and force folks in the middle to take smaller pieces. It's nothing but legalized theft. Consider the pie to be the GDP or total profits or whatever. We let a few folks take slices that are way too big and establishment propaganda programs us to think it's all just hunky dory.

The problem with Capitalism is that it creates a few winners and a whole lot of losers, just like monarchies of the past and dictatorships of the present. It has opened up the gateway of social mobility for sure, a step in the right direction, but the wealth distributions are heinous.

[hedge]

"Yes of COURSE Governor Whitmer has been silent on this whole thing: she is embarrassed. She is embarrassed and ashamed that her side "lost" because their entire case was predicated on charging and prosecuting men who were LARP-ing. And instead of taking plea deals they were like, no, fuck you, lets go to court. And the defense won and the FBI and Gov Whitmer are embarrassed."

How embarrassed are you about these two clowns getting convicted for the Witmer kidnapping plot?

2 men convicted in plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer

https://apnews.com/article/elections-pr ... 9d6c4cb8d5

Yeah, these guys look like real winners. Your people....

[aTm]

"Capitalism is legalized theft"

Yikes. Capitalism is not perfect, and we already hedge it in with a lot of socialist regulations. Our economy is not purely socialist or capitalist. The idea that there is some fixed "GDP" and if Bezos makes more, then everybody else makes less is simpleton understanding of economics. There is a bit of a balancing act, sure, capitalism can lead to an oligarchy of the rich, but pure socialism leads to stagnation and decline. Just like your fanciful "Nicaragua is great" healthcare article you posted. Yes it is admirable how the socialist government can make sure high and low all can receive their treatment for dengue fever equally. However, it completely glossed over the fact that the picture painted of a "hospital" in that article is about as foreign to an American as can be despite the how much she lipstick she slathered all over that pig. 40 beds in a dengue fever ward with mosquito nets is not a "Hospital". You know what they dont have in an American hospital in a malarial environment in say Louisiana or Florida? A building where they need mosquito nets. You know what happens if you get cancer in Nicaragua and even catch it early at your free hospital? You're rich enough to go get it treated in Houston or you're poor and you die.

[aTm]

And if every place in the world had pure socialized only government pays healthcare? Then everyone would just die when they get cancer, because there would be nowhere in the world that is on the cutting edge of advancement. The entire world would rely on the hope that there was some country out there where the politicians actually focus and spend money (without wasting it on the wrong things) on improving the quality of its citizens lives rather than buying either stability or votes which is a laughable thing really.