Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Josephine Harvey: Trump Declares He Has 'Total' Authority As President In Defiant Press Briefing (Huffington Post)
He then refused to answer questions from a reporter who pressed him on the inaccuracy of that claim.
Paul Blumenthal and Tara Golshan: Liberals Prevail In Wisconsin's Contentious Coronavirus Judicial Election (Huffington Post)
Democrats characterized the election as "voter suppression on steroids" after Republicans refused to postpone it amid a deadly viral pandemic.
Aaron Rupar: Trump sent Arizona a fraction of the ventilators it sought. Republicans still framed it as a big win. (Vox)
The state of Arizona, led by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and Health Services Department Director Dr. Cara Christ, initially asked the federal government for 5,000 ventilators. That ask was approved by federal officials. But Arizona's request was dramatically downsized to just 500 ventilators last week as it became clear that the federal government didn't actually have the resources to follow through on its original agreement. By ultimately sending 100, the feds are fulfilling just 2 percent of what they initially agreed to send and only 20 percent of the request the state made just last week.
Stef W. Kight: Michelle Obama to push absentee voting amid coronavirus (Axios)
Michelle Obama will throw her support today behind expanding vote-by-mail options, advisers tell Axios, with her voting rights group embracing legislation before Congress amid coronavirus fears. Why it matters: It's the first time the celebrity-backed organization has endorsed federal legislation - and it comes as Democrats await the Obamas' return to the political stage to help Joe Biden.
Josh Marshall: A Good OpEd on Saving the US Economy (TPM)
The other point is unemployment insurance. Beefed up unemployment checks are again a very good part of the bill. I have even heard some people saying that it's better for many workers to get laid off so they can collect. This may be the case individually in some cases. But this greatly understates the importance of maintaining the connection between employees and businesses. Once that is severed the challenges of moving back to economic health becomes much greater. There's also the psychological impact of joblessness and the inherent uncertainty about finding new employment, even if income is covered in the short-term.
Christina Cabrera: "Ohio GOP Gov. Rejects Immediate Reopening Of Economy: 'That's Just Not Going To Happen'" (TPM)
"I will say this, that going out of this thing is going to be just as tough, if not tougher, than going into it and closing things down," the governor told the co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe." [Ohio Governor Mike] DeWine said governors face a "series of decisions" on the process of allowing businesses to reopen as the coronavirus continues to spread throughout the country and put physically vulnerable people at major risk of death.
Mark Joseph Stern: Liberal Challenger Defeats Conservative Incumbent in Wisconsin Supreme Court Race (Slate)
Republicans' voter suppression efforts appear to have backfired.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
hsd returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
New Venture
Michael Egan
Reader Response
Philosophy
Marty,
Thank you for your response to my query!
As I have grown older, I tend to believe in the philosophy of " no coincidences", e.g. The Mueller Report Investigation and the Impeachment failed (due to Repug Malfeasance), but Repugs can not conquer Mother Nature! Despite their proclivity for destroying beautiful/worthy/beneficial things, they can never top the beauty of nature in dandelions or anything else.
I have nothing against pot and have long been in favor of decriminalizing it, but in all my years (5*5*3 + 1) the closest I have come to trying it has been at concerts, i.e. second-hand smoke. My basic objection is smoking, not what is smoked. I know many who swear by it and many who condemn it and I believe it is an individual/personal CHOICE which is paramount for each citizen. Like so many things, California leads the way on many good things and follows on others.
Best regards,
Billy
Thanks, Billy!
Long, long time ago, I started doing custom baking on the side.
Some of it was for people in the Life Extension movement, who wanted preservatives (BHT, never BHA) and water soluble vitamin C added to everything.
Some of it was for people with allergies and food sensitivities.
And some of it was for people who preferred ingestion to inhalation.
Baking is almost a form of meditation for me - for example, if I want to concentrate, it's fancy pie crusts.
If I need to hit something, it's bread.
And if I need to slow down, it's brownies, one of the first recipes perfected long, long ago.
Worked on a new variation one gray winter afternoon, and started to write a letter to a pal in Germany, convinced the recipe was a bust.
Then I realized I was on page 18....
Hadn't made any since BartFest in Vegas and I've baked more than enough bread for a while.
from Bruce
Anecdotes
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Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
The extra-frisky raccoons are at it, again.
Why the 'Beatles Were Better' Than the Stones
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney phoned into The Howard Stern Show Tuesday morning for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on everything from his love of Billie Eilish to his life during the quarantine to the Beatles' ancient rivalry with the Rolling Stones. Stern suggested that the Beatles were the better band, and McCartney didn't disagree.
"You know you're going to persuade me to agree with that one," McCartney said. "They are rooted in the blues. When they are writing stuff, it has to do with the blues. We had a little more influences. … There's a lot of differences, and I love the Stones, but I'm with you. The Beatles were better."
Stern then brought up the Stones' attempt to create their own Sgt. Pepper-like album in late 1967 with Their Satanic Majesties Request. "We started to notice that whatever we did, the Stones sort of did it shortly thereafter," McCartney said. "We went to America and we had huge success. Then the Stones went to America. We did Sgt. Pepper, the Stones did a psychedelic album. There's a lot of that. We were great friends, still are kind of. We admire each other. … The Stones are a fantastic group. I go see them every time they're out. They're a great, great band."
McCartney isn't promoting much at the moment, since the coronavirus has essentially shut down most of the music industry, but he did talk about the upcoming documentary The Beatles: Get Back. The film is directed by Peter Jackson and draws from previously unseen footage shot during the making of Let It Be in 1969. The audio from the shoot leaked many years ago, but the vast majority of the footage that didn't make the original Let It Be film has never been seen.
Paul McCartney
Walk-On Role
DiCaprio & De Niro
Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are encouraging people to donate to the All In Challenge to help those in need during the COVID-19 crisis. Those who donate will get a chance for a walk-on role in Martin Scorsese's upcoming feature production Killers of the Flower Moon.
The lucky winner will also meet the actors and the director, and attend the world premiere.
DiCaprio and De Niro announced the news this morning in an Instagram video. DiCaprio mentioned how he launched America's Food Fund with Lorraine Jobs "to help make sure every family in need gets access to food at this critical time."
Donations at www.allinchallenge.com will go to Meals on Wheels, No Kid Hungry and America's Food Fund said De Niro.
DiCaprio & De Niro
IT Staff Go Rogue
Valence Media
The IT staff of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard who were laid off en masse by parent company Valence Media on Tuesday appear to have struck back with an unauthorized story posted on Billboard's website that mocked the employer and quoted the movie "Animal House."
The story, headlined "Billboard/Hollywood Reporter Lays Off Entire IT Staff Due to Covid19," was on the site for several hours before it was taken down - but not before the Internet Archive recorded it and readers shared the post on social media.
"In the wake of Covid-19 pandemic, Valence Media has decided to lay off their entire web IT staff. Effective today. The online Billboard Charts are essentially perfect, so IT staff are no longer needed. Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life… #SavingABuckAtYourExpense," began the post, which carried the "devops" byline and a photo of Stephen Furst's character, Flounder, from the 1978 comedy.
Valence Media
Hollywood Reporter
Valence Media
Valence Media made news earlier this month after the Hollywood Reporter's editorial director, Matthew Belloni, left over a dispute with management about its coverage. Belloni reportedly butted heads with executives at Valence who wanted a heads up anytime the Hollywood Reporter covered a "sensitive" person or company. In one particularly egregious instance, executives tried to kill a profile of actress Louise Linton, according to the New York Times.
Linton is the wife of 57-year-old Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a Hollywood producer and prominent member of the Trump regime who's now "one of the most powerful Cabinet members in modern history," according to the Washington Post. Mnuchin is distributing the $2.2 trillion in coronavirus emergency aid to individuals and corporations, often called the CARES Act, largely without any oversight. President Trump fired the watchdog who was supposed to oversee the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, without even giving an explanation.
Valence also owns brands like Vibe, Media Rights Capital, and Dick Clark Productions. More than 100 people have been laid off at Valence, roughly 30 percent of its editorial division, according to CNN. In a companywide memo some of the cuts were blamed on "advertising market conditions" related to the coronavirus pandemic, but other cuts were supposedly part of a restructuring that had already been planned. Valence is also instituting pay cuts of between 15 and 25 percent for anyone left making over $100,000 per year and co-CEOs Modi Wiczyk and Asif Satchu are reportedly no longer going to be taking a salary.
The entire media industry is facing upheaval at the moment, with several newspapers and websites announcing cuts over the past few weeks. The Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune announced furloughs yesterday with managers taking a pay cut of 15 percent. Vox Media, which owns the Verge, Eater, and SBNation, will reportedly furlough about 100 employees this week and writers at Slate also announced on Twitter that the news and opinion outlet was instituting pay cuts this week.
Valence Media
Judge Cancels Permit
Keystone XL Pipeline
A U.S. judge canceled a key permit Wednesday for the Keystone XL oil pipeline that's expected to stretch from Canada to Nebraska, another setback for the disputed project that got underway less than two weeks ago following years of delays.
Judge Brian Morris said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to adequately consider effects on endangered species such as pallid sturgeon, a massive, dinosaur-like fish that lives in rivers the pipeline would cross.
The ruling, however, does not shut down work that has begun at the U.S.-Canada border crossing in Montana, according to attorneys in the case. Pipeline sponsor TC Energy will need the permit for future construction across hundreds of rivers and streams along Keystone's 1,200-mile (1,930-kilometer) route.
"It creates another significant hurdle for the project," said Anthony Swift with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups that challenged the permit.
"Regardless of whether they have the cross border segment ... Keystone XL has basically lost all of its Clean Water Act permits for water crossings," he said.
Keystone XL Pipeline
Gains $24 Billion
Jeff Bezos
The world's richest person is getting richer, even in a pandemic, and perhaps because of it.
With consumers stuck at home, they're relying on Jeff Bezos's Amazon.com Inc. more than ever. The retailer's stock climbed 5.3% to a record Tuesday, lifting the founder's net worth to $138.5 billion.
The pandemic has brought the global economy to a near standstill and pushed almost 17 million Americans onto the unemployment rolls in the span of three weeks. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. signaled Tuesday that loan losses fueled by the unprecedented job cuts -- many of them in the retail sector that Amazon so efficiently disrupted -- could rival those incurred after the 2008 financial crisis.
Yet Bezos and many of his wealthy peers in technology, private equity and elsewhere are doing just fine, helped by unprecedented stimulus efforts by governments and central bankers. While the combined net worth of the world's 500 richest people has dropped $553 billion this year, it has surged 20% from its low on March 23, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index
"The wealth gap, it's only going to get wider with what's going on now," said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co. "The really wealthy people haven't had to worry. Yes, they're less wealthy, but you haven't had to worry about putting food on the table or keeping a roof over your head."
Jeff Bezos
Deferred To Pigboy
Radio Show
On a Saturday in early March, President Donald Trump (R-Unfit), clad in a baseball cap, strode into the Situation Room for a meeting with the coronavirus task force. He didn't stop by the group's daily meetings often, but he had an idea he was eager to share: He wanted to start a White House talk radio show.
At the time, the virus was rapidly spreading across the country, and Trump would soon announce a ban on European travel. A talk radio show, Trump excitedly explained, would allow him to quell Americans' fears and answer their questions about the pandemic directly, according to three White House officials who heard the pitch. There would be no screening, he said, just an open line for people to call and engage one-on-one with the president.
But that Saturday, almost as suddenly as he proposed it, the president outlined one reason he would not be moving forward with it: He did not want to compete with Rush Limbaugh.
No one in the room was sure how to respond, two of the officials said. Someone suggested hosting the show in the mornings or on weekends, to steer clear of the conservative radio host's schedule. But Trump shook his head, saying he envisioned his show as two hours a day, every day. And were it not for Limbaugh, and the risk of encroaching on his territory, he reiterated, he would do it.
When it comes to the president's favored media figures, most observers tend to fixate on the Fox News lineup of Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. But several people close to Trump say that in the midst of a pandemic, he has come to keenly appreciate the extent of Limbaugh's reach, and the fact that his show, perhaps more than any other source, offers a real-time metric of how the president's decisions are playing with his supporters.
Radio Show
'Devil's Staircase'
Earthquakes
Large shallow earthquakes appear to follow a mathematical pattern known as the "Devil's Staircase", according to a new study, where clusters are spaced out in long but irregular intervals of inactivity.
The finding differs from classical models which suggest earthquakes are periodic due to cycles of build-up and release of tectonic stress, the Seismological Society of America (SSA) reported.
The new data was published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America by a group of scientists from the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Missouri.
The Devil's Staircase pattern was evident in large earthquakes in the US's Great Basin, spanning Nevada, much of Oregon and Utah, and parts of California, Idaho, and Wyoming. The pattern was also discovered in Australia, on the Africa-Eurasia plate boundary off the coast of western Algeria, along the Dead Sea Transform Fault, and potentially in the New Madrid seismic zone of the central US, said one researcher, Dr Mian Liu. The patterns vary from region to region.
Dr Liu, Chen's PhD advisor, learned of the Devil's Staircase in an unexpected way - by reading a UCLA study of the temporal pattern of a serial killer from the former Soviet Union, Andrei Chikatilo. He murdered 53 people from 1978 until he was arrested in 1990, with his killings separated by the shortest interval of three days and at the longest, 986 days.
Earthquakes
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