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LOL Go get'em Joe. The truth may at least set some of them free.
"Biden on Trump: He 'didn't build a damn thing'
[...]“He promised a $10 billion investment by Foxconn. He came with your senator, Ron Johnson,
with a golden shovel and didn’t build a damn thing,” Biden said. “They dug
a hole with those golden shovels and then they fell into it.”"
To link a couple ..
Foxconn mostly abandons $10 billion Wisconsin project touted by Trump
"Trump’s “Incredible” Foxconn Deal Turns Out to Be a Another Massive Con Job""
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174382930
If you get the chance eat one raw. I've had two, both times on a dare. They are tasty. Best take the wings off first though.
LOL Good you have come to enjoy him, he's cool. To the monkey chef, i sure hope no human eats anything
the monkey gets his hands, scratches ass, on, we've all heard of disease passing from animals to humans.
A beautiful story -- For Olympian Ashleigh Johnson, making a splash as a role model for Black kids is just as important as success in the pool
"Countdown to Paris 2024
Latest news and updates on the Paris Olympics.
The Olympics are nearly here. For a weary world, they can't come soon enough."
Ashleigh, and her family, her mother especially, personify the America
the rest of the world is grateful for. Trump's America on the other hand...
Her family and working to inspire others have helped buoy the national team's goalkeeper, as she heads to her third Olympic games.
Ashleigh Johnson celebrates after her team wins gold at the World Aquatics Championships on Feb. 16, 2024 in Doha, Qatar. Adam Nurkiewicz / Getty Images file
May 4, 2024, 8:00 PM GMT+10
By Curtis Bunn
Growing up in Miami, Ashleigh Johnson and her four siblings took swimming lessons as kids, primarily to ease the mind of their mother, who feared they could drown in the family pool while she was at work.
Those lessons led to falling in love with swimming, which led to joining the local Riptides swim team at nearby Cutler Ridge, which eventually led them to a unique sport for Black youths: water polo.
Johnson’s sister and three brothers all took lessons from Carroll Vaughan and thrived in the sport. But Ashleigh Johnson soared as a goalkeeper, using her spindly body, quickness and understanding of angles to become an All-American at Princeton University, where she compiled 100 victories and was the school’s all-time saves leader.
In 2016, she became the first Black athlete to make the U.S. Olympic team in water polo — and earned a gold medal. She backed it up with another gold in the Tokyo Games four years later. At 29, Johnson is widely considered the best at her position in the world.
Ashleigh Johnson was the first Black athlete to make the U.S. Olympic team in water polo, back in 2016. Mike Coppola / Getty Images
While she desperately wants to win a third gold medal in Paris this summer, Johnson said just as important to her is having an impact on young people — especially in underserved communities.“The longer that you play a sport, the less it becomes about you,” Johnson said. “I remember when I was young on this national team and just starting to find my footing, I didn’t understand why it was important for me to be here. But I understand now. As a Black woman of Caribbean descent in this sport, I definitely feel a special obligation to be a light for little Black and brown girls — and boys — who may be interested in swimming and water polo. That’s really special and is a priority for me.”
[Insert: Well said, Ashleigh Johnson. You are a real credit to the U.S.A.]
Johnson’s younger sister, Chelsea Johnson, now 28, also played water polo at Princeton. Vaughan said she could count on them to come back home to hold clinics for local kids.
Meeting and spending time with children remains one of Johnson’s favorite aspects of competing.
“It’s so cool to see how inspiring the sport can be,” Johnson said. “These kids sometimes share their experiences, their struggles, and the chances are I’ve been through something like they have been and [I’m] able to give them some words of encouragement. We’re all unique in some way, but we’re all so similar in other ways. And getting to have these experiences with the kids makes us all really strong.”
Johnson’s Jamaican mother, Donna Johnson, basks in her daughter’s achievements. But what gratifies her the most, she said, is her daughter’s personal growth on a journey in which she has often been the only Black person in the pool.
“I didn’t even know what water polo was,” Donna Johnson said. She was a home health care nurse and a single mother who didn’t feel comfortable leaving her kids at home with a sitter until they learned to swim.
“I had these horrible nightmares and daymares of them falling into the pool and them all trying to save each other, but all drowning together,” she said. Through the simple act of finding her children a place to learn to swim, water polo became so important in their lives. “And for Ashleigh,” she said, “I am very happy that playing the sport has helped her grow into someone who loves to inspire kids.”
To get to that place was not easy. Once Ashleigh Johnson and her siblings began competing outside of their area in Miami, they quickly found themselves as the only Black players on their teams. The sisters played together at Princeton, but after Chelsea’s first year, Ashleigh was off to play on a national team. It was a significant next step, but challenging.
Johnson, a goalkeeper, learned to use her spindly body and speed to her advantage.
Xia Yifang / Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images file
“I saw that she was very athletic when her mother brought all her kids to me,” Vaughan said. “Ashleigh was 8 or 9. She just got better and better. When she went to the national team in California, though, it was very tough for her.” Vaughan said the coaches “only saw negatives in her. There were times when she wanted to quit. But she hung in there and finally broke down the barriers they had put up.”Being the only Black athlete in competition was another barrier.
“At the very base of it, I really wanted to play water polo and I had a lot of fun and was really passionate about the sport,” Johnson said. But being away from her old team and family in Florida, and submerged in a swim culture foreign to her, she said, was isolating. “I was like, ‘I love doing this, but I don’t want to have to deal with that.’”
Her mother was unaware of her conflicts. “I didn’t realize she felt alone a lot of the time,” Donna Johnson said. “I raised my children to see people as people, which, in retrospect, was a very naive stand. I was never concerned about that aspect. I was more concerned about her being taken care of since I wasn’t there. But as I became more enlightened, I realized she was the only Black in most cases, which is an American condition for Black people.”
Johnson and her brothers and sister were fortified, however, by “the foundation my mother built in all of us,” she said. “She instilled in us that we are worthy and beautiful and belong. So as much as there were times when I felt isolated, I actually felt more powerful being there. I also had a realization that because I was different didn’t make me stand out in a bad way. You end up realizing you have the power to change that and to make it a welcoming space for other Black people or brown people who may come after you.”
When Johnson first started to find her footing on the national team she said she "I didn’t understand why it was important" for her, as a Black woman, to be there. "But I understand now." Adam Nurkiewicz / Getty Images file
Johnson, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, said she is not sure what’s next for her after the Games. However, she said, “Life is calling me. And it’s a real privilege to choose when you stop playing.” If her water polo career ends this summer, Johnson said her post-athletic life will begin as a search for her place. She eventually wants to start a family. She is considering culinary school. She may move to another country and “pursue a trade there.”
“I’ve put a lot of time into this and not a lot of time exploring other parts of myself,” she said. “I think that’s a journey that everyone needs to go on in their life. So that is exactly where I am. I want to give myself the space to just explore.”
For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
Curtis Bunn is an Atlanta-based journalist for NBC BLK who writes about race.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/ashleigh-johnson-olympics-water-polo-rcna150580
A beautiful story -- For Olympian Ashleigh Johnson, making a splash as a role model for Black kids is just as important as success in the pool
"Countdown to Paris 2024
Latest news and updates on the Paris Olympics.
The Olympics are nearly here. For a weary world, they can't come soon enough."
Ashleigh, and her family, her mother especially, personify the America
the rest of the world is grateful for. Trump's America on the other hand...
Her family and working to inspire others have helped buoy the national team's goalkeeper, as she heads to her third Olympic games.
Ashleigh Johnson celebrates after her team wins gold at the World Aquatics Championships on Feb. 16, 2024 in Doha, Qatar. Adam Nurkiewicz / Getty Images file
May 4, 2024, 8:00 PM GMT+10
By Curtis Bunn
Growing up in Miami, Ashleigh Johnson and her four siblings took swimming lessons as kids, primarily to ease the mind of their mother, who feared they could drown in the family pool while she was at work.
Those lessons led to falling in love with swimming, which led to joining the local Riptides swim team at nearby Cutler Ridge, which eventually led them to a unique sport for Black youths: water polo.
Johnson’s sister and three brothers all took lessons from Carroll Vaughan and thrived in the sport. But Ashleigh Johnson soared as a goalkeeper, using her spindly body, quickness and understanding of angles to become an All-American at Princeton University, where she compiled 100 victories and was the school’s all-time saves leader.
In 2016, she became the first Black athlete to make the U.S. Olympic team in water polo — and earned a gold medal. She backed it up with another gold in the Tokyo Games four years later. At 29, Johnson is widely considered the best at her position in the world.
Ashleigh Johnson was the first Black athlete to make the U.S. Olympic team in water polo, back in 2016. Mike Coppola / Getty Images
While she desperately wants to win a third gold medal in Paris this summer, Johnson said just as important to her is having an impact on young people — especially in underserved communities.“The longer that you play a sport, the less it becomes about you,” Johnson said. “I remember when I was young on this national team and just starting to find my footing, I didn’t understand why it was important for me to be here. But I understand now. As a Black woman of Caribbean descent in this sport, I definitely feel a special obligation to be a light for little Black and brown girls — and boys — who may be interested in swimming and water polo. That’s really special and is a priority for me.”
[Insert: Well said, Ashleigh Johnson. You are a real credit to the U.S.A.]
Johnson’s younger sister, Chelsea Johnson, now 28, also played water polo at Princeton. Vaughan said she could count on them to come back home to hold clinics for local kids.
Meeting and spending time with children remains one of Johnson’s favorite aspects of competing.
“It’s so cool to see how inspiring the sport can be,” Johnson said. “These kids sometimes share their experiences, their struggles, and the chances are I’ve been through something like they have been and [I’m] able to give them some words of encouragement. We’re all unique in some way, but we’re all so similar in other ways. And getting to have these experiences with the kids makes us all really strong.”
Johnson’s Jamaican mother, Donna Johnson, basks in her daughter’s achievements. But what gratifies her the most, she said, is her daughter’s personal growth on a journey in which she has often been the only Black person in the pool.
“I didn’t even know what water polo was,” Donna Johnson said. She was a home health care nurse and a single mother who didn’t feel comfortable leaving her kids at home with a sitter until they learned to swim.
“I had these horrible nightmares and daymares of them falling into the pool and them all trying to save each other, but all drowning together,” she said. Through the simple act of finding her children a place to learn to swim, water polo became so important in their lives. “And for Ashleigh,” she said, “I am very happy that playing the sport has helped her grow into someone who loves to inspire kids.”
To get to that place was not easy. Once Ashleigh Johnson and her siblings began competing outside of their area in Miami, they quickly found themselves as the only Black players on their teams. The sisters played together at Princeton, but after Chelsea’s first year, Ashleigh was off to play on a national team. It was a significant next step, but challenging.
Johnson, a goalkeeper, learned to use her spindly body and speed to her advantage.
Xia Yifang / Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images file
“I saw that she was very athletic when her mother brought all her kids to me,” Vaughan said. “Ashleigh was 8 or 9. She just got better and better. When she went to the national team in California, though, it was very tough for her.” Vaughan said the coaches “only saw negatives in her. There were times when she wanted to quit. But she hung in there and finally broke down the barriers they had put up.”Being the only Black athlete in competition was another barrier.
“At the very base of it, I really wanted to play water polo and I had a lot of fun and was really passionate about the sport,” Johnson said. But being away from her old team and family in Florida, and submerged in a swim culture foreign to her, she said, was isolating. “I was like, ‘I love doing this, but I don’t want to have to deal with that.’”
Her mother was unaware of her conflicts. “I didn’t realize she felt alone a lot of the time,” Donna Johnson said. “I raised my children to see people as people, which, in retrospect, was a very naive stand. I was never concerned about that aspect. I was more concerned about her being taken care of since I wasn’t there. But as I became more enlightened, I realized she was the only Black in most cases, which is an American condition for Black people.”
Johnson and her brothers and sister were fortified, however, by “the foundation my mother built in all of us,” she said. “She instilled in us that we are worthy and beautiful and belong. So as much as there were times when I felt isolated, I actually felt more powerful being there. I also had a realization that because I was different didn’t make me stand out in a bad way. You end up realizing you have the power to change that and to make it a welcoming space for other Black people or brown people who may come after you.”
When Johnson first started to find her footing on the national team she said she "I didn’t understand why it was important" for her, as a Black woman, to be there. "But I understand now." Adam Nurkiewicz / Getty Images file
Johnson, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, said she is not sure what’s next for her after the Games. However, she said, “Life is calling me. And it’s a real privilege to choose when you stop playing.” If her water polo career ends this summer, Johnson said her post-athletic life will begin as a search for her place. She eventually wants to start a family. She is considering culinary school. She may move to another country and “pursue a trade there.”
“I’ve put a lot of time into this and not a lot of time exploring other parts of myself,” she said. “I think that’s a journey that everyone needs to go on in their life. So that is exactly where I am. I want to give myself the space to just explore.”
For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
Curtis Bunn is an Atlanta-based journalist for NBC BLK who writes about race.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/ashleigh-johnson-olympics-water-polo-rcna150580
Thanks. No need to break anything down as we know pay wall sites either give a number of free reads, or simply hold back some articles for subscribers only. The latter would account for your access to some and not to others. Seriously, don't spend any time breaking any of that down for me. Thanks for the thought, but it wouldn't be of any value to me.
And Trump yeah, as blatantly, no thought of the good for the country. wannabe beholden strongman Putinish as could be.
And environmental protection would be much more positively prominent in many
more American minds. If Gore had been awarded the election he actually won.
Opinion Let us praise Al Gore for saving the country ... Al Gore gave the world much about much.
[...]
We don’t talk enough about Al Gore and his greatest moment: The night of Dec. 12, 2000, when he saved the country by accepting the bitter results of a partisan Supreme Court ruling on a tied election.
The 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore gave George W. Bush 271 electoral college votes — one more than required for victory. After the excruciating spectacle of the Florida recount, there was more reason to challenge the legitimacy of the presidential election than any time since 1860.
If Donald Trump .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/?itid=lk_inline_manual_6 .. loses next year, as I believe he will, it is a foregone conclusion that he won’t accept the results. Most of the Republican Party will either support his fraudulent claims or remain silent, just as they did in 2020. This is the great shame that will forever taint my former party.
By continuing to follow Trump, the Republican Party is transforming from a traditional American political party into an autocratic movement. Gore was in the American mainstream, with the shared belief that democracy is a sacred trust that must be protected. Trump rejects that basic value. The House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), announced he has been anointed by God. This is not a party prepared to accept the verdict of mere citizens over God’s will.
Gore could have shattered our electoral system’s stability by raising legitimate questions about a deeply flawed process. There was clear reason to feel he had been cheated in a state governed by his opponent’s brother and by a Supreme Court influenced by his opponent’s father. It was the first time in more than a century that the winner of the popular vote was not elected president.
I moved to Austin to work for the Bush campaign in the spring of 1999. We were more relieved than jubilant when the election was finally called. Looking back, what Gore did was the action of a quiet hero, like so many others in our history. He passed the character test that the GOP fails every day that they support Trump. Gore showed what patriots do: Put the country first.
“Almost a century and a half ago,” Gore said that December night, “Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, ‘Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.’” Gore urged the country to come together and was later praised for his graciousness. “Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. … And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”
After the 2000 election, Gore withdrew from elected politics and focused on sounding the alarm about climate change. His legacy will be most remembered for his time in elected office — as a member of Congress, a U.S. senator and vice president — and for his prescient environmental warnings. He’ll join the list of other Democrats and Republicans who lost a presidential race, the stuff of historical footnotes remembered for what they failed to accomplish, not what they achieved.
But as we increasingly realize the inherent fragility of our democracy with its dependency on good will, Gore’s greatest moment may well be when he accepted defeat. This year, let us pause to honor the actions of a quiet American hero who simply did the right thing. As the Republican Party has forgotten, there can be no democracy unless someone is willing to lose.
That night in December 2000, Gore told his staff not to trash the Supreme Court because he believed there was something more important at stake than the results of one election. He was right. We owe Gore the respect of a grateful nation.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174055960
A man and his dogs. Tops!
What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign
"buying votes you say?
Donald Trump has pledged to scrap President Biden’s policies on electric vehicles and wind energy, as well as other initiatives opposed by the fossil fuel industry.
By Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow
Updated May 9, 2024 at 1:54 p.m. EDT|Published May 9, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Former president Donald Trump shakes hands with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R),
who is leading the Trump campaign’s development of its energy policy, at a rally
in Laconia, N.H., on Jan. 22. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
All links
As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/?itid=lk_inline_manual_4 ’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including the rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.
The contrast between the two candidates on climate policy could not be more stark. Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” and over the last three years, his administration has finalized more than 100 new environmental regulations .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/climate-environment/biden-climate-environment-actions/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9 .. aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters. In comparison, Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/climate-environment/trump-climate-environment-protections/?itid=lk_inline_manual_5&itid=lk_inline_manual_9 .. and policies over four years.
In recent months, the Biden administration has raced to overturn Trump’s environmental actions and issue new ones before the November election. So far, Biden officials have overturned 27 Trump actions affecting the fossil fuel industry and completed at least 24 new actions affecting the sector, according to a Washington Post analysis .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/climate-environment/biden-climate-environment-actions/?itid=lk_inline_manual_10 . The Interior Department, for instance, recently blocked future oil drilling across 13 million acres of the Alaskan Arctic .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/19/drilling-alaska-national-petroleum-reserve/?itid=lk_inline_manual_10 .
Despite the oil industry’s complaints about Biden’s policies, the United States is now producing more oil than any country ever has .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/31/us-oil-production-has-hit-record-under-biden-he-hardly-mentions-it/?itid=lk_inline_manual_13 , pumping nearly 13 million barrels per day on average last year. ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. energy companies, reported their biggest annual profits .. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/business/oil-gas-companies-profits.html .. in a decade last year.
Yet oil giants will see an even greater windfall — helped by new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations — in a second Trump administration, the former president told the executives over the dinner of chopped steak at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump vowed at the dinner to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/26/biden-lng-export-projects-climate/?itid=lk_inline_manual_15 — a top priority for the executives, according to three people present. “You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said, according to the recollection of an attendee.
The roughly two dozen executives invited included Mike Sabel, the CEO and founder of Venture Global, and Jack Fusco, the CEO of Cheniere Energy, whose proposed projects would directly benefit from lifting the pause on new LNG exports. Other attendees came from companies including Chevron, Continental Resources, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, according to an attendance list obtained by The Post.
Oil well pump jacks operated by Chevron in San Ardo, Calif. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
News)
Trump told the executives that he would start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a priority that several of the executives raised. He railed against wind power, as The Post previously reported .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/04/17/trump-wind-power-oil-executives/?itid=lk_inline_manual_18 . And he said he would reverse the restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.
“You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told the executives, according to the recollection of the attendee.
At the dinner, Trump also promised that he would scrap Biden’s “mandate” on electric vehicles — mischaracterizing ambitious rules .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/03/20/biden-car-emissions-rules/?itid=lk_inline_manual_22 .. that the Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/03/20/biden-car-emissions-rules/?itid=lk_inline_manual_22 , according to people who attended. The rules require automakers to reduce emissions from car tailpipes, but they don’t mandate a particular technology such as EVs. Trump called them “ridiculous” in the meeting with donors.
The fossil fuel industry has aggressively lobbied against the EPA’s tailpipe rules, which could eat into demand for its petroleum products. The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry trade group, has launched a seven-figure campaign .. https://www.afpm.org/newsroom/news/afpm-launches-seven-figure-issue-campaign-spotlighting-gas-car-ban-policies-across .. against what it calls a de facto “gas car ban.” The campaign includes ads in battleground states warning that the rule will restrict consumer choice.
“Clearly, if you are producing gasoline and diesel, you want to make sure that there’s enough market there,” said Stephen Brown, an energy consultant and a former lobbyist for Tesoro, an oil refining company. “I don’t know that the oil industry would walk in united with a set of asks for the Trump administration, but I think it’s important for this issue to get raised.”
Donald Trump [... links for each inside ...]
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How Trump’s allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world
Tracking the Trump criminal cases and where they stand
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Although the repeal of the EPA rule would benefit the fossil fuel industry, it would probably anger the auto industry, which has invested billions of dollars in the transition away from gasoline-powered cars. Many automakers are under increasing pressure to sell more EVs in Europe, which has tightened its own tailpipe emissions rules, and they are eager to avoid a patchwork of regulations around the globe.
“Automakers need some degree of regulatory certainty from government,” said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, Toyota and other car companies.
“What has emerged instead is a wholesale repeal… and then reinstatement… and then repeal again of regulations every four or eight years,” Bozzella said in an email.
Insert: So Mr. Bozzella, How many millions are you people putting into ad campaigns to get Biden reelected?
Your desire for consistency from government is fair. Moves to help gain a cleaner environment will
continue in Europe. obviously it follows you should be pouring dollars into ads to help Biden.
Biden's cause is the only decent way forward, Europe knows it. You know it.
So get the campaign going. Do it.
Biden’s EV policies have also sparked opposition in rural, Republican-led states such as North Dakota, where there are far more oil pump jacks than charging stations. A key figure leading the Trump campaign’s development of its energy policy is North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/doug-burgum-2024/?itid=lk_inline_manual_33 .. (R), who has been talking extensively to oil donors and CEOs.
[ It wasn't a "certain amount of money", it was a certain amount of donors. He [Burgum] needed 40k individual donors and he bought them with $19 payola.
P - They were not votes per se, but he needed a specific number of donations that signified enough support to get a place on the stage. Whether it violated campaign finance rules is uncertain, as new schemes are being hatched as fast a rules are being written.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doug-burgum-president-campaign-gift-cards-20-donations-legal-experts/
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174375170 ]
At a fundraiser on Saturday in Palm Beach, Fla., Burgum told donors that Trump would halt Biden’s “attack” on fossil fuels, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Post.
“What would be the No. 1 thing that President Trump could do on Day 1? It’s stop the hostile attack against all American energy, and I mean all,” Burgum said. “Whether it’s baseload electricity, whether it’s oil, whether it’s gas, whether it’s ethanol, there is an attack on liquid fuels.”
Burgum also criticized the Biden administration’s policies on gas stoves and vehicles with internal combustion engines, claiming that they would prevent consumers from buying both technologies. While the Energy Department recently set new efficiency standards .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/29/gas-stoves-biden-energy-climate/?itid=lk_inline_manual_38 .. for gas stoves, they would not affect the stoves in people’s kitchens or those currently on the market.
“They’ve got some liberal idea about what products we need,” Burgum said. “You all need EV cars. You don’t need internal combustion. We’ll decide what kind of car you’re going to drive, and we’re going to regulate the other ones out of business. I mean, it’s just in every industry, not just in cars, not just in energy. They’re telling people what stoves you can buy. This is not America.”
[That's it Burgum. Leave out the reasons why. Leave out the important reason why
some buying options for the oil and gas industry are being eased out. The reason
of course is because Europe and other countries care about leaving a cleaner
and healthier world for your children's children. And their children. Think of
your selfish self, Mr. Burgum. Sadly, that is your America.]
Cheniere Energy President and CEO Jack Fusco speaks during the CERAWeek energy
conference in Houston on March 18. (Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images)
The Biden campaign initially declined to comment for this article. After this piece was published, however, Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement that “Donald Trump is selling out working families to Big Oil for campaign checks. It’s that simple.”
“It doesn’t matter to Trump that oil and gas companies charge working families and middle-class Americans whatever they want while raking in record profits — if Donald can cash a check, he’ll do what they say,” Moussa added.
Burgum — a possible contender to lead the Energy Department in a second Trump term — has pushed harder to address climate change than many other Republicans. He set a goal in 2021 for North Dakota — the third-largest oil-producing state .. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/where-our-oil-comes-from.php — to become carbon-neutral by 2030. He has stressed, however, that the goal won’t be achieved via government mandates or the elimination of fossil fuels, and he has cultivated deep support among oil donors.
Despite Trump’s huge fundraising ask, oil donors and their allies have yet to donate hundreds of millions to his campaign. They have contributed more than $6.4 million to Trump’s joint fundraising committee in the first three months of this year, according to an analysis by the advocacy group Climate Power. Oil billionaire Harold Hamm and others are scheduling a fundraiser for Trump later this year, advisers said, where they expect large checks to flow to his bid to return to office.
One person involved in the industry said many oil executives wanted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or another Republican to challenge Biden. But now that Trump is the nominee, this person said, they are going to embrace his policies and give.
Dan Eberhart, chief executive of the oil-field services company Canary and a Trump donor, said the Republican onslaught of donations was not surprising.
“Biden constantly throws a wet blanket to the oil and gas industry,” Eberhart said. “Trump’s ‘drill baby drill’ philosophy aligns much better with the oil patch than Biden’s green-energy approach. It’s a no-brainer.”
Alex Witt, a senior adviser for oil and gas with Climate Power, said Trump’s promise is he will do whatever the oil industry wants if they support him. With Trump, Witt said, “everything has a price.”
“They got a great return on their investment during Trump’s first term, and Trump is making it crystal clear that they’re in for an even bigger payout if he’s reelected,” she said.
John Muyskens contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/
Could you please now let me know if you are able to read WaPo articles
linked into the above. Thinking likely no too, would like to know for sure.
conix, Of course you have no idea if what you said there is right, or not. Yet again. Oh, and a link in
support could have given a boost to your integrity. If only a tiny one, still it would have been a start.
Will do.
That's right. Would be good if he is at the convention just for the experience,
while looking forward to being at college and learning more about himself.
Aw, why not like in a movie. That aside, neat.
conix, And which all goes to suggest that way down deep in that propagandized, brainwashed conservative heart of yours lies a, struggling for air liberal part of you crying out to be freed. Yes,freed. You know you would feel so much better if only. If only.
"My posting an interesting video that I may not agree with every point is just an example that I do not stay in echo chambers. Galloway' work and opinions has always been interesting to me.
P - His point about too expensive education overlooks the impact of Government Guaranteed student loans on the inflation rate in tuition."
Always hope. Still, i wonder hoe much or it you watched before posting it.
Which, on top of her humanitarians heart is a damn good mix. Thks for thew info.
Chuckle, what you say about b4 and his polls and that index thing makes sense too. LOL
Both of you know more about what you're talking about than any of my mes do.
I'll retire -- again -- lols.
Ok, since it's been there for years it means it really doesn't mean anything outside of normal for
years market chat. And you being in that arena would sure know about it's suitability, or not.
Thanks.
Of course, Gloria Gaynor.. One of the best. It's a super song.
Thank you very much. He speaks very quickly which makes him tougher for me to follow, and all i was thinking at three minutes was that to have gained a TED talk he must have something going for him, and that because he said he had already bombed a couple of times he must be getting something wrong too. Thanks very much again, I'll probably watch the rest, but is good to know there likely isn't much new there. Not surprised at at that either.
Coulter, '.. because you are an Indian, i still wouldn't vote for you...' "SAY WHAT!?"
What's Coulter got against Indians except that they aren't as white as she is.
That Ramaswamy guy looked to have lost his smile pretty quickly.
conix, By memory you parroted conservative talking points and their general positions in all
your posts arguing against increasing the minimum wage. The video looks worth watching.
Only three minutes in, one positive at least for Australia was that
[...]The National Minimum Wage applies to employees not covered by an award or registered agreement.
This is the minimum pay rate provided by the Fair Work Act 2009 and is reviewed each year.
As of 1 July 2023 the National Minimum Wage is $23.23 per hour or $882.80 per week.
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages
ours is at least roughly equivalent to what his graph suggesting yours should be. About $22.
It's about the only positive i'd guess that would be in there for us too. As a matter of fact the biggie, housing
(renting and buying) for those struggling to manage, is out of control in every country in the world.
Inequality, of course, is important in all of this. And education cost, you have always been on
the wrong side of that when it comes to talking about how tough it is for young people, too.
I'm guessing most of what he says will echo positions we have consistently expressed
concerns about, on this board. Positions on which you invariably argue the opposite.
I wonder if you have watched the video, or was it just a catchy title for you to post.
Intentionally or not that's what using fear there would do...
"That to me is what they are trying to promote. A negative agenda. The conservative agenda."
Should have read yours before making my last two, but still got away with them. Equivocation helps, sometimes.
Using fear instead of pessimistic, or even just negative, i see as silly, but agree it isn't much if any indication of a CNN swing to the right. Though Zorax is into media more than i am, i haven't noticed any big change in CNN tone. Haven't felt it is maybe a better way for me to put it. That said though why would anyone even consider using fear there unless it did indicate a desire to be more right-wing sensationalistic. Maybe there is something to what Zorax is thinking.
Pace died too late to change the ballot. Guessing many would have given her a goodbye thanks, we miss you vote ..
Pace received 31.2 percent of the vote, while retired Army Lieutenant Catherine Ping, who finished in second place, received 29.9 percent of the vote. It remains unknown whom Republicans will nominate for the seat.
https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-candidate-indiana-house-seat-died-march-1898335
As Sox..., said, the vote against Trump is huge.
Is good background -- "Put Your Lights On" is a song by American rock band Santana .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santana_(band) .. and American musician Everlast .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everlast .. from Santana's 18th studio album, Supernatural (1999). Serviced to US rock radio in August 1999, the song peaked at number 18 on the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 and number eight on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. "Put Your Lights On" won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards.[2]
Background
Everlast wrote the song while recovering from a major heart attack that he had suffered in February 1998 (directly after he completed recording his second solo album, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues). He has referred to it as "one of the most personal songs I ever wrote", stating that the song was "kind of all about hope, but it's coming from a really dark place you know, so... and really questioning a lot of your beliefs, and affirming, you know, stuff in your soul."[3] Everlast converted to Islam in 1996, and the end of the song contains the words "La ilaha illa Allah", ("There is no God but God" in Arabic), the first part of the Shahada, the Islamic profession of faith.
Santana called Everlast in 1998, asking him if he could contribute a song for Supernatural, and Everlast suggested "Put Your Lights On". According to Everlast, Santana loved the song, and "from then on everything went very fast." Everlast has stated that he was unsure whether to include the Arabic-language portion in the recorded song, because "I did not want to sell Allah's words", but that Santana insisted that they be included.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Put_Your_Lights_On
LOLOL - It ran into one of my new favorites - CAKE - I Will Survive (Official HD Video)
Foxconn mostly abandons $10 billion Wisconsin project touted by Trump
"Trump’s “Incredible” Foxconn Deal Turns Out to Be a Another Massive Con Job"
That was 2018, to be fair and open had to at least see what had happened
on that incredibly incredible incredible Trump Wisconsin effort, so update:
Published Wed, Apr 21 20215:46 AM EDTUpdated Tue, Sep 13 20227:00 PM EDT
Reuters
Key Points
* Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn is drastically scaling back a planned $10 billion factory in Wisconsin.
* Under a deal, Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion, and slash the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000.
* The deal was first announced at the White House in July 2017, with then-president Donald Trump boasting of it as an example of how his “America First” agenda could revive U.S. tech manufacturing.
Construction at Foxconn complex in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin in August 2020.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn is drastically scaling back a planned $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, confirming its retreat from a project that former U.S. President Donald Trump once called “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Under a deal with the state of Wisconsin announced on Tuesday, Foxconn will reduce its planned investment to $672 million from $10 billion and cut the number of new jobs to 1,454 from 13,000.
The Foxconn-Wisconsin deal was first announced to great fanfare at the White House in July 2017, with Trump boasting of it as an example of how his “America First” agenda could revive U.S. tech manufacturing.
For Foxconn, the investment promise was an opportunity for its charismatic founder and then-chairman, Terry Gou, to build goodwill at a moment when Trump’s trade policies threatened the company’s cash cow: building Apple’s .. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/AAPL/ .. iPhones in China for export to America.
Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronic devices, proposed a 20-million-square-foot manufacturing campus in Wisconsin that would have been the largest investment in U.S. history for a new location by a foreign-based company.
VIDEO - 02:07 - Only 550 hires after Foxconn promised 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin
It was supposed to build cutting-edge flat-panel display screens for TVs and other devices and instantly establish Wisconsin as a destination for tech firms.
But industry executives, including some at Foxconn, were highly skeptical of the plan from the start, pointing out that none of the crucial suppliers needed for flat-panel display production were located anywhere near Wisconsin.
The plan faced local opposition too, with critics denouncing a taxpayer giveaway to a foreign company and provisions of the deal that granted extensive water rights and allowed for the acquisition and demolition of houses through eminent domain.
As of 2019, the village where the plant is located had paid just over $152 million for 132 properties to make way for Foxconn, plus $7.9 million in relocation costs, according to village records obtained by Wisconsin Public Radio and analyzed by Wisconsin Watch.
Foxconn, formally called Hon Hai Precision, said the new agreement gives it “flexibility to pursue business opportunities in response to changing global market conditions.” The company said: “Original projections used during negotiations in 2017 have at this time changed due to unanticipated market fluctuations.”
After abandoning its plans for advanced displays, Foxconn later said it would build smaller, earlier-generation displays in Wisconsin, but that plan never came to fruition either .. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-wisconsin-exclusive/exclusive-foxconn-reconsidering-plans-to-make-lcd-panels-at-wisconsin-plant-idUSKCN1PO0FV .
Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, Foxconn Chairman Liu Young-way told reporters in Taipei that the company currently makes servers, communications technology products and medical devices in Wisconsin, adding that electric vehicles (EVs) have a “promising future” there. He did not elaborate.
Liu had previously said the infrastructure was there in Wisconsin to make EVs because of its proximity to the traditional heartland of U.S. automaking, but the company also could decide on Mexico.
Hon Hai shares fell as much as 1.6% on Wednesday morning, underperforming the broader Taiwan market which was down 0.7%.
Incentives
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said the new agreement will save Wisconsin taxpayers “a total of $2.77 billion compared to the previous contract, maintain accountability measures requiring job creation to receive incentives, and protect hundreds of millions of dollars in local and state infrastructure investments made in support of the project.”
Evers said under the deal negotiated between the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and Foxconn, the Taiwan company is eligible to receive up to $80 million in performance-based tax credits over six years if it meets employment and capital investment targets. He stressed that the incentives were in line with those available to any company.
The state will reduce the tax credits authorized for the project to $80 million from $2.85 billion.
The original Wisconsin package also included local tax incentives and road and highway investments by state and local governments, which brought total taxpayer-funded subsidies to more than $4 billion.
Foxconn noted that since 2017, it has invested $900 million in Wisconsin, including several different facilities in the state.
The state has already spent more than $200 million on road improvements, tax exemptions and grants to local governments for worker training and employment, according to the records obtained by Wisconsin Public Radio.
What Apple's largest manufacturer Foxconn does, and what it's really up to in Wisconsin
Watch: VIDEO - 17:33 -- What Foxconn does, and what it’s really up to in Wisconsin
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/06/28/what-apples-largest-manufacturer-foxconn-is-really-up-to-in-wisconsin.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/foxconn-mostly-abandons-10-billion-wisconsin-project-touted-by-trump.html
Whatever happened to Optimism and Pessimism. Or Positivity and Negativity That CNN Fear Index looks stupid. Extreme fear through fear - neutral - greed to Extreme greed. I don't understand how CNN rationalizes a useless and misleading index like that.
Trump’s “Incredible” Foxconn Deal Turns Out to Be a Another Massive Con Job
Trumps Foxconn was another republican con in Wisconsin.""
such an incredible deal .. couldn't be more incredible .. did i say incredible, yeah, it is as i
am, just joking, it really is the most incredible thing for Wisconsin, all thanks to incredible me.
This may turn out to be the great dealmaker’s greatest scam yet.
By Bess Levin
November 5, 2018
By Andy Manis/Getty Images.
Last month, at a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, Donald Trump introduced Governor Scott Walker to the stage with a boast .. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/10/24/watch_live_president_trump_holds_maga_rally_in_mosinee_wisconsin.html .. regarding a dubious, shared accomplishment. “I got him set up with an incredible company called Foxconn,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing giant that had agreed to build its first U.S. plant in the Badger State. “[Foxconn] came to Wisconsin with the most incredible plan . . . It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. We toured it, and we had a ribbon-cutting a few months ago. And I handed it over to Scott . . . there’s no plant like it anywhere in the United States. One of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. One of the most incredible things.”
And it’s true! There is nothing like the literally incredible Foxconn deal in the United States, because the Foxconn deal—brokered by First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner .. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/president-trump-welcomes-foxconn-white-house-major-jobs-announcement/ —has turned out to be less of a jobs boon than an economic nuclear bomb, and not the good kind, either. To put it more elegantly, the Foxconn deal is the ultimate example of Trump promising Americans the world and then handing them a flaming bag of s--t.
Dan Kaufman, writing for The New Yorker, illuminates some of the many ways .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/did-scott-walker-and-donald-trump-deal-away-the-governors-race-to-foxconn .. that the Foxconn deal will screw Wisconsin locals for years to come:
Advertisement
* The deal will cost taxpayers more than $4.5 billion in subsidies, but because manufacturing companies in Wisconsin are already exempt from paying taxes, “Foxconn, which generated a hundred and fifty-eight billion dollars in revenue last year, will receive much of this subsidy in direct cash payments from taxpayers”—the largest subsidy given to a foreign corporation in U.S. history
* If Wisconsinites ever see a return on their investment, it’ll be in 2042 at the earliest, according to analysis from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau
* Good old Scott Pruitt did Foxconn a solid by “overrul[ing] the objections of his staff to grant most of southeastern Wisconsin an exemption from limits on smog pollution” so the plant can poison the air to its heart’s delight
* The company has been granted special court privileges by the state legislature, like the ability to make numerous appeals of unfavorable rulings in a single case
* The town’s Village Board of Trustees has been using eminent domain to expel obstinate homeowners, forcing them to “sell at a price determined by the village.” They’ve been able to do so by decreeing the 2,800-acre area around the plant “blighted,” a designation typically reserved for property that is “detrimental to the public health, safety, or welfare,” but which the board has extended to include property that “impairs or arrests the sound growth of the community”
All this, when the U.S. economy is already minting some 200,000 jobs a month, was designed to create 13,000 new, middle-class manufacturing jobs, as Foxconn and Trump .. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/foxconn-wisconsin-investment .. promised. Except, as Kaufman reports, the Foxconn deal will actually create far fewer jobs, and most of them will not be of the blue-collar variety.
. . . the company recently changed the type of factory it plans to build, downsizing to a highly automated plant that will only require three thousand employees, ninety per cent of them “knowledge workers,” such as engineers, programmers, and designers. Almost all of the assembly work will be done by robots. Terry Gou, Foxconn’s chairman, has said he plans to replace eighty percent of Foxconn’s global workforce with “Foxbots” in the next five to ten years. The company still says it will hire thirteen thousand employees in Wisconsin, but it has fallen short of similar promises in Brazil, India, and Pennsylvania, among other places. Foxconn has already replaced sixty thousand workers who were earning roughly $2.50 an hour in China. Even the expansion of I-94, which is being done to accommodate Foxconn (and being paid for by Wisconsin taxpayers) reflects Foxconn’s faith in automation: the company and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation have discussed dedicating lanes to self-driving cars and trucks.
The problems go on and on. Because the plant will be located 20 miles from the Illinois border, many employees will likely not actually be Wisconsin residents. There are concerns from local environmental groups regarding what will become of the water supply .. https://journaltimes.com/opinion/editorial/journal-times-editorial-foxconn-and-our-water-supply/article_1da26180-0967-5e5e-937e-ae84bab5b69b.html . Billions in taxpayer money will be shifted away from places they could be used—like on the state’s crumbling roads or understaffed rural schools. All this, again, to create very few jobs, in the scheme of things. According to calculations by two former University of Wisconsin business-school professors, “if Foxconn’s taxpayer subsidies were given to random entrepreneurs, the money would generate more than ninety thousand jobs.”
The Foxconn deal is, in other words, a lot like many of the other “incredible“ feats brought to America by the mind behind Trump University and the United States Football League and the Carrier plant that laid off more than 600 workers and the Ford factory that got moved to China and the trillion-dollar corporate tax cut that has mysteriously failed to trickle down. Incredible, indeed.
WATCH - Watch the 2024 Met Gala Red Carpet Replay - Presented by eBay and Porsche
In a statement, a company representative said, “Foxconn is fully committed to our investment of at least $10 billion in building our state-of-the-art Wisconsin Valley Science and Technology Park in Wisconsin and to meeting all contractual obligations with the relevant government agencies.”
**
You’ll never believe it but Trump has gone easy on corporate wrongdoing
We know, it’s a total shock! Per *The New York Times ..https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/us/trump-sec-doj-corporate-penalties.html .. :*
-----
In the final months of the Obama administration, Walmart was under pressure from federal officials to pay nearly $1 billion and accept a guilty plea to resolve a foreign bribery investigation.
Barclays faced demands that it pay nearly $7 billion to settle civil claims that it had sold toxic mortgage investments that helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis, and the Royal Bank of Scotland was ensnared in a criminal investigation over its role in the crisis.
The three corporate giants complained that the Obama administration was being unreasonable and stood their ground, according to people briefed on the investigations. After President Trump took office, they looked to his administration for a more sympathetic ear—and got one.
Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission have yet to charge Walmart, and the Justice Department reached a much lower settlement agreement with Barclays in March, for $2 billion. R.B.S. paid a civil penalty, but escaped criminal charges altogether.
-----
According to analysis by the Times comparing the last 20 months of the Obama administration with the first 20 months of the Trump administration, there has been: a 62 percent plunge in penalties imposed and ill-gotten gains ordered returned by the Securities and Exchange Commission; a 72 percent drop in corporate penalties from criminal prosecutions at the Justice Department; and just one-quarter the amount of penalties imposed on the banking industry by the S.E.C. But while Brandon Garrett, a Duke University professor, told the Times the the sharp falloff has led to the sense among companies that “there’s no reason to fear prosecution for committing serious corporate crimes,” Trump’s S.E.C. is shocked and offended by the notion it is going easy on corporate America. “The article’s conclusion that enforcement of the federal securities laws has flagged rests on deeply flawed methodology,” Stephanie Avakian and Steven Peikin, the heads of enforcement, said in a statement. “As the thorough analysis in our annual report makes clear, the division of enforcement’s performance, effectiveness, and activity level during our tenure compares favorably with any period in the commission’s history.”
**
Under Armour will no longer allow employees to use company funds at strip clubs
Meaning, yes, there was a time in which swiping corporate credit cards for lap dances and the like was standard company practice .. https://www.wsj.com/articles/under-armours-metoo-moment-no-more-strip-clubs-on-company-dime-1541450209 :
---
Over the years, executives and employees of the sports-apparel company, including Chairman and Chief Executive Kevin Plank, went with athletes or co-workers to strip clubs after some corporate and sporting events, and the company often paid for the visits of many attendees, people familiar with the matter said. . . . In a Feb. 20 e-mail to staff, Under Armour’s finance chief, David Bergman, said the company would no longer reimburse certain expenses, including adult entertainment, limousine services and gambling, according to the e-mail, which was reviewed by the Journal.
One venue popular with some employees was the Scores club, featuring nude dancers, near downtown Baltimore and a short drive from Under Armour headquarters. On some visits, employees charged hundreds of dollars there to the company, according to some of the people familiar with the matter.
---
In a statement, Plank told The Wall Street Journal: “Our teammates deserve to work in a respectful and empowering environment. We believe that there is systemic inequality in the global workplace and we will embrace this moment to accelerate the ongoing meaningful cultural transformation that is already under way at Under Armour. We can and will do better.”
**
Goldman Sachs will change fewer lives this year
The firm, which is currently dealing the fallout of two former employees being indicted on criminal charges tied to the alleged theft of $4.5 billion from Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, is inducting a historically tiny number of people into what was once essentially the Brotherhood of F--k You Money, and has now been downgraded to the Brotherhood of A Lot of Money:
---
The Wall Street firm is set to name its smallest class of new partners in years this week, according to people familiar with the matter. It’s the first crop of promotions under Chief Executive David Solomon, who aims to keep Goldman’s upper ranks exclusive and compensate for a recent influx of outside hires.
Fewer than 65 people are likely to get the nod, the people said. That would be the smallest class since 1998, when Goldman was still a private company, and fewer than the 84 promoted two years ago.
Being a Goldman partner once meant tying one’s personal fortunes to the firm’s. From its founding in 1869 until its 1999 initial public offering, Goldman’s partners funded its balance sheet, sharing profits and shouldering losses.
Today the title is largely symbolic—partners own less than 5 percent of the firm—but the every-other-year selection process remains a central part of Goldman’s identity, a way to reward and motivate employees and guard the firm’s culture.
**
Area man’s lips move, ergo area man tells lies
Gotta get the good ones in before voters head to the polls!
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1059539625344143361
Elsewhere!
Wall Street Moguls Predict the Dems Will Take the House, the G.O.P.
Gains in the Senate, and They Remain Life’s Great Winners (The Hive)
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/wall-street-predictions-midterms
Goldman Says World Economy “Past the Best” (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-05/goldman-says-world-economy-past-the-best-as-2019-looks-softer
Inside a secretive billionaire club’s plan to help Democrats take Congress (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/02/2018-elections-outside-money-democrats-democrat-alliance-soros-steyer-956032
No Sleep Till Brexit: The City Scrambles to Deal with Quitting the E.U. (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-01/no-sleep-till-brexit-the-city-scrambles-to-deal-with-quitting-the-eu?srnd=premium
More -- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/donald-trump-foxconn-scam
Spot on, AOC. Absolutely correct! Same goes for comments like she's a lawyer, or doctor of teacher so must be smart. i've said to innumerable people over years, hang on, there are many people who never went to uni who are smarter and better than i have ever been. A higher education degree is most valuable for one thing for any who do one, it keeps doors open. For many it means little more than that.
B402, Is always good to find someone who agrees with you, eh. It's one of our cooperative human traits.
Noted: This of yours is really one you really, really, really should have provided a link in support of your ..
"Morning Joe, stormy case,,,,they agree with me on this stormy case.....And thats on the far left channel...."
It's actually a classic case of an assertion requiring a link from you. You must agree, so find one.
Being as Smith is ex-chief prosecutor for war crimes at The Hague, we have to
trust he will be able to handle the loose Cannon he finds at his door. Hope so.
"Obviously Smith has a plan, at least we hope so."
John Luman Smith (born June 5, 1969) is an American attorney who has served in the United States Department of Justice as an assistant U.S. attorney, acting U.S. attorney, and head of the department's Public Integrity Section. He was also the chief prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, an international tribunal at The Hague tasked with investigating and prosecuting war crimes in the Kosovo War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smith_(lawyer)
Let the Party Begin! Olympic Flame Arrives in Marseille.
"MORE: 2024 Paris Olympic Games"
The flame will be carried on a 79-day journey across France and its territories, culminating in Paris with the start of the Olympic Games on July 26.
Video - Olympic Torch Enters Marseille - 0:53
Crowds gathered around the waterfront of the port city to witness the arrival of the Olympic flame before it’s 79-day relay across France, ending in Paris, where the Olympic Games will begin on July 26.CreditCredit...Sebastien Nogier/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Roger Cohen and Ségolène Le Stradic
Roger Cohen reported from Paris. Ségolène Le Stradic reported from Marseille.
May 8, 2024Updated 5:09 p.m. ET
Before a crowd thronging the waterfront and hilltops of the ancient port city of Marseille, the Olympic flame arrived on French soil on Wednesday, beginning a 79-day relay across the country and its territories that will culminate in Paris with the start of the Olympic Games on July 26.
Florent Manaudou, France’s Olympic men’s 50 meters freestyle swimming champion in 2012, ushered the flame ashore from a historic three-masted ship, the Belem. It had left Greece on April 27, carrying the flame lit in Ancient Olympia 11 days before that.
After a branch of the French Air Force, known as the “Acrobatic Patrol,” traced the five Olympic rings in the sky, Mr. Manaudou walked the flame along a temporary jetty crafted to resemble track and field lanes, in front of a crowd estimated by local authorities at more than 225,000. Fireworks erupted in plumes of red, white and blue smoke — the colors of the French flag — when he reached land.
President Emmanuel Macron looked on with a smile, basking in the joyous atmosphere of a city he loves, as Mr. Manaudou handed the torch of to Nantenin Keïta, a French paralympic sprinter. The flame was then given to Jul, a popular Marseille rapper, who lit the Olympic cauldron to wild applause.
The French rapper Jul lit the Olympic cauldron. Thibault Camus/Associated Press
“We needed a powerful symbol, a strong symbol that somehow showed the radiant face of France,” Tony Estanguet, the head of the Paris Olympic Committee, told France 2 television of the city, which was founded some 2,600 years ago. “Marseille is a city of sport, passion, and festivities.”
2024 Paris Summer Olympics --- [links inside]
* What to Know: The Summer Olympic Games in Paris are expected to draw millions of spectators. Here’s how to get tickets.
* An Opening Without Walls: The opening ceremony for the Paris Games will be held outside a stadium — an Olympics first. Making it safe is complicated.
* Anticipating Cyberattacks: As technology plays a growing role in the Games rollout, organizers increasingly view cyberattacks as a more constant danger. To prepare, they have been hosting war games and paying “bug bounties” to hackers.
* Cleaning Up Their Act: The organizers of the Paris Olympics promise to slash greenhouse gas emissions by re-using historic buildings, adding bike lanes and even putting solar panels on the Seine. But will it work?
France has been the target of repeated Islamist terrorist attacks over the past decade, and security was tight on Wednesday, with access to the port area controlled by more than 6,000 law enforcement officers. Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister and a prospective presidential candidate, called the level of security “unprecedented.”
Lucas Poujade, 23, a business student from the Auvergne region of central France, was on vacation near Marseille and decided to come witness the festivities.
“This is once in a lifetime,” he said. “I think people from Marseille are proud and happy that the games are not only hosted in Paris. For those who will not have the chance to see one of the events, at least this is a way to feel involved.”
President Emmanuel Macron attending the arrival ceremony for the Olympic flame. Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images
Benoît Payan, the mayor of Marseille, was jubilant over a spectacle he described as moving and full of surprises. “We can say that Marseille is the Olympic champion of atmosphere,” he said.
The relay carrying the flame will begin on Thursday. The torch bearers will include former star players for Olympique de Marseille, the local soccer club. Among them will be Didier Drogba and Jean-Pierre Papin. Alexandre Mazzia, a three-star chef with an acclaimed restaurant in Marseille, who will provide food for athletes during the Games, will also bear the torch.
[Insert: The chef gets the highlight for the foodies on the board. ]
“I am happy and proud to be part of this exceptional event,” Mr. Mazzia said in a brief interview. He added that carrying the flame, for him, represented “values of fraternity, of engagement, of artisanal work and of French savoir-faire.”
The elaborate relay will involve more than 10,000 people and will include France’s overseas departments as well as mainland France and Corsica. The torch, on a kind of grand tour of the Francophone world, is going to Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Réunion, between June 9 and June 17. It will make a first stop in Paris on July 14 and 15, before returning there on July 26 for its installation in the Jardin des Tuileries, between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde.
One idea behind the relay is to knit together France, which has not been entirely persuaded by the prospect of the Olympics. A survey last month by the Ipsos polling institute found that only 53 percent of French people were interested in the Games; some 37 percent of people living outside of Paris felt entirely indifferent. While interest and enthusiasm have been growing in recent months as the Games approach, there is nothing resembling unanimity in France.
Jets emitting smoke in the three colors of the French flag overflew the event. Arnold Jerocki/Getty Images
An opinion piece .. https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/tribunes/a-marseille-une-flamme-olympique-incompatible-avec-lecologie-populaire-20240507_QYSS5S3TQJDC3JV6IFZIQKJITI/?redirected=1 .. published on Wednesday in the left-wing daily Libération and written by several local officials in Marseille, including two deputy mayors, illustrated some of the concerns.
“Let’s open our eyes,” they wrote. “The flame is arriving in a fortress Europe that has forgotten its traditions of greeting and hospitality,” they added, alluding to attempts by far-right parties to clamp down on rising immigration. The Olympics would damage the local environment, they said, and in Paris “will accelerate the phenomena of gentrification and expulsion of poor people.”
Marseille is a traditional rival of Paris, in sporting terms and most others. Mr. Macron, a supporter of Olympique de Marseille, has been a regular visitor to the city throughout his seven-year presidency. He has tried, with only partial success, to address the acute social problems — drugs, violent crime, extreme poverty — that plague parts of the Mediterranean city.
“There are always doubts, there is always a France that doubts, and some among us who only want to see problems,” Mr. Macron told journalists after the ceremony. But, he added, “now I believe we have entered the games, the games are here, the flame is here!”
Certainly on Wednesday the atmosphere in Marseille was resolutely upbeat. Music filled the air and the sounds of horns rose from an armada of more than 1,000 boats that came to welcome the Belem under blue skies in the calm, glittering harbor.
The weather smiled on a city that has known more than its fair share of violence and hardship, while retaining a fierce pride and the openness of a port city. As a symbol of the promise of the French Olympics, the choice of Marseille seemed apt.
A French flag and a rainbow at the port of Marseille on Wednesday. Daniel Cole/Associated Press
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars
in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades
as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
More about Roger Cohen
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/world/europe/olympic-torch-france-marseille.html
OOps, Au. sad act - Sydney council bans same-sex parenting books from libraries for ‘safety of our children’
"Elon Musk and Anthony Albanese's church attack
spat isn't about free speech. It's about power"
Yes, like i've said many times we have over-protective reactionaries too. One local council
goes Christian right-wing 'we mean our type of family' freak fear book ban 5-6, by one vote.
Mr. Christou, Between you and the gatepost, the great majority of Australians
do not appreciate your attempt to further import the US culture war to Australia.
Local MP is concerned move breaches Anti-Discrimination Act while NSW arts minister accuses council of ‘censorship’
Caitlin Cassidy and Tamsin Rose
Tue 7 May 2024 19.57 AEST
First published on Tue 7 May 2024 19.04 AEST
A Sydney council has voted to place a blanket ban on same-sex parenting books from local libraries in a move the New South Wales government warns could be a breach of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act.
At a meeting last week, Cumberland city council in western Sydney voted on a new strategy for its eight council-run libraries.
The amendment, put forward by the former mayor and current councillor Steve Christou, proposed that the council take “immediate action” to “rid” same-sex parents books and materials in its library service.
During the meeting, Christou brandished a book he alleged had received “really disturbing” constituent complaints, saying parents were “distraught” to see the book, Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig, displayed on a shelf in the children’s section of the library.
NSW outlaws gay conversion practices and makes it harder for young people to get bail
[LGBTQ groups welcome legislation passed after marathon overnight sitting,
but critics line up to warn bail laws will put more children in jail]
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/22/nsw-outlaws-gay-conversion-practices-and-makes-it-harder-for-young-people-to-get-bail
The book, originally published in the UK, explores the experience of having two mums or two dads and features two men and a young child on the front cover.
Six councillors voted in favour of the amendment and five voted against, while four councillors were not present to vote.
“We’re going to make it clear tonight that … these kind of books, same-sex parents books, don’t find their way to our kids,” Christou said during debate. “Our kids shouldn’t be sexualised."
Insert: Well, Mr. Christou, Being female-male your favorite families are already sexualized, and, Mr. Christou,
by insisting the female-male is the only family form for you you are sexualizing it even more. That glaringly
obvious flaw in your position aside, you are also taking a very bigoted position toward the family.
Not good form at all for a supposedly caring Christian, Mr Christou.
“This community is a very religious community, a very family-orientated community.
“They don’t want such controversial issues going against their beliefs indoctrinated to their libraries. This is not Marrickville or Newtown, this is Cumberland city council.”
[Well, Mr. Christou personally i am very glad i live in Marrickville. And this
minute am hearing you and your fellows there haven't even read the book.]
Christou said toddlers shouldn’t be “exposed” to same-sex content and that the proposed amendment was “for the protection and safety of our children”.
“Hands off our kids,” he repeated.
More than half of the population represented by the Cumberland city council were born overseas. About 12.7% of its population has Chinese ancestry, while 13.3% are Lebanese.
Christou told Guardian Australia the motion was not targeted at the LGBTQ+ community but towards any books that promoted “sexualisation”.
Asked what aspects of the book in question were sexualised, he said parents had complained about the book being on the shelf, reiterating that “no form” of sexualisation should be accepted.
“We are a deeply religious community with deep family values,” he said. “I’m only representing the wishes of my community.”
The Auburn MP Lynda Voltz expressed concern over the resolution and asked the NSW arts minister, John Graham, to look at the matter.
“I am greatly concerned at the decision of Cumberland council and believe that it may possibly risk breaching the guidelines for funding of libraries and may also be in breach of the Anti-Discrimination Act,” she said.
“The overwhelming majority of the people in Auburn will tell you that everyone is welcome and we pride ourselves on being a peaceful and friendly community.”
Minister accuses council of censorship
Graham accused the council of engaging in censorship.
“When civilisations turn to burning books or banning books it is a very bad sign. That is equally true for local councils,” he said.
“It is up to readers to choose which book to take off the shelf. It should not be up to local councillors to make that choice for them or engage in censorship.”
NSW arts minister John Graham (centre) with Mardi Gras performers in March. Photograph: Esther Linder/AAP
He said the decision could impact the library’s ability to receive funding from the government.
The mayor, Lisa Lake, opposed the motion and said she was “appalled and saddened” by the result.
Lake said the book had been in the library since 2019 and was “nothing new”.
“We work really hard at council to foster a spirit of inclusion and talk about everybody feeling welcome,” she said.
“As long as parents are loving families, that’s what’s important.”
Councillor Diane Colman, who also opposed the motion, told Guardian Australia it wasn’t the body’s place to “police” accessibility to books.
“It’s problematic on so many levels,” she said.
“Cumberland city council’s motto is ‘welcome, belong, succeed’ – that means everyone is welcome, everyone belongs.
“Bans like this indicate some people believe that isn’t the case.”
Colman said the “whole premise” of a public library was to provide individuals with equitable rights to information – not to censor it.
A spokesperson for Cumberland city council said it had commenced the process of reviewing its collection to determine which titles “would need to be considered for removal” from library services.
VIDEO -- Sydney council bans same-sex parenting books from libraries - video
“Council welcomes everyone to our local government area and our libraries, irrespective of the materials available in our library collections,” they said.
Equality Australia’s legal director Ghassan Kassisieh said “providing the children of same-sex couples with books that reflect their everyday lives is part of ensuring public libraries are inclusive and welcoming places for everyone”.
“This book is part of an age-appropriate series about different types of families, and the attempt to erase local families off library shelves sinks well below the standard that should be set by our elected representatives,” Kassisieh said.
“If you don’t want to borrow the book, you don’t have to – but don’t deny others the chance to access books that reflect modern family life in Australia in 2024.”
Kassisieh said if the move wasn’t unlawful under the NSW anti-discrimination act, it “certainly should be”.
Landmark report calls for removal of LGBTQ+ discrimination exemptions for Australia’s religious schools
[Law Reform Commission says schools shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against staff
and students on basis of sexuality, gender identity or relationship status]
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/mar/21/landmark-report-calls-for-removal-of-discrimination-exemptions-given-to-australias-religious-schools
Rainbow Families, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ families in Australia, spoke with the anti-discrimination board on Tuesday to try to get the ban reversed.
Its executive officer, Ashley Scott, said the board was considering what actions it could take in response.
“We’re very disappointed by the decision … in Australia our families are very diverse and that’s something that should be celebrated,” he said.
Scott said he had witnessed an increase in hate speech and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the past 12 months, which had been distressing for families.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/07/sydney-council-bans-same-sex-parenting-books-from-libraries-for-safety-of-our-children
How Tennessee Became the Poster State for Political Meltdown
"Tennessee and guns, now that school shooting in Nashville is old news, time to arm the teachers.
The Volunteer State was long defined by its unique culture. Then came toxic redistricting, poisoned social media, parties polarized on race and other pathologies.
State Rep. Justin Jones, with his fist in the air, marches with supporters to the Tennessee State Capitol on Monday, April 10. | George Walker IV/AP Photo
By Jonathan Martin
04/12/2023 04:30 AM EDT
Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s politics bureau chief and senior political columnist. His
reported column chronicles the inside conversation and big-picture trends shaping politics.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Standing in the sun outside Tennessee’s Capitol Monday afternoon, and hoisting a sign that had the words “thoughts and prayers” crossed out in red, Karen Carter explained why she drove nearly two hours from her hometown of Lawrenceburg, Tenn., to confront most anybody who looked like they could be a lawmaker.
“We look like tin-pot dictators in this state and it pisses me off as a citizen of this state,” Carter said, alluding to the Republican expulsion of a pair of Democratic state representatives last week. “I’m angry and I’m embarrassed, and I’m humiliated.”
She was something else, too, though: nostalgic.
“The state would swing left-right, left-right, Republican-Democrat, Republican-Democrat,” Carter recalled about Tennessee’s political tradition, before turning away from me and raising her voice toward a group of official-looking people in suits headed into the Capitol who perhaps could address gun violence: “Guys, think about the children!”
The day after Easter was gorgeous here, a city that knows from both Christianity and renewal. Every trip I make seems to bring more cranes, more scooters, just a few food trucks shy of being indistinguishable from Austin.
The weather and Bird-riding tourists, however, masked what has been a searing spring in Tennessee, a horrific school shooting in Nashville that begot days of protest and the stunning defrocking of a pair of young, Black lawmakers who carried those demonstrations, bullhorn in hand, onto the floor of the House chamber.
This turn of events has yanked this future-focused city back to the present and the past and, for the state and the country, spotlighted what Tennessee was and what it has become.
To some, the echoes are evocative of Jim Crow, as white leaders suppress Black agency and a multiracial group of next-generation activists respond with hymns, marches and Black Power salutes that would recall Diane Nash and Stokely Carmichael were it not for all the iPhones.
Tense scenes as Tennessee House votes on expelling three Dems
However, for people like Carter, and some in Tennessee’s leadership ranks, these new days of political rage only remind them of what the state had been more recently: a model of competition and competence.
Today, Tennessee represents the grim culmination of the forces corroding state politics: the nationalization of elections and governance, the tribalism between the two parties, the collapse of local media and internet-accelerated siloing of news and the incentive structure wrought by extreme gerrymandering. Also, if we’re being honest, the transition from pragmatists anchored in their communities to partisans more fixated on what’s said online than at their local Rotary Club.
That this convergence is taking place here for all the world to see is sadly ironic.
From 1970 to 2018, Tennessee traded the governorship between the two parties. In fact, Gov. Bill Lee is the first GOP governor in the state’s history to succeed another GOP governor. In those same years, Tennessee sent a succession of lawmakers to Washington who emerged as national leaders, effective local politicians or both, a bipartisan litany that includes Howard Baker, Al Gore, Lamar Alexander, Jim Sasser and Bill Frist.
The state’s tripartite nature — what they call the three Grand Divisions — between East, Middle and West Tennessee demanded coalition-building. The sheer width of the state, stretching from Appalachia to the Cotton South, meant the presence of a robust Republican Party descending from Unionists, long preexisting 20th century realignment, alongside an equally strong Democratic Party that absorbed rural white voters and big-city Black voters alike. There were moderates and conservatives within both parties.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), today the longest-serving House member in the delegation, helped father Tennessee’s lottery as a state senator in the early 2000s, no easy task in the Bible Belt.
“I sat on the Republican side of the aisle, nurtured them, worked with them and eventually got six or seven of them to vote for the lottery,” Cohen recalled. “They were my friends.”
The coalition that backed the lottery, which has poured over $8 billion into education funding, reflected the state’s political makeup: There were Black lawmakers, a few moderate Republicans, an exurban conservative who knew her Nashville area constituents wanted more money for schools and a rural conservative Democrat who was nudged along with the promise of some road projects by the state’s Republican governor, Don Sundquist, who signed the bill. That exurban conservative was Marsha Blackburn and the rural Democrat was Lincoln Davis, both of whom would join Cohen in Congress.
Through this period, Tennessee was drawing international attention for its success luring auto companies to the state, a bipartisan effort that transformed the state’s agriculture-heavy economy and is well told in Keel Hunt’s “Crossing the Aisle .. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0826522394/ref=redir_mobile_desktop?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1681268427&ref_=tmm_hrd_swatch_0&sr=8-2 .”
The success and the leadership became self-reinforcing.
Alexander, now retired in Tennessee and writing his memoir of service from Presidents Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, reminded me of how it was that a heart surgeon and Nashville scion named Frist gave up medicine for politics.
“I asked him why he’d give that up,” Alexander remembered. “He said, ‘I can fly to Chattanooga, cut a heart out and maybe save one person, but if I’m senator I might be able to help a million people.’ And thanks to what he did with George W. Bush on PEPFAR he did just that. So we had a competitive system that attracted really talented people with purpose.”
Which isn’t to say the Tennessee volunteers of yesteryear were all statespeople whose like we won’t see again. This being politics and humans being all too fallible, there were ample sins of the bottle, flesh and purse. If the Sheraton still towering over the state Capitol could talk, well, it wouldn’t be telling stories of public-spirited, bipartisan bonhomie. Take, for example, how Alexander became governor in the first place: by being sworn in early after the outgoing Democrat, Ray Blanton, was found to be selling pardons. Then, more recently, there was the FBI sting Operation Tennessee Waltz (how’s that for a mission name?) that netted seven lawmakers for accepting bribes.
Lamar Alexander became governor of Tennessee by being sworn in early after the outgoing Democrat, Ray Blanton, was found to be selling pardons. | Pool photo by Alex Edelman
The old boys were also, well, old boys. There’s yet to be a female governor here,
and racial minorities have been all too scarce outside the state’s large cities.
What there was, though, was competition and accountability.
Statewide races were hotly contested, as were many legislative and congressional campaigns and, with the right conditions, moderate Southern Democrats could carry the state in presidential races (or fall achingly short).
And accountability came from middle-of-the-road voters, business leaders invested in Tennessee’s success and a robust press corps, led by the two-newspaper towns across the state.
That was then.
Now, the voters are confined to safely red or blue districts and are animated by the same partisan impulses down the ballot that have made Tennessee a deep-red state in federal races. Candidate quality, cyclical changes in the economy and local issues are moot, at least when compared to party label.
“We don’t have elections anymore, we have censuses,” Jeff Yarbro lamented.
A state senator from Nashville, Yarbro, 46, grew up a farmer’s son in rural West Tennessee before picking up degrees at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He’s precisely the sort of Southern Democrat who in earlier generations would have run for governor by now. That’s no longer an option given Tennessee’s tilt, so, disheartened by what the Legislature has become, he’s leaving to run for mayor this year.
That may be the only other office left given that through redistricting Tennessee Republicans “cracked” the Democratic-heavy congressional seat anchored in Nashville, splitting the state capital into three, GOP-heavy seats.
This has been well-documented. What’s been less covered is how the Republican majority did much the same in state legislative seats across smaller cities. Yarbro is now the farthest-east Democratic senator in the state. In fact, there’s six Senate Democrats left in the 33-member chamber: three from Nashville and three from Memphis.
One of them is the Senate Democratic leader, Raumesh Akbari, who’s not yet 40 and has great promise but is setting her sights on succeeding Cohen in the lone remaining U.S. House seat held by a Democrat.
“I’d prefer my district be more competitive,” Akbari told me, noting that it’s 89 percent African American. It would be hard enough for a Black woman to win statewide, but it’s made even more difficult when she hails from a nearly all-Black seat and is therefore easy to portray as a representative for only her community. (This is why, in hindsight, Bobby Rush may have done Barack Obama a favor by thrashing him in the 2000 primary for Rush’s heavily Black Chicago House seat.)
Race is an inescapable factor in the current contretemps here, but it wasn’t until after Obama’s presidential election in 2008 that it became as defining to Tennessee politics as it is now.
There were rural white Democrats in the Legislature, and the congressional delegation included Davis, Bart Gordon and John Tanner. None of the three lawmakers returned after 2010, and gerrymandering and realignment eventually killed off nearly all their contemporaries in the state Capitol.
“In a lot of folks’ minds here, it made the Democratic Party Black,” Akbari said of Obama’s victory and the image of a Black family in the White House.
Memphis had long been to Tennessee what Chicago is to Illinois and New Orleans is to Louisiana: the heavily Black, ethically flexible big city that conservative candidates ran against but had to be watched on election nights because the size of their vote could determine elections. Cohen told me he used to host legislative visits in Memphis, replete with a night at the famed Peabody Hotel and plenty of ribs, to show lawmakers the city had assets worthy of state dollars and wasn’t the crime-ridden den of iniquity they may have imagined.
What’s striking today is that Nashville has become as much of a pariah as Memphis. Tennessee Republicans have for years been watching the city become Austin-ized, and the fuse was finally lit when city leaders spurned the state’s hope (and the RNC’s preference) to hold the 2024 Republican Convention in Nashville.
In addition to erasing the city’s congressional seat, legislative Republicans have also sought to halve the size of the metro government’s council (Nashville and Davidson County have a merged government) and shift control of the city’s convention authority and airport from the city to the state. They’re the kind of power plays the state’s Republicans used to, understandably, rage about when they were done by the state Legislature’s old Democratic leaders.
VIDEO - Expelled lawmaker says Tennessee House will retaliate if he’s reinstated
And that was before thousands of Nashville area residents and their children descended on the Capitol demanding new gun control laws in the wake of last month’s mass shooting, which prompted the floor protests and expulsion of state Reps. Justin Jones from Nashville and Justin Pearson from Memphis.
Nearly overlooked in the hurly-burly was, fittingly, a Twitter exchange between the GOP House speaker, Cameron Sexton, and a Democratic rival. Sexton posted video of the protesting lawmakers on the House floor, putting John Lewis’ catch phrase “good trouble” in quotation marks, and adding the accounts of local talk radio stations, the conservative Daily Wire and Fox News. When a Democrat replied by adding the Twitter accounts of CNN, a handful of local, Democratic-leaning websites and Resistance hero Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Sexton replied to her, this time with more conservative accounts cc’d.
It was a revealing look at what passes for online discourse, the role of dueling (local and national) partisan media outlets and the fixation with Twitter on the part of lawmakers. There’s still a handful of excellent local reporters whom I’ve read and followed for years, but those two-newspaper towns have long died and Gannett has done grave damage to nearly every major daily in Tennessee.
Information is gleaned from social media or national cable networks. “Everywhere you go, all you see is Fox News,” said Tanner, the old West Tennessee Democrat.
Republicans also lament how social media has warped the political culture.
“When you’re in Nashville, it’s all you hear,” said Johnny Garrett, a GOP state representative, of the faculty club-style chatter on Twitter. But Garrett noted how his colleagues often tell him that when they’re back in their districts “they don’t hear a lot that stuff, the social media.”
This tunnel vision is part of what convinced the Republicans they had to take such an extreme step last week. Bill Haslam, a former GOP governor, told me he was struck by how even some pragmatic Republican lawmakers were scared for their lives because of the protests and convinced they had to show strength.
“They told me ‘You don’t understand,’” Haslam said.
In fact, it was the GOP legislators who didn’t understand how badly their retribution looked outside their cloakrooms, which is all the more apparent now that the two Justins are being hailed as martyrs and reinstated this week by their local governing bodies.
What’s more depressing to leaders like Haslam, a pragmatic governor in the East Tennessee Republican tradition, is the response he and his predecessor as governor, Democrat Phil Bredesen, received when they wrote a joint op-ed in The Tennessean advocating for some incremental gun safety measures.
Garrett told me hadn’t even read it (though he did see the headline), and once one aspiring Republican candidate for governor — Knox County mayor and pro wrestler turned Ron Paul acolyte Glenn Jacobs — rejected the proposal, other ambitious Republicans followed suit, surely mindful of their viability in future primaries.
Haslam, I’m told by Republicans and Democrats alike, has been calling state lawmakers, urging them to work together on the gun issue and counseling restraint in the partisan wars.
Which until Tuesday was more than the current governor had done. Lee has been stunningly quiet as his state suffers tragedy and a self-inflicted black eye. A first-time elected official when he became governor in 2019, Lee has made a constitutionally weak governorship that much more limited by keeping an arm’s length from the press and largely deferring to a Legislature ever more animated by culture wars.
VIDEO -- Tennessee's Republican governor calls for tougher gun laws
Haslam was careful to show respect to his successor, “one governor at a time,” and said Lee was eager to act. The governor didn’t say a word about the expulsions, but he finally addressed the gun issue Tuesday in Nashville, vowing to sign an executive order tightening background checks and urging lawmakers to pass the sort of red flag law proposed by Haslam and Bredesen that would make it harder for dangerous people to access guns.
Remarkably, none of the state’s major corporate actors have publicly pushed Lee to try to calm the state’s political waters.
Not that doing so may matter, given what drives today’s legislators — talk radio and the internet — said Cohen.
“Some of them wouldn’t even know who Fred Smith is,” he quipped, referring to the CEO of FedEx, one of Tennessee’s leading employers.
To Alexander, a protégé of Baker and mentor to so many Republicans in the state, it’s difficult to watch. That’s in part because he’s been alarmed about his state party’s drift since well before last week.
In farewell remarks he was to give to the state Legislature in 2020 before Covid-19 interrupted his plans, he planned to tell the lawmakers that competition produces results and a lack of it can be corrosive.
“One-party rule runs the risk of encouraging self-serving, narrow interests,” he was to tell the legislators according to a speech draft he shared with me. Do not, he was to warn, “adopt Washington, D.C.’s bad manners.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/12/tennessee-political-meltdown-00091517
We too said it back then, still -- Opinion It’s time to say it: The conservatives on the Supreme Court lied to us all
"Why? Free speech. SCOTUS says it's ok to lie -- period."
By Paul Waldman | December 3, 2021 at 2:01 p.m. EST
Then-President Donald Trump walks out with Amy Coney Barrett after announcing her
nomination to the Supreme Court in September 2020.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
They lied.
Yes, I’m talking about the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and the abortion rights those justices have now made clear they will eviscerate.
They weren’t just evasive, or vague, or deceptive. They lied. They lied to Congress and to the country, claiming they either had no opinions at all about abortion, or that their beliefs were simply irrelevant to how they would rule. They would be wise and pure, unsullied by crass policy preferences, offering impeccably objective readings of the Constitution.
It. Was. A. Lie.
We went through the same routine in the confirmation hearings of every one of those justices. When Democrats tried to get them to state plainly their views on Roe v. Wade, they took two approaches. Some tried to convince everyone that they would leave it untouched. Others, those already on record proclaiming opposition to abortion rights, suggested they had undergone a kind of intellectual factory reset enabling them to assess the question anew with an unspoiled mind, one concerned only with the law.
Unfortunately, that lie was and is still enabled by the news media. Even in the face of what we saw at the court on Wednesday — when at least five of the six conservatives made clear their intention to overturn Roe — press accounts continued offering euphemisms and weasel words, about “inconsistencies” or “contradictions.”
AUDIO - Kavanaugh presents counter-argument that the Supreme Court should be ‘neutral’ on abortion 2:07
During oral arguments on Dec. 1, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh argued that the “other side” thinks
the court should leave abortion rights to each state. (Video: The Washington Post)
But sometimes the right puts its purposes in the open. There was a particularly striking exchange between Laura Ingraham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Fox News, where Ingraham grew inexplicably enraged ..
.. over the mere possibility that Roe might not be overturned.Just saying it out in the open.
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 2, 2021
Laura Ingraham says it's time to "blow it up" if "these six justices cannot do the right thing" by overturning Roe v. Wade after "all the money that has been raised" and "these big fat cat dinners."
"I'm pissed about this!" pic.twitter.com/fyP16lplt8
As newmedman just said again, it's tough to toss her. I don't have anything to add to:
Guess he knows how difficult it is recuse a judge and doesn't want to lose one. I wonder, has he used
that safety valve he set up where if she made a terrible decision then he could.... do something i forget.
What Does the Law Say About Recusing Judge Cannon?
... out a bit here ..
[...]There are two statutes that require federal district court judges to recuse themselves in cases where they might be biased or reasonably have their impartiality questioned, but such statutes have been interpreted narrowly and usually refer only to judges’ personal connections to cases. Therefore, having Cannon recused based on her history and perception of bias is a difficult task.
[...]Unless Judge Cannon decides to voluntarily recuse, the high bar for requesting recusal based only on prior judicial decisions, and the procedure for requesting recusal, makes the task of having Cannon recused seem almost impossible. Although the Eleventh Circuit has been quick to overturn Cannon’s questionable rulings in the past, forcing Cannon’s recusal here would be a significant departure from prior precedent. For these reasons, it appears unlikely that the prosecution would pursue recusal at the district court level and will prepare to conduct a trial with a judge who may be kinder to President Trump than some other judges. However, this does not mean recusal is irrelevant. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173822685
.. it's in with others of some relevance here .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174145477
rooster, Not at all. You do know no one here is afraid of the truth. You know that.
LOL DD a real firefighter, experienced real danger. We not and didn't. Were just lucky to meet a good American guy, there. Heh, no, can't imagine an airline doing it now. And you were much younger then too. He was great, didn't just fly us to the fire, but gave us a bit of a roller-coaster ride on the way.