McCabe about to retire from FBI at age 49.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.e175731646d2
McCabe about to retire from FBI at age 49.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=.e175731646d2
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Republicans are behaving badly with the heat they are putting on the FBI. From my vantage point it is just an attempt to undermine the investigation, which is just about as despicable if Trump were to fire Mueller.Originally Posted by LA Ute
It's high stakes maneuvering toward "high noon". McCabe is a specific threat because he could corroborate Comey's claim that Trump asked him to "let the Flynn thing go", from an obstruction of justice angle.
Maybe tit-for-tat, a political counter punch, but 2 senior aides (apparently) are claiming Trump said "all Haitians have AIDS" - take that, Mia Love! - and once Nigerians saw America, they wouldn't want to go back to their huts. The two leakers to the NYT reportedly thought the June 2017 diatribe was notable enough to convey the remarks to others, at the time. (John Kelly is probably on the mother of all mole hunts, right now.) http://www.businessinsider.com/trump...tburst-2017-12
Hopefully these 2 accounts become public and corroborated, ie, this isn't fake news. But politically, the claims are credible, in the eyes of the 60+% of Americans who disapprove of Trump.
How many other punches / counter-punches does Trump - or rather his team, because DJT is now doubting that he said the remarks on the Access Hollywood tape - need to worry about coming out, as they try to inoculate themselves against McCabe and whatever Mueller is going to reveal?
That is a bad Photoshop.
Actually, on second thought it is a pretty good Photoshop and they matched the font and shading. But it still is a Photoshop and isn't out of the realm of crazy things she would say.
I don’t get this ranting about the FBI being commies thing.
First of all, we all know that the Enforcement Establishment had always been a liberal bastion. /sarcasm
But even if it is true, does it really matter? After all, they aren’t the arbiters of justice. In the end they just collect evidence and build a story and it is the judiciary (or Congress in the case of impeachment) that have the final say.
If he is truly innocent, he should welcome all of this.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Kay Coles James just became President of the Heritage Foundation. She succeeds Jim DeMint, who took Heritage to a very conservative social issues-oriented place, quite different from what the think tank had been. (Back in the 1990s, a Heritage guy, Stuart Butler, came up with the individual mandate concept for health care policy, which DeMint thought was borderline socialism.) It’ll be interesting to see what Ms. James does there now. Some conservatives have already raised concerns about her because she worked in one of the Bush administrations (horrors!) and because in her acceptance of the Heritage job she mentioned her plan to be “inclusive.” Obviously the place is going to hell in a handbasket.
I’m an African-American Woman. Here’s My Advice to Conservatives Wooing My Community.
http://dailysignal.com/2016/08/29/im...-my-community/
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
My hunch is Kay Cole James is going to get the Michael Steele treatment - ie, appreciated as a token within Heritage, mostly ignored outside it.
I've seen the problems she speaks of in the AA community - they're pretty acute. But the source of the problem really hasn't been the conservatives favorite excuse (Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, social programs).
The problem is actually much simpler, in my opinion.
After Civil Rights, those African Americans who were bright and ambitious escaped the segregated circumstances they started in (including my wife, who was in a segregated school 9 years after Brown v Board of Education). What is left in the hood is incredibly concentrated dysfunction, highly resistant to efforts to address it. For example, Betsy DeVos' school choice drive in Michigan has had zero positive effect.
You see the same stratification phenomenon within families. Among my wife's 7 siblings, 2 took their educational opportunities and eventually became C-class officers of larger corporations and one a business owner, a few ventured out and came back, comfortable in the low expectations of the hood, and one has been in and out of prison.
It's much like you see within any other families, white, black, Latino, Asian. Among siblings, some are quite successful and have achieved a lot, some have been "average", some have seriously struggled. It's like the old TV drama from the 70s, "Rich Man, Poor Man", about the divergent paths of two brothers.
The key question is how do we identify and help those at risk early, and guide them to have higher expectations of themselves, help them make better life choices. I don't think there are any easy answers.
Ms James' appeals within the Heritage Foundation to stimulate better outcomes within the African American community are going to run into the current alarming, widespread problem the nation faces: Opioid abuse, which is responsible for Americans' life expectancy dropping for two consecutive years, and is a problem that disproportionately affects white people.
The current opioid issue, which is manifested by higher mortality rates for working class whites (while Latinos and African Americans with even lower economic statistics continue to see slightly improving mortality rates) will be "felt" within the conservative community as a tacit tribal issue much more important than trying to make inroads with African American voters.
(What is yet to be seen is whether having a white face back in the WH will arrest the white mortality decline, as the recent stats are for 2016. There is some reason to think the positive reinforcement of seeing somebody who looks like you do at the helm buoys battered souls, but the economic plight of lower middle class / working class Americans is still on a long term decline, from technology & international competition. Opioids may be a drug that is a bigger issue for those of European ancestry. Back in the my wife's neighborhood, it's certainly not the drug of choice.)
Last edited by Ma'ake; 12-26-2017 at 07:45 AM.
“Token” is a loaded word and implies not only extreme disingenuousness on the part of Heritage, but also a whiff of racism. I doubt you meant it that way. Heritage is a serious organization, in my experience. I was on a panel there once and spent time with the guys who really run the place. The DeMint era there was a departure for Heritage from a long history of sober and responsible thinking and scholarship. His departure was involuntary, I believe. We’ll see how James does. She looks like a return to Heritage’s roots.
Last edited by LA Ute; 12-26-2017 at 02:10 PM.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
You are our token neoliberal on this board, so you have that going for you.
And I appreciate the inclusiveness you have all embraced by allowing me be here. I’m grateful for it every time I post.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Wait a minute - "roots" is a racially tinged word, too!
Seriously, I know Heritage is/was a respected think tank, they came up with the complicated framework that was the response to Hillarycare and became a foundation of RomneyCare... until they got thrown under the bus (along with Romneycare and Mitt himself) because of the similarities to Obamacare. I forgot that Jim DeMint was the head of Heritage.
How does Heritage fit into whatever is left of the conservative think tank ecosystem is an interesting question. There's the Koch Brothers and their growing influence... does anyone else even matter, on the right? I see thinkers like George Will and William Kristol recoiling in horror at what has happened to the Republican party's once proud intellectual tradition.
Then today I read this funny headline from Alan Dershowitz: "I am not Trump's advocate!" http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...n-advocate-for
What I can say is that Heritage is pretty much modeled after the Reagan tradition, and some of its graybeards are former Reagan types like Ed Meese. I’m not a Reaganite but neither are Trump and his followers. Still, Reagan and his people at least had a clearly expressed and coherent philosophy.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
The SL Trib's naming of Orrin Hatch as Utahn of the Year was picked up by The Hill: http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3...ring-editorial
What The Hill didn't include was the Trib's insinuation that Hatch's favorable treatment of Big Pharma helped fuel the Opioid crisis:
An investigation byThe Washington Post and CBS’ “60 Minutes”found that a law, which Hatch played a key role in, helped fuel the opioid crisis across the country by hamstringing the Drug Enforcement Administration from cracking down on large-scale shipments of the drug.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/...n-of-the-year/
This is dumb. If an award is supposed to be an honor 98% of the time, make it an honor 100% of the time.
It seems like the Trib's attempt at a kiss-of-death for Hatch. That won't be going in any campaign literature as an achievement.
(It's not as bad as their tortured endorsement of George W. Bush for re-election in 2004, where the Editorial Board seemed to get undercut by the owner (Dean Singleton) at the last minute. That was really weird.)
CNN has picked it up as well
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/26/politi...une/index.html
This is a very interesting piece by the NY Times’ former public editor who is now the WaPo’s media columnist. She still shows some blind spots but is refreshingly open to criticism.
Polls show Americans distrust the media. But talk to them, and it’s a very different story.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...=.9d977e1f09eb
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
So I’ve actually done two Amazon delivery routes. My nephew going to college does it and was telling me about it and so I had to see how it worked (because I’m actually kind of a junkie for process and automation type stuff).
It is pretty phenomenal. It is all driven and automated by their app. They assign blocks that you can pick up that fits your schedule. Typically the come in 3-5 hour delivery blocks at $18/hour. You are an independent contractor and so they pay you that full amount and don’t deduct taxes.
So you show up, check in by scanning a QR code, they give to you a cart, you scan the packages and go. The GPS plans the most efficient route and when you arrive you scan the package to deliver, drop it on the doorstep and take a picture and then it tells you where the next package goes.
My first route was a 3 hour one and took me about 2 hours and 15 minutes because I wasn’t very smart about it. My second was a 4 hour route and took me 1.5 hours because I got smart.
The packages have zone numbers on them. I figured out that if you load them in order then you don’t waste time trying to find packages and you can do it quick.
I taught my nephew how to do that and he says he now can usually do it in about half the time if not 1/3 of the assigned block. That means he makes about $36/hour doing it.
I was fascinated enough about whether this was a good economically for the deliverer that I created a spreadsheet for my nephew to track his mileage, actual time spent and pay. If you can do it in half the time it is a good thing. Most routes my nephew does are 30-40 miles. Using the standard deduction of 53.5 cents a mile as the real expense means about $15-$20 per block. So about $25-$30 an hour when it is all said and done. He drives and old Honda Civic and so his actual cost is likely much lower.
A caveat, if you want to use Amazon as your primary income it won’t work. It is great for supplemental income or for college students. I saw a lot of cab drivers doing it actually and my nephew says most there do Uber and Amazon. The reason it won’t work is it isn’t like you can put in 8-10 hours a day doing it. You typically get one 4 hour block for the day, so essentially only working two hours. If you finish early you can’t get another block until your block is over.
Anyway, sorry for the nerdery on this, but it is pretty amazing stuff. For metro areas Amazon could absolutely do away with UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc. Raising rates on Amazon would just put the nail in the coffin for that.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Last edited by Rocker Ute; 12-30-2017 at 09:58 PM.
Very interesting. Thanks.
With the new Amazon and UPS facilities in SL things will get interesting. You combine those two buildings it’s 1,600,000 square feet.
Amazon is literally across the street from Fed Ex and a 5 minute drive from UPS.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I'm connecting dots here and jumping topics, but assuming UPS & FedEx (and USPS) are facing wage/benefit pressure from the free-lancers, this adds pressure toward healthcare reform. As GM demonstrated a few years ago as they moved manufacturing from plants in the US north to Canada because of healthcare costs, many businesses are increasingly finding the benefits aspect of wages to be cost prohibitive.
Ironically, Intermountain (Health Care) has a new CEO who is on a campaign to dramatically re-invent how they operate. The word is a LOT of people are going to be riffed, and at least in the IT part of IHC, they intend to keep the architecture and security groups, with everyone else becoming contractors. (We're getting really, really good applicants looking to jump off that ship, right now. The IT placement folks in SLC are really getting a workout, from different angles.)
IHC shedding employees will certainly help bend the healthcare cost curve downward (in Utah), though it needs to come down quite a bit more to allow non-insured workers to be able to afford healthcare. CVS Pharmacy acquired Aetna (the health insurer), so there is some serious consolidation going on in healthcare, vertically, nationally. They may be able to stave off a push toward a Single Payer model that a resurgent Democratic party would be pushing in the early 20s.
Fascinating times as an economic & political observer. Probably not so much fun as a participant.
This seems like an insane move, after IHC's equally insane move to build their own shitty medical data/billing/charting software for billions of dollars rather than just buying licenses to the best, easiest to use, and most widespread product (Epic). They will be in desperate need of high-quality IT people to diagnose, customize, and upgrade their program from here on out to suit the needs of their providers. And it will never be anywhere as close to modern and up-to-date as the professional software products are, since those programs are already managing the medical records for hundreds of millions of people across the nation.
On a bigger view, the big problem with driving prices to the bottom is the savings usually tends to come out of employees' salaries and benefits/retirement. And there is little market pressure to cause companies to plow savings back into their employees, as most cost savings will instead go toward stock dividends or schemes to raise stock valuation (e.g. stock buybacks). These are short-term outcomes.
This is precisely the opposite of what the economy needs to expand over the long term. More people at the bottom of the scale need to have more expendable money so they can buy more things. They need to be healthy and they need to be educated.
In a few decades time there is a very good chance that most of our current jobs will be obsolete, whether through shipping manufacturing/customer service jobs overseas, robots replacing manual workers (truck/cab drivers, retail point-of-sale, fast food) or AI (diagnostic jobs in finance, law, medicine, real estate, engineering, etc will be heavily impacted). The entire economy will operate with significantly fewer workers, and finding employment will be exponentially harder than it is now.
We are eventually going to have a serious look our own American brand of single-payer healthcare, retirement, etc, and probably some form of a universal basic income. Because without those things, the masses of people will not be able to feed their families and desperate situations will likely lead to desperate actions and/or significant civil unrest, civil war, etc.
Great post.
As for your last points about technological disruption of jobs, I agree, and though new jobs will appear, with the rapid impact of technological changes there's an increasing chance that the disruptions will be broad enough to lead to serious social instability. In the past, technological disruptions weren't as broad, or frequent.
Combined with the "Breaking Faith" article referenced by LA, it's pretty clear a wide swath of Americans are losing faith in America, itself. Are churches the victims of economic turbulence for common people? (This article is excellent, but has so many points and contra indicative points it deserves a lot more analysis.)
Today I told my son about our ancestor who was a delegate to the Utah State Constitutional Convention, and was also the grand master of the Masonic Temple in SLC. Before TV came along, people belonged to fraternal organizations to pass the time, including all the various Masons offshoots, the Moose lodge, Elk lodge, etc. Now we have youth sports to bring us together (and adult sports) but they don't promote explicit cultural values like the fraternal organizations did, ...and like religions have done.
The Breaking Faith article accurately describes how people under economic distress retreat into tribalism, which is reflected and amplified at the national level in our politics. If the rise of the Nones in our religiosity is replaced by following Hannity and Rachel Maddow in the political space, we're missing common ingredients we really need to keep to be a viable nation.
The Amazon free-lancer I saw yesterday was driving an Audi A8, an older gentleman with his car stuffed with packages. Interesting...
Hunch - if the USPS is losing money on the Amazon deliveries, it's probably due to employee benefits, like health insurance.
The Trump tweet feels like an instance of him finding out they're losing money on Amazon deliveries, prompting him to take on Bezos in a twitter attack. (Certainly USPS brass know if they raise rates, they'll lose business.)
My sense is the Amazon delivery landscape is pretty fluid - I see fewer UPS and FedEx deliveries than I used to, and now see USPS Amazon deliveries blended in with the regular mail run, along with the free-lancers.
The same-day delivery capability Diehard references, along with the Whole Foods grocery side of Amazon, will do further damage to regular retail... but it may also cut down on air pollution along the Wasatch Front, as fewer people start cold cars to drive 1-4 miles to the store, where the delivery vehicles have warm engines operating efficiently and polluting less.
UPS just sent a record for packages delivered during the holiday season.
One of the big changes is UPS and FedEx have their ‘hybrid’ model, they move the package, but deliver it to the post office for final delivery
Reality is usps isn’t losing money on package deliveries. It’s the only area they make money, they just aren’t making as much money as they could be (and some think should be).
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Extremely interesting piece by lefty pundit Peter Beinart:
Breaking Faith
The culture war over religious morality has faded; in its place is something much worse.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...utm_source=twb
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
It’s going to be an interesting 2018.
Partisans, Wielding Money, Begin Seeking to Exploit Harassment Claims
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/3....co/im1iT36tYS
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
What Bannon is saying is the Fusion GPS group uncovered deep money laundering going back decades and amounting well into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and fully involving the Trump and Kushner families, and that the ties run deep into Russian oligarchy/mafia. Much of this money was frozen internationally through the Magnitsky Act, named for the Russian billionaire who was (allegedly) murdered by the Putin regime after he tried to drop a dime on international money laundering.
Bannon is a despicable character but he is a well educated man and a former Naval officer. He has to know well enough (from being in the room during that meeting at Trump Tower) that Russians sought influence to 1) end US sanctions on Russia over Crimea (to free up the multi-trillion dollar Exxon/Rosneft pipeline project), and to end the Magnitsky Act (Russia banned the foreign adoption of orphans in retaliation for the Act, hence the reason for Don Jr wanting to discuss 'adoptions'). Don't forget, one of the items listed in the Steele Dossier/Fusion GPS research was the apparent transfer of approx 15% of Rosneft (nationalised Russian oil company) to private banks in the Cayman Islands roughly around the same time.
So this whole thing may have begun as an investigation into Russian influence in the election, but it stumbled into an enormous scheme. The Panama Papers and Paradise Papers leaks will all play into this. And Mueller already has the Deutchebank and other foreign bank records showing the money trails.
If we are lucky, very many people will go to prison over this entire mess. I just hope the dam breaks before the Mad Bomber in the White House taunts an equally mad man in North Korea to do something very stupid and we a end up killing tens of millions of people.
“...Bannon serves his own ambition when he offers up material with which to take down Trump. That should be a reason to mistrust him, but if you hate Trump and want him destroyed, you welcome Bannon, the man you once loathed. Should liberals allow their anti-Trump passion to speed Bannon along? Maybe they think that Bannon is so ugly and ridiculous and obviously evil that he could never get very far if he decides to run for President, but it’s that kind of thinking that let Trump get so much traction that he could not be stopped.”
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2018/01...olffs.html?m=1
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
Its not binary; you can loathe Trump and Bannon at the same time. Trump made this Faustian bargain in hiring and listening to Bannon, picked his poison, lay with dogs, has chickens coming home to roost, among many metaphors.
Last edited by concerned; 01-04-2018 at 07:38 AM.
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