Governor DeSantis is putting in place a mechanism to track menstrual cycles.
Help him out, ladies.
Please send all your used "sanitary products" to:
Gov Ron DeSantis
700 N Adams St
Tallahassee FL 32303
Mar 10, 2023
Today's Tweet
It's automatically a good day when I can watch Matt Taibbi take it in the shorts on national TV.
The evidence that foreign actors interfered in the 2016 election is overwhelming, yet today's GOP witnesses neither accepted that fact nor believe we should prevent it in the future.
— Rep. Dan Goldman (@RepDanGoldman) March 9, 2023
It's shocking anyone would think defending democracy isn't a legitimate law enforcement mission. pic.twitter.com/9xWwdHzZbk
Today's Crooked Politician
But it seems like it's always a Republican, because something like 95% of the time, it's a Republican.
So yeah - for all practical purposes, it's always a fucking Republican.
Former Ohio House speaker convicted in $60 million bribery scheme
Former state House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges were convicted Thursday in a $60 million bribery scheme that federal prosecutors have called the largest corruption case in state history.
A jury in Cincinnati found the two guilty of conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise involving bribery and money laundering, after about 9.5 half hours of deliberations over two days.
U.S. Attorney Kenneth Parker said the government's prosecution team showed that "Householder sold the Statehouse, and thus he ultimately betrayed the people of the great state of Ohio he was elected to serve." He called Borges "a willing co-conspirator."
"Through its verdict today, the jury reaffirmed that the illegal acts committed by both men will not be tolerated and that they should be held accountable," Parker said.
Attorneys for Householder and Borges did not immediately respond to messages left by The Associated Press on Thursday.
Prosecutors alleged that Householder orchestrated a scheme secretly funded by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to secure his power in the Legislature, elect his allies — and then to pass and defend a $1 billion nuclear power plant bailout benefiting the electric utility. They alleged that Borges, then a lobbyist, sought to bribe an operative for inside information on the referendum to overturn the bailout.
Householder, 63, had been one of Ohio's most powerful politicians — and twice elected speaker — until the Republican-controlled House ousted him after his indictment from his leadership post, and then in a bipartisan vote, and with Householder vigorously objecting, from the chamber. It was the first such expulsion in 150 years.
He took the stand in his own defense, contradicting FBI testimony and denying that he attended swanky Washington dinners where prosecutors allege he and executives of FirstEnergy hatched the elaborate scheme in 2017.
Borges, 50, did not testify at trial but has insisted that he's innocent. Both men face up to 20 years in prison.
The verdict comes two-and-a-half years after Householder, Borges and three others were arrested. Over the past seven weeks, jurors at the trial were presented with firsthand accounts of the alleged scheme, as well as reams of financial documents, emails, texts and wiretap audio.
"... alleged ..." ? - it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt, to the satisfaction of 12 regular everyday people who returned a unanimous verdict. It's not fucking "alleged" anymore.
The prosecution called two of the people arrested — Juan Cespedes and Jeff Longstreth, who pleaded guilty — to testify about political contributions that they said are not ordinary, but bribes intended to secure passage of the bailout bill, known as House Bill 6.
Householder's attorneys described his activities as nothing more than hardball politics.
Jurors also heard taped phone calls in which Householder and another co-defendant, the late Statehouse superlobbyist Neil Clark, plotted a nasty attack ad — and, in expletive-laced fashion, contemplated revenge against lawmakers who had crossed Householder.
Householder testified that he never retaliated against those who voted counter to his wishes or who donated to his rivals.
Under a deal to avoid prosecution, FirstEnergy admitted using a network of dark money groups to fund the scheme and even bribing the state's top utility regulator, Sam Randazzo.
Randazzo resigned as chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio after an FBI search of his home, but he has not been charged and denies wrongdoing.
A Thought
Republicans voting against raising the debt ceiling is the perfectly Trumpian thing to do.
- Commit to the funding
- Let people start planning - or start actual projects
- Renege on the promises and don't follow thru when it's time to settle up
- Pretend it's "the ethical thing to do"
It's a way the GOP can fuck with our heads.
ie: "We fucked up the government so you could see how the government's all fucked up. You need to keep us in power so we can go ahead and tear it all down and start from scratch, because - well, because it's all fucked up, dontcha see?"
GOP backdoor fuckery.
They need to get rid of that stupid rule so politicians can't use it to torpedo everything a year after the fucking budget was passed.
If you put a budget in place, then you've already made the commitment to pay for it when the time comes. It should take extraordinary action to change that budget after the fact.
Which brings it back to:
Trump did not remake the GOP in his own image. He's the perfect reflection of what that party has been morphing into for decades.
Mar 9, 2023
Adapt Improvise Overcome
US man puts phone on drone to send rescue message
When a US motorist got stuck in the snow on a remote road in Oregon, he used sky-high thinking to save himself.
After realising he was without mobile phone reception, he typed a text message to a trusted person showing his exact location, attached the phone to a drone and launched it several hundred feet into the air.
The airborne phone sent his message for help once it found signal.
Rescuers praised the man for making "several smart decisions".
The man, who has not been identified, was in the Willamette National Forest on a road that is not maintained in the winter.
After his vehicle got stuck, he realised there was no cell phone reception - making matters worse "his family was out of the country and nobody knew where he had gone" according to the Lane County Sheriff Search and Rescue.
"Regardless of the circumstances leading to his situation, once stranded this person made several smart decisions," Lane County Sheriff Search and Rescue said in a statement.
First, he stayed in his car.
"Rarely does anyone in Oregon die from exposure waiting in their vehicle to be found and rescued," the statement said.
"But we have unfortunately seen many poor outcomes from those who chose to walk away."
After attaching his phone to a drone, "the increased elevation allowed his phone to connect to a tower" and send his message for help.
His ingenuity allowed for rescue teams to deploy and assist him out of the situation.
While teams were rescuing the man, they also rescued another motorist who had been stranded for several days in the snow.
Officials said they were impressed with the man's creativity - but advised people to heed their warnings during wintertime travel.
They urged people to "always tell a responsible person exactly where you are going, and when you expect to be back".
Additionally, they said most rescue missions they have conducted this winter involved bigger vehicles, whose owners told rescuers they did not think they would get stuck.
The search and rescue team suggested: "Instead of asking yourself whether you think you can get through a section of road, ask yourself 'what will happen if I do get stuck?'"
Climate Change
2022 Tied for Fifth Warmest Year on Record
Earth’s average surface temperature in 2022 tied with 2015 as the fifth warmest on record, according to an analysis by NASA. Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2022 were 0.89 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951–1980), according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern record keeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 1.11°C (2°F) warmer than the late 19th century average.
The map above depicts global temperature anomalies in 2022. It does not show absolute temperatures; instead, it shows how much warmer or cooler each region of Earth was compared to the average from 1951 to 1980. The bar chart below shows 2022 in context with temperature anomalies since 1880. The values represent surface temperatures averaged over the entire globe for the year.
“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling.
Human-driven greenhouse gas emissions have rebounded following a short-lived dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, NASA scientists, as well as international scientists, determined carbon dioxide emissions were the highest on record in 2022. NASA also identified some super-emitters of methane—another powerful greenhouse gas—using the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) instrument that launched to the International Space Station last year.
The Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends—close to four times the global average—according to GISS research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, as well as a separate study.
Communities around the world are experiencing impacts scientists see as connected to the warming atmosphere and ocean. Climate change has intensified rainfall and tropical storms, deepened the severity of droughts, and increased the impact of storm surges. Last year brought torrential monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and a persistent megadrought in the U.S. Southwest. In September, Hurricane Ian became one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes to strike the continental U.S.
NASA’s global temperature analysis is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations, as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys. NASA scientists analyze these measurements to account for uncertainties in the data and to maintain consistent methods for calculating global average surface temperature differences for every year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are consistent with satellite data collected since 2002 by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua satellite and with other estimates.
NASA uses the period from 1951–1980 as a baseline to understand how global temperatures change over time. That baseline includes climate patterns such as La Niña and El Niño, as well as unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.
Many factors can affect the average temperature in any given year. For example, 2022 was one of the warmest on record despite a third consecutive year of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. NASA scientists estimate that La Niña’s cooling influence may have lowered global temperatures slightly (about 0.06°C or 0.11°F) from what the average would have been under more typical ocean conditions.
A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that the global surface temperature for 2022 was the sixth highest since 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901–2000) and methodology. Although rankings for specific years can differ slightly between the records, they are in broad agreement and both reflect ongoing long-term warming.
BTW, today I learned:
for every one of the 8 billion humans on this planet, there are 21,000 pieces of plastic strewn about the environment.
Woke Is As Woke Does, Sir
I dunno what you thought should happen, George - or what you think needs to happen - but when things get as shitty as they are right now, people will rebel.
Ain't nobody happy to hear "leaders" bullying and abusing their neighbors, family, and friends.
And when it seems like everything is outa whack, then we're going to get lots of people trying to rectify the situation in a variety of ways.
60 years ago, using the n-word was common, and "normal", and acceptable. 40 years ago, we started to realize that was a really shitty way to talk.
Likewise with "faggot" and calling somebody "woman" in an attempt to drag them down.
So we began to make changes in the way we think, and talk, and act - because society has to evolve, and society's use of the language has to evolve too.
That doesn't mean you should be afraid to push back and try to make your stand - no matter what an atavistic dumbass fool you make of yourself while you're doing it. (I am quite familiar with this particular aspect)
Just know this: Yes, you get to speak your mind, but you don't get to demand never to suffer the blowback.
Opinion
Sometimes in politics, which currently saturates everything, worse is better. When a political craze based on a bad idea achieves a critical mass, one wants it to be undone by ridiculous excess. Consider the movement to scrub from the English language and the rest of life everything that anyone might consider harmful or otherwise retrograde.
Worse really is better in today’s America (if you will pardon that noun; some at Stanford University will not; read on) as the fever of foolishness denoted by the word “woke” now defies satire. At Stanford, a full-service, broad-spectrum educational institution, an “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” several months ago listed words to avoid lest they make someone feel sad, unsafe, disrespected or something. Problematic words include “American,” which suggests that America (this column enjoys being transgressive) is the most important country in North and South America. The list was quickly drenched by an acid rain of derision, and Stanford distanced itself from itself: The university’s chief information officer said the list was not a mandate. The list warns against using the “culturally appropriative” word “chief” about any “non-indigenous person.”
The University of Southern California’s school of social work banned the word “field” because it connotes slavery. So, Joe DiMaggio did not roam Yankee Stadium’s center field. Heaven forfend. Perhaps centerpasture. DiMaggio was a centerpasturer? An awkward locution, but it appeases the sensitivity police. The Chicago Cubs should henceforth play in Wrigley Meadow.
Such is the New York Times’s astonishment, last week the newspaper treated as front-page news the fact that few people like the term “Latinx.” The Times describes this as “an inclusive, gender-neutral term to describe people of Latino descent.” With “Latinx,” advanced thinkers, probably including hyper-progressive non-Latino readers of the Times, have exhausted the public’s tolerance of linguistic progressivism. Progressives’ bewildering new pronoun protocols ignited the laughter that “Latinx” intensified.
Back at Stanford, more than 75 professors are opposing the university’s snitching apparatus. The “Protected Identity Harm” system enables — actually, by its existence, it encourages — students to anonymously report allegations against other students, from whom they have experienced what the system calls “harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.”
The PIH website breathlessly greets visitors: “If you are on this website, we recognize that you might have experienced something traumatic. Take a sip of water. Take a deep breath.” PIH recently made national news when someone reported the trauma of seeing a student reading Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
The professors urge Stanford to avoid “a formal process that students could construe as some sort of investigation into protected speech, or that effectively requires them to admit their protected expression was problematic. Instead, Stanford can support students who are sensitive to speech without involving the speaker.” Perhaps by gently shipping those who are “sensitive to speech” to a Trappist monastery.
Early in the Cold War, some colleges and universities were pressured to require faculty to sign loyalty oaths pledging they were not members of the Communist Party. Liberals honorably led the fight against such government-enforced orthodoxy. Today, liberals are orthodoxy enforcers at the many schools that require applicants for faculty positions to write their own oaths of loyalty to today’s DEI obsession.
They must express enthusiasm for whatever policies are deemed necessary to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Fortunately, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina recently joined a growing movement to ban requiring DEI statements in hiring and promotion processes, a recoil against aggressive wokeness.
Being dead, Roald Dahl is spared watching woke editors inflict on his children’s books what Meghan Cox Gurdon, writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls “social-justice blandification.” To make them “inclusive,” Dahl’s edited characters are no longer “fat” or “ugly” or anything else that might harm readers. The derisive laughter you hear is from parents who know how unwoke their children are in their enjoyment of vividly, sometimes insultingly, presented fictional characters.
A story is told of a revolutionary socialist who was strolling with a friend when they encountered a beggar. The friend began to hand a few coins to the mendicant, but the revolutionary stopped him, exclaiming: “Don’t delay the revolution!” The socialist thought worse would be better. More social misery would mean more social upheaval. “Arise ye prisoners of starvation” and all that.
In America (take that, Stanford), the worse wokeness becomes, the better. Wokeness is being shrunk by the solvent of the laughter it provokes.
And c'mon, George - what is it about being awake, and aware, and alert, that you're having a problem with?
Fall Down Go Boom
Dear Mitch,
Get well soon. I can't really justify bad-mouthing a guy who's all stove in and laid up. I need you good and healthy so I can shit on your ugly malignant head with a clear conscience.
Your pal,
Mike
Mitch McConnell hospitalized after falling at hotel
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been hospitalized following a fall at a hotel in Washington, his spokesman said late Wednesday.
The 81-year-old senator was attending a private dinner at a local hotel when he tripped, spokesman David Popp said in a statement. “He has been admitted to the hospital where he is receiving treatment,” he added, without providing any further details on his condition.
McConnell, who is serving his seventh six-year term in the Senate, became GOP leader in 2007. He has held the post for longer than any other Republican and for years has been among the most powerful elected officials in Washington.
He previously underwent surgery following a serious fall in August 2019, when he fractured his shoulder after tripping outside his Louisville home. The procedure kept him out of the public eye for weeks as he spent the congressional break recovering at home and undergoing physical therapy.
The senator, who overcame polio as a child, also has a history of heart issues and underwent triple bypass surgery in 2003, just after being promoted to the No. 2 Senate Republican post.
When pictures emerged in 2020 showing his hands bruised and bandaged, he downplayed interest in his health as media hype. As of December, the average age in the Senate was 64.
In November, McConnell was reelected Senate minority leader, overcoming the first challenge to his leadership following a disappointing performance for Republicans in the midterm elections. McConnell easily defeated Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) on a 37-10 vote. The GOP infighting underscored that while McConnell has overwhelming support in his conference, he has lost key allies to retirement.
GOP hopes of capturing the Senate majority in a difficult year for President Biden and Democrats were dashed by ineffective and problematic candidates who had the backing of Donald Trump. McConnell blamed the former president, saying he “proved to be decisive” in the midterms’ outcome, highlighting the ongoing rift between the two men.
Trump is a frequent critic of McConnell, who accused the then-president of provoking the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump repeatedly has mocked McConnell’s wife, former transportation secretary Elaine Chao, and has made racist remarks about her.
This week, McConnell denounced the leadership of Fox News for airing Tucker Carlson’s vision of the assault on the Capitol, holding up a letter from U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger that said Carlson’s show was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions.”
“It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here in the Capitol thinks,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.
The Senate has dealt with the absence of other lawmakers less than three months into the session. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the oldest senator at 89, was recently hospitalized for shingles and is recovering at home. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for clinical depression nearly three weeks ago.
Ukraine
(Looks a bit like David Crosby)
Taras Shevchenko 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861, also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language, though this is different from the language of his poems. He also wrote some works in Russian (nine novellas, a diary, and an autobiography). Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.
He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Shevchenko was convicted in 1847 of explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of an independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was a champion of independence.
Слава Україні
🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦
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