“Technically, the FedGov ‘shut down’ for about an hour on Saturday morning. That’s because the Senate did not pass the ‘continuing resolution’ spending bill until well after midnight, the magic ‘deadline’ for the latest budget (spending) deal. Did your heart go pitty-patter during that 60 or 70 minutes? Did the stock market crash? Did the bank call in all your federally-insured loans or seize all your federally-insured deposits? Did China, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Mexico and Canada launch a massive invasion of the States?” (12/21/24)
“On December 19 thousands of Amazon workers organizing with the Teamsters launched a cascade of unfair practice strikes from coast to coast at the logistics giant. At the picket line in Queens, New York, police arrested and released Anthony Rosario, a Teamsters organizer, and Jogernsyn Cardenas, one of the striking workers, and then threatened mass arrests before breaking the line in two to allow vans through. Six other facilities in California, Illinois and Georgia are also on strike and the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, N.Y. will soon follow suit. The Teamsters are striking Amazon because the company refuses to recognize the unions at its delivery stations and fulfillment center and bargain with its workers. The union has argued that under the new joint-employer standard the delivery drivers are also legally employees of Amazon, which Amazon disputes.” (12/19/24)
“The states are ‘duty bound to interpose.’ That’s how James Madison put it in his Virginia Resolutions, passed on Dec 21 and 24, 1798, in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. His resolutions answer a timeless question: What should be done when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds? Today, that’s 24/7/365 – so it might be the most important question we face. For Madison, there were six essential principles that make up his plan to stop federal tyranny – without waiting on the federal government to magically do what it almost never does – limit its own power.” (12/21/24)
“On Thursday, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting President-elect Donald Trump and others for alleged 2020 ‘election interference’. The Court held that Willis suffered from a conflict of interest because she hired her paramour, Nathan Wade, as a special counsel to investigate Trump. Basic legal ethics and common sense dictate that both Wade, who resigned last March, and Willis had to go. The appellate court did not dismiss the indictment, stating that the record did not support imposing such an ‘extreme sanction.’ The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia will now assign the case to a different prosecutor who will decide whether to continue, narrow, or drop the flawed RICO case.” [editor’s note: Odd how John Yoo talks so much about “basic legal ethics” after his pro-torture memo dispensing with legal ethics altogether – TLK] (12/21/24)
“When Bluesky launched, I hoped that it would succeed. But the platform has quickly shown that it is hard for any social network to deliver on its promise of being the place for a kinder or gentler discourse. At its best, Bluesky has become a giant progressive echo chamber, with Blue MAGA accounts freely sharing ‘misinformation’ such as the notion that the vote count in the 2024 election was fraudulent because millions of Democratic votes inexplicably went missing. At its worst, it openly revels in violence — so long as that violence can make a claim, however tenuous, to defend or avenge righteous victims.” (12/20/24)
“More than 15 years after the ‘kids for cash’ scandal shocked the nation, it’s back, stirring not just public incredulity but, for some, soul-slicing memories of hell on Earth. This is thanks to U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to grant clemency to Michel Conahan, one of two juvenile-court judges in Luzerne County. Pennsylvania, convicted of accepting cash from private detention centers (as much as $2.8 million over a period of about six years) in exchange for sending them children (my God, as young as eight years-old) convicted of petty offenses, such as fighting, shoplifting, underage drinking, to serve prolonged sentences in prison. Conahan, along with Mark Ciavarella, had collected cash for sending more than 2,300 children to prison. Many of them were scarred for life by this experience. Some committed suicide.” (12/21/24)
“We lack the tools to critically assess and interrogate our social institutions and our ways of thinking about and interacting with them. That is among the core claims of a new book by Michael J. Thompson, a professor of political theory at William Paterson University and a practicing psychoanalyst. In The Descent of the Dialectic, published earlier this year, Thompson argues that in our age of all-penetrating relativism and the ‘drastic decline of critical thought in Western culture,’ we must attempt to put an objective ethics grounded in critical theory back on firm footing.” (12/20/24)
“Of course, if docks are automated, many longshore-people will be laid off, and they are willing to hold all of us hostage to prevent that from happening. An added bonus to automation is that dockworkers will no longer be able to do so – strikes lasting just a couple of days can cost us billions. The October strike was estimated to cost the economy about $5 billion per day. Trade that goes through ports is simply too important to our economy to allow a few people to dictate a disruption.” (12/20/24)
“Some things haven’t changed since 1883. In that year Yale University professor William Graham Sumner, the anti-imperialist laissez-faire liberal and pioneer of American sociology, noticed that ‘we are told every day that great social problems stand before us and demand a solution, and we are assailed by oracles, threats, and warnings in reference to those problems.’ Then, as now, self-styled progressives announced that the sky would fall unless the problem that had most recently caught their fancy was addressed once by the government. Adam Smith’s observation that ‘there is a great deal of ruin in a nation’ was too complacent for these world-savers.” (12/20/24)
“If one wants to discuss the prospect of a new director unleashing the FBI on enemies, shouldn’t he grapple with the reality of years of bureau leadership unleashing the FBI on enemies? During the Trump years, FBI directors and other top law enforcement and intelligence officials did the following: 1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates. 2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers. 3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering. 4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser. 5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States. 6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research. 7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.” (12/21/24)
