Have you ever looked at Ketanji Brown Jackson's work history?
"She spent a year in private practice at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin...Jackson returned to private legal practice at the law firm of Goodwin Procter from 2000 to 2002, then under Kenneth Feinberg at the law firm now called Feinberg & Rozen LLP from 2002 to 2003...."
Advanced degree my eye! I’m pretty sure a 10 yr old can define it and supply images documenting the exact biological differences. Her refusal to do so confirms that (1) she knows her view is shared by only a tiny fraction of the population and (2) that she believes the source of the law is whatever she “feels” the result should be.
It is illuminating, and it doesn't take long to read the bios of all your state's senators, or all the people who've represented your district in the House.
I have to say this is some of the best writing I've seen: "Her life is this: she shows up once the pie is baked and tells you how she thinks it should be divided. She doesn’t bake pie."
A prerequisite for every single politician at every level should be they worked at McDonald's, Walmart, fast food or other restaurant, or some other type of service industry job.
I worked some SHIT jobs as a young man, and I'm glad. I chopped lettuce for the Sizzler salad bar for $3.35 an hour in the 1980s. Good preparation for life.
We must be close to the same age. I remember $3.35 an hour minimum wage. Then at 17 years old they made me "Night Drive Thru Manager", put me in charge of two 16 year olds, and gave me a 50¢ an hour raise. And boy did they want a lot more from me for that 50¢. Fun times.
I worked at a pet store. Started at 15 so minimum wage was even less, IIRC. Cleaned out hamster and gerbil and rat cages (those wood shavings soaked with rodent pee and poop were delightful), trying not to get bitten by the inhabitants, and scraped algae off fish tanks and had to remember which fish could coexist in the same tank and which would eat each other. And had to pull out the sick fish before they infected the others and kill them “humanely” -- no flushing allowed, we would put them in plastic bags and whack them against the counter in the back room. Good times!
Sizzler! Now that’s a throwback. But weren’t the go go 80s only 20 years ago? Hold on a moment, being told they were 40 years ago and that I am old AF.
Your analysis is missing childlessness. Most of the western leadership is childless; for them, the future is a theoretical construct in which they have nothing invested; they feel free to implement whatever policy they want or feel will have an outcome that will raise their social status among their peers.
No childless person should be anywhere near the levers of power, including the voting booth.
Yes, and how could I have missed it? I think about that exact thing all the time, in a state where our highest-profile state legislator is a childless 53 year-old man who talks constantly about child sex.
I remember Wiener from when he was an arrogant, elitist & moronic SF Supervisor. If you were to package excrement in a skin suit, you’d have Scott Wiener.
IMHO, something important took place with McCarthy's ouster: Gaetz held a swamp creature/uniparty member accountable.
The Uniparty and the media acolytes are already saying (repeating) nasty things about Gaetz, but I truly believe he believes the same thing David Schweizer believes: That government should be accountable, particularly in regard to spending. Gaetz is trying to change the appropriation process to single subject appropriations bills, meaning you can only pay for one thing / department in a bill. Which will allow everyone to examine what it costs and where it could be trimmed, or if it should even be bought in the first place.
McCarthy was willing to continue status quo to fund the government, which translates to maximum spending and maximum pork. He promised Gaetz and the other holdouts he wouldn't do it.
Mr. McCarthy, say hello to the check you wrote 9 months ago: It bounced and you're being held accountable.
They need to ban the use of the phrase "and for other purposes" from all bills. It's used to sneak in all kinds of unrelated shit that would never pass on its own.
What you say is true. But elected officials have a responsibility to govern, and it’s unclear how the Republicans will govern if splinter groups run off to the Democrats to sack the Speaker whenever a group doesn’t get its way. Anyone who thinks this stunt helps Republicans’ image with former Biden voters is nuts.
Look, “Dobbs” prevented the Republicans from having a governable majority. If the motivation for the vacancy motion was truly about spending, then the 8 Congressmen should have picked a different front man than Gaetz with his recurring ethics baggage.
The United States is going to need to borrow $2 trillion dollars in it's next budget. It's clear to anyone with a working brain and any capacity for understanding numbers: This cannot continue.
If the correction process is messy, so be it. Better politically messy now than violent in the streets later. Worrying about the Republican brand is like worrying about waxing your car in the driveway, when the transmission is busted.
But it will, until an outside force stops it. Schweikert nailed it – Politicians looking to their next re-election are psychologically unable to acknowledge a tough reality.
My own thought (shocking even me that I would suggest it) is to revisit HRC’s 1990s healthcare analysis to see what factors are driving U.S. healthcare costs and see which ones can be moderated by law changes, e.g., defensive medicine.
It’s obvious that the amount spent of healthcare will be reduced – either by reform, or by literally running out of money.
It’s ironic that he seeds of Medicare’s destruction were sowed by its very success in extending seniors’ life spans by 10+ yrs.
I believe you mean alleged ethics baggage. The man -- and his family -- was attacked by a huckster threatening to extort him with false claims. This was adjudicated in a court but was played down by the "media" when truth came to light.
I guess the job of trashing Gaetz's reputation by making false claims really worked with some people.
It is more than noteworthy that after ending the Ethics inquiry, it was resumed quietly earlier this year. Gaetz has had a hard-on for McCarthy ever since. BTW, your stmt that the claims are “alleged” is 100% correct, but it also applies to your claim that they’re false.
The extortionist was arrested. If he had actual blackmail material on Matt Gaetz, that material would have been front-page news in every rag in the country.
I’m a former journalist, and I've seen zero evidence to justify another ethics probe of Matt Gaetz.
Here’s a Florida newspaper report that summarizes the state of play. The $25M bribe accusation has been dealt with by arresting the accuser (as you said), but the July 2023 allegations summarized in the article are different and subsequent to the false bribe accusation.
To comment on the article, I like to say that reality has a nasty way of injecting itself into the conversation. The idiots can play pretend all they want -- and they've been able to because our system was so robust. But now the cracks are appearing, and the idiots response is to swing the giant sledgehammer of force EVEN HARDER, causing more cracks to appear....and guess what they want to do in response?
Pierre Poilievre the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, is also a career politican, but he is our last hope of getting rid of Trudeau who has been dismantling everything in this country that proud Canadians like me love. As you well know Chris, Trudeau is a disaster and pretty much a disgusting human being. But I have to put my hopes in Poilievre because he is the only one in the last 8 years that can possibly beat Trudeau. Erin O'Toole the last Tory leader, had a background as a lawyer, and had been a members of the military, the airforce where he served as an officer. He was a total flop, and was forced to resign in the middle of the trucker convoy because he couldn't form a recognizable position on where his party stood regarding the truckers. He had also flip flopped on many of his policie as leaders moving closer and closer to Liberal policies. So, I don't know, I guess just hold your nose and vote.
I am too, but it has very much to do with our electoral system which gives the lion's share of the seats in parliament to Ontario and Quebec, which have huge number of Liberal voters, regardless of who is leading them. The Conservative won the popular vote in the last two elections, meaning more Canadians voted for Conservatives than the Liberals. It is extremely frustrating to those of us like me, saw through Trudeau from the beginning and knew what a disaster he would be. I knew a few friends who voted for him and now regret it and just shrug my shoulders and say I saw through the phony sob right away, don't know why you didn't.
Yes they are because they haven't kept up with population growth in the western provinces. BC and Alberta for instance have seen substantial increases in their populations but their seat allocation hasn't changed. Quebec, regardless of population is allotted 25% of the seats. period.
Not really, if there was Alberta and BC would have more seats to reflect their populatio growth and that hasn't happened. Just by way of example the province of Prince Edward Island which has a total population of 160,000 has four seats that's one MP for per 40,000 people. Alberta has a population of close to 5 million, and has 34 seats -- that's one MP per 147,000 people. And PEI votes Liberal pretty consistently, while Alberta votes mostly Conservative.
Why would NDP remove their support and force an election that would cause both Lib and NDP MPs to lose their seats earlier than necessary? They are not hot prospects for other fields of employment. “. You get to keep the best job you will ever have for nearly two more years or lose it now”
It is not mysterious how Trudeau holds on to the PM position
This is why you should stock up on useful things like food, safety tools, spare parts to machinery, a stock of OTCs, cash, precious metals etc. Begin with the stuff, until you have no more space to store the stuff. Then move on to the other.
Yes – I shoot the interloper at 300 meters, and the conversation never takes place. Currently, the Fed govt spends 69% of the budget on SS, Medicare & Medicaid. The balloon will go up when there are fewer bidders at Treasury bond auctions than there are offerings. When these programs are abruptly cut based on insufficient govt cash on hand, there are going to be a shitload of ppl wandering the land looking for “stuff.” Thus 300 meters is a good safe margin.
Not letting it be known that you have stuff, or what stuff you have, also helps. Don't post your brags on facebook. It's not just the thugs you have to watch out for, it's also the family members and hey-remember-me old friends who are just going through some hard times and could really use your help, maaaan. And the other ones who are going to emotionally blackmail you for saying no, and so on and so on. Best way to keep it safe and keep yourself safe is to be invisible. If they know enough to know you're armed and ready to defend what you've got they already know too much.
I believe the illegals flooding this country will be those people, not just in taxpayers' money to take care of them, but govt will recruit them to attack.
So the "math" can't be waved around, like it's, what the word I'm looking for here?
Like it's "The Science!"
Government functions as the social nervous system while money and banking are blood and the circulation system. With public government and private banking, the banks rule. These people are flunkies, whose main job is to run up the public debt the banks need to grow metastatically. "The real money is in bonds."
What they do with that money isn't important, just so it's wasted and the debt can't be repaid.
When the banks do it to countries, it's called, "disaster capitalism." When it's done to the poor and the naive, it's called, "predatory lending." Wait until Blackrock owns I-70 and the chip, factory installed in your car, is debited.
So they are off playing cowboys and indians on the other side of the planet, while the country falls apart.
Consider Russia and China basically had to go back to private government, with Putin and Xi as respective CEO's, specifically to control their oligarchs. That's why our oligarchs, their political prostitutes and media hacks hate them so much.
Decades ago my grandpa told me something relevant to this discussion. He said, "If you want a bigger piece of the pie, get off your ass and bake more pies!"
So, what was Barak Obama before being elected to the Senate? The only real difference was he was technically Elected. The bar has slowly but inexorably been lowered...
What's more, much of our national debt goes to ngo's that provide sinecures to these people where they think up ruinous solutions to the important problems of the day like climate change and systemic racism.
“...she shows up once the pie is baked and tells you how she thinks it should be divided. She doesn’t bake pie.”
This is a great analogy.
Not only that, but she surely believes she deserves a piece of that pie for advising as to how to most equitably divide it.
As a professional recruiter, the only thing that makes me more nauseous than reading this resume is that:
1) it "succeeds"
2) our universities are filled with professors and eager students who look to her career path as paragon.
Have you ever looked at Ketanji Brown Jackson's work history?
"She spent a year in private practice at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin...Jackson returned to private legal practice at the law firm of Goodwin Procter from 2000 to 2002, then under Kenneth Feinberg at the law firm now called Feinberg & Rozen LLP from 2002 to 2003...."
To the Supreme Court.
Very interesting. I only knew she didn't have an advanced degree in biology.
Advanced degree my eye! I’m pretty sure a 10 yr old can define it and supply images documenting the exact biological differences. Her refusal to do so confirms that (1) she knows her view is shared by only a tiny fraction of the population and (2) that she believes the source of the law is whatever she “feels” the result should be.
^This!!^
Trivia question:
Who is the only president to have ever been granted a patent?
Hint: generally considered a pretty good Republican.
That can’t possibly be true when they’re “living their truth.”
You can read short bios of everyone who's ever been in Congress at https://bioguide.congress.gov/
It is illuminating, and it doesn't take long to read the bios of all your state's senators, or all the people who've represented your district in the House.
I have to say this is some of the best writing I've seen: "Her life is this: she shows up once the pie is baked and tells you how she thinks it should be divided. She doesn’t bake pie."
"BAKE A PIE, BEEYOTCH!"
It reminds me of all of these fart-sniffers who flock to non-profits. Why don't they want to contribute to the kitty?
They go to Washington to do good and end up doing well.
They tell their constituents 'doing good' is why they want, need to go. Career foundation lie Number One.
Chris Bray, the adoring public clamors for your appearance at a meetup! What say you!??!?!
Long overdue. Has been a hard year, but it's time.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
You have an international readership. World tour?
Good plan! I'll fuel up the jet.
Here, here
Camping trip fine.
Wherever Chris is, I imagine? I think CA somewhere.
A prerequisite for every single politician at every level should be they worked at McDonald's, Walmart, fast food or other restaurant, or some other type of service industry job.
I worked some SHIT jobs as a young man, and I'm glad. I chopped lettuce for the Sizzler salad bar for $3.35 an hour in the 1980s. Good preparation for life.
We must be close to the same age. I remember $3.35 an hour minimum wage. Then at 17 years old they made me "Night Drive Thru Manager", put me in charge of two 16 year olds, and gave me a 50¢ an hour raise. And boy did they want a lot more from me for that 50¢. Fun times.
I worked at a pet store. Started at 15 so minimum wage was even less, IIRC. Cleaned out hamster and gerbil and rat cages (those wood shavings soaked with rodent pee and poop were delightful), trying not to get bitten by the inhabitants, and scraped algae off fish tanks and had to remember which fish could coexist in the same tank and which would eat each other. And had to pull out the sick fish before they infected the others and kill them “humanely” -- no flushing allowed, we would put them in plastic bags and whack them against the counter in the back room. Good times!
Sizzler! Now that’s a throwback. But weren’t the go go 80s only 20 years ago? Hold on a moment, being told they were 40 years ago and that I am old AF.
Me too
Salad Bar was one of my first jobs too. Victoria Station.
Busted my young fanny doing that.
Or swung a hammer
Or military service.
Your analysis is missing childlessness. Most of the western leadership is childless; for them, the future is a theoretical construct in which they have nothing invested; they feel free to implement whatever policy they want or feel will have an outcome that will raise their social status among their peers.
No childless person should be anywhere near the levers of power, including the voting booth.
Yes, and how could I have missed it? I think about that exact thing all the time, in a state where our highest-profile state legislator is a childless 53 year-old man who talks constantly about child sex.
https://twitter.com/scott_wiener/status/1484560885364396036
I remember Wiener from when he was an arrogant, elitist & moronic SF Supervisor. If you were to package excrement in a skin suit, you’d have Scott Wiener.
OMG The Childless Leader meme? 2021 called, they want their BS back,
Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, the execrable Tony Blair - fathers all.
IMHO, something important took place with McCarthy's ouster: Gaetz held a swamp creature/uniparty member accountable.
The Uniparty and the media acolytes are already saying (repeating) nasty things about Gaetz, but I truly believe he believes the same thing David Schweizer believes: That government should be accountable, particularly in regard to spending. Gaetz is trying to change the appropriation process to single subject appropriations bills, meaning you can only pay for one thing / department in a bill. Which will allow everyone to examine what it costs and where it could be trimmed, or if it should even be bought in the first place.
McCarthy was willing to continue status quo to fund the government, which translates to maximum spending and maximum pork. He promised Gaetz and the other holdouts he wouldn't do it.
Mr. McCarthy, say hello to the check you wrote 9 months ago: It bounced and you're being held accountable.
They need to ban the use of the phrase "and for other purposes" from all bills. It's used to sneak in all kinds of unrelated shit that would never pass on its own.
What you say is true. But elected officials have a responsibility to govern, and it’s unclear how the Republicans will govern if splinter groups run off to the Democrats to sack the Speaker whenever a group doesn’t get its way. Anyone who thinks this stunt helps Republicans’ image with former Biden voters is nuts.
Look, “Dobbs” prevented the Republicans from having a governable majority. If the motivation for the vacancy motion was truly about spending, then the 8 Congressmen should have picked a different front man than Gaetz with his recurring ethics baggage.
The United States is going to need to borrow $2 trillion dollars in it's next budget. It's clear to anyone with a working brain and any capacity for understanding numbers: This cannot continue.
If the correction process is messy, so be it. Better politically messy now than violent in the streets later. Worrying about the Republican brand is like worrying about waxing your car in the driveway, when the transmission is busted.
“This cannot continue.”
But it will, until an outside force stops it. Schweikert nailed it – Politicians looking to their next re-election are psychologically unable to acknowledge a tough reality.
My own thought (shocking even me that I would suggest it) is to revisit HRC’s 1990s healthcare analysis to see what factors are driving U.S. healthcare costs and see which ones can be moderated by law changes, e.g., defensive medicine.
It’s obvious that the amount spent of healthcare will be reduced – either by reform, or by literally running out of money.
It’s ironic that he seeds of Medicare’s destruction were sowed by its very success in extending seniors’ life spans by 10+ yrs.
I believe you mean alleged ethics baggage. The man -- and his family -- was attacked by a huckster threatening to extort him with false claims. This was adjudicated in a court but was played down by the "media" when truth came to light.
I guess the job of trashing Gaetz's reputation by making false claims really worked with some people.
It is more than noteworthy that after ending the Ethics inquiry, it was resumed quietly earlier this year. Gaetz has had a hard-on for McCarthy ever since. BTW, your stmt that the claims are “alleged” is 100% correct, but it also applies to your claim that they’re false.
The extortionist was arrested. If he had actual blackmail material on Matt Gaetz, that material would have been front-page news in every rag in the country.
I’m a former journalist, and I've seen zero evidence to justify another ethics probe of Matt Gaetz.
If you have evidence, please share.
Here’s a Florida newspaper report that summarizes the state of play. The $25M bribe accusation has been dealt with by arresting the accuser (as you said), but the July 2023 allegations summarized in the article are different and subsequent to the false bribe accusation.
https://www.pnj.com/story/news/politics/2023/10/02/matt-gaetz-controversies-could-lead-to-expulsion-by-house-gop-members/71032948007/
There is absolutely nothing in that story that shows Gaetz has committed any of the misdeeds you obviously believe.
I’m a former journalist; that story is written as insinuations galore. No facts.
Let's just agree to disagree, as neither of us will change the other's mind.
Have a great day.
Agree
To comment on the article, I like to say that reality has a nasty way of injecting itself into the conversation. The idiots can play pretend all they want -- and they've been able to because our system was so robust. But now the cracks are appearing, and the idiots response is to swing the giant sledgehammer of force EVEN HARDER, causing more cracks to appear....and guess what they want to do in response?
Ayn Rand said you can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
I misspelled Ayn.
You can click on the three dots to the right and edit your original comment, FYI
Thanks
Just guessing, but do you think that maybe *they* are frantically looking for a bigger hammer?
MISINFORMATION! GUARDS!
Man that Rep. David Schweikert video is informative and terrifying. His presentation was well done
I've always wondered why we are borrowing money from China to give to other countries.
Pierre Poilievre the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, is also a career politican, but he is our last hope of getting rid of Trudeau who has been dismantling everything in this country that proud Canadians like me love. As you well know Chris, Trudeau is a disaster and pretty much a disgusting human being. But I have to put my hopes in Poilievre because he is the only one in the last 8 years that can possibly beat Trudeau. Erin O'Toole the last Tory leader, had a background as a lawyer, and had been a members of the military, the airforce where he served as an officer. He was a total flop, and was forced to resign in the middle of the trucker convoy because he couldn't form a recognizable position on where his party stood regarding the truckers. He had also flip flopped on many of his policie as leaders moving closer and closer to Liberal policies. So, I don't know, I guess just hold your nose and vote.
I am, at this point, just stunned that Trudeau is still holding on. He's such a repellent scumbag.
I am too, but it has very much to do with our electoral system which gives the lion's share of the seats in parliament to Ontario and Quebec, which have huge number of Liberal voters, regardless of who is leading them. The Conservative won the popular vote in the last two elections, meaning more Canadians voted for Conservatives than the Liberals. It is extremely frustrating to those of us like me, saw through Trudeau from the beginning and knew what a disaster he would be. I knew a few friends who voted for him and now regret it and just shrug my shoulders and say I saw through the phony sob right away, don't know why you didn't.
Hard times and impossible decisions are getting closer in both Canada and the US.
Are the number of seats allocated to ON & QC disproportionate to their share of the national population?
Yes they are because they haven't kept up with population growth in the western provinces. BC and Alberta for instance have seen substantial increases in their populations but their seat allocation hasn't changed. Quebec, regardless of population is allotted 25% of the seats. period.
Aside from QC, is there a periodic reapportionment of seats, e.g., in the U.S. it’s every 10 yrs for the lower House.
Not really, if there was Alberta and BC would have more seats to reflect their populatio growth and that hasn't happened. Just by way of example the province of Prince Edward Island which has a total population of 160,000 has four seats that's one MP for per 40,000 people. Alberta has a population of close to 5 million, and has 34 seats -- that's one MP per 147,000 people. And PEI votes Liberal pretty consistently, while Alberta votes mostly Conservative.
Why would NDP remove their support and force an election that would cause both Lib and NDP MPs to lose their seats earlier than necessary? They are not hot prospects for other fields of employment. “. You get to keep the best job you will ever have for nearly two more years or lose it now”
It is not mysterious how Trudeau holds on to the PM position
This is why you should stock up on useful things like food, safety tools, spare parts to machinery, a stock of OTCs, cash, precious metals etc. Begin with the stuff, until you have no more space to store the stuff. Then move on to the other.
You need guns and other people because eventually someone is going to come to take all of your stuff.
"I'll trade one bullet for all your stuff."
"That's a terrible deal, why would I agree to that?"
"I don't think you understand.........."
Where I live, everyone is assumed to be armed. Hopefully they won't FAFO.
Lol
There are options to shooting each other. Can you guess who they are?
Yes – I shoot the interloper at 300 meters, and the conversation never takes place. Currently, the Fed govt spends 69% of the budget on SS, Medicare & Medicaid. The balloon will go up when there are fewer bidders at Treasury bond auctions than there are offerings. When these programs are abruptly cut based on insufficient govt cash on hand, there are going to be a shitload of ppl wandering the land looking for “stuff.” Thus 300 meters is a good safe margin.
Not letting it be known that you have stuff, or what stuff you have, also helps. Don't post your brags on facebook. It's not just the thugs you have to watch out for, it's also the family members and hey-remember-me old friends who are just going through some hard times and could really use your help, maaaan. And the other ones who are going to emotionally blackmail you for saying no, and so on and so on. Best way to keep it safe and keep yourself safe is to be invisible. If they know enough to know you're armed and ready to defend what you've got they already know too much.
I believe the illegals flooding this country will be those people, not just in taxpayers' money to take care of them, but govt will recruit them to attack.
Well, what else do they have to do? Idle hands and all that.
The obvious, though unstated, corollary is that you keep your mouth shut about your stuff.
"Safety tools." Regarding other people, you either got 'em or you don't.
Pb as precious as Au and Ag!
And guns and ammo.
"Safety tools"
So the "math" can't be waved around, like it's, what the word I'm looking for here?
Like it's "The Science!"
Government functions as the social nervous system while money and banking are blood and the circulation system. With public government and private banking, the banks rule. These people are flunkies, whose main job is to run up the public debt the banks need to grow metastatically. "The real money is in bonds."
What they do with that money isn't important, just so it's wasted and the debt can't be repaid.
When the banks do it to countries, it's called, "disaster capitalism." When it's done to the poor and the naive, it's called, "predatory lending." Wait until Blackrock owns I-70 and the chip, factory installed in your car, is debited.
So they are off playing cowboys and indians on the other side of the planet, while the country falls apart.
Consider Russia and China basically had to go back to private government, with Putin and Xi as respective CEO's, specifically to control their oligarchs. That's why our oligarchs, their political prostitutes and media hacks hate them so much.
Decades ago my grandpa told me something relevant to this discussion. He said, "If you want a bigger piece of the pie, get off your ass and bake more pies!"
So, what was Barak Obama before being elected to the Senate? The only real difference was he was technically Elected. The bar has slowly but inexorably been lowered...
He was a homosexual Marxist activist...apparently.
What's more, much of our national debt goes to ngo's that provide sinecures to these people where they think up ruinous solutions to the important problems of the day like climate change and systemic racism.
BINGO