The Progressive Wing

Way to start your day..

I grew up with my parents listening to this one on an early version of FM radio.👏🎼👏

Saw her open the Mandelay Bay Hotel In Vegas years ago 1999-2000. I and Hubster treated ourself to a Vegas NY weekend.👍👏👍 Needless to say, the Divine Miss M delivered. Big-time. She’s barely 5’ tall but she was prancing around in these 5+inch high heel sneakers like no problem. Her backup singers were dressed just like a couple of pot joints. Man, what a show! 🎼👏🎼👏🎼👏

Schumer Has an Opportunity to Pass Anti-Legislation. Why Hasn’t He?

Bipartisan backers of a trio of proposals to rein in the power of Big Tech and stiffen antitrust enforcement have a simple question for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.): What’s the deal?
As this Congress’s final days tick away, Schumer has yet to deliver a promised vote on the legislation, prompting pressure campaigns and pleading with the White House to intervene with the apparently recalcitrant New Yorker, who advocates believe is willing ― or maybe even eager ― to let the clock run out on the legislation.
The legislation, if passed, would be both bipartisan and a direct confrontation of corporate power, a near sure-fire recipe for a political winner and the fulfillment of two of the Biden administration’s stated goals.
Neither Schumer’s office nor the White House responded to emails seeking comment for this article.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who has dedicated much of the past two years to antitrust policy, wrote a book on the topic and chairs the Judiciary subcommittee devoted to it, did not name names when HuffPost asked about the status of the bills last week. But she made it clear corporate influence was blocking them from passage.
“At some point, the people in the building are going to have to decide that they are not giving in to the dominant social media platforms.”
– Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)
“At some point, the people in the building are going to have to decide that they are not giving in to the dominant social media platforms,” she said. “If they’re willing to take the heat from these big companies, then we can get something done.”
Klobuchar then noted how quickly Congress had removed legislation aimed at tech giants compensating the news industry from a recently passed defense bill. “They folded like a cheap suit,” she said. A spokesperson for Klobuchar later clarified that Schumer “had been advocating to get the journalism bill in the NDAA.”
When a reporter asked if that was due to opposition from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, she was blunt: “Of course it was.”
The three antitrust bills that advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, are relatively moderate measures that stop well short of anti-monopolists’ dreams of breaking up the big technology companies.
Klobuchar’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act would bar technology “platforms,” such as Google or Amazon, from giving preferential treatment to their own products. The committee voted to advance her bill, which has the backing of ranking Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, in a 16-6 vote.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s Open App Markets Act would bar companies like Apple that operate digital app stores from restricting the app stores on which app developers can sell their products. The committee voted to advance the Connecticut Democrat’s bill in a 20-2 vote.
And another Klobuchar bill, the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, would increase fees paid to the antitrust enforcement agencies by companies involved in the most expensive mergers. The bill passed the House on a bipartisan vote and advanced out of committee in the Senate by voice vote. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is the only senator to voice opposition to it.
Schumer promised Klobuchar a floor vote on her platform bill. And given the bipartisan majorities in support of Blumenthal’s legislation and hers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, antitrust advocates are confident that there would be the 60 votes needed to pass them.
But antitrust advocates say that Schumer has insisted that they produce a whip count of the 60 votes on their own, which these advocates believe is a transparent stalling tactic. It is very difficult for an outside organization to force a lawmaker to publicly commit to a particular vote on controversial legislation without even knowing whether a floor vote will occur.
“Whipping by a majority leader or a whip in service of an actual floor vote that they know is going to happen is going to carry way more weight than whipping by outside organizations,” said David Segal, a co-founder of Demand Progress, which supports stricter antitrust regulation.
“Chuck Schumer could call a vote on the app store bill and the self-preferencing bill tomorrow with confidence that they would pass,” Segal added. “I have no doubt that he knows that they would pass.”
With their bills in limbo, antitrust advocates have largely focused their ire on Schumer for persistently delaying action.
Over the past year, many possible reasons have been put forward to explain Schumer’s decision to delay. There were the complaints from a small group of vulnerable senators in the summer that a vote on the legislation before the election would only increase Big Tech’s advertising campaigns targeting them. Another group of Democrats raised concerns that the legislation would make content moderation on social platforms difficult. And now Schumer points to the cramped end-of-session Senate schedule as a reason why the bill can’t get its promised floor vote.
“If Schumer wanted this to happen it would have already happened, but it’s not too late, and hopefully he’ll have a change of heart,” a former Senate staffer who works on antitrust issues said.
Antitrust advocates knock these reasons as “pretense,” as the former Senate staffer put it, used to delay consideration until the clock runs out. Worries about content moderation are “concern trolling” regurgitating industry talking points, they said. And advocates note that Schumer has found time for other priorities during the lame-duck period, including offering a vote on a proposal by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to make it easier to get permits for energy projects.
There is a divide among antitrust advocates on how hard to knock Schumer for not giving their bills time on the Senate floor. Some have pointed out that Schumer’s daughters work for Big Tech companies Amazon and Meta, with one registered as a lobbyist, and that he frequently raises money in Silicon Valley from tech industry executives.
Silicon Valley and the Big Four tech companies ― Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook (Meta) and Apple ― play an outsize role in Democratic Party politics. Combined, they represent one of the largest sources of funds raised by Democratic campaigns and party committees. While this heft has waned somewhat with the explosion and decentralization of small-donor fundraising in the past four years, Democratic candidates and party leaders still make the pilgrimage to the Bay Area for big-money fundraising events.
The full extent of tech’s money influence in the Democratic Party can’t be fully known thanks to the continued operation of dark-money groups by party leadership to allow anonymous funding of election campaigns. The Schumer-connected dark-money nonprofit Majority Forward was the biggest donor to Senate Majority PAC, Schumer’s super PAC, in the 2022 election with more than $50 million in donations to it and other affiliated groups. No one knows who is behind these donations, although in the past some donations from other liberal nonprofits, labor unions, corporations and private equity executives have been identified.
Schumer has also elicited some suspicion for his personal ties to the industry. His daughter Allison is a product manager for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and his daughter Jessica is a registered lobbyist for Amazon in New York state.
Big Tech executives specifically targeted him over the spring and summer in their successful efforts to delay a floor vote on the bills. He fielded phone calls from the CEOs of Google and Amazon in June. And in August, Bloomberg reported that Schumer had received $30,000 in donations from top lobbyists for Apple, Amazon and Alphabet after receiving no comparable sums in the two preceding election cycles.
Alleging a conflict of interest, advocates called on Schumer in July to allow a floor vote on the antitrust bills or recuse himself from their consideration. They also called on Schumer to disclose any Big Tech-connected contributions to Majority Forward.
Still other advocates, along with members and staff in Congress who support the bills, aim to put softer pressure on Schumer as they see that they will have to continue to work with him in the future and don’t want to burn bridges. Instead, they point to the massive lobbying campaign the tech industry ran against the bills over the past two years.

Read the rest here.

Don’t need to read any further. It’s bribe city and Chuckie is drowning in it. What a piece of bought off sh1t. 💩

BREAKING: Republicans are blaming Joe Biden for the high cost of Trump NFTs.
— Middle Age Riot (@middleageriot) December 17, 2022

PT Barnum applies to cult-45s NFTs

That Superman tRump card takes the 💩cake.

Small town Iowa police chief charged with lying to ATF to get 90 machine guns for department with 3 officers
William Morris
Noelle Alviz-Gransee
Des Moines Register

A small Iowa town of 800 residents likely has no need for a police force armed with 90 machine guns to keep the peace.

That, at least, is the view of federal prosecutors, who on Wednesday announced the indictment of Adair Chief of Police Bradley Wendt on charges of making false statements to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to obtain numerous machine guns over a four-year period on behalf of the Adair Police Department, which during Wendt’s tenure has never had more than three officers.

Instead, according to prosecutors, weapons were resold for profit through Wendt’s private gun store or another store owned by a friend who also is facing charges.

According to court filings and a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wendt used his position as police chief to obtain 10 machine guns for the official use of the police department, but later resold at least six of those weapons for “significant profit.”

In addition, Wendt obtained 13 guns for his Dennison- and Anita-based gun store, BW Outfitters, under the pretense they were to be used as demonstration models for potential future purchases by the department. Another 10 weapons were obtained in the same manner for Williams Contracting, a business Williams owned that is federally licensed as a firearms dealer.

May 2022:Chuck Grassley reiterates concerns over gun control as Senate considers ATF confirmation

Prosecutors say Wendt sought to purchase or demonstrate approximately 90 machine guns between July 2018 and August 2022. Some of the weapons were used for public machine gun shoots, where Wendt and Williams charged customers money to be able to fire the weapons.

The indictment describes the firearms as fully automatic weapons not legally available to the public, including an M60 machine gun, a belt-fed weapon widely used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam war that was purportedly obtained for official use by the Adair Police Department.

Wendt instead had the M60 mounted on his personally owned armored Humvee.
Helicopter munitions for department without a chopper
Wendt also sought repeatedly to obtain for the department a rotary M134 minigun capable of firing 50 rounds per second, usually mounted on military helicopters. The ATF denied the requested transfer.
“The Adair Police Department does not own a helicopter,” the indictment notes.

At least some of the weapons purportedly obtained for the police department were bought with Wendt’s personal funds, and it is not clear if city money was involved in the purchases.

Luke Zemaitis checks out an M134 Minigun while touring a Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter during the Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture on Wednesday, July 28, 2021, at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wis. Attendance at AirVenture is up from years past after the EAA canceled AirVenture 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tork Mason/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin
Wendt is charged with 18 counts of making a false statement to the ATF and one for unlawfully possessing a machine gun. Williams is charged with three counts of false statements and with aiding and abetting. Prosecutors are also seeking forfeiture of at least 35 machine guns involved in the case.

“Brad Wendt is charged with exploiting his position as chief of police to unlawfully obtain and sell guns for his own personal profit,” Eugene Kowel, a senior FBI agent based in Omaha, said in a statement. “The FBI is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to investigate and hold accountable those who violate their oath of office to enrich themselves.”

Wendt was put on leave by the city in September after federal agents raided his gun stores and his City Hall offices. It is not clear if he remains employed with the city, which did not return an emailed message seeking comment. A phone number listed for the city clerk could not be connected.

The case against Wendt and Williams was not yet listed in online court records Thursday afternoon, and it is not clear if either man has an attorney currently representing him.

I wonder if any of these were sold to the RWNJs as IOWA is part of the evangelical nut job base. Money talks

This ahole needs to be in jail. No wonder we no longer trust the fuzz anymore. Peace officers sworn to serve and protect?! Since when?💩💩🤮🤮

T and R x 2, Ms. Benny!!☮️🙂👍 I know it’s a pipe dream, but I keep hoping pb4 will post again.

pb’s about. Just not here at present.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

I miss her too

An R said their dirty secret out load If you dont vote R will find a reason to throw it out’

A Republican is seeking to throw out his daughter’s absentee ballot after she voted for his Democratic opponent, a report says

Alia Shoaib Dec 17, 2022, 5:29 AM

New Jersey Republican committeeman Tom Baio lost his re-election bid by three votes.
Baio is seeking to throw out his daughter’s absentee ballot, who voted Democratic.
Republicans allege that several young Democrats who do not live in the state cast absentee ballots.
A New Jersey Republican committeeman is seeking to throw out his daughter’s absentee ballot after she voted for his Democratic opponent, a report says.
Tom Baio, a Mendham Township committeeman, lost his re-election bid to his Democratic challenger Lauren Spirig by three votes, according to the Observer-Tribune.
Morris County Republicans said in a statement Thursday that they plan to file a lawsuit contesting the results, alleging that several young Democrats who cast vote-by-mail ballots did not meet the state residency requirement, per the paper.
Baio told the paper that among those is his daughter, Ariana Baio, who he said voted for the Democratic candidate.
The Republican expressed regret that he and his wife had mailed the ballot to their daughter, who is a journalist based in New York City,
“Like many parents driven by a sense of duty, we were wrong to advance the VBM [vote-by-mail ballot] to my daughter, Ariana,” he said. “My daughter did answer the call of duty and did vote by the mail-in ballot.”
“We all need to correct this behavior,” he said. “As parents, and as citizens of towns as great as Mendham, I call on all Mendham residents next year to heed this example. As shameful as it is, we need to correct this behavior. I know I will.”
In the statement from Morris County Republicans, Committee Chair Laura Ali said there was “at least one provisional ballot filed by a Republican voter that was questionably rejected,” which she said could not be reconsidered due to recount rules.
She also identified “a large and growing number of vote-by-mail ballots filed by Democrat voters who do not appear to meet the residency requirement for voting in Mendham Township.”
While she did not mention Baio’s daughter in the statement, she said in an email to the Observer-Tribune: “Tom’s daughter is a Democrat and voted the Democrat ticket. We had nothing to do with her vote.”
The statement did, however, claim that one young voter who, it is alleged, did not appear to meet the residency requirement was the daughter of Morris County Democratic Chair and Mendham Township Committeewoman Amalia Duarte.
The statement claimed that Duarte’s adult daughter voted despite living in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Duarte, told the paper that Republicans singling out her daughter was “deeply disappointing” and called on Baio to concede his loss.
“We’ve never had a recount in a Mendham Township election, let alone this type of divisiveness,” she said. “Local and county Republican operatives are trying to pit neighbor against neighbor.”
Baio initially lost the election by two votes, and a recount, in fact, increased that margin by another vote, according to the paper.
Voter registration law in New Jersey requires residents to be US citizens that are at least 18 years old and live in a county for at least 30 days before the election.

Its been awile on the toons so

To late for this idea it would’ve saved some lives maybe?

🤦‍♂️ https://t.co/SvRkJrDh0Q
— Railroad Workers United ✊ (@railroadworkers) December 18, 2022

Biden’s communications team has Midas’ Ears.

FED Chair Jerome Powell says the US is not in a recession

Despite his best efforts to to put us into one.
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/world/feds-jeromepowell-says-inflation-battle-not-won-more-rate-hikes-coming-9707511.html

Depress wages is what he’s trying to do. Biden needs to sack him but won’t.

Corporate profits surged to a record high of $2.1Tn in the 3rd quarter of this year, even as inflation continued to hurt consumers. Over the last 2 years, profits have ballooned more than an 80%, from ~$1.2Tn to more than $2Tn.
Folks, this is what’s driving inflation.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 17, 2022

Isn’t he a holdover from the orange maggot ‘administration’?

Today would be the 76th birthday of Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement and martyr of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle:
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." pic.twitter.com/sqQdVs02qT
— Jacobin (@jacobin) December 18, 2022

Probably about time to rewatch Cry Freedom.

Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death

And I just dug up his book from the 1980s – “I Write What I Like”. Just reading the first few sentences on the jacket cover has me in tears. Dare I read it again?

Not sure if you should as your emotions are at play and that its upsetting only you can make that call. But i normally read a book 2-3 times as i pick up things i missed the first time thru or rethink a thought i precieved at the first read.

Amen and +270!

U.S. should’ve spied on Chinese health officials who were hiding what they knew about Covid, Congress says

U.S. intelligence agencies began warning that Covid-19 could become a pandemic just weeks after the coronavirus was first reported in China, but they missed an opportunity to better understand its spread because they didn’t quickly begin spying on Chinese health officials who were hiding what they knew, says a newly declassified report by the House Intelligence Committee.
The report partly vindicates the CIA and other U.S. spy agencies, noting that they raised the specter of a pandemic well before the World Health Organization declared one on March 11, 2020. And it adds to the body of evidence showing that then-President Donald Trump misled the public about what he was hearing from advisers about the seriousness of the virus. The intelligence warnings summarized in the report debunk Trump’s contention that intelligence officials described the virus “in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner.”
But the report, authored by staff members for the committee’s Democratic majority, also says U.S. intelligence agencies have largely failed to fix their shortcomings in public health intelligence and are therefore not adequately prepared for the next pandemic. That is in part, investigators found, because many intelligence officers don’t see biological threats as a top-tier national security issue, even after more than a million people died from Covid in the U.S.
“We would be moving heaven and earth if we lost a million people as a result of some terrorist incident,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the frequent Trump critic who chairs the Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.
Schiff said the intelligence community has failed to create “the culture … to recognize a biothreat as a hard threat that could kill massive numbers of our citizens the way we view terrorism and other threats,” adding, “And so that’s a cultural change that needs to take place.”
The report didn’t delve deeply into the effort by the intelligence community to examine the question of whether Covid began to infect humans through animal transmission or a lab leak in China.
It said the current U.S. government view on that hasn’t changed since a declassified summary was released in August 2021, revealing that one U.S. intelligence agency assesses with moderate confidence that the virus infected humans after a lab-associated incident, while four others assess with low confidence that the virus emerged naturally.
Schiff said the intelligence community’s “failure to pivot” to collecting Covid-related intelligence from China made it less likely that evidence supporting a lab leak, if that is in fact what happened, will be uncovered.
“I wouldn’t characterize it as an intelligence failure, but they were very slow to pivot and use their unique assets to glean insights that were not in the public record,” Schiff said. “And that, to me, is the most fundamental missed opportunity.”
A separate report issued Wednesday evening by the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee accused intelligence agencies of “misleading” omissions in their public assessment of Covid origins, adding that the Republicans have “reason to believe that the [intelligence community] downplayed the possibility that SARS-CoV2 was connected to China’s bioweapons program based in part on input from outside experts.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on either report.
The Democrats’ report, which is replete with blacked-out sections after a declassification review by ODNI, looks closely at exactly when and how the intelligence community first learned about the virus, what warnings were given to the Trump White House and what steps investigators believe agencies should take to be better prepared for future pandemics. The House investigators didn’t have access to presidential briefing documents, but they said they were able to piece together from documents and interviews what information most likely made it to Trump’s intelligence briefing.
Investigators said they were “unable to corroborate” reports by NBC News and ABC News that U.S. spies collected raw intelligence in November indicating a health crisis in Wuhan, China.
The report says the first intelligence report mentioning the virus that would become known as coronavirus or Covid-19 came on the day of the first media report about it.
On Dec. 31, 2019, an analyst at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency, noticed a report on a public health listserv run by the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, known as ProMED, about an unexplained pneumonia that Chinese officials were seeing in Wuhan.
The analyst, identified as Mark, flagged the notice in a report titled “Note: Possible Pandemic Warning Update” and put it in a database that is used by U.S. military commanders around the world.
“Mark had … flagged the disease as an event that warranted close scrutiny,” the House report said.

WTF

Schiff is as warlike as they come so I don’t fully trust him. Down here word on the ground was that a new batch of diseases were coming in with the foreign tourists. Tourist Trapville does both plane and ship travel. This was 2019. The other thing about Asians is their cuisine. It’s quite exotic (to put it politely). Some of the animals they eat do have diseases not familiar to westerners. You also have to keep in mind the neocons drumming up Chinese war lust here.

.@jaketapper “It seems, from the reporting I have been able to do, that some of the obstacles to this happening, even a vote on it in the Senate, are @SenSchumer…isn't the Democratic Party supposed to stand for this, fundamental fairness, antimonopolistic behavior, competition?” pic.twitter.com/k2lHDjXIlM
— Luther Lowe (@lutherlowe) December 18, 2022

https://youtu.be/CbRhISPIMMA?t=871

Bernie is on around the 14 and half mark.