Author: hearseeno

Trump Asked for Veto Power Over Sally Yates’s Testimony at Russia Hearing

wilwheaton:

This administration is the most corrupt in my lifetime, and the Congress is failing to due its constitutional duty to defend the country from enemies foreign and domestic.

Congressional Republicans are a disgrace, and for a group of people who use patriotism as a cudgel to silence dissent, their hypocrisy is unequaled. 

March 28, 2017 1:09 p.m.

In sum

  • While briefly acting as an interim US attorney general, Sally Yates warned WH counsel that Michael Flynn “had misled his superiors about his preelection conversation with the Russian ambassador to the United States.”  It wasn’t until weeks later that that info was leaked and Flynn resigned.
  • Yates was recently invited to testify to these events in front of the House Intelligence Committee, related to their investigation on “Putin government’s alleged interference in the 2016 election”
  • She accepted and then got hit with a warning from the White House/DOJ that basically the events she was being asked to testify to were “client confidences” or subject to “presidential communications privilege,” and so anything in her testimony would have to be cleared by the White House.  
  • Last Friday, Yates’ lawyer basically replied, “ha! yeaaaah, right.” Yates still intends to testify.
  • A national security blogger Marcy Wheeler agues that the only way that Yates testimony would be covered under presidential communications privilege is if “Trump is claiming that he was involved in hiding this information from Mike Pence.”  From what I gather, since Yates can only testify to events involving WH staff who were party to Flynn’s act of lying, unless Trump was somehow an actor involved in Flynn’s lies, he has no case to claim that Yates can’t testify without his consent.
  • Also on Friday, Yates “informed government officials that her testimony would probably contradict some statements made by the Trump administration.” 
  • House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes canceled Yates’ hearing that very same day.
  • On Tuesday, the White house issued a statement that the report of the above “is entirely false.”  “The White House has taken no action to prevent Sally Yates from testifying and the Department of Justice specifically told her that it would not stop her and to suggest otherwise is completely irresponsible.”
  • To which the Washington Post replies, “Ostensibly, the White House does not consider warning Yates that her testimony would be illegal — absent the president’s consent — as such an action.”

“The fact that Nunes appears [emphasis theirs] to have canceled a hearing — that the White House wished to prevent — has further undermined the GOP lawmaker’s standing with Democratic committee members.”

Trump Asked for Veto Power Over Sally Yates’s Testimony at Russia Hearing

Analysis | Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year

themegalosaurus:

denugis:

Come on, Washington Post. I know democracy dies in darkness and all that, but there are some headlines you don’t need to bring to the light of day.

/0

“average spiders eat 7 billion humans a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average spider eats 0 persons per year. Georg Spider, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Analysis | Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year

Want Congress to Protect Your Privacy? A Clever App Makes the Call for You

…congressional phone lines are often busy. Voicemail is often full. You might spend ages on hold, or keep calling back until overwhelmed congressional staffers clear clogged inboxes.

A new app called Stance helps overcome these democracy-hindering headaches. It lets you record messages for your elected representatives, then delivers them at night when phone lines aren’t so busy. And it keeps calling back until it delivers your message. You don’t even have to deal with navigating a phone tree.

Want Congress to Protect Your Privacy? A Clever App Makes the Call for You

Michigan and Flint just agreed to replace 18,000 lead-tainted pipes

By Brady Dennis March 27 at 6:55 PM

Michigan and the city of Flint have agreed to spend the next several years replacing roughly 18,000 aging underground pipes as part of a far-reaching legal settlement over the city’s ongoing crisis involving lead-tainted water.

A proposed settlement filed Monday will require the state to fund Flint’s efforts to replace the lead and galvanized water service lines by 2020. Under the agreement, the state will agree to pay $87 million for the undertaking and will keep another $10 million in reserve in case more pipes than expected need replacing. About $30 million of that money will come from the $100 million that Congress approved late last year in aid to Flint. The state will be responsible for the remainder.

…

Under the terms of the deal, state officials also must continue to deliver bottled water to housebound residents and must continue to operate free bottled water distribution centers around the city through early September, though it could begin to phase out some sites after May 1 if demand fades. The state also will continue to go door to door in the city through December 2018 to make sure people have properly installed water filters and to provide new filters and replacement cartridges.

Michigan and Flint just agreed to replace 18,000 lead-tainted pipes

40000-spiders:

raye-of-many-rains:

ginger-in-a-fez:

worldflower:

fantasychica37:

sweetdansvestite:

ahyperactivehero:

chronicimpulsivereader:

comicconverse:

m4ge:

strawberryaj:

andyouknowit:

thatonevaleriegirl:

meme-of-lord:

thegenderfluiddruid:

envyadams:

ledamemangociana:

magebirb:

stellaathena:

spankyhole:

soldieronbarnes:

greatestgoth:

ghost-plot:

I was hoping the notes would be full of similar stories, but they’re not, so I’ll add my story for anyone else looking for more laughs:

I had to go to a library to pay a fee and I was practicing in the car between “I have to pay a fine” and “I have to pay a fee” and I walked in and firmly stated “I have to pee” and slapped a five dollar bill on the counter (the fee was like ten cents), and walked out. This was like three years ago and I still haven’t been back,

My friend was driving and we were almost past our turnoff so I tried to say “quick” and “fast” at the same time and I ended up screaming “QUACK” which ended up with him judging me very hard and missing the turn

Recently someone in class asked me how I was doing and I started off saying I was good but switched to I’m okay in the middle and ended up saying “I’m gay.”

Which, while kind of accurate, was not what I meant to announce to my classmate.

This Halloween I was handing out candy and a child said “trick or treat” and I smiled gave them their candy and apparently my mouth betrayed me and I said “Merry Christmas” and proceeded to sit down and look up to the sky for answers while their mother laughed at me :)))))

Sometimes I try to say “I fucking love you” but it comes out in the wrong order and then everyone’s uncomfortable.

When I first started my coffee shop job, I was still getting used to greeting customers as they came in the door. A man walked in, and in the jumble of trying to say, “How are you doing?” and “What’s up?” I ended up demanding “What are you doing here?!”

something really cool happened once at the office and i started to say “i’m so amazed” but halfway through my mind changed to “that’s really amazing” and i just ended up saying “i’m really so amazing”

today at work i let someone into a dressing room and they said “thanks” and half of me tried to say “you’re welcome” and the other half tried to say “no problem” and i ended up saying “your problem”

I was at the convenience store and I was going to buy a drink, but i dropped my keys and the drink when I got to the register so I got caught between “my drink!” and “my keys” and ended up screaming “MY KINK.”

I walked up to this register,in a target. When the cashier finished checking me out she said have a good day, and i wanted to say “You have a good day” and “You too” so it came out “You have a good do do”

I FUCKIN H HIT MY HEAD ON A CHAIR FROM LAUGHING TOO HARD AT THIS FUCKING POS T

This post is too good. I once tried to say have a nice day or have a good day to a customer and said ‘Have a nude gay!’. Still haven’t recovered.

OOC: i get really used to working nights or days at my work so i’m often jumbled between “have a nice night” and “have a good day” so often it comes out as “have a nice neigh” or “have a good date” or occasionally even “have a night die”

in first grade someone apologized to me and i responded by saying “you’re welcome” and i still haven’t recovered

I was mad at my friend Gabe and tried to call him a bitch, ended up calling him “babe”. It’s been four years and he still hasn’t let it go

My little sister tried to say “sneaky” and “secretive” at the same time and ended up saying “sneakrative”

One time my friend’s mom was driving us home and she tried to yell “Opossum! ” because one ran out into the road, but it got mixed up with “My God!” And came out “MUFASA!” She laughed so hard she had to pull over and my friend almost had an asthma attack.

Once I went to this restaurant my family and I had been going to since I was an infant,and I wanted to ask if my family had been going there since before I was born. Well,something got mixed up in my brain and I ended up turning to my mom and saying “Did you guys come here when I was still alive?” And my mom lost her damn mind.

In fourth grade I had to lead the pledge of allegiance and said “Amen” at the end and was so embarrassed!

I worked at a call center and one time I hung up to find all my coworkers staring at me. Apparently I told the caller “I love you” and didn’t even realize it

First big high school debate meet. Practicing in my head “I’m Melanie, this is my partner Cassidy. I’m Melanie, this is my partner Cassidy.” I get up there and go “I’m Cassidy….” and Cassidy goes “No you’re not”

one time i was trying to say “thank you bella” and for some reason it came out like “thank you belly” let me die in peace thank you very much

Once i answered the phone and in a perfectly nice amiable voice just said “one?”

saxifraga-x-urbium:

systlin:

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok

My favorite example is Janet Stephens, professional hairdresser and amateur, published archeologist.  One of the insights that she discovered was that women in ancient Rome stitched their braids together to keep the hairstyles in place, and so they didn’t wear wigs nearly as often as had been thought.  

Looking for styling clues in translation, Stephens discovered that the Latin word acus was sometimes translated as “hairpin” and other times as “sewing needle.” Something finally clicked when Stephens came across a citation for acus in the 1986 edition of Charlton T. Lewis & Charles Short’s A Latin Dictionary. In a tiny citation at the bottom of the definition for acus, she found a note for a passage on hairdressing from the second-century Roman grammarian named Sexus Pompeius Festus. In Latin, Sexus Pompeius Festus wrote, “Acus dicitur, qua sacrinatrix gel etiam ornatrix utitur.” In English, that translates to “Needle, that which the clothmender and the hairdresser use.”

To borrow an ancient phrase: Eureka. Roman women did indeed sew their hair up with needle and thread, using the same tools a tailor would. Stephens published her findings in a 2008 article in The Journal of Roman Archaeology called “Ancient Roman hairdressing: on (hair)pins and needles.” A hairdresser and her mannequin head schooled the notoriously stuffy community of antiquities scholars.

…

Before Stephens’s work, scholars largely ignored women’s hair — as they ignored most things about women — while translating. For example, in a passage from Ovid’s Art of Love, a narrator begs his female lover to get her hair redone after he beats her violently. “[Stephens] notes an intricate, braided hairstyle that has been sewn into place is extremely stable,” said a blogger by the pen name Livius Drusus, who runs thehistoryblog.com. “In order to tear her hair out of its stitching, the narrator has to have used a great deal of physical force.” If the translation doesn’t explain that, the hair-pulling brutality of the narrator reads like hyperbole, rather than an admission of his abuse.

Nazis are [recruiting] gamers. It is a medium that is filled with socially reclusive men that are receptive their message.
–
Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club? You know how everyone who joins the fight club is this super sad dude looking for meaning and belonging? You show that to anyone who lived through WW2 and they straight up tell you, ‘That is how the Nazis recruited people. That is how they turned normal men into Nazis. They found them when they are weak, made them feel worthless and built them back up.’ That movie spoke to every single one of my 20 year old friends when they saw it. It’s hard to watch now, almost terrifying.
–
Now think of your group of gamer friends. How many people did you know growing up who were desperate to belong to something? To feel worthwhile? Because over the last 5 years I’ve watched a whole bunch of people from my competitive gaming community turn into full blown white nationalists. An alarming number.

comment on a Polygon article about PewDiepie’s antisemitic jokes by user
Fkeefe4th  (via theroguefeminist)
Source: theroguefeminist

How Republicans quietly sabotaged Obamacare long before Trump came into office

3/22/17

Risk corridors = the first ten years after ACA was implemented, insurance companies were expected to lose money because of the influx of sick people who had not had insurance previously.

The ACA promised to reimburse those loses for the first 10 years in order to get insurance companies on board.

Rubio and other Republicans refused to fully fund risk corridor reimbursement in 2015, so by 2016:

So the insurance companies did the only things they could.  In (mostly red) states with low incomes and thus poorer health, they simply pulled out of the marketplace altogether.  This has left some states with only one single insurer left.  In others, they jacked up their prices to make up their losses.

It all hit the fan in the fall of 2016, right before the election.

Rubio’s October Surprise was extraordinarily effective.  October 2016 saw an explosion of stories in the news about how health insurance companies were either pulling out of ACA exchanges, or jacking their prices up wildly.

It’s still in litigation now, but some of the effects can’t be mitigated.

Meanwhile, federal judge Thomas Wheeler of the US Court of Federal Claims, ruled recently (as reported last month by Forbes) that the feds actually have to pay back – to the tune of about $8 billion – the moneys lost by health insurance companies operationg in good faith.

But it’s way too late; dozens of nonprofits started to provide health insurance through the exchanges have already gone bankrupt, and the health insurance giants are both subsuming their smaller competitors and merging like there’s no tomorrow. Additionally, Wheeler’s ruling is certain to be appealed – meaning it’s in limbo for the moment.

Consolidation among health insurance giants means that there is little to no competition – regardless of whether or not you introduce competition across state lines.  Which sets the stage for the giants increasing premiums.

So, yet again, the GOP is quite happy to throw their constituency under the bus in order to achieve their aims.

How Republicans quietly sabotaged Obamacare long before Trump came into office

Trump’s Executive Order on Obamacare Leads to a Big Tax Change — The Motley Fool

So, now that it appears that the ACA will remain in place, Trump’s executive order from January 20th relaxing the individual mandate becomes relevant again.

Sean Williams Feb 27, 2017 at 8:27AM

In 2014 and 2015, … the IRS had made it clear that any Form 1040s (the standard tax form) filed for the 2016 calendar tax year without line 61 filled in – the line that would demonstrate to the IRS if you had health coverage or paid the SRP – would be rejected.

But Trump’s executive order changed everything.

According to Yahoo Finance, the IRS will once again be accepting electronic and paper tax returns for calendar year 2016 without line 61 filled in.

Now here’s where things get tricky. On one hand, the ACA is still the health law of the land, even if it seems to be living on borrowed time. This means the individual mandate is still law, and those who choose not to purchase health insurance should be paying the SRP, unless they’re exempt. On the other hand, without line 61 filled in, the IRS has no guarantee that the taxpayer paid the SRP or was even insured in 2016.

The IRS has suggested that if it has a question about a particular tax return it’ll follow up with those taxpayers after the filing process is over. However, the IRS has also previously said that it wouldn’t garnish wages or go after a person’s property for not paying the SRP. In effect, Trump’s executive order has made it nearly impossible for the IRS to collect the SRP or to concretely verify an individuals’ health insurance status.

The individual mandate broadens the health characteristics of the people in the insurance pool, and so keeps premiums down.  

If the administration does nothing, chaos ensues over the next several weeks as taxes come due.  Which sounds about right for this administration.  You know that enough someones somewhere will test whether or not the IRS is going to enforce the individual mandate.  

The individual mandate will be law, but I’m betting that the administration is not going to enforce it.  Both this administration and the GOP are invested in the ACA imploding, and I’m sure they will do so by undermining the individual mandate under the cover of claiming to give the people back “choice.”  But choosing between insurance you can’t afford because the premiums have risen too high because of market forces, and insurance you can’t afford because the government’s insurance tax breaks overwhelmingly go to people who make over $200,000, is no real choice.

Trump’s Executive Order on Obamacare Leads to a Big Tax Change — The Motley Fool