The Trump/Noem Shitshow

ICE expansion has been as much of a disaster as the expansion of the Border Patrol by Chimpy McFuckwit.

The Rest of DOGE Should Only be Beaten Into Comas

More than 300 million Americans’ Social Security data was put at risk after Department of Government Efficiency officials uploaded sensitive information to a cloud account not subject to oversight, according to a whistleblower disclosure submitted to the special counsel’s office Tuesday.

Whistleblower Charles Borges, who worked as the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration since January, said the potential sensitive information that risks being released includes health diagnoses, income, banking information, familial relationships and personal biographic data.

“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost,” said the complaint.

This is what happens when you give a bunch of punks who are barely old enough to shave the ability to fuck with the lives of everyone. Kids that are are both arrogant and unable to see the ramifications of what they are doing.

This is why kids are riflemen and attacks are planned by those who know what the hell they are doing. Every one of those DOGE assholes should be fired and prosecuted.

Or give them a reflectve vest, a garbage bag, a grabber and set them to work doing the job they're best suited to.

The Federal Highway Administration is Staffed With Humorless and Stupid People.

First there was making the states renumber their highway exits, probably because some clown at the FHWA is (or was) too stupid to read a map or use a GPS. Now those same worthies are "strongly advising" states not to have electronic signs with funny or quirky messages. Those bureaucrats with too much time on their hands and a deep-felt need to stick their nibs into everything seem to think that the signs are distracting and that drivers should be focused on the road.

Well, if they really want to do that, why not ban billboards, especially the LED ones that change messages? Why not ban road signs, since drivers have to read them and understand them, instead of looking at the road.

If you're curious about what the Federales think road signs should be like, well, they've got five hundred or so pages on that subject in this here manual.

News Flash: CT Staties Are Racist as Fuck

Hundreds of Connecticut state police troopers falsified information on at least 26,000 traffic stops from 2014 to 2021, skewing reports on the race and ethnicity of pulled-over motorists, according to an audit released Wednesday.

Data analysts with the University of Connecticut said the reports resulted in too many drivers being identified as white. They cautioned, however, that they did not try to determine whether the records were intentionally falsified or were wrong due to carelessness or human error.

Right. They falsified tens of thousands of traffic stops because of "carelessness or human error"? Note that the false data almost always listed the stopped drivers as being white, which skewed the data on racial profiling.

Tollbooth Ned, a governor who is a regular Inspector Closeau when it comes to detecting corruption and malfeasance in state government, has referred the issue to his AG, a man who, if seeing state fuckery was testable like vision, would have 6/400 vision.

Another Line of Government Theft is Now Illegal

Governments can not sell your property to satisfy a tax bill and then keep the excess money.

so say the Supremes, 9-0.

Shame on the lower courts for siding with the thieves of a homeowner's equity.

Of Course They Don’t Believe the EPA

EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who walked along a creek that still reeks of chemicals, sought to reassure skeptical residents that the water is fit for drinking and the air safe to breathe around East Palestine [Ohio], where just under 5,000 people live near the Pennsylvania state line.

They possibly remember that the EPA lied about the safety of Ground Zero after 9-11. Allegedly

If You Need Stamps, Get Them Now

DeJoy is hiking them, again.

If you use the "additional ounce" stamps, those are jumping by four cents.

Veterans' Administration Fuckery; Agent Orange Deja Vu

It's hard to read this article about how the VA and the DoD have been fighting to prevent recognition of lung problems from burning trash and hazardous materials in Iraq and Afghanistan and not be reminded of the decades that the VA fought to deny benefits for those who were affected by Agent Orange.

Denying the results of studies -- check. Preventins researchers from investigating the issue -- check. Censoring research -- check. Not changing position until political pressure was brought to bear -- check.

Same shit, different war.

Commercials and Rapist Capitalists

What with the shortage of new cars for sale and the stories I keep seeing of them flying off the lots, I have to ask: What's with all of the "sales events" commercials the car companies are running right now?

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If you're wondering why meat prices are so high, it's not because the ranchers or the supermarkets are making more money from it. They're not. It's the meatpackers. Tyson Foods, Cargill, National Beef Packing Company and JBS have bought up and closed competing slaughterhouses. Over the last forty years, those four companies have gone from having 36% of the market to 85%. They squeeze the ranchers and the feedlots and then keep the savings for themselves.

120 years ago, they would be called "the beef trust". Maybe they're not conspiring, but they are acting in concert. None of the companies seem to seek to undercut the others. It's sort of an unvoiced, unspoken price-fixing scheme. Which means that they are price-fixing, but since they aren't discussing it amongst each other, they're not doing anything that can be proven.

But we know what is going on. It's extracting the maximum amount of money from the consumers and the producers to benefit the middleman. It's charging as much as the market can bear, which was evil when the railroads were doing it in the 19th Century and it's just as evil now.

One of the main functions of government should be restraining the unfettered greed of corporations. Corporations do not exist for the public good. They don't care about their employees, their customers, the nation, the environment, none of that. Corporations are amoral sociopaths, it is baked into the system. You need only look at a few tech companies (one of which stated, when it was much smaller, that its guiding principle was "do no evil", a principle that has been replaced by "let's make a shitload more money") to see that in action. The fuckery in the pharmaceuitcal companies, especially the huge price-hikes of older drugs, is another example.

Those greedy pigs need to be restrained, lest they ruin us all.

Foxes in the Henhouse

St. Clair County, IL – Ten out of 13 members of the Prairie Du Pont Volunteer Fire Department quit at a fire district board meeting on Monday night after a convicted arsonist was appointed acting fire chief.

I guess the fact that the Chief Arsonist is the son of the county's emergency management agency made no difference whatsover.

In a pig's eye.

The CIA Seems to be Into Kiddie Porn

It seems that the CIA and the DoJ have cooperated to sweep a shitload of cases of agency employees and contractos downloadeding, viewing, and distributing kiddie porn.

Buzzfeed has gotten their hands on thousands of pages of documents regarding those cases, as well as a shorter summary of cases. The CIA seems to have been acting on the premise that they are above the law when it comes to all things, even crimes against choldren.

It Sure Looks Like a Small-Time Crook is Leaving With His Pockets Full

Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Anthony Hamlet resigned his position on Wednesday, Sept. 8. Effective on Oct. 1., the resignation comes 13 days after the Pennsylvania State Ethics Commission released a report detailing the ethical lapses by the superintendent.

Hamlet’s resignation follows a series of closed meetings of the Pittsburgh Board of Public Education about the Ethics Commission report. Board President Sylvia Wilson said in a Zoom meeting with the media that she would not disclose the substance of those meetings because they involved a confidential personnel matter.

Hamlet will receive $399,687, which Pittsburgh Public Schools [PPS] Solicitor Ira Weiss said reflects one year of his salary and benefits minus the value of vacation days that the commission found Hamlet owed to the district. The payment was part of Hamlet’s contract with the schools.

They call it "ethical lapses". Those "ethical lapses"? He put expenses for sponsored trips on his company credit card and then didn't reimburse the PPS when the vendor (The Flying Classroom) reimbursed him for the expenses. Instead of taking time off when he took trips sponsored TFC, he went on those sponsored trips on clock. His contract didn't allow him to roll over vacation days, but he did so anyway. He claimed meal reimbursements while on personal trips.

There's more, of course. Thousands of laptops have gone missing with no response from Hamlet or the PPS as to what happened. I've seen reporting in an offline newspaper that Hamlet accepted (and the school board retroactively approved) the donation of a Boeing 727 engine from TFC for the city's aerospace training program, but that they had no suitable place to put it; they then planned to put it into a K-8 school (and nobody will say where the engine currently is).

You have to know that there was some severe fuckery involved when the PPS tried to limit the press's access to a public meeting.

What is even more unseemly is that both Hamlet and his supporters are insinuating that he only got pushed out for being a small-time bureaucratic crook because he's Black. Playing the race card when caught doing bad shit is the refuge of scoundrels.

The Bureau of Printing and Engraving Is Run By a Bunch of Tired Old Racists

Prove me wrong.

President Biden’s White House basked in praise from allies in its early days when it pledged to look for ways to “speed up” the process of putting abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20 bill, replacing President Andrew Jackson, who owned enslaved people and forcibly relocated Native Americans.

But four months after taking office, there is little evidence that the administration has taken any steps to accelerate the schedule set out years ago by a small agency within the Treasury Department.
...
But removing the portrait has proven much easier than accelerating the actions of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a unit of the Treasury Department, which critics say displays scant interest in transforming the currency.

The intractable bureaucrats are bleating about they'll have to redesign the entire bill. That's bullshit, all they have to do is replace the portrait. They can redesign the damned thing later.

Once you strip out the bullshit, the only reason left standing for them not to replace the portrait is the only one that makes sense: Bigotry, whether it is racism or misogyny. Or both.

DeJoy's Cabal of Liars

Everything that is sent to me or that I send out through the mail has USPS tracking numbers. Formerly, I'd only pay attention if they were late. But recently, I've been watching all of them.

What I've been noticing is that the Post Office gives an expected delivery date; everything is arriving a day early. I sent something off to a friend half-way across the country by Priority Mail. The expected day of delivery was stated to be four days out.[1]

My suspicion is that DeJoy has rigged the system so he can claim that 99.44% of packages are arriving on-time. Which just goes to show that he must have gotten his MBA from Trump University, where cheating is a virtue.
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[1] You may recall that Priority Mail once was a two-day service.

Defund the Fuzz?

A councilman in Atlanta who supports defunding the police had his car stolen by a bunch of kids.

If you don't know about the "defund the police" movement, you can learn about it by some savvy searching, but try to avoid the fascist Right's blatherings on it.

There is an argument to be made that we expect too much of the police. I suspect that the percentge of police recruits who joined the force out of an aspiration to deal with homeless people and people having mental health breakdowns is probably in the lowsingle-digits of a percentile. There has to be a better way to do it.

But the way to address those needs is to figure out what should be done and put those services and programs in place before taking mental health crisis response and homeless outreach away from the police. Get those programs running, make sure they work and then, if it cam be shown that there has been a significan load reduction on police services, reduce funding for the police. But this will cost real money.

Otherwise, we'd repeat the same mistakes that were made, decades ago, when the lunatic asylums were closed down without providing for any alternatives for those who needed those services.

In summation, if you really think that defunding the police will translate into reduced costs for local government, I respectfully suggest that you grab ahold of your ears and pull your head out of your ass.

Ode DeJoy

The U.S. Postal Service said it will raise rates on postage for letters, postcards and other mail services this summer as part of Postmaster Louis DeJoy's 10-year plan to overhaul the agency's flailing finances. The cost of a stamp for first-class mail will increase to 58 cents from its current 55 cents.

DeJoy, whose tenure has been marked by controversy over his operational changes at the service, earlier this year unveiled a 10-year plan to overhaul the USPS. He said the changes are necessary to stanch billions of dollars in losses and put the agency on the path to profitability — and on Friday he said raising postage rates are part of the effort to boost revenue.

Single-piece first-class mail volume, such as letters that have postages stamps, has declined 47% during the past 10 years, the USPS said Friday.

This is called the business death spiral: You're not selling enough of your shit, so you raise your price so that people will end up buying less of your shit.

Make no mistake about it, DeJoy and the Republicans aren't trying to save the Postal Service, they're trying to bury it. The Postal Service is one of the few constitutionally-mandated functions of the Federal government. But the party of corporatism has this fantasy that government services should make money, instead of serving the people.

The evilness of DeJoy and his party should never be understimated and cannot be overstated.

Did You Criticize the 2020 Census Online?

If you did, a bunch of Constitution-shredding spooks in the Department of Commerce called the Investigations and Threat Management Service probably opened a file on you. When they weren't busily racially profiling Commerce Department workers, they were scouring social media in seach of people who were critical of the Census.

The Washington Post has the story: "In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated “to benefit the Trump Party!” records show." That retiree made his comments on Twitter; he had under 100 followers.

ITMS came to the attention of a Trump appointee, who was working to shut them down, except that he quit after the Insurrection. In March, Biden Administration ordered ITMS to stop all ciminal investigations (which they had no authority to conduct) and ordered them to cease all activities after the Post asked for interviews. The abuses of authority of ITMS have sparked critical interest by legilators from both parties.

The whole operation seems to be the diseased brainchild of one career Federal employee. That goon sent copies of critical social media posts on the Census to the FBI, which told him that maybe he ought to take a referesher course in freedom of speech.

Said goon probably deserves to be at a Federal guest house for awhile. If they can't convict him or fire him, they can at least transfer him to working the trash pickup detail at a remote Federal park.

Coming Soon to a Roadway Near You

Tolls. Or something like that.

I base this on the rise of electric vehicles. The impact of EVs on the environment is arguable (not terribly great if the generating plant is fossil-fueled) and their utility (you can refuel a petroleum-fueled vehicle in minutes and drive a few hundred more miles) may be marginal for some, but one point, so far, is clear: EVs contribute nothing towards the maintenance of the road network.

This is because road maintenance almost everywhere in the U.S. is paid for by fuel taxes. Even states where the legislature is stuffed with mouth-breathing ideologues have realized that gas taxes have to go up to keep the roads and bridges from crumbling.

If you drive 10,000 miles a year and your vehicle gets 20 MPG and if we assume a tax rate of thirty cents a gallon, that means you're paying $150/year into the road maintenance kitty (assuming your state's legilsators aren't stealing reallocating the tax receipts), that works out to about $150 a year. The easiest way to do it would be to assess a flat tax to the registration fees, which could be adjusted based on the size of the vehicle.

But that's not going to fly, as people will squawk that they don't drive 10,000 miles a year. So instead of that, there will be some system that keeps track of people's driving. Because if it'll save them a few bucks, people will eagerly sell their privacy (witness all of those spyapps that the auto insurance companies are pushing).

Why is DeJoy's Postal Service Spying on People?

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.

The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.

What the hell is wrong with the Postal Service? They complain that they're running short of cash, but then they spend Lord-knows how many millions of dollars surfing around the internet to spy on people? Don't we have the FBI and the DHS to do that shit?

I get that the USPS is a qualsi-independent government agency, but I still think that Congress ought to pass a law that forbids the Postal Service from doing stuff like this. Violations would result in the chief postal inspector and the postmaster general being sent to the pokey where they can only correspond with people by mail.

"Jack-Booted Thug Gear! "Get Your Official Jack-Booted Thug Gear, Here!"

The ATF Store is now open!
The official site for ATF merchandise & apparel.

🔗https://t.co/MAuqrk8f1h

A portion of all sales support the blind & visually impaired. pic.twitter.com/NhYnKyVDZr

— ATF New York (@ATFNewYork) April 13, 2021

No word as to whether they're going to be selling AKs left over from Operation Gunwalker at a discount.

Given ATF's reputation for shooting people's dogs, there is either a delicious irony or utter tone-deafness in their selling stuffed dogs.

UPDATE:

It didn't take long for this to appear: