Yep

(Found here)

There's No Corruption Like Good Old-School Corruption

For years, the Interior Department resisted proposals to raise the height of its towering Shasta Dam in Northern California. The department’s own scientists and researchers concluded that doing so would endanger rare plants and animals in the area, as well as the bald eagle, and devastate the West Coast’s salmon industry downstream.

But the project is going forward now, in a big win for a powerful consortium of California farmers that stands to profit substantially by gaining access to more irrigation water from a higher dam and has been trying to get the project approved for more than a decade.

For much of the past decade, the chief lobbyist for the group was David Bernhardt. Today, Mr. Bernhardt is the Interior Secretary.

It's not as old-school as taking bags of cash, but it's the next best thing.

Care to guess who Bernhardt will be working for once both he and Trump are gone?

L'Shana Tova

May you be written and sealed for a good year.

Happy 5780!

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

Lear 55:

I'm following the numerical order even though they wen't so produced.

Caturday

A shelter cat plays with light and shadows.

Media Angles for Another Massacre

A document prepared at a U.S. Army base in Oklahoma says officials have been alerted to "disturbing" online chatter about a potential mass shooting threat at a theater during next week's release of the movie "Joker," but it references no specific location.

And this:

The Los Angeles Police Department has announced that officers will have “high visibility” at theaters during premiere screenings of “Joker.”

I've seen several TV news stories about this. It's almost as though they're trying to encourage some soft-minded lunatic to go shoot up a movie theater.

We Never Will Learn

Don Winslow on the War on Drugs:

It’s not only that we can’t win this war, it’s that we’re destroying ourselves fighting it. We are literally addicted to the War on Drugs. A half-century of failed policy, one trillion dollars and forty-five million arrests has not reduced daily drug use—at all. The U.S. still leads the world in illegal drug consumption, drugs are cheaper, more available, and more potent than ever before.

How many Americans have died in this stupid war on drugs? How many Mexicans, Guatemalans, El Saladorans, Columbians and the rest? Since Nixon declared this war (as a way to have his vengeance on hippies and Blacks), millions have died, untold numbers of pyschopaths have gotten rich, we've become the most incarcerated nation in the world, the Fourth Amendment in particular has been eviscerated and for what?

The drug cartels make money. The private prison industry makes money. The cops get theirs.

The rest of us get hosed. We pay taxes to support this failed war. We suffer the crime it breeds.

I'll say this for the New World (1871-1889) and Hard Times (1890-1908) Generations: They were a hell of a lot smarter than the Greatest, Baby Boomers and X Generations. They figured out in pretty short order that their own War on Ethanol, aka Prohibition, was a failure. They figured out that it was making American consumers complicit in criminal activity and it was fueling criminal organizations, official corruption, and crime in the street. They broke the code that without Prohibition, there would have been no St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

We of the generations that have been in charge for the last fifty years, we're just not that smart.

We can break the backs of the cartels and the gangs in a year or so by one simple step: Legalize (and tax) everything. Oh, we can still keep it forbidden to drive trucks or fly planes or do other things while under the influence of drugs. But for those who want to dabble with drugs or waste their lives using them, they're adults and it's their choice to make.

In the meantime, we can tax the stuff. We can ensure some standard of purity, that heroin, for instance, is not cut with baby formula or fentanyl.

We can realize that it is far cheaper to educate than to incarcerate. We can rip down a lot of the prisons. And we can retrain the DEA to do HVAC work, plumbing or welding.

The Corruption Issue

One of the things that has been warned about for the entirety of the Trump presidency was that people were going to Trump properties to curry favor with Trump. President Zelenskyy laid that bare in his call with Trump:

President Zelenskyy: ... Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower.

To the Defenders of All Things Trump, there is nothing wrong with that. But imagine, if you will, that Barack Obama owned a share of a Hilton hotel franchise. If foreign leaders had stayed in that hotel, the Republicans would have gone batshit. Devin Nunez, who would begin an investigation if a stapler had gone missing from Obama's West Wing offices, would have tied himself in knots investigating that hotel.

Oh, Republicans would deny that, now. But it is true. What is also true is that Republicans never investigated President Obama's personal finances because even they knew there was nothing to find. Obama released his tax returns, unlike, say, our current Grifter-in-Chief.

But let's be clear: Republican presidential candidates using their campaign staff to "work with" foreign governments to do things that sometimes have crossed the line into outright treason is nothing new. Nixon sabotaged the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, for which he should have been put on trial and shot. Similarly, Ronald Reagan sabotaged the negotiations with Iran in 1980, which may be why he was so willing to later enter into the "arms for hostages" deal with Iran, when it turned out later that the Reagan administration began shipping weapons to Iran in 1981.

So by Republican standards of "When Our Guy Does It, It's No Big Deal", Trump's shakedown of Ukraine and his taking of disguised bribes is, in comparison, small potatoes.

That's why Trump is astonished that he's being impeached for it.

Because It's Friday

Post-run engine maintenance. It'll give you an idea why diesels were so attractive to railroads.

Don't Believe Trump's Transcript on His Ukraine Call

A president who will take a sharpie to a forecast map...

...will have no qualms at having a transcript altered.

Trump has diligently worked to ensure that the top-level people in the intel community are his toadies. If Trump says that the greatest threat to America is the threat from Venusian legions, those lackeys would back him up.