Good Day Good Newsies! I know things are still tough and sometimes it feels overwhelming but guess what? November is just around the corner and I am PUMPED to vote and I am PUMPED to get others to commit to voting and have them get others to commit to voting. Through this thriving community I know you are all trying to GOTV. We can do this!
OK! Onward:
New York tax officials investigating allegations Trump committed ‘outright fraud’
Tax officials in New York state said they will be “vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation” after an extensive New York Times story alleged President Donald Trump committed “instances of outright fraud” by dodging taxes and boosting the money he got from inheritances.
The investigation, published Tuesday, claimed that Trump’s parents, Fred and Mary, transferred over $1 billion to their children. By setting up a sham corporation, using improper tax deductions, and dramatically undervaluing his parents’ real estate holdings, Trump reportedly avoided paying nearly half-a-billion dollars worth of taxes.
Along with avoiding taxes, the Times investigation also revealed the massive amount of cash Trump was given by his father, starting when he was just a toddler. According to the investigation, Trump was receiving $200,000 a year by the time he was three years old, and was given part ownership of an apartment building by the time he was 17. When he was in college, Trump was receiving the equivalent of $1 million a year.
The damning claims clash with the version of himself Trump has presented — painting himself a self-made businessman ….
And this BaHaHaHa:
Speed Read: The 5 Richest Bits in Forbes’ Look at Trump the ‘Net Loser’
If President Trump thought he could profit from occupying the Oval Office, he was apparently very, very wrong.
He himself told Fortune in 2000, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”
Sickening really. Didn’t anyone see this buffoon coming? OK don’t answer that.
However, despite the best efforts by his offspring and numerous business and product-licensing ventures, Trump’s net worth has dropped since Inauguration Day, along with revenue from his U.S. golf and real-estate properties, a new examination by Forbes magazine suggests. And he has become such a polarizing figure that “people are afraid to do business with him,” according to the long read by Dan Alexander and Chase Peterson Withorn published Tuesday.
- tRump’s Net Worth Has Dropped by More Than $1 Billion
- Revenue at his Golf and Real Estate Properties Has Fallen Dramatically
- His Product Licensing Operation is Down to a Staggering 87 percent
- Eric and Don Jr.’s “Scion” Hotel Brand Appears to be Going Nowhere
The irony? Trump may have been better off by divesting when he had the opportunity, Alexander and Peterson Withorn report.
He is such an idiot...sigh.
I learn something new everyday:
Donna Strickland is the 3rd woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics
The 2018 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three scientists — including one woman — for advancing the science of lasers and creating extremely useful tools out of laser beams.
The winners include Arthur Ashkin, 96, a retired American physicist who worked Bell Labs; Gerard Mourou, 74, now at the École Polytechnique in France and University of Michigan; and Donna Strickland, 59, now at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
These scientists are responsible for two important inventions. One is laser tweezers, which allow scientists to manipulate microscopic particles (often viruses and bacteria) within a laser beam. The second is a technology that led to the rapid increase of laser beam intensity, which has allowed for myriad laser-based tools, including the beams commonly used in laser eye surgery.
Astonishingly, Strickland is just the third woman to have ever won the Nobel Prize in physics. The prize has not been awarded to a woman since 1963 when Maria Goeppert-Mayer won for her work on atomic structure. That was 55 years ago! The only time a woman was awarded the prize before that was in 1903 when Marie Curie won for her work on radioactivity.
During the Nobel Prize press conference Tuesday morning, Strickland was reminded by a reporter that she was the just third woman to win, and immediately responded, “Is that all, really? I thought there might have been more.”\
Today’s prize announcement is historic. But the Nobel Committee has a long way to go to catch up in recognizing women scientists. (And they’ve had missed opportunities, like failing to honor Vera Rubin for her discovery of dark matter before she died and became ineligible to win the award.)
Today’s prize was just a small step to increase the visibility of women in physics. More need to come.
Congratulations!
Tick Tock:
Trump reportedly told Michael Cohen to stop Stormy Daniels from speaking out in February
The drip, drip, drip about what President Donald Trump knew and when about the Stormy Daniels payout continues. The latest: a new report saying that in February, Trump personally directed an effort to stop porn actress Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, from speaking out about their alleged 2006 affair.
Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld at the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that, according to people familiar with the events, Trump told his then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen in February to try to get a restraining order against Daniels through a confidential arbitration proceeding in order to keep her from speaking out.
According to the WSJ, Trump and Cohen also got Eric Trump involved:
Mr. Trump told Mr. Cohen to coordinate the legal response with Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, and another outside lawyer who had represented Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization in other matters, the people said. Eric Trump, who is running the company with his brother in Mr. Trump’s absence, then tasked a Trump Organization staff attorney in California with signing off on the arbitration paperwork, these people said.
Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s lawyer, tweeted about the WSJ report on Tuesday and compared tactics used against Daniels to those being utilized against Julie Swetnick, another of his clients, who has brought forward sexual misconduct allegations about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Once again. He is an idiot.
Well it’s a start, but Amazon is still evil (I am a hypocrite here I shop on-line a lot….sigh):
Amazon to pay all workers at least $15 an hour
This comes as Amazon is facing increasing scrutiny over how its workers are treated and paid. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, recently introduced legislation to end what he calls “corporate welfare” — and it’s pretty clear who he had in mind, since the bill was titled Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS).
As the writer at BoingBoing pointed out, “now unionize”.
A little break. I had to listen to Baby Beluga over and over in the 80’s with my first born:
Alert: Children’s music legend Raffi is out here fighting fascists
For people of a certain age, the entire genre of children’s music is synonymous with the name Raffi. The Egyptian-born Canadian singer-songwriter brought joy into the lives of young people with his simple, undeniably catchy songs about bananaphones, baby belugas, and all manner of things that can be found down by the bay. Regardless of what was going on in the world back then, Raffi remained pure and good. According to a new article from Mel Magazine, that fact hasn’t changed. While we may have long ago outgrown his lullabies, Raffi has continued to be a positive force in this world, and now spends his time combating fascists on our behalf.
Though the singer lives in Canada, he’s regularly shared his thoughts on American politics over the years, and is outspoken about his opposition to the alt-right and the Trump administration.
...Raffi is adamant about the fact that we need to call these people what they are—fascists and bigots.
He is also a huge climate change activist and shares this through his music with children.
Perhaps most importantly, Raffi has routinely turned down offers to license his music for advertisements and movies saying he is “a long standing advocate for a child’s right to live free of commercial exploitation.” In the end, that’s really who Raffi is. He’s a guy who is willing to turn down big paychecks and withstand criticism for his political viewpoints all because he cares about us. We really don’t deserve him.
Here it is:
Some time for thinking outside the box:
Reform Everything At Once
“Why is our system of government so dysfunctional?” we ask ourselves periodically, decade after decade, without ever changing it. The solution, I think, is to round up all the biggest problems and kill them with one shot.
Politics, which depends to a large degree on mobilizing the interest of the bored, busy, and easily distracted public, focuses on intermittent issues far more than it ever focuses on the structure that underlies and causes those issues. Structural reform of our political system—as opposed to just attacking whichever problem came up most recently—is difficult to pull off because it doesn’t align with the political incentives we have created.
It’s hard to get politicians and interest groups to spend political capital on structural reform because there is no clear, immediate political payoff (unless reform happens to coincide with the interests of one party, in which case it will be dismissed as partisan hackery by the other party, and never happen).
What we need is one big political reform bill to fix it all at once. Do it in one throw. Capitalize on people’s momentary focus.
So I suggest that we take advantage of our current national outrage over the perverted spectacle of our Supreme Court confirmation process to push through a bill that does the following:
- Ends lifetime Supreme Court appointments and limits judges to one term of 20 (or 15, or 12) years.
- Abolishes the Electoral College in order to ensure that the winner of the popular vote becomes president.
- Outlaws gerrymandering and assigns the drawing of political districts to a nonpartisan commission or, even better, to a nonpartisan computer program.
- Automatically registers everyone to vote when they reach voting age.
Nobody who genuinely wants our democratic system to function justly in order to represent the will of the people disagrees with any of these measures. Everyone who opposes these measures is a dishonest, power-hungry hack. That unfortunately includes most of the Republican Party…
These, of course, are not the only improvements you could make to our system. The two biggest reforms that I would love to add to the list above would be campaign finance reform (in the form of some formula for public financing of elections) and abolishing the U.S. Senate (a grotesquely undemocratic body that gives the same amount of power to 600,000 citizens of Wyoming that it gives to 40 million citizens of California, warping our democracy irreparably).
Both of those reforms will need to be dragged into existence by scary, howling public mobs. And I hope they are.
Until then: please fix the other stuff before it comes back to screw us all again. Because it will. Over and over and over and over.
Food for thought, right?
Of course you moron rethugs:
Utilities have a problem: the public wants 100% renewable energy, and quick
Renewable energy is hot. It has incredible momentum, not only in terms of deployment and costs but in terms of public opinion and cultural cachet. To put it simply: Everyone loves renewable energy. It’s cleaner, it’s high-tech, it’s new jobs, it’s the future.
And so more and more big energy customers are demanding the full meal deal: 100 percent renewable energy.
The rapid spread and evident popularity of the 100 percent target has created an alarming situation for power utilities. Suffice to say, while there are some visionary utilities in the country, as an industry, they tend to be extremely small-c conservative.
In short, their customers are stampeding in a direction that terrifies them.
The industry’s dilemma is brought home by a recent bit of market research and polling done on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities.
The work was done by the market research firm Maslansky & Partners, which analyzed existing utility messaging, interviewed utility execs and environmentalists, ran a national opinion survey, and did a couple of three-hour sit-downs with “media informed customers” in Minneapolis and Phoenix.
The results are striking. They do a great job of laying out the public opinion landscape on renewables, showing where different groups have advantages and disadvantages.
The takeaway: Renewables are a public opinion juggernaut. Being against them is no longer an option. The industry’s best and only hope is to slow down the stampede a bit (and that’s what they plan to try).
The basic message from the public, if I could pull together all the strands of the research, is this: We want clean, modern energy, and we’ll pay for it. We’re willing to let experts work out the details, but we don’t want to hear that it can’t be done. Just do it.
Utilities can’t make that sentiment go away, though they can and will try to soften it. In the meantime, in the off-chance that their messaging efforts fail, they’d better get serious about giving customers the clean energy they want.
Well good luck big utilities.
Another intermission. I had no idea this was being made. So awesome:
Love me some Elton John! Looking forward to this.
Well, well, well, holy cow this is a lot. Just putting the links here.
Hundreds of law professors sign letters rejecting Kavanaugh nomination
Harvard law students cheer news Kavanaugh will not return – but questions remain
Brett Kavanaugh faced police questioning over 1985 bar brawl – report
For the love of all that is good what more do they need. Right, stupid question.
OK I know many of you are reading this quick before you go to work or perhaps at work with your cup a Joe, but the following is hysterical. Try and catch it later if you can:
Seth Meyers on Trump: 'How much of a sexist dick can you possibly be?'
Late-night hosts discussed the president’s ‘surreal’ press conference that saw him defend Brett Kavanaugh and treat female journalists with disrespect.
One knows we need the laughter.
Our beloved Kerry Eleveld:
Republicans aren't just losing women, they're losing married women—a critical GOP demographic
Republicans are taking a hit among a demographic they have long relied on as a key part of their narrowing coalition: married women. Multiple polls are showing that as married women sour on Donald Trump, they are also adopting a more favorable view of Democrats.
Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg has found that married women's view of Trump has worsened by fully 17 points since March of last year, up from 40 percent who disapproved of him then to 57 percent who do now.
The trend among married women mirrors the trend among women overall, who are also simultaneously rejecting Trump in higher numbers as they embrace the Democratic Party. It’s been a significant shift, particularly among independent women.
Please, please, please follow, promote Yosef52! This is where you can find all the voting information you need.
So, Netflix has almost all the Monty Python material available on their service starting today. The hubby and I just watched their 2014 farewell tour videoed in London. It was awesome and certainly brought some good cheer to us. We need it right...jeesh. So to take us out:
If you have any Good News to share please do, it is always appreciated. We are all here for each other and your input is so important to this community. Happy hump day……..
One more:
Feds finally arrest SoCal racists for violence in Charlottesville, long after media named them
The Los Angeles Times, the OC Weekly, and ProPublica—all in their own ways, and in their own time—have, since early 2017, identified multiple members of the Rise Above Movement as perpetrators of white supremacist violence at various events across California and in Charlottesville, Virginia. As a result of that good journalism, some members of RAM—classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—lost their jobs due to their affiliations, yet none faced arrest. The group also proudly boasted of their hateful violence on social media, yet somehow, the violent white nationalists never faced any criminal charges.
Until now.
Read it all!