Friday, October 27, 2017

What Fresh Hell? for October 27, 2017: The Undead Nancy Reagan; Nazis head for TN, leaving VA to the GOP; and one company added 159,000 employees in Q2 2017. MOTUS peeved: It was Amazon.


Raleigh Republicans don’t even try to hide their plans to throttle democracy any more. Of their plan to make all 403 state judges, from the lowest to the Supreme Court, run partisan, privately funded races every two years, The News & Observer reports,


Lead racial gerrymander artist, state Rep. David Lewis, spouts this claim: “If you’re going to act like a legislator, (we’re going to) make you run like one.”


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Up the road, in a tight race for governor, the *resident is trying to hot up Virginia’s racist voters for Ed Gillespie, who is, doubtless, a very fine man on one side.


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MOTUS himself was busy yesterday. He rode Air Force One to Dallas for three hours for a re-election fundraiser. His re-election. The one in 2020.


Having forced out his HHS secretary for not covering up a million bucks in air travel on charters and government planes, the *resident knows appearances count.




From 2009 to January, his supporters found more fault with less presidential travel.


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The problem with new energy industries is they aren’t big and mature enough to match the campaign contributions of the old ones:


A Trump administration plan to subsidize coal and nuclear energy would cost US taxpayers about $10.6bn a year and prop up some of the oldest and dirtiest power plants in the country, a new analysis has found.

The Department of Energy has proposed that coal and nuclear plants be compensated not only for the electricity they produce but also for the reliability they provide to the grid. The new rule would provide payments to facilities that store fuel on-site for 90 days or more because they are “indispensable for our economic and national security”.

Rick Perry, the energy secretary, said the subsidies were needed to avoid power outages “in times of supply stress such as recent natural disasters”.

The plan would provide a lifeline to many ageing coal and nuclear plants that would otherwise go out of business, primarily due to the abundance of cheap natural gas and the plummeting cost of renewables.


corn dog perry.jpg


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For once, it’s actually true that ignorance of the law is no excuse:


The Australian deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, and four senators have been ruled ineligible to sit in parliament by the high court, with only the National party’s Matt Canavan and NXT’s Nick Xenophon surviving a challenge that has hung over seven parliamentarians since their dual citizenship was discovered in July and August.

The court’s unanimous decision to uphold a strict reading of the constitutional disqualification of foreign citizens will trigger a byelection in the New South Wales seat of New England, won comfortably by Joyce, the National party leader, at the 2016 election. The court’s ruling also forced the deputy National party leader, Fiona Nash, and One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts out of the Senate. Two Greens senators, Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters, who had already resigned, were confirmed as ineligible by the court.

Joyce’s exit strips Malcolm Turnbull’s government of its one-seat majority in the House of Representatives for now, but he could return through a byelection on 2 December.

At a brief media conference in Canberra on Friday, Turnbull insisted his government still had a majority – it holds 75 of 149 seats in the lower house although one sits in the Speaker’s chair – and enjoyed the support of several crossbench MPs who could guarantee confidence and supply.

The federal president of the Nationals party, Larry Anthony, told the ABC on Friday that the Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, will serve as interim leader.

In a joint decision the justices rejected the commonwealth’s argument that MPs or senators would need to have knowledge of their dual citizenship in order to be disqualified.


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It worked for sex, and rock-and-roll:


Now that Republicans have discovered a large cadre of their base is made up of white dope fiends, a role has been discovered for the US government to play in health care.


It consists of wall-to-wall TV ads featuring Nancy Reagan.


Everyone else will still be arrested and used to placate shareholders in corporate prisons.




After his speech, media meat puppets raved over how lifelike the *resident’s regrets over his older brother Fred’s death from alcoholism seemed.




When Donald Trump’s father, Fred Sr., died in 1999, the roughly $20 million inheritance was divided up among his children and their descendants, “other than my son Fred C. Trump Jr.,” according to the Times.

Donald Trump had helped draft the will. At the time, Freddy Trump’s children sued, claiming Donald Trump and his siblings had used “undue influence” over their grandfather, who had dementia.

Donald retaliated by withdrawing the medical benefits he had promised to his nephew’s infant son, who suffered from seizures that led to cerebral palsy, according to the Times.

“I was angry because they sued,” Trump told the Times. The suit was settled “very amicably,” he added.

The Times article also details Freddy Trump’s struggles trying his hand at the family real estate business. He helped his father build Trump Village in the 1960s but was berated for installing expensive new windows instead of repairing old ones, according to the Times.

When he left real estate to become a pilot, Donald Trump gave his brother a hard time and told him to come back to the family business.

“I was too young; I didn’t realize,” he told the Times. “Now I give speeches on success, and I tell people, ‘You’ve got to love what you’re doing.’”


As he told others, Fred “just wasn’t a killer.”


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Sacco Vandal (formerly Scott Wurgler), of Ohio, hosts “War Room” an alt right internet radio show, and created the website Vandal Void with his twin brother, Vanzetti Vandal (formerly Matthew Wurgler). The brothers’ website and book, The American Militant Manifesto, promote white supremacist militant nationalism. At April’s white supremacist rally in Pikeville, Kentucky, Sacco said, “America is for the white man.”


The white supremacist Nationalist Front will hold a series of “White Lives Matter” protests at various points in Tennessee on Saturday, October 28, 2017. The events will begin at 10am EST and culminate in a private social event that evening. With an expected attendance of around 200 people, this could be the largest gathering of white supremacists since Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Virginia.


...According to group leaders’ posts to social media, the protests are meant to call attention to the “ongoing problem of refugee resettlement in Middle Tennessee,” with a special emphasis on the Emanuel Samson church shooting. Organizers also plan to protest the Trump administration’s recent decision to remove Sudan from the list of countries included in the travel ban, its failure to build a border wall with Mexico and for its apparent willingness to work with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on a new version of the DREAM Act.


President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville in August saying they included “some very fine people,” while expressing sympathy for their demonstration against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.


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MP Ryad Abdel Sattar on Wednesday introduced to the parliament’s speaker Ali Abdel Aal a draft law entailing five main articles of the criminalisation of homosexuality.

The draft law would pave the way for strict punitive measures against the LGBT community in Egypt, in addition to restricting the presence of LGBT People inside Egyptian society, Abdel Sattar said in media statements dedicated to local outlets.


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Meanwhile, until the rule of law in America is finally throttled, a hew norms still apply. A Kentucky judge has resigned after an ethics complaint was filed against him for refusing to hear adoptions by same-sex couples.


Judge W. Mitchell Nance also oversaw divorce in two counties. While he opposes that, too, he never refused to grant one.


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Amazon added a whopping 159,500 employees in the last quarter, pushing its total employment to 541,900 people worldwide, according to new numbers from the tech giant released today.

RELATED: Amazon crushes profit expectations with $43.7B in quarterly sales; stock up 7%
Amazon’s headcount grew 77 percent over this time last year, and a big reason for that is the completion of Amazon’s blockbuster deal to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion and the acquisition of e-commerce company Souq. The Whole Foods deal includes 87,000 people who worked at the grocery chain, making up a big chunk of the employment growth this quarter. Even factoring out the acquisitions of Whole Foods and Souq, Amazon’s headcount climbed 47 percent over this time last year.

“Certainly hiring continues to remain strong, especially in the tech areas and sales force, particularly in AWS,” Amazon’s CFO Brian Olsavsky said on a call with reporters.

For perspective, Google’s entire workforce totaled 78,101 at the end of the third quarter, approximately half the amount Amazon added in the last three months.. Microsoft employed 124,293 people as of the end of its fiscal year in June.

Amazon’s total employment this quarter is roughly on par with the population of the city of Albuquerque, N.M.

Much of Amazon’s eye-popping growth happened in the last decade, as the retail giant had just 20,000 employees nine years ago, and 81,000 five years ago. Amazon has doubled its headcount in just the past five quarters.

Amazon’s growth has propelled the retail giant to become the country’s second-largest employer behind Walmart. But in terms of total employment, Amazon remains well behind Walmart, its chief competitor on a number of fronts. Walmart employs 2.3 million people worldwide.



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