tingilinde

playing the coal game

Some interesting characters at a Montana operation.

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As night fell, a driver traveling along a state road some 20 miles away from Bluefield noticed a man on the roadside: a disheveled Mr. Price, who was rushed to a hospital. He told investigators he had been abducted by an outlaw biker gang that drugged him and took him to his motorcycle shop where they robbed him before loading him into a van and dumping him on the roadside. When surveillance cameras showed there hadn’t been a robbery, he changed his story, saying that the gang had asked him for coal train schedules for a scheme to traffic methamphetamines by rail.

The truth was, Mr. Price hadn’t been kidnapped at all. As he later admitted in court, he had staged his own kidnapping, a last-ditch attempt to escape investors’ wrath for embezzlement schemes totaling more than $20 million that he’d hatched with the president of the Montana coal mine.

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probably a right wing hero

Selling fake Covid-19 vaccination cards and destroying vaccines..  a Utah plastic surgeon and his friend.

At the very least he should pay a large fine and loose his medical license.

 

 

on ethics

 

 

santos in action

Can you spell Ponzi? He seems to define honesty for his party.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

debt

Does America have too much?  A note by Paul Krugman

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Then came Covid, and this time the government responded very strongly, with trillions in aid to families, businesses, the unemployed and state and local governments. The result was a gratifyingly fast economic recovery — again, accompanied by a burst of inflation, but that seems to be subsiding. Of course, there was also an upward jump in debt.

So should we start trying to pay this debt down now? Leave aside the fact that, politically, it just isn’t going to happen, would it even be a good idea economically?

The answer depends in large part on whether the Fed would be able to offset the depressing effects of fiscal austerity on demand. Right now that wouldn’t be a problem, since the Fed is raising rates to fight inflation; all it would need to do is slow or reverse these rate hikes. But what will the economic environment look like in, say, two or three years?

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myths about taxing the rich

A fine piece by Robert Reich.

a tip of the hat to Greg

white hot hate

An old New Yorker piece on the harassment of women by the Christian anti-abortion cult .

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I went into the hospital early in the morning, and was home in bed early that evening. At seven the next morning, the telephone rang. A woman asked for me.

“Yes?” I said.

“How are you?” she asked.

I said I was O.K.

“Well, we know that yesterday morning you murdered a six-week-old baby girl, and we’d like to offer you some guidance.”

“Who is this?” I said, frightened and trying to think.

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The piece was written 45 years ago.  The hate is still there - much stronger now and emboldened by an illegitimate Supreme Court.

 

 

 

 

white collar crime

A map

a tip of the hat to Greg

an encounter with a maga person

Historian Thomas Zimmer on his encounter on a beach.

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While chasing seagulls on the beach with my two little boys, we ran into two elderly ladies who were delighted at the sight of the human cubs: “Oh, they are adorable!” (They really are. And considering that one was a preschooler and one was a toddler, they had also gotten quite good at working together to get closer to the seagulls.) I expected some pleasant small talk, and that’s indeed how it started. But within maybe four minutes, one of the ladies had launched into a tirade about the impending doom of the Republic and rattled off one rightwing conspiracy theory after another. She was particularly alarmed about encroaching government tyranny: Outraged about the FBI having “raided” Mar-a-Lago just a few days earlier, and utterly convinced that the IRS was about to unleash 87,000 new agents – which she seemed to imagine as a heavily armed special ops force – on her and her fellow supporters of “President Trump” (she kept saying that: President Trump – very much in contrast to “Biden,” just Biden, or “the Clintons”).

87,000 IRS agents, out to destroy the lives and livelihoods of real Americans.

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Santos is the perfect representation of the current Republican party at this point.

 

 

on the origin of amazon smile

From ex-Amazon employees...

a tip of the hat to Carl