Arguments today in Supreme Court about whether Congress gets Executive Branch information or not. Bad if decided the wrong way but it would undo 200+ years of Black Letter Law. These particular cases have uniformly resulted in practically unanimous findings in favor of Congress at both the District and Appeals level.

I would hope Roberts has at least some Constitutional loyalty but I’m not holding my breath.

Trump’s lawyers just made appalling arguments to the Supreme Court
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
May 12, 2020

When Donald Trump ran for president and claimed he’d release his tax returns as soon as the IRS was done auditing them, it was an obvious lie. Since then, he has taken extraordinary steps to conceal what every president and party nominee in almost half a century has gladly offered to the public.

But his desperate attempts to keep the public from understanding his finances may finally be reaching their end — though how long it will take to actually see the documents, or if we will at all, is far from clear.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in three separate lawsuits Trump has filed to stop officials from seeing those returns. The first two concern congressional subpoenas given to Mazars (his accounting firm) and Deutsche Bank (his bank). The third concerns an investigation by the district attorney of Manhattan.

It was hard to tell how the justices might rule. But what the arguments did reveal is the almost limitless scope of immunity he seeks. Trump believes he should be excused not just from congressional oversight, not just from criminal investigation, not just from questioning by the press, but even from politics itself.

It’s almost impossible to overstate how appalling the arguments by Trump’s lawyers have been. They have claimed kingly powers for the president — that while he is in office he can’t be prosecuted or even investigated. That, they say, applies to both Congress and prosecutors.

In the lower court rulings as these cases (and others in which Trump has made similar sweeping claims of immunity) make their way up to the Supreme Court, Trump hasn’t
just lost. Again and again, judges expressed shock and even outrage at the audacity of his claims before rejecting them out of hand.

Consider the first two cases the Supreme Court heard together, the ones involving congressional subpoenas for his tax returns. The position Trump’s lawyers have taken is essentially that Congress didn’t have a good enough reason to exercise its subpoena power, and therefore the subpoenas are invalid — even though they’re directed at outside companies.

Again and again before the high court, Trump’s lawyers used the word “harassment” to describe Congress’s requests, claiming they had no legitimate legislative purpose. That’s despite the fact that the House explicitly cited their legislative purpose: They need to know what kinds of conflicts of interest Trump has to see if the country’s ethics laws need to be strengthened, not to mention figuring out whether legislation ought to be passed requiring presidents to release their tax returns.

But no, Trump’s lawyers said. That’s not good enough, because what they’re really doing is trying to harass him. It’s just political, and because he’s president, he can shield his personal records from their view.

As Justice Elena Kagan noted, Trump would “essentially make it impossible for Congress to perform oversight and carry out its functions where the presidency is concerned.”

Not only in these cases but in other instances — as when Trump refused to comply with subpoenas during impeachment, or when he refused to allow members of his coronavirus task force to testify to the House because it’s “a bunch of Trump-haters” — Trump has claimed a kind of immunity from politics that no other president in history has been granted.

Congress shouldn’t be allowed to carry out its functions, Trump believes, if he decides they have political motives for doing so. Are they trying to hurt me in my reelection, or embarrass me, or gain some kind of advantage? If I decide they are, then I can shut them down.

But of course, Congress always has political motives. Democrats have political motives in seeking his tax returns just like Republicans had political motives in mounting eight separate investigations of Benghazi. Politics infuses everything. Sometimes it’s more important and sometimes less, but it’s always present. The idea that a political motive invalidates Congress’s right to issue subpoenas is positively bonkers.

But we see this again and again: Any of the unpleasant things a president has to deal with — congressional oversight, demands for transparency, critical questioning by the news media — are treated by Trump not as inconveniences but as fundamentally illegitimate.

It was hard to tell how these cases will turn out. Conservative justices asked skeptical questions of Trump’s lawyers, liberal justices asked skeptical questions of Democratic lawyers, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave few hints about his opinion.

But it’s important to understand that even if the court rules against him and his tax returns are turned over, it isn’t as though the next day we’ll all finally learn what Trump has worked so hard to hide for all these years. Trump and his shady accountants have constructed his financial affairs to be as opaque and confusing as possible so that even the IRS won’t have the resources to unravel them.

The Trump Organization is not a company in the way we ordinarily think of them; it’s an amalgam of about 500 separate limited liability corporations. So if there’s a line on the return saying Trump got $5 million from Nothing To See Here Partners LLC, knowing that is only the starting point. For each one of them you’d have to figure out who’s involved and where the money comes from before you could even start to understand what kinds of malfeasance he was engaged in, who he’s in bed with or how he might be compromised.

No single news organization could do it alone. It’s going to require a massive crowdsourced effort. But at this point it’s far from certain we’ll ever see those returns. Trump is counting on five conservative justices to give him the immunity he believes he deserves, and they might do so.

But there’s one thing Trump can’t claim immunity from: the voters.

Evidently, he’s a real Doctor, Lab Coat, Stethescope, and everything.

How does it feel to live in a World of Morons?

Some times it’s about politics.

Eh, pretty ok I guess. What did you expect?

I don’t know, maybe Cracked is starting up again. Cody Johnston got his start there.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Hitler takes Austria; FDR’s first fireside chat; Gacy convicted; Girl Scouts predecessor founded; Les Miserables opens.

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A stream. CBS is not the source I would have chosen given that they maligned MSF by eliding their deployment during Sandy, but they do start earlier than most- 9:30 am.

Matt Phillips at The Times makes a very important point.

Repeat After Me: The Markets Are Not the Economy
By Matt Phillips, The New York Times
May 10, 2020

The stock market looks increasingly divorced from economic reality.

The United States is on the brink of the worst economic collapse since the Hoover administration. Corporate profits have crumpled. More than a million Americans have contracted the coronavirus, and hundreds are dying each day. There is no turnaround in sight.

Yet stocks keep climbing. Even as 20.5 million people lost their jobs in April, the S&P 500 stock index logged its best month in 33 years. After a few weeks of wild swings, the market is down a mere 9.3 percent this year and 13.5 percent from its peak — what most investors would consider a correction. On Friday, after the government released the staggering unemployment figures, the S&P 500 closed up 1.7 percent.

Conventional wisdom would explain the market’s comparatively modest losses this way: Since markets tend to be forward-looking, investors have already accounted for what’s expected to be a cataclysmic drop in second-quarter activity and are forecasting a relatively rapid economic recovery afterward. The Federal Reserve’s actions have also bolstered investors’ confidence that the bottom won’t fall out of the market.

But the pandemic has also highlighted a deeper trend. For decades, the market has been growing increasingly detached from the mainstream of American life, mirroring broad changes in the economy.

“Wall Street has very little to do with Main Street,” said Joachim Klement, a market analyst at Liberum Capital in London. “And less and less so.”

Still, the market retains its grip on the collective imagination. From politicians and corporate executives to mom-and-pop investors, Americans have long relied on the stock market as a proxy for the U.S. economy — for reasons that are partly historical. Its crests suggested bright days ahead, while its troughs suggested a darkening outlook. The current economic fallout, however, could snap any illusions that the logic of the market is derived, in any consistent way, from real-world events.

Part of the reason is the makeup of the stock market, and the fact that the giant companies that make up the S&P 500 operate under very different circumstances than the nation’s small businesses, workers and cities and states. They are highly profitable, hold significant sums of cash and have regular access to public bond markets. They’re far more global than the typical American family firm. (Roughly 40 percent of the revenues of S&P 500 companies come from abroad.)

In 2015, about 600,000 U.S. companies counted at least 20 employees, and only 3,600 of those — or less than 1 percent — were publicly listed, said René Stulz, a professor of finance at Ohio State University, who has studied the changing composition of publicly traded markets.

Because the financial strength of big companies makes them more likely to survive the downturn, their share prices tend to underplay the impact of a widespread economic collapse. In fact, market indexes like the S&P 500 are weighted to reflect the performance of the largest and most profitable companies. In recent weeks, the stocks of such companies have not only veered in the opposite direction of the outlook for the U.S. economy, but from the rest of the stock market itself.

The five largest listed companies — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook — have continued to climb this year, as investors bet these behemoths will emerge in an even more dominant position after the crisis. Through the end of April, these companies were up roughly 10 percent this year, while the 495 other companies in the S&P were down 13 percent, according to Goldman Sachs analysts. These highly valued firms — Microsoft, Amazon and Apple are each worth more than $1 trillion — now account for one-fifth of the market value of the index, the highest level in 30 years.

“It’s very easy to get confused by looking at the S&P doing well and that being driven by a relatively small subset of firms which aren’t really affected by this virus and actually gain from it,” said Mr. Stulz.

Nor does the mood of the market necessarily reflect the sentiment of a broad swathe of Americans. While U.S. stock markets are more democratic than most, with more than half of American households owning shares or investment funds like mutual funds, the overwhelming majority of stock accounts are relatively modest. Rather, stock ownership is heavily skewed to the richest segments of the population, who are least likely to feel the pain of an economic downturn.

“Stock ownership among the middle class is pretty minimal,” said Ed Wolff, an economist at New York University who studies the net worth of American families. He added: “The fluctuations in the stock market don’t have much effect on the net worth of middle-class families.”

In fact, a relatively small number of wealthy families own the vast majority of the shares controlled by U.S. households.

The most recent data from the Federal Reserve shows that the wealthiest top 10 percent of American households own about 84 percent of the value of all household stock ownership, according to an analysis by Mr. Wolff. The top 1 percent controlled 40 percent of household stock holdings.

Economists who have studied the performance of stock markets over time say there’s relatively little evidence that economic growth matters to the outcome of the market at all.
…
So why do millions of Americans continue to think the market really is a barometer on the economy? That’s more a question of history and culture than economics.

Historians say the stock market’s link in the American psyche to the economic health of the country goes back, at least, to the 1929 crash.

“You can think of the Great Crash as almost traumatizing Americans,” said Janice Traflet, a financial historian at Bucknell University’s Freeman College of Management.

With little quality economic information, many Americans saw the 1929 market collapse — the S&P fell an astounding 86 percent before bottoming in 1932 — as the event that caused the Great Depression. The close connection between the health of the economy and the health of the markets, in the minds of many Americans, had been forged.

“Whether or not they were right or wrong that’s the way many Americans interpreted it. And sometimes perceptions become the reality,” said Ms. Traflet.

The crash put mainstream America off the stock market for decades. But by the 1950s, a marketing push from major Wall Street institutions began to coax newly affluent Americans to invest as postwar prosperity grew. The New York Stock Exchange pushed a campaign urging people to “own your share of American business.”

During the 1950s and 1960s, it was easier to link the health of the largest American companies with the broader health of the country, partly because their enormous payrolls helped fuel the expansion of the middle class.

According to a Brookings Institution report, for example, the two most highly valued companies in the country in 1962 — AT&T and General Motors — employed nearly 1.2 million people combined. Last year, the two largest companies in the S&P 500 — Microsoft and Apple — employed 280,000.

I think the link to memories of The Great Depression is kind of weak. Almost everyone who experienced it first hand is dead and even their children are getting a little elderly.

It’s like Nuking from Orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. If your Blood Oxygen is below 70% you’re probably pretty sick for whatever reason. I had undiagnosed Anemia for years and years (told you I was the Whitest Guy you know), it’s something I should be tracking anyway if only to establish a baseline.

I was quite surprised to find one available on Amazon at a completely reasonable price and I ordered it as if it were an e-Bay Auction- Buy Now!

There are some other Orders cooking (Prime Standard Shipping) and the general delay appears to be a week or two, but they do get here- eventually, and while I was checking on them I got a scary Red message saying my shipment had been delayed.

Well, that’s not a good sign. I’ve ordered Readers from China before (.50 since you ask, hard to get) and it’s anyone’s guess unless they’re already in a West Coast Warehouse. Oximeters are in high demand and for purposes much more useful than mine so I wrote it off as one of those tools that will arrive just after you need it.

After a couple of days I went to check the status of my Orders (might arrive this week, might not) and Lo and Behold apparently back on track, though for sometime between Wednesday and Forever.

We’ll see. Amazon won’t deliver it anyway, it’s coming straight from the Vendor.

They won’t drop it on my doorstep any more than Amazon will, still pretty reliant on that “Last Mile” “Universal Service” model.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Nor Pandemic we hope, but Republicans seem intent.

U.S. Post Office Loss Doubles as It Warns COVID-19 Will Hit Its Finances
By Diane Bartz, Chris Sanders, and Lisa Baertlein, Reuters
May 8, 2020

The U.S. Postal Service on Friday said its losses more than doubled to $4.5 billion in the quarter ending in March and warned the economic slowdown spurred by the spread of COVID-19 could severely hurt its finances over the next 18 months.

The Postal Service’s Board of Governors also met on Friday and said the service needs financial help from Congress to maintain service at current levels. The White House has threatened to block aid that Congress has already approved during the pandemic, and has accused the Postal Service of charging too little to package shippers such as Amazon.com Inc.

“The stark reality is that the pandemic will cause meaningful near-term and long-term implications, from the steep decline in revenue we will suffer this year and in the coming years. That will endanger our ability to fulfill our universal service missions absent congressional intervention,” said Postmaster General Megan Brennan, who steps down June 15.

She said the Postal Service had requested funding from Congress and unrestricted access to borrowing. She told a congressional committee last month that the new coronavirus alone could mean $13 billion in lost revenue this year.
…
To determine what it pays for workers’ compensation each quarter, the Postal Service calculates potential costs related to injuries and other problems. It then determines how much it must invest to have those funds available when needed. Lower interest rates because of the economic slowdown related to the pandemic require more investment.

The meeting comes two days after the governors announced they had selected Republican donor Louis DeJoy to be the next postmaster general.

The Postal Service has been struggling for years as online communication has replaced letters, and after a 2006 law required it to pre-fund employee pension and retirement health care costs for the next 75 years. It is funded entirely through services and postage and has been further hurt as advertisers have decided to reduce mail during the pandemic.

Congress has authorized the Treasury Department to lend the Postal Service up to $10 billion as part of a $2.3 trillion coronavirus stimulus package. President Donald Trump has threatened to block that aid.

Trump has frequently criticized the post office, saying it charges too little to deliver packages sent by online retailers such as Amazon, whose founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which has been critical of the president.

E-commerce packages account for most of the USPS Parcel Select business, which brought in revenue of $6.8 billion on the delivery of 2.9 billion packages during the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2019.

The three largest USPS customers – identified by experts as Parcel Select users Amazon.com, United Parcel Service Inc and FedEx Corp – account for 8.5% of its operating revenue. USPS makes money on every package, based on a review by the Postal Regulatory Commission. Shippers get discounted rates for some U.S. ZIP codes, but not on roughly 23,000 ZIP codes outside of urban areas where it is more competitive, said Robert Fisher, a postal consultant and a former USPS executive.

Delivering to far-flung doorsteps in more-remote areas is expensive and few shippers want to pay extra fees that companies like UPS and FedEx tack on to cover the cost. Fisher doubted the USPS will disappear. “It’s not going to happen anytime soon because approximately one out of three Amazon packages is still delivered by the Postal Service, and it will be skewed towards the places where it’s more expensive for them to do it themselves,” he said.

The pandemic has also boosted interest in expanding options to vote by mail rather than crowding into polling places, making it more important that funding extends past November for the presidential election.

You know, things were not all Skittles and Beer before Coronavirus either.

Ok, Skittles.

A lot of people think Wallingford is Stars Hollow.

It’s not.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Charges dropped against Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case; Garry Kasparov loses a chess match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer; Songwriter Irving Berlin born; Reggae star Bob Marley dies.

And I’d like to give my love to everybody, and let them know that the grass may look greener on the other side, but believe me, it’s just as hard to cut.

Little Richard

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It’s not always a good thing. Robert Reich explains-

Under Trump, American exceptionalism means poverty, misery and death
by Robert Reich, The Guardian
Sun 10 May 2020

No other nation has endured as much death from Covid-19 nor nearly as a high a death rate as has the United States.

With 4.25% of the world population, America has the tragic distinction of accounting for about 30% of pandemic deaths so far.

And it is the only advanced nation where the death rate is still climbing. Three thousand deaths per day are anticipated by 1 June.

No other nation has loosened lockdowns and other social-distancing measures while deaths are increasing, as the US is now doing.

No other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the US.

We now know Donald Trump and his administration were told by public health experts in mid-January that immediate action was required to stop the spread of Covid-19. But according to Dr Anthony Fauci, “there was a lot of pushback”. Trump didn’t act until 16 March

Epidemiologists estimate 90% of the deaths in the US from the first wave of Covid-19 might have been prevented had social distancing policies been put into effect two weeks earlier, on 2 March.

No nation other than the US has left it to subordinate units of government – states and cities – to buy ventilators and personal protective equipment. In no other nation have such sub-governments been forced to bid against each another.

In no other nation have experts in public health and emergency preparedness been pushed aside and replaced by political cronies like Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in turn has been advised by Trump donors and Fox News celebrities.

In no other advanced nation has Covid-19 forced so many average citizens into poverty so quickly. The Urban Institute reports that more than 30% of American adults have had to reduce their spending on food.

Elsewhere around the world, governments are providing generous income support. Not in the US.

At best, Americans have received one-time checks for $1,200, about a week’s worth of rent, groceries and utilities. Few are collecting unemployment benefits because unemployment offices are overwhelmed with claims.

Congress’s “payroll protection program” has been a mess. Because funds have been distributed through financial institutions, banks have raked off money for themselves and rewarded their favored customers. Of the $350bn originally intended for small businesses, $243.4m has gone to large, publicly held companies.

Meanwhile, the treasury and the Fed are bailing out big corporations from the debts they accumulated in recent years to buy back their shares of stock.

Why is America so different from other advanced nations facing the same coronavirus threat? Why has everything gone so tragically wrong?

Some of it is due to Trump and his hapless and corrupt collection of grifters, buffoons, sycophants, lobbyists and relatives.

But there are also deeper roots.

The coronavirus has been especially potent in the US because America is the only industrialized nation lacking universal healthcare. Many families have been reluctant to see doctors or check into emergency rooms for fear of racking up large bills.

America is also the only one of 22 advanced nations failing to give all workers some form of paid sick leave. As a result, many American workers have remained on the job when they should have been home.

Adding to this is the skimpiness of unemployment benefits in America – providing less support in the first year of unemployment than those in any other advanced country.

American workplaces are also more dangerous. Even before Covid-19 ripped through meatpackers and warehouses, fatality rates were higher among American workers than European.

Even before the pandemic robbed Americans of their jobs and incomes, average wage growth in the US had lagged behind average wage growth in most other advanced countries. Since 1980, American workers’ share of total national income has declined more than in any other rich nation.

In other nations, unions have long pushed for safer working conditions and higher wages. But American workers are far less unionized than workers in other advanced economies. Only 6.4% of private-sector workers in America belong to a union, compared with more than 26% in Canada, 37% in Italy, 67% in Sweden, and 25% in Britain.

So who and what’s to blame for the worst avoidable loss of life in American history?

Partly, Donald Trump’s malfeasance.

But the calamity is also due to America’s longer-term failure to provide its people the basic support they need.

Still anxious to return to status quo ante? Things were not so good and that is mostly responsible for the fix we’re in. Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is a criminal sure.

So are lots of other Republicans. All must go, most should be arrested.

Yes, Bowling is a sport. My Mother, Emily, actually used it to fulfill her Athletics mandatory electives. I don’t think she was very good and whatever talent she had I don’t. I’m utterly hopeless and was even before my Arthritis. My Grandfather and my Great Grandfather both rolled a few 300s and the scoresheets were framed and hung on the walls of the Basement.

2019 PBA Cheetah Championship Stepladder Finals

2019 PBA World Championship Stepladder Finals

2019 PBA Playoffs Championship Finals