Harmony Hall – Vampire Weekend

Burn The Witch – Radiohead

Days Go By – Dirty Vegas

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.

My Lai Massacre in Vietnam; Terry Anderson abducted; First successful liquid-fuel rocket launch; Jerry Lewis born.

The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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Look, I know you long for the days of Obama but he only looks good by comparison. He self identifies as slightly to the right of Eisenhower and that’s not progressive or Left in any sense.

One of his worst policies was Investor State Dispute Settlement as instituted in NAFTA (by Bill Clinton) and in the Trans Pacific Partnership. Basically any Global MegaCorp could sue a Government for expected profits in a Kangaroo Court arbitration process superseding Constitutional Courts of Law, ones where they got to pick the Judge and the Jury.

Think it couldn’t happen here? It already is and by an Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio affiliated Russian Oligarch no less.

Deripaska Sues Over U.S. Sanctions, Claims $7.5 Billion Loss
By Andrew M Harris, David Voreacos, and Stephanie Baker, Bloomberg News
March 15, 2019

Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska is fighting back in a U.S. court against American sanctions that he said are unfairly destroying his global businesses and are based on unproven allegations about his close ties to the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Deripaska, who made his fortune in the metals industry, sued the U.S. Treasury Department and Secretary Steven Mnuchin in Washington on Friday, asking a federal judge to lift the restrictions against him. In his complaint, the magnate said he is “the latest victim” of “political infighting and ongoing reaction to Russia’s purported interference” with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, unfairly targeted Deripaska and caused his net worth to drop by $7.5 billion as banks withdrew credit and other businesses refused to work with him, according to the suit. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his net worth at $3.9 billion, after dropping $5.8 billion last year, the most among Russia’s ultra-wealthy.

“I have filed a civil complaint against Treasury and OFAC to clear my name and remove the sanctions that have been arbitrarily imposed on me for political reasons,” Deripaska said in an Instagram post. “This is about simple justice.”

U.S. government sanctions have resulted in “the utter devastation of Deripaska’s wealth, reputation and economic livelihood,” according to the complaint. “Deripaska has been effectively shut out from the international business community and the global financial system.”

Deripaska, the founder of aluminum producers En+ Group and United Co. Rusal, was among the most prominent tycoons hit with sanctions by President Donald Trump’s administration. The move followed passage of a law to retaliate against Moscow for its election meddling. In April 2018, the Treasury slapped sanctions on Deripaska and six other Russians it labeled oligarchs in response to the Kremlin’s “malign activity around the globe.”

Recognize the name? I thought you might. Oleg Deripaska is the Putin controlled spy that has a monopoly on Aluminum in Russia and is the direct conduit between the GRU and Manafort.

Yeah, that’s just exactly the kind of behavior we should be encouraging.

So Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio lost 12 Republicans in the Senate during his showdown over an Emergency Declaration to fund his Vanity Project Penis Wall O’ Racism and that might seem bad enough, but it’s actually much worse.

He Whipped them, “whipped” in this sense meaning he made the vote explicitly a test of personal and Party loyalty and reached out to individually contact and lobby each of the 53 Senators in his Caucus.

It was a miserable failure. Indeed a last minute delegation of Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Ben Sasse was virtually kicked out as trespassers. The Art Of The Deal baby.

Does this mean there may be some movement on Pelosi style bi-partisan Impeachment?

No.

It is significant in that it makes the record clear for the Courts which will ultimately decide the Constitutionality of this “Emergency” that there is bi-partisan consensus that Congress does not want to spend any money on the Vanity Project Penis Wall O’ Racism and has taken extraordinary action to prevent it.

You can’t spend willy-nilly as if it was all some huge pot of greenbacks to be thrown at whatever you want. It’s Congress’ dough and if you look at the programs that will be looted and pillaged you’ll find a fair amount is being stolen from Representative’s and Senator’s Districts and States and that might not sit so well with their constituents.

Trump rages as fresh signs of his weakness emerge
By Greg Sargent, Washington Post
March 15, 2019

There is probably no better way to demonstrate one’s manly strength and control than firing off a tweet in capital letters. So it is that, when a dozen GOP senators defied President Trump’s orders and voted to terminate his declaration of a national emergency, his powerful Twitter thumbs sprang into action: “VETO!”

The thrilling message to his supporters: Trump’s got this. He’s totally in command of the situation.

But we are now learning new details about just how personally involved Trump was in trying to prevent defections among GOP senators. It turns out Trump aggressively sought to make this vote all about himself — frequently warning that he would unleash the cult-like wrath of his voters if the Senate didn’t do his bidding — and raged as that effort failed.

What makes this so odd is that even though the Senate and House have now voted to terminate Trump’s national emergency, he actually can veto the measure, and his emergency will proceed. So why the histrionics? One possible answer is that, for Trump, even this interim loss represented an unacceptable display of weakness — with ominous portents for the future.
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The Post also reports that White House aides informed undecided GOP senators that Trump was paying close attention to their votes, as White House aides worked to “keep the number of Republican defectors in the single digits.”
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The New York Times reports that Trump made a “volley of phone calls” to Senate Republicans and “warned them of the electoral consequences of defying him.”
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The Times adds that when this effort failed to persuade Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Trump “flew into a rage.”

The key point here is that Trump’s effort to make this vote all about “border security” failed. Republican senators objected to Trump’s national emergency declaration on separation-of-powers grounds: He used it to gain wall funding that Congress had just denied him. But over and over, Trump commanded them to see this as only about border security, and about him.

Notably, Trump repeatedly threatened them with the idea that his own supporters would see it this way, too, and that this should frighten them very deeply. But it didn’t.

Why did Trump invest so much in this one vote, when he always had the option of a “VETO!” to render its outcome moot?

Well, for one thing, a large congressional rebuke on this could weaken his legal stance. Multiple lawsuits underway argue that Trump’s national emergency violated the Constitution by using the emergency to secure funds Congress had explicitly denied him. Senate Republicans have now reiterated Congress’s opposition to funding the wall.

But there’s another plausible explanation for Trump’s rage about this vote: It’s rooted in the same impulse that leads him to keep claiming the wall is currently being built, when it isn’t.

As Trump gears up for his reelection campaign, his aides have been instructing his followers to bellow “Finish the wall!” rather than “Build the wall!” Trump is extremely sensitive to the nuances of what is chanted at his rallies. As Trump himself recently put it: “The chant now should be ‘Finish the wall’ instead of ‘Build the wall,’ because we’re building a lot of wall.”

We actually aren’t. But all this is a reminder of how deeply entangled the wall is with Trump’s belief that his hold on his followers depends on creating the impression that he’s winning everywhere and that he’s perpetually taking control of events.

Crucial to maintaining this impression throughout has been Trump’s insistence that he has bent his whole party to his will on “border security.” (Please remember: Republicans didn’t fund his wall when they held both houses of Congress.) During the government shutdown, news reports indicated that Republicans were splintering, and Trump raged that “there is GREAT unity” on “Strong Border Security,” despite the “Fake News Media” reporting otherwise. But Trump’s capital-letter tweets couldn’t make that true, and he caved. The declaration of the national emergency after that, similarly, was all about projecting action and control.

Now Trump’s command that Republicans see their national emergency vote as one about border security failed. We’ve learned this came after extensive browbeating, including the threat to unleash the anger of Trump voters. But the national emergency is deeply unpopular, and the legal arguments for it are deeply absurd. In the face of that threat, as frightening as it was, reality proved overwhelming.

Trump will do his “VETO!,” and the national emergency will continue. But the wall still faces extensive legal obstacles, and it still isn’t being built. It’s hard to say whether this will ultimately cost Trump with his supporters. But judging by all his behind-the-scenes raging to keep Republicans in line, he certainly seems to think something is amiss.

Episode IX

It was a dark day on the Intertubz as the Trucks piled up. Evil Jenny Nicholson of the Amazon Order sits on her bed with the giant stuffed Porg and her plush BB-8 with a “Be My Valentine” sash and reads to us from a book that definitely does not rip off Star Wars at all and is just a dumb romance novel of the type my sister, who has a huge Kindle habit, says I should be writing instead of wasting my time on politics.

“As he spoke, sitting beside her, his hand brushed her thigh and she thrilled to the touch, momentarily forgetting the deadly peril they faced. In that instant she knew that they were destined to be together forever and vowed that no danger would prevent their inevitable union, in life and in death.”

C’mon, who does Mary Sue? I do. It’s a thousand pages give or take a few, I’ll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer if you like the style or I can change it ’round for you overnight. If I can’t get published I’ll just post it here, but I need a break and I want to be a Paperback Writer.

Paperback Writer.

Oh, and I’ve come in possession (many Bothans died) of the plans for the McGuffin so we can save our people and restore freedom to the Galaxy.

Also some Llamas who seem to have wandered over from that set where they’ve been playing with those Sparrow shipped Coconut Shells and pointy things (to be fair they did finally chase off the Moose infestation).

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.

Julius Caesar assassinated in Rome; Johnson urges passage of Voting Rights Act; Worldcom CEO Bernard Ebbers convicted of fraud; Elizabeth Taylor marries Richard Burton; “My Fair Lady” debuts on Broadway.

Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools.

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

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Ok, this is what a love sponge is-

This is Tucker Carlson: White Supremacist–

Not sponge worthy.

Occupied Palestine is, umm… Occupied

They’re actually equally Semites as far as labels like that go (not far unless you’re Tucker Carlson). Benjamin Netanyahu is a crook who deserves to be in jail for perfectly obvious and ordinary reasons and AIPAC is the United States lobbying arm of his political party. Are you ok with that?

Not in the sense that you agree necessarily, just that it’s ok to talk about.

Only not on this site without prior review.

I affirm and attest I have reviewed this statement- ek hornbeck.

Cartnoon!

Nah, it’s about sexual harassment.

Frankly I don’t understand misogynous Geek/Nerd culture at all. I’ve spent a long time looking for people who at least pretend to tolerate my madness and I treasure their companionship.

Re-posted for obvious reasons ~ TMC

π (Pi), how could we live without it. So let’s celebrate π on it’s day 3.14.

As you remember from grammar school math, π is the mathematical constant consisting of the main numbers 3, 1 and 4. According to the Wikipedia of π, “it is the the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, and is approximately equal to 3.14159.”

It has been represented by the Greek letter “π” since the mid-18th century, though it is also sometimes written as pi. π is an irrational number, which means that it cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of two integers (such as 22/7 or other fractions that are commonly used to approximate π); consequently, its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. The digits appear to be randomly distributed, although no proof of this has yet been discovered. π is a transcendental number – a number that is not the root of any nonzero polynomial having rational coefficients. The transcendence of π implies that it is impossible to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle with a compass and straight-edge.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion lab only uses 15 digits to calculate interplanetary travel, while mathematician James Grime argues that just 39 digits of pi is enough to calculate the circumference of the known universe.

OK, enough of that. Let’s get on to the fun stuff.

It’s earliest known celebration was in California where in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium physicist Larry Shaw along with the staff and the public marched around one of its circular spaces eating fruit pies. In 2009. The US House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution declaring 3.14 π (Pi) Day. And in 2010, a French computer scientist claimed to have calculated pi to almost 2.7 trillion digits. This year is no different. The party starts at 10 AM PT and all are invited and it’s FREE!!

Coincidentally, it is also the birthday of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. So at Princeton University in New Jersey there are numerous celebrations around both events that also include an Albert Einstein look alike contest.

Besides the partying at Princeton, here’s what is going on elsewhere to celebrate this mathematical necessity that drives mathematicians nuts.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology releases its undergraduate admissions decisions on Pi Day, and starting in 2012, it began sending the verdicts at 6:28 pm, or “Tau time,” for the mathematical equation 2π.

Today is the 30th anniversary of Pi Day. In its honor Google has a new doodle, although not as cool as the one at the top of this post but it may taste better. The doodle is based on a pi-inspired dish, salted caramel apple pie, courtesy of Cronut creator and pastry pioneer Dominique Ansel.

NASA is inviting math whizzes to compete in its “Pi in the Sky” challenge to solve a series of interplanetary math problems.

Check your local news and on line for specials on everything from pizza to deserts to geeky tee shirts, gadgets and memorabilia.

In 2010’s “Moment of Geek”, Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” featured a math student teacher, Teresa Miller, from the University of New Mexico with a hula hoop and a Rubic’s Cube that was quite amazing.

Now for your moment of Zen.

Winter – Off The Air

Punxsutawney Phil tells us it should be over any week now. In light of Global Warming I hesitate to celebrate. Daylight Savings has come again (still recovering and by any rational scheme we would be on Atlantic Time permanently) and March Madness not far away.

First Formula One Sunday. Hopefully this season will be easier to grasp.

Uhh… here on Sores and Boils Alley we’re hipper than you think. I live near a family that are distant relatives of some totally legitimate business people as far as I know and we never really feel the need to lock our doors at night.

If you know what I mean.

Frank Cali, Gambino crime boss, killed in front of Staten Island home
By Timothy Bella, Washington Post
March 14, 2019

Frank Cali, the reputed boss of the Gambino crime family whose deep ties to the Sicilian Mafia made him a figure of influence and power in both New York and Sicily, was fatally shot outside his home in Staten Island on Wednesday night, police told The Washington Post.

At around 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, Cali, 53, was in front of his red-brick colonial style home in the Todt Hill neighborhood, when he was approached by a blue pickup truck. Known as “Franky Boy,” the Gambino boss was reportedly shot six times in the chest and run over by the truck, as first reported by the New York Daily News. Police said that a suspect sped off in the truck, WNBC reported.
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Cali’s death marks the first time in 34 years that a crime family boss was fatally shot in New York City. The previous instance was in 1985, when Paul Castellano, another Gambino crime boss, who was assassinated under the orders of John Gotti outside Manhattan’s Sparks Steak House. As the Daily News reported, Cali lived only a half-mile away from Castellano’s home.

Once described as “the rising star of the American mafia,” Cali was an influential figure who surrounded himself with many Italian-born associates. He gained the trust of Jackie “The Nose” D’Amico, an acting boss who promoted him to capo before the age of 40. Cali’s ascension within the Gambino crime family, once considered one of the most significant criminal organizations in the U.S., came years after federal prosecutors sent its top leaders to prison, crippling its national and global reach. One of those prosecutors, Rudolph W. Giuliani, currently the attorney for President Trump, used the 1986 indictment of the heads of the five crime families to help launch his successful campaign for mayor of New York years later.

As a leader, Cali was reportedly considerably less flashy than the ebullient Gotti, another Gambino boss, and was described by the New York Post as “a real quiet old-school boss.” Cali’s influence reportedly stemmed from his family connections with the Inzerillo crime family in Palermo, Sicily.

“Cali is seen as a man of influence and power by organized crime members in Italy,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joey Lipton said during a bail hearing in 2008.

Lipton went on to quote an intercepted conversation from an Italian mobster, who described Cali as “a friend of ours.”

“He is everything over there,” the mobster allegedly said, referring to Cali’s stature in New York, according to the Daily News.

Federal authorities recognized Cali’s sense of stability and attempted to stop his meteoric rise. In what would be his only mob-related criminal conviction, Cali plead guilty to conspiring to extort money in 2008, stemming from a failed bid to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island years earlier. He was released after completing a 16-month prison sentence. Upon his release, the Justice Department ordered that Cali not come in contact with his uncle, John Gambino, if it was not approved ahead of time by his probation officer. (Gambino died at 77 of natural causes in 2017.)

In 2015, Cali was reportedly elevated to acting boss of the Gambino crime family, succeeding Domenico Cefalu, according to the Daily News. During his run with the family, Cali was looked at as a unifying leader, concentrating on enhancing the organization’s role in the OxyContin and heroin trade, the New York Post reported.

The death in Todt Hill came on the same day that Bonnano crime family boss Joseph Cammarano Jr., and his consigliere, John Zancocchio, were acquitted in federal court of charges of racketeering and conspiracy to commit extortion.

But, Stars Hollow.

One night for yuks I went to a notorious restaurant which, while they seemed somewhat surprised that I waltzed in, sat at the Bar, and asked for a menu, was otherwise completely unremarkable.