Monday Reading

As always, please follow the links to the full articles/ op eds.

Looks like Elon Musk isn't such a nice person at all:

While the rest of the world celebrated the rescue of 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach trapped in a cave in northern Thailand this week, Elon Musk is still mad his plan to help out didn’t work. And he’s throwing a fit on Twitter — he baselessly accused one of the British divers involved in the mission of being a pedophile. 

Here’s what happened: 63-year-old British caver Vern Unsworth, who according to CNN played an instrumental role in rescuing the team, criticized Musk in an interview with the network this week for his attempted involvement in the mission. As the saga was unfolding, Musk said that his companies SpaceX and the Boring Company would help rescue the boys. He proposed creating an “air tunnel underwater.” Musk also had engineers from SpaceX and Tesla build and test a mini-submarine for the boys to escape, but it was never used. 

Unsworth in an interview with CNN said Musk’s submarine was “just a PR stunt” and had “absolutely no chance” of working. “He can stick his submarine where it hurts,” he said. 

Musk in a series of tweets reacted to Unsworth’s assessment. He said he “never saw this British expat guy” and mentioned a rescue video that he said could refute his remarks. 

But then, Musk went a step further, saying not to “bother” showing the video and calling Unsworth a “pedo guy” — as in, accusing him of being a pedophile.

Unsworth is considering suing Musk. We wish him well.

And Musk's a big donor to Republican PAC "Protect the House":

Filings show that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO donated $33,900 to the PAC, which is dedicated to keeping Republicans in control of Congress. The PAC raised over $8 million in quarter two, according to filings compiled by ProPublica. 

The top donors of the PAC include Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate, and Robert McNair, the owner of the NFL's Houston Texans. Although Adelson and McNair's contributions far outweighed Musk's — Adelson and McNair each gave $371,500 respectively, while Musk gave $33,900 — Musk was one of the top 50 donors of the PAC.

When you're putting up money to keep spineless Trump bots in office so they can protect him and do further damage to our country, you don't even need those Musk tweets to know this guy is an asshole.

The scam worked (but not for Trump chumps):

Six months after the Tax Cut and Jobs Act became law, there's still little evidence that the average job holder is feeling the benefit. 

Worker pay in the second quarter dropped nearly one percent below its first-quarter level, according to the PayScale Index, one measure of worker pay. When accounting for inflation, the drop is even steeper. Year-over-year, rising prices have eaten up still-modest pay gains for many workers, with the result that real wages fell 1.4 percent from the prior year, according to PayScale. The drop was broad, with 80 percent of industries and two-thirds of metro areas affected. 

"Now, economic confidence has been good, we're in a strong economy, GDP is growing, but the question has been, where's the paycheck?" said Katie Bardaro, vice president of data analytics at PayScale.   

The answer is, largely, in the companies' coffers. Businesses are spending nearly $700 billion on repurchasing their own stock so far this year, according to research from TrimTabs. Corporations set a record in Q2, announcing $433 billion worth of buybacks — nearly doubling the previous record, which was set in Q1.

Trump chumps will continue to willingly play the sucker as long as they see him hating on the same people they hate and fear.

Friday's indictments of a dozen Russian operatives provided yet another nail in the despicable Seth Rich conspiracy coffin:

On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks published more than 44,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee. On August 12, DCLeaks — a since-shuttered website used as a testing ground of sorts for dumping emails — posted more material, including a picture of former first lady Michelle Obama’s passport and emails from associates of Hillary Clinton. 

Reporters had already determined back in March that Guccifer 2.0 — the hacker who reportedly sent a “major trove of the #DCCC materials and emails to #wikileaks” — was actually believed to be a Russian intelligence officer. And Friday’s indictments make it clear — both Guccifer and DCLeaks were part of a Russian intelligence operation to influence the 2016 presidential election and swing it to Donald Trump. 

But the fever swamps of the far right argued that somehow Seth Rich, who was shot to death about a block from where he lived in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2016, was the real source of the Wikileaks emails, saying that Seth, who worked at the DNC as the director of voter expansion data, was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders and thus leaked the emails to help Sanders just before the Democratic National Convention was to take place. 

None of this was true. [snip] 

But that didn’t stop some of the biggest names in right-wing media from pushing the story — even after Seth’s family demanded that they stop. In the Washington Post op-ed, Joel and Mary Rich wrote about their ordeal. “Imagine that every single day, with every phone call, you hope it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case. Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.”  (our emphasis)

Sean "Heil" Hannity was the most rabid purveyor of this destructive red herring. He had some help, though, from none other than the odious serial adulterer Newt Gingrich, who was asked this:

In light of the Mueller indictments, I called @newtgingrich to see if he would like to apologize to the Seth Rich family for peddling the conspiracy theory that Rich was killed for supposedly leaking the DNC docs to Wikileaks.

"No. Goodbye!" Gingrich told me before hanging up. https://t.co/hhy10ru7MN

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 13, 2018

Expecting decency from the indecent is a fool's errand.

Lastly, we highly recommend you go over to Infidel 753's link round- up for one of the best collections of links to stories, tidbits and "interesting stuff" he found on the Internet in the past week or so.