Ever heard of Misha Tseytlin? Matthew Yglesias explains how he was hired by unlamented Koch brothers employee Scott Walker in Wisconsin to do a particularly nasty deed at the core of rotted- out Republican "values":
A bright, funny young man named Misha Tseytlin was hired to do the job.
When I met him earlier this year during a week-long visit to the University of Wisconsin, Tseytlin explained to me that he had no particular connection to Wisconsin when he took the position in 2015. He’d just been working as an attorney in the West Virginia Attorney General’s office (another state to which he had no personal connection) in the general field of suing the Obama administration and thought the Wisconsin gig would be a fun opportunity to expand his horizons in this regard. He cooked up this lawsuit, persuaded his bosses in state government to sign on, and eventually got twenty state governments to pursue his argument. [snip]
But what strikes me about the case is how utterly mainstream Tseytlin’s theory became in GOP circles very quickly, and how brazenly undemocratic Republicans have been in pursuit of their goal of depriving people of their health insurance. (our emphasis)"Oh what fun it is to take healthcare away to-night."
Jonathan Adler and Abbe Gluck on the "unmoored" Obamacare ruling by a wingnut judge in Texas:
A ruling this consequential had better be based on rock-solid legal argument. Instead, the opinion by Judge Reed O’Connor is an exercise of raw judicial power, unmoored from the relevant doctrines concerning when judges may strike down a whole law because of a single alleged legal infirmity buried within.
We were on opposing sides of the 2012 and 2015 Supreme Court challenges to the Affordable Care Act, and we have different views of the merits of the act itself. But as experts in the field of statutory law, we agree that this decision makes a mockery of the rule of law and basic principles of democracy — especially Congress’s constitutional power to amend its own statutes and do so in accord with its own internal rules.Democrats in 2010 assumed that, once people had access to affordable health care, it would be nearly impossible to take it away. They didn't foresee a frothing, single- minded Republican party willing to do it anyway, damn the consequences. (Here's a prime example.) Tuck that lesson away, and let there be consequences!
E.J. Dionne, Jr., has a hopeful projection about one of the most evil foundations of the Republican party:
Sometimes, dramatic shifts in American politics go unnoticed. They are buried under other news or dismissed because they represent such a sharp break from long-standing assumptions and expectations.
So please open your mind to this: Taken together, the events of 2016 and the results of the 2018 election will be remembered as the beginning of the end of the gun lobby’s power.The demise of this death lobby would help free us to engage in meaningful gun control actions at every level of government. Ironically, we might have Russia partially to thank for that.
Speaking of Russia, a draft Senate Intelligence Committee report says Russia's disinformation efforts in the run- up to the 2016 presidential campaign were larger and deeper than commonly known, and also asserts that our Tech Overlords were, at best, useful idiots and, at worst, complicit in their efforts:
The report also offered some of the first detailed analyses of the role played by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, and Instagram, owned by Facebook, in the Russian campaign, as well as anecdotes about how Russians used other social media platforms — Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest — that have received relatively little scrutiny. The Russian effort also used email accounts from Yahoo, Microsoft’s Hotmail service and Google’s Gmail.
The authors, while reliant on data provided by technology companies, also highlighted the companies' “belated and uncoordinated response” to the disinformation campaign and, once it was discovered, their failure to share more with investigators. The authors urged that in the future they provide data in “meaningful and constructive” ways. (our emphasis)Now that the House will be under new management, we look forward to these craven asswipes being hauled in to testify as to their grudging response to investigations with critical national security implications.
For an OPEC country relatively flush oil revenue, you'd think Nigeria could move faster to electrify its rural areas. And you'd be wrong:
In 2017, Nigeria was ranked second out of 137 countries on The Spectator Index of countries with the worst electricity supply. The daily average supply in Africa's most populous country averages around 3,850 megawatts.
Despite the progress local government officials claim and a reported increase in energy output from 4,000 megawatts to 7,000 megawatts, Unguwar Dogo is among at least 8,000 villages in Africa's most populous country that are still being left to fend for themselves in the dark.There's much more to be found at Infidel 753's link round- up, where we found the story above. Check this site out!
