DL Open Thread: Friday, Sept. 8, 2023
700 Years And Counting. The amount of prison time that has been meted out to all those convicted of Jan. 6 crimes:
The sentences over the past week — including 22 years for Tarrio, 17 for Biggs and 15 for Rehl — bring the total number of years of incarceration in Jan. 6 sentences to about 700, according to a Washington Post review of Justice Department data.
More than 350 people have been sentenced to jail or prison time, with an average sentence of just less than two years.
While Trump deserves much of the blame, you could argue (OK, I will) that these people were predisposed to criminal behavior. So, by bringing them all to DC and having them commit crimes all in one place at one time, perhaps Trump inadvertently committed a public service by enabling law enforcement to hoover all these miscreants up in one fell swoop. Which raises the question, what is a fell swoop? Back in a sec:
All at once, in a single action, as in This law has lifted all the controls on cable TV in one fell swoop. This term was used and probably invented by Shakespeare in Macbeth (4:3), where the playwright likens the murder of Macduff’s wife and children to a hawk swooping down on defenseless prey.
Former President Donald Trump hosted a $100,000-a-plate fundraiser for disgraced former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club Thursday night as Giuliani struggles to pay his mounting legal bills.Giuliani’s son, Andrew, said in a radio interview Thursday morning that the event was expected to raise more than $1 million for his father and that Trump had committed to hosting a second event at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida later in the fall or early winter.
Democrats woke up Thursday to yet another poll showing a large percentage of voters are concerned about President Biden’s age and data that showed most GOP primary candidates fared well in hypothetical match-ups with Biden.
A CNN poll contained numerous red flags for Biden and Democrats. It found 46 percent of registered voters said any Republican presidential nominee would be better than Biden in next year’s election, and 49 percent said Biden’s age was their biggest concern about him as a candidate in 2024.
But the reality is that the CNN poll is only the latest in a string of troubling surveys that show Biden’s approval remains stagnant and his age continues to be a concern for voters.
“These numbers are not good, and they’re consistent with most of the other polling that we’ve seen. The country is in a sour mood. He’s not getting credit for what I think is a fairly substantial list of achievements,” David Axelrod, a former Obama White House and campaign strategist, said on CNN.
“And the reality is, if this were a referendum, he would be in deep, deep trouble,” he added. “There’s an expression in sports that, you know, sometimes you have to win ugly. And I think that’s what lies ahead here for this president and this White House.”
Who doesn’t want 14 more months of that?
WTF Is The NYPD Up To? Not any of that friendly cop-on-the-beat stuff. Check this out:
New York law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars to expand their capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents show, including by contracting with a surveillance firm accused of improperly scraping social media platforms for data.
Documents obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a privacy advocacy non-profit and shared with the Guardian, reveal the New York police department in 2018 entered a nearly $9m contract with Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on an estimated 600,000 users.
Law enforcement across the United States have worked with social media analytics companies for years, hoping to more effectively and efficiently collect and make sense of the hordes of personal information available on the internet.
But experts have argued the practice can cross ethical and legal lines, particularly when used to access private information, make inferences or predict future criminality based on the content posted on social media, or otherwise help law enforcement skip obtaining subpoenas and warrants before gathering information on someone.
William Owens, the communications director at Stop, said there’s often also little public information available on law enforcement’s contracts with private surveillance companies, which make it difficult to hold law enforcement accountable to existing laws that protect people against privacy violations and unreasonable searches and seizures. “It takes something like a [Freedom of Information Law] request to then receive any information from the NYPD, which often is redacted,” he said.
Wouldn’t you like to know if this technology is being used in Delaware? I would. Gee, ya think a simple phone call would get us a straight answer? Is there a public data base that lists all contracts awarded by state agencies? Nancy or Mediawatch, do you know? Because I’d like to know whether the state police and or other police agencies have any contracts with Voyager Labs and/or Cobweb Technologies, which is yet another shady company involved in private surveillance of the public. ‘Private surveillance of the public’. Wrap your head around that phrase for awhile. Might as well be Shakespearean in its implications.
What do you want to talk about?
So, the state encourages businesses that increase our residents’ risk of cancer to locate here … and those residents can’t sue for relief until they actually have cancer.
https://thenewsarcade.substack.com/p/supreme-court-new-castle-residents?utm_source=substack&publication_id=1427172&post_id=136405673&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=1g9o2z
At the ribbon-cutting in 2017 for the cancer-causing plant, our esteemed governor celebrated what he called Delaware’s “tax and regulatory environment that’s conducive to businesses wanting to locate here…. I can’t think of a better facility to have now at the base of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which is really a gateway to Delaware.”
Wow. THAT is an absolute must-read. The least surprising part of the article?:
“Pressed whether there should be a maximum allowable limit for ethylene oxide at Atlas Point, Eagan deferred to state regulators who are currently “working on a plant-wide air permit renewal.”
When asked the same question, a spokesman for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control said the agency “does not intend to include a facility-wide limit” for ethylene oxide at Atlas Point.”
Because the state agency supposedly charged with regulating environmental hazards is completely in thrall to the companies that cause the hazards.
You ought to be able to sue DNREC for aiding and abetting the proliferation of cancer in the state.
But there’s probably something in state law that protects DNREC’s flunkies the same way the LEOBOR protects cops. And, if not, DNREC will probably enlist the corporate law section of the Delaware Bar to write one.
This has to be an issue in the Governor’s race. Which candidates will push for a stronger environmental regulatory presence in Delaware?
BHL now has the added pressure of having to break with Carney here, or to double down on carte blanche for cancer-causing polluters. In fact, you’d think that someone who is always touting her public health cred would have spoken to Carney about this during her eight years of photo ops.
Delaware remains in the grip of the hated Delaware way, and that includes a deliberate blind eye to pollution, if it brings in enough money. As noted the Delaware Department of natural resources is yet another “captive agency” that serves the people they are supposed to regulate, and not us or our health.
Shakespeare probably gets a little too much credit for coming up with so may words and phrases in English. It is more likely that he used a lot of terms that were already circulating and John Heminge and Henry Condell’s first folio (1623) locked them as Shakespeares for posterity.
That said, good listening and artful stealing is the cornerstone of great writing.
I shudder to think what kind of writer I’d be w/o artful, or even inartful, stealing.