DL Open Thread: Friday, April 2, 2021

Plant That Screwed Up Vaccine Got Huge Grant From Operation Warp Speed.  Despite a record of previous mix-ups and violations.  Maybe this was part of the reason for the big contract?

At the time of the award, that office was led by Assistant Secretary Robert Kadlec. The Post previously reported that before joining the Trump administration, Kadlec was paid as a consultant to Emergent and formed a start-up company with Emergent’s chairman. Kadlec did not mention either role in a questionnaire about his career that he completed for the Senate when it considered his nomination by Trump in 2017. Kadlec and Emergent previously told The Post that Kadlec’s past work for Emergent had no bearing on the firm’s government contracts.

Of course not. Regardless, 15 million doses. Gone.

Matt Gaetz ‘Has Never Paid For Sex’.  I suspect that might be proven to be demonstrably false. Soon. Depending of course, on what ‘is’ is:

The Times said it had reviewed receipts from Cash App and Apple Pay that show payments from Gaetz and Greenberg to one of the women, and a payment from Greenberg to a second women.

“The women told their friends that the payments were for sex with the two men, according to two people familiar with the conversations,” the Times reported..

The report added: “Some of the men and women took ecstasy, an illegal mood-alerting drug, before having sex, including Mr. Gaetz, two people familiar with the encounters said.”

Maybe he merely paid for the X, and the sex was just a side benefit? EEE-EW, Gaetz apparently showed nude pictures of his play-for-play women to his House colleagues.  Did any of them complain?

Georgia Rethugs Vs. Delta. Something tells me that Delta is the more likely of the two combatants to survive this feud:

A senior Republican told the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Wednesday that lawmakers likened the Delta CEO’s condemnation of the new law to the company “shooting us in the face with a shotgun without telling us it was coming.”

He’s got a point. At least the Georgia Rethugs told every minority voter in the state that the shotgun blast of voter restrictions was coming.

A Progressive Victory On Corporate Law At The Supreme Court. The Court rules unanimously that corporations can’t use the ‘home court’ advantage to have product liability cases tried in their home states:

Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court consolidated two cases brought in connection with accidents involving vehicles manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The plaintiffs alleged that Ford was at fault, and brought the cases in the states where the accidents occurred and the motorists had resided: Montana and Minnesota. The Montana resident was killed when a tread separated from a rear tire of her 1996 Explorer, causing the SUV to land upside down in a ditch. The Minnesota resident suffered serious brain damage when, while a passenger in a 1994 Crown Victoria, his airbag failed to deploy after the driver rear-ended a snow plow.

Ford tried to get both suits thrown out on the rationale that they could only be brought where Ford designed, manufactured or sold the cars; personal jurisdiction, as it is known, is an area of constitutional law that historically has given corporations a home-field advantage when defending product liability claims, among others. Given the court’s pro-business track record in these cases, Ford had reason to be sanguine about the outcome. Instead, the unanimous ruling departed from the court’s solidly conservative trajectory stretching back over 40 years.

‘Forever Chemicals’ Befoul North Carolina’s Waters.  Yes, DuPont/Chemours are among the reasons why:

Since then the state has engaged in a back-and-forth with the offending companies over the issue. In 2017 the North Carolina department of environmental quality blocked the DuPont plant (now operated by a DuPont offshoot The Chemours Company) from discharging into the Cape Fear, and later entered into a consent order requiring Chemours pay a $12m fine.

Late last year the state filed a lawsuit against the companies, alleging they “knowingly discharged vast quantities of PFAS into the air, water, sediments, and soils of … southeastern North Carolina.”

Asked to comment about the CR test finding in Pittsboro, Chemours spokesman Thom Sueta said it had taken “numerous actions to reduce the emissions of fluorinated organic compounds (FOC), that includes PFAS” and its goal was to reduce them “by at least 99%” at its sites worldwide compared to a 2018 baseline.

Being a ‘spokesman’ for Chemours requires having no conscience.

What do you want to talk about?