Former House Speaker Paul Ryan's former spokesman calls for increase to Congressional pay

Your man or woman in Congress is already in the top 3% of wage earners in America, but it's not enough, says this guy. Republicans carry the Democrats' water, every damn time.

Congressional pay raise amendments roil House:

Brendan Buck, former spokesperson for onetime Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., tweeted his support for a pay raise Friday.

“Congressional member and staff pay should be increased. I know that sounds bad, and makes for bad politics, but it’s just true. No, current member pay is by no means paltry, but it is too low, and it’s having a negative effect on Congress,” said Buck.

USA Today op-ed calls Biden "perfect tool of the oligarchy", might as well be referring to Trump

Joe Biden is a candidate of the oligarchy. Democratic primary voters will see through him:

The best among us may get elected to high office in D.C. with high minded ideals and goals but eventually get co-opted by an insidious system, and gradually become an out-of-touch, often-duplicitous, platitude-mouthing D.C. elite. 

Trump signed everything a Republican controlled Congress sent him without getting anything on immigration in return, the basis for his candidacy. Now he's running for reelection on immigration again.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . ..

The fact is, these two guys could run together on the same ticket.

Meanwhile 744 candidates have filed to run for president as of June 3, 2019, including Communist Michael Tyler Shortshit.

You have choice!

Iraq has handed down at least 3,000 death sentences to ISIS fighters so far

Iraq handing out thousands of death sentences in hasty trials for ISIS fighters:

It remains unclear the window of time between the sentencing and the execution. Interior Ministry sources say it most often takes years for the President to sign for the execution – most often by hanging – to be carried out.

 

The recovery of full time jobs under Reagan hit 50.1% of population in three years, we're still not that far after seven

If I'm repeating myself, let me know.

If the current jobs recovery just equaled the average of previous cycle highs, we'd have 3.1 million more working full time jobs than we do

Six previous full time jobs recoveries since 1968 have meant 51.1% of the population working full time on average at peak, but we appear to have stalled out at around 49.9%.

It looks like a small difference on paper but amounts to almost 3.1 million more working full time today than are.

Population continues to grow, why not full time employment along with it?

This is not a boom.

Hey IRS, when are you going to investigate Rep. Ilhan Omar of MN for filing false tax returns in 2014 and 2015?

Fun explanation of May 2019 market plunge, and the next one

Boston Bruins fans prove there's no uniting the whites

Link.

No way, man, if you're not rockin' a wife-beater crop top you look way too faggy, man

no way

way

Average hourly earnings increases for the bottom 80% of workers not-seasonally-adjusted are averaging 3.08% in April and May vs. 3.42% in 4Q2018 and 1Q2019

These are good numbers compared with the awful Obama era, but still far off the 4+% levels before the last two recessions.

Trump outshines his two predecessors despite today's May jobs miss, but we're still far from a jobs boom

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Greedy and craven U.S. tech companies have helped China control the internet and police its citizens"

Defying China: The world must fight the Tiananmen legacy:

The world must stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery. ... [Tank man's] defiance is a lesson for the rest of the world, which must resolutely stand up to China’s crimes, repression and chicanery and nurture democracy there whenever, however, it can.

Rush Limbaugh tells us western civilization is in jeopardy when one of his advertizers features a woman boasting she dumped her boyfriend because he was a dud in the bedroom

Rush's market is cads and whores.

Western civilization isn't in jeopardy, it's already dead.

I would demonetize you just for writing "When YouTube demonetizes I"

You are an embarrassment to the platform and to the English language, sir.

Chip Roy calls latest House immigration bill a show, political theatre, which is ignoring the invasion

Everything government does is theatre, usually bad theatre, and when it's occasionally mediocre theatre because it's so rarely even that good the politicians abandon all sense of proportion and fall all over themselves telling us how wonderful what they did was.

Trump won't actually do his job. Congress won't actually do its job.

Sounds like a trend.

Link.

Then Republicans should nominate someone who can actually deliver those things

What I have been telling you, like forever

Link.

He's on a thing called TV, which I haven't had since 2009.

Imagine you are the Nazis, it's easy if you try

Climate Update for Grand Rapids, MI, May 2019

Climate Update for Grand Rapids, MI, May 2019

Max Temp 79, Mean Max 86

Min Temp 38, Mean Min 32

Av Temp 57, Mean Av 57.9

Precip 5.96, Mean 3.48 (12th wettest May on record)

Snow 0, Mean 0.2

HDD 248, Mean 252

Season to date HDD 6673, Mean 6654

CDD 6, Mean 39

We've had a very wet spring, and now we're seeing caterpillar activity on some pine and apple trees, in addition to vigorous ant activity in our sandy soils. Song birds have a plentiful supply of bugs to eat and are feeding and nesting robustly. 

Robin Munro: The Tiananmen massacre was not primarily of the students, rather the workers, not in the Square but citywide in Beijing

Remembering Tiananmen Square:

Western criticisms based on a false version of the clearing of Tiananmen Square have handed the butchers of Beijing needless propaganda victories in the U.N. and elsewhere. ... By May 17, the sight of as many as 2,000 idealistic young students collapsing from heat and starvation brought more than a million ordinary Beijing citizens into the square in a moving display of human solidarity. “The students speak on behalf of all of us,” they would tell any foreigner who cared to listen. 

Having been passive spectators, the laobaixing now began to act as a bastion of active support for the students, bringing food and other supplies to the square on a round-the-clock basis. This specter of emerging cross-class solidarity led directly to the authorities’ decision to impose martial law in Beijing on May 20. ...

Action groups formed spontaneously throughout Beijing. ... The laobaixing were now in a posture of peaceful, nonviolent but direct confrontation with the government and army, and similar “turmoil”—to use the party’s term—rapidly emerged in dozens of other cities. Moreover, the laobaixing were beginning to articulate their own grievances. ...

However, the birth of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation a few days after the abortive imposition of martial law posed a much greater threat. That is because this group, headquartered in a couple of scruffy tents in the northwest corner of Tiananmen Square, raised an issue that had been taboo in China since 1949: the right of workers to engage in independent labor organization and self-representation. Such a demand struck at the very core of the Chinese Communist state, for the party’s main claim to legitimacy is that it rules in the name and interests of the “laboring masses.” Although its active membership remained relatively small, its formal membership soared during the first few days of June, reaching a peak of more than 10,000 enrollments after three of its leaders were secretly arrested on May 29.

Autonomous workers’ groups quickly sprang up in most of China’s major cities. This was the “cancer cell” that the authorities had feared from the outset would appear if legal recognition were ever to be conferred on the student organizations. In the government’s eyes, if the statue of the Goddess of Democracy, erected in the square at the end of May, represented the arrogant defiance of the students and the symbolic intrusion of “bourgeois liberalism” and “Western subversion” into the sacred heart of Communist rule, the crude red-and-black banner of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, not a hundred yards away from the goddess, represented the terrifying power of the workers awakened.

Both had to be crushed, and the rapidly defecting party apparatus had to be frightened and shocked back into line.