End the cover-up

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate tomorrow. She is urging the Senate to end to cover-up. To emphasize her point she tweeted a comparison of the nasty guy impeachment and that of Bill Clinton:

Key witnesses blocked by the president
Trump: 12
Clinton: 0
Subpoenaed witnesses blocked by the president
Trump: 9
Clinton: 0
Major document subpoenas blocked by the president
Trump: 5 (100%)
Clinton:0 (0%)
Wholesale defiance of document requests
Trump: Yes (all 71 administrative requests ignored)
Clinton: No
Documents produced by the president
Trump: 0
Clinton: More than 90,000 pages
Number of witnesses who testified in Senate trial
Trump: ?
Clinton: 3 (who had already testified in the Starr investigation)



Twitter user uwu posted a long thread of the art that has come out of the Hong Kong protests and the artists who make it. The profile says “Take your broken heart and turn it into art.” The link is to an image of protest cakes, which is in the middle of the thread. Scroll up and down for the rest of it. Naturally, a great deal of the art features gas masks. There are also lots of umbrellas which were the symbols of protests a couple years ago, before the current round started a half year ago.



Andy Doe taught his first child how to use photoshop. And now he has a thread about famous works of art with search and rescue boats added. One of the painting is the Barque of Dante in which several people are in the water outside the boat. It looks like the rescue is coming just in time.



Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has said he will donate $690,000 to help Australia recover from the fires. The odd number makes more sense as $1,000,000 Australian dollars.

He was roundly scorned for such a stingy gift.

Stingy? Yeah. Business Insider says his personal wealth grows by $181 million every day. The profit (not revenue) of his company in 2018 was $74 billion. So $690 thousand is a rounding error.

Jason Karsh tweeted that Bezos could use two days of earnings and give away $1M to some lucky family every day for a year.

Hunter of Daily Kos noted that $690,000 doesn’t even buy a house in Silicon Valley. Then he added:

People can't help but draw conclusions. A good one to draw might be "The charity of the top 0.1 percent and of corporations both are vastly overstated and not even fractionally as useful as simply taxing them at the same effective rate as the rest of us pay, so maybe we should get on with that already."

Elizabeth Warren tweeted:

If the only way to run for president of the United States is either to be a billionaire or to suck up to billionaires, then we're going to have a country that works better for billionaires—and worse for everyone else.

Back when Bush II was trying to convince America to go to war in Iraq a favorite tactic of his supporters was to bully liberals by accusing them of loving Islamic terrorists. Now that the nasty guy is trying to convince America to go to war in Iran his supporters are back to using that tactic. This time it isn’t working. Amanda Marcotte at Salon reports that Rep. Doug Collins tried it and had to (pretend to) apologize.