Skepticism...

Two House Democrats broke ranks with their party leadership on Thursday's highly-contentious vote for a resolution setting the rules for the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

The resolution passed 232-196 but lacked votes from Reps. Jeff Van Drew, D-N.J., who has long expressed skepticism about impeachment, and Collin Peterson, D-Minn, whose district Trump won by 31 points. 

No Republicans voted for the resolution, signaling that the House GOP still stands firmly behind Trump as he comes under heavy fire.

"At the end of the day we’ll have the same president and same candidate and a failed impeachment process, and the only difference would be that the president will have been exonerated of charges," Van Drew said in a statement.

Gun powder...

 Saturday afternoon five family members and the expectant mother gathered and placed gunpowder in the bottom of a homemade stand that was welded to a metal base plate. A hole had been drilled in the side for a fuse, a piece of wood was placed on top of the gunpowder and colored powder was placed on top of the board. 

Tape was then wrapped over the top of the metal tubing, inadvertently creating a pipe bomb. Instead of the gunpowder shooting the powder out the top of the stand, the stand exploded sending metal pieces flying. 

One of these metal pieces struck Pamela Kreimeyer in the head causing instant death. 

She was standing with other family members approximately 45 feet from the device. It’s believed that the projectile that struck the victim then continued another 144 yards through the air coming to rest in a field.

Consent...

Katie Hill’s case illuminates the tricky nuances of workplace relationships in the #MeToo era. 

 The cultural reckoning with sexual harassment has cast a pall over many workplace relationships, and especially those between a boss and a subordinate.  
 
According to the new code of ethics, consent is impossible when there is a power imbalance involved.

Katie admitted to her relationship with her female campaign staffer and denied having a relationship with legislative staffer. 

 There is no allegation of coercion, harassment, or abuse: just the fact of one relationship and the allegation of another.  

 If it weren’t for the photos, Hill would likely have been able to ride this out.

Pregnant...

the Washington Free Beacon obtained the aforementioned school-board minutes showing that the Riverdale Board of Education had approved a second-year teaching contract for a young Elizabeth Warren in April 1971. 

Rather than accepting the Board’s offer of continued employment, Warren chose to tender her resignation, which was “accepted with regret,” according to minutes from a school board meeting held two months after the offer was extended.

Warren has repeatedly described on the campaign trail how she was “shown the door” after one year because her pregnancy became visible, and routinely claims the experience informed her commitment to gender equality and her decision to enter politics.

Fake it till you make it. 

It is a disgraceful way of claiming a real problem women face every day which never happened to you.  Just a thought.

Morgan...

JPMorgan is seriously contemplating selling its investment banking headquarters, located at 383 Madison Ave., which currently houses the well-paid bankers and traders. 

JPMorgan has already built up and staffed offices in lower-cost areas, such as Plano, Texas where the bank now has 25,000 workers and is building a 12-story tower that will house even 4more employees, Columbus, Ohio and Wilmington, Delaware. 

This is part of a larger, growing trend by banks to ruthlessly cut costs out of fear of a possible recession, concerns that the bull market may soon end and low interest rates, which cut deeply into profits. Real estate and salaries in New York are substantially higher than other parts of the country.

Moving from State and City taxes to no taxes. Good luck NY 

Justice...

Breakthrough...

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) released a report called “Breakthrough Batteries: Powering the Era of Clean Electrification” that asserts that transition to green energy is happening faster than originally predicted. And as a result, it could hinder natural gas growth.

These investments will push both Li-ion and new battery technologies across competitive thresholds for new applications more quickly than anticipated.

This, in turn, will reduce the costs of decarbonization in key sectors and speed the global energy transition beyond the expectations of mainstream global energy models.  

These changes are already contributing to cancellations of planned natural-gas power generation. The need for these new natural-gas plants can be offset through clean-energy portfolios (CEPs) of energy storage, efficiency, renewable energy, and demand response.

RMI predicts that natural-gas plants that already exist could cease to be competitive soon.

Weaponize...

Katie Hill’s case lands smack in the middle of the three-way intersection between tech, sex, and power.

Technology has changed sex; sex has changed power; and power is newly vulnerable to strains of disgrace that didn’t exist a decade ago.  

This provides new and humiliating ways to document sexual encounters, and all sexual encounters especially when they involve a public figure are now subjected to brutal public dissection.   

Rep. Katie Hill, who is openly bisexual, admits to the relationship with the female campaign staffer. She denies the relationship with the male legislative aide, and has accused her “abusive” husband of orchestrating the smear campaign amidst their divorce.)

Since millennials live most of their lives online, it’s only natural that their sex lives have gone digital as well, and Hill was no exception.      

 One 2015 study found that 82% of adults had sexted in the last year, mostly with their partners in a committed relationship. But all those sexual messages can be easily weaponized by disgruntled exes or abusers: a 2016 study from the journal Data & Society found that roughly 10.4 million people—have either had their photos posted without their consent or else had someone threaten to do so. 

The weaponization of nudes is a 21st century sex crime, one that state and federal officials have done little to address. Hill’s nudes, including one of her combing her campaign staffer’s hair while naked, were leaked to a conservative blog and to the Daily Mail, which forced Hill to admit to the affair and apologize. But for millennials who are young and single in the age of dating apps, leaked nudes may soon become ubiquitous—and could eventually be considered as scandalous as a past divorce or a failed business: just another part of life. 

Complains...

WAAaaaa. Aaaaa...