I should have included these in this morning’s post…
1. How desperate are Trump Deranged? This bad: a veteran lawyer, scholar and all-around good guy whom I admire and will continue to despite his extreme Trump Derangement symptoms, just wrote on Facebook: “Today’s column by Heather Delaney Reese hits the mark perfectly. The rats are increasingly deserting the Trump moral sinkhole. Not because they’re not rats, but because rats are survivors and they know a sinking ship when they see one.”
Can you guess whom he (and the columnist) is referring to? Yes, it’s Tucker Carlson. He has not been a supporter of Trump for quite a while, and has always been a dishonest, revolting hypocrite and self-serving weasel. It would be hard for me to imagine anyone who would be a worse example to cite in claiming that President Trump’s “moral sinkhole” has cost him or the Republican Party valuable support. Carlson leaving the Republican Party is approximately as much of a blow to the GOP as George Wallace leaving the Democratic Party was in 1968.
Meanwhile, this qualifies as breaking news over at the New York Times: “Images circulated by an activist group reveal bare marble where President Trump’s name once resided. The Kennedy Center previously told a federal judge it had been removed.”
2. Can someone tell me how fake caller IDs being used by robocalls and other pests are legal? I know they are unethical. The same “senior benefit” peddler has called me under false names including “Verizon,” “USMC,” “Department of Agriculture,” and “CVS,” just to name a few.
Ethics Alarms 
4. “Watched my wedding video again the other day. Damned if Michael Caine wasn’t in it!”
— Dennis Miller
Joy Reid: how many times does a name need to be repeated and heard by a populace to react as if the name has some import?
We did.
There has been a civil rights movement since the 1860’s. The 14th Amendment was ratified at a time when an amendment to enshrine racial segregation and apartheid would have been very politically popular.
It was. Again, I rem ind readers
The 14th Amendment was used as a sword against this program.
While this particular program did not enforce a preference for White Americans, the precedents that required the Wisconsin Supreme Court to strike down this program had struck down actual preferences for White Americans.
google search results:
Total Spending on the War on Poverty Since Its Inception
Since President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $30 trillion on federal anti-poverty programs (Cato Institute). This figure covers the combined costs of the 134 welfare and anti-poverty programs administered by multiple federal agencies, including cash assistance, in-kind benefits, and targeted programs for specific groups (Cato Institute).
Context and Scope
I’d say the war on poverty qualifies as the quagmire of quagmires.
“I’d say the war on poverty qualifies as the quagmire of quagmires.”
Jeepers, YB…you want to ruin everything…?
PWS
Well, I heard that Elon’s Trillion will solve child poverty.
Obviously, the government is throwing the wrong money at this problem.
-Jut
It is only a quagmire if you think it was supposed to elevate minorities and alleviate poverty. If you think it was supposed to create a new means for keeping blacks as a permanent underclass dominated by the Democratic Party, then it was not a quagmire. It also created a massive government bureaucracy, a 4rth branch of government, that is also controlled by the Democratic Party. From that perspective, it was incredibly successful. It was so successful, that even suggesting that it be dismantled is considered to be ‘undermining democracy’. This is so ingrained in people’s view of what ‘the government’ is, that most people are incapable of imagining a life with a pre-depression governmental structure.
2. Fake caller IDs are necessary in limited cases, such as a doctor’s cell phone spoofing his office’s number, or a local insurance agency spoofing the corporate customer service number for some outgoing calls. Using spoofing deceptively is indeed illegal. (which no doubt is the vast majority of its uses). Some numbers (like 1800-medicare) are able to prevent other’s from claiming they’re that number, but this kind of blocking is not based on a system that can scale.
Telemarketing law is roughly split along two chunks, the ‘Telemarketing Sales Rule’ regulations which are quite extensive, and only rarely enforced, and the ‘Telephone Consumer Protection Act’ rules. The latter are much more basic (essentially “do-not-call” record keeping rules) and give consumers the private right of action for enforcement.
Spoofing was previously thought to only fall under TSR, so only enforceable by government agencies, but a certain well-known retired cop pro-se plaintiff discovered that the FTC promulgated rules about deceptive caller ID under the TCPA law prior to congress encoding the same into the TSR, so people can now claim up to $1500 damages per call for spoofed spam.
Phone consumers can’t sue CVS for the caller stating they’re with CVS though, that’s the hard part. I just signed onto my fourth lawsuit for illegal telemarketing today. In my experience It takes a minimum of 12 minutes and sometimes over an hour on the phone before you MIGHT identify the company paying for the spam. TSR rules require full company identification provided within the first few statements, but, again, it’s the government that (doesn’t) enforce that.
That spoofing isn’t ‘necessary’, it is just convenient. The doctor can have a separate phone for business calls that is registered to the office. The sales people can too.
Caller ID spoofing technology is good enough that a scammer can fool your phone into thinking a legitimate number is calling.
I recently had my credit card number stolen; when my bank detected fraud, my banking app directed me to call their fraud number. Luckily, it was easy to resolve, and since it was just my credit card that was stolen, my bank accounts were safe. The next day, however, I got calls from what my phone said was my bank, correct number and ID. I answered, but was suspicious from the start, since that’s not how my bank handles issues. It was easy to tell that it was a scam, trying to get my banking info. Figure it was the same people that tried to use my credit card and were frustrated when it failed. They tried getting info about my account, info the bank already has and would never ask for. Didn’t give them any info, and reported the incident to my bank’s fraud department. They tried calling a few more times but gave up when I hung up without answering.
Besides asking for info like bank balance, and account passwords, they also made specific claims about the attempted fraud (an AirBnB), they repeated the same line several times verbatim, with no connection to the actual conversation, and they made claims that they were going to change the account number to prevent future fraud, but that any direct deposits and autopay would continue without me having to change anything. Those accounts would have to be updated if the checking account number changed. These scams are getting harder to figure out, and the scammers don’t mind spending hours slowly wearing you down before you accidentally give out info you shouldn’t. I figure the best way to deal with them is to not answer your phone if it says your bank is calling, then call your bank yourself and ask if they called you for anything.