Random Ponderings on a lazy Sunday
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump Organization is selling its Washington D.C. hotel to a Miami-based investment group. Sale price is $375 million. The sale is actually not of the building (owned by the federal government) but a lease with extensions that lasts nearly a century.
The hotel has been losing money. But why would Trump unload one of the flagship properties in his business, especially if he hopes to return to the Oval Office?
* * *
The Los Angeles Times has published an editorial criticizing a proposal from LAUSD Superintendent of Schools Austin Beutner to get increased funding for arts education in the public school system. The problem with the idea is that it doesn't generate any new revenue sources. It merely takes from the already overburndened general fund of the state.
As the editorial points out, right now there are funds available in the public coffers. Or are there? Estimates of the amount of California's unfunded pension liabilities range from $93 billion (Legislative Analyst's Office) to $1 trillion (Forbes Magazine to $1.5 trillion (CA Policy Center).
I will not sign the petition for the ballot proposition and I will vote against it.
On a related note, I will be writing a separate blog about how the CA state government continues to break its promise that 34% of lottery revenues will go to education. Accorrding to the CA Lottery's annual financial report (covers the year that ended June 20, 2020), only 25.04% of the lottery revenues for that period went to education. That is $661.8 million short of 34%
* * *
Benghazi is a location we are all familiar with, thanks to what happened there on September 11, 2012. There were ten different investiations into the attack on the U.S. Diplomatic Compound there.
However, the town of Baghuz in Syria is another story. March 18, 2019 saw a U.S. military airstrike that might have been a war crime. The New York Times reports that between 50 and 70 civilians were killed when an F-15E dropped a 2,000 bomb on them.
Dean Korsak is an Air Force attorney who is named in the story. Here is an excerpt from the article:
But the Air Force lawyer, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, believed he had witnessed possible war crimes and repeatedly pressed his leadership and Air Force criminal investigators to act. When they did not, he alerted the Defense Department’s independent inspector general. Two years after the strike, seeing no evidence that the watchdog agency was taking action, Colonel Korsak emailed the Senate Armed Services Committee, telling its staff that he had top secret material to discuss and adding, “I’m putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this.”
The U.S. Central Command says the strike was justified and that there was no way to determine with certainty that the women and children were not legitimate military targets because "...women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms." If that sounds familiar, think back to March of 1968. Army CPT Ernest Medina instructed the men of Charlie Company, that most of the women and children of the village of Son My (we know it as My Lai) would be gone by 0700 and anyone remaining were either Viet Cong or VC sympathaziers. Army 2LT William Calley led the massacre of between 347 and 504 civilians based on that faulty assumption.
Congress needs to investigate this. Obviously the in-house investigation by the U.S. Central Command was nothing more than another military coverup. To borrow from Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
* * *
Props to Mr. T for getting the Covid-19 booster shot.
The headline reads that Australian pro golfer Su Oh won a $384,000 Lamborghini with a hole-in-one but the reality is that she won a 2-year lease of the car, not the car itself.
Did Mitch McConnell try to disinvite Donald Trump from the inauguration of Joe Biden? That's the claim in a book coming out Tuesday. Supposedly Kevin McCarthy warned the White House which led to Trump's final tweet.
The hotel has been losing money. But why would Trump unload one of the flagship properties in his business, especially if he hopes to return to the Oval Office?
* * *
The Los Angeles Times has published an editorial criticizing a proposal from LAUSD Superintendent of Schools Austin Beutner to get increased funding for arts education in the public school system. The problem with the idea is that it doesn't generate any new revenue sources. It merely takes from the already overburndened general fund of the state.
As the editorial points out, right now there are funds available in the public coffers. Or are there? Estimates of the amount of California's unfunded pension liabilities range from $93 billion (Legislative Analyst's Office) to $1 trillion (Forbes Magazine to $1.5 trillion (CA Policy Center).
I will not sign the petition for the ballot proposition and I will vote against it.
On a related note, I will be writing a separate blog about how the CA state government continues to break its promise that 34% of lottery revenues will go to education. Accorrding to the CA Lottery's annual financial report (covers the year that ended June 20, 2020), only 25.04% of the lottery revenues for that period went to education. That is $661.8 million short of 34%
* * *
Benghazi is a location we are all familiar with, thanks to what happened there on September 11, 2012. There were ten different investiations into the attack on the U.S. Diplomatic Compound there.
However, the town of Baghuz in Syria is another story. March 18, 2019 saw a U.S. military airstrike that might have been a war crime. The New York Times reports that between 50 and 70 civilians were killed when an F-15E dropped a 2,000 bomb on them.
Dean Korsak is an Air Force attorney who is named in the story. Here is an excerpt from the article:
But the Air Force lawyer, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, believed he had witnessed possible war crimes and repeatedly pressed his leadership and Air Force criminal investigators to act. When they did not, he alerted the Defense Department’s independent inspector general. Two years after the strike, seeing no evidence that the watchdog agency was taking action, Colonel Korsak emailed the Senate Armed Services Committee, telling its staff that he had top secret material to discuss and adding, “I’m putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this.”
The U.S. Central Command says the strike was justified and that there was no way to determine with certainty that the women and children were not legitimate military targets because "...women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms." If that sounds familiar, think back to March of 1968. Army CPT Ernest Medina instructed the men of Charlie Company, that most of the women and children of the village of Son My (we know it as My Lai) would be gone by 0700 and anyone remaining were either Viet Cong or VC sympathaziers. Army 2LT William Calley led the massacre of between 347 and 504 civilians based on that faulty assumption.
Congress needs to investigate this. Obviously the in-house investigation by the U.S. Central Command was nothing more than another military coverup. To borrow from Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
* * *
Props to Mr. T for getting the Covid-19 booster shot.
The headline reads that Australian pro golfer Su Oh won a $384,000 Lamborghini with a hole-in-one but the reality is that she won a 2-year lease of the car, not the car itself.
Did Mitch McConnell try to disinvite Donald Trump from the inauguration of Joe Biden? That's the claim in a book coming out Tuesday. Supposedly Kevin McCarthy warned the White House which led to Trump's final tweet.
posted by me at 6:08 AM
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