[AMV] #910 soon the united states will be better again.

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 02:45 schreef Dutch_view het volgende:

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Eens voor grote bedrijven, die moeten geen misbruik gaan maken van hun positie. Hoewel geen fijne bepaling van de Reps, ik ben van mening dat de Dems in dit geval het maar moeten slikken want zonder deze "Bill" gaan er miljoenen mensen een groot probleem krijgen. Of nog een groter probleem dan die ze al hadden.
Wat dat betreft is het een 3e wereldland hoe het er aan toe gaat qua werkloosheiduitkering en geld voor eten.

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 02:57 schreef Dutch_view het volgende:
Ben t met je eens wat je schrijft hoor, maar vind ook dat je (kleine) bedrijven moet beschermen tegen absurde claims die, anders dan in Nederland, geen uitzondering zijn. Lastig lastig, gelukkig zit ik niet in het Senaat

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 03:02 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

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Maar als een klein bedrijf zich gewoon aan de regels houdt (die voor hen gelden) is dat toch geen probleem?

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 03:00 schreef tjoptjop het volgende:

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Is het probleem niet gewoon dat het een hele bundeling is, soort package deal van alles of niets. En iedereen probeert z'n stokpaardjes er in te proppen. En dat het geheel vervolgens blijft hangen op een paar punten

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 03:11 schreef Dutch_view het volgende:

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Klopt inderdaad, gister was er geloof ik wel een pakket 1. met regelingen waar ze het beide over eens waren en een pakket 2. met "opties" die voor beide partijen lastig te verteren zijn. Hoe het nu precies is, weet ik niet.

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At the worst possible time, when the United States is at its most vulnerable — during a presidential transition and a devastating public health crisis — the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation. We need to understand the scale and significance of what is happening.

Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been hacked and that its clients, which include the United States government, had been placed at risk. This week, we learned that SolarWinds, a publicly traded company that provides software to tens of thousands of government and corporate customers, was also hacked.

The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network.

This is what is called a supply-chain attack, meaning the pathway into the target networks relies on access to a supplier. Supply-chain attacks require significant resources and sometimes years to execute. They are almost always the product of a nation-state. Evidence in the SolarWinds attack points to the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world.

According to SolarWinds S.E.C. filings, the malware was on the software from March to June. The number of organizations that downloaded the corrupted update could be as many as 18,000, which includes most federal government unclassified networks and more than 425 Fortune 500 companies.

The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 01:11 schreef Dutch_view het volgende:
Volgens CNN zou Trump tegen een aantal van zijn adviseurs hebben gezegd The White House niet te zullen gaan verlaten op 20 januari. Hij is volgens mij zijn eigen leugens gaan geloven van een rigged election.

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 05:57 schreef AnneX het volgende:
[ twitter ]
Als je Barbie popje 2 of 3 x zo hebt gezien, dan weet je het wel: hartstikke waar!
Als woordvoerder hoef je toch niks te ‘bewijzen’? alleen woord te voeren...

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EXCLUSIVE: The 2020 Intelligence Community Assessment focused on foreign election influence will be delayed, Fox News has learned, amid a dispute among senior intelligence analysts over whether China sought to influence the election.

"This afternoon the DNI was notified by career intelligence officials that the Intelligence Community will not meet the December 18 deadline, set by Executive Order and Congress, to submit the IC's classified assessment on foreign threats to the 2020 U.S. elections," Amanda Schoch, Assistant DNI for Strategic Communications said in a statement to Fox News.

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 08:07 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:
https://www.politico.com/(...)nity-strategy-446408
Als dit waar is, dan gaat gaan er koppen rollen..

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In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said that Alexander’s demands for herd immunity “absolutely did not” shape department strategy.

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From Fixing Potholes to Managing Billions: Is Buttigieg Ready to Be Transportation Chief?
As the former mayor of a town with an 18-route bus system and a giant pothole problem, Buttigieg will now have to shepherd Biden's national infrastructure plan.


Mayor Pete Buttigieg had a problem. It was the summer of 2017, and dozens of angry South Benders were inundating his office with complaints about being kept awake in the wee hours of the morning by the non-stop blaring of train horns.

On July 22, as they trundled through an otherwise serene near east side Sunnymede neighborhood, train conductors along the Grand Trunk Western railroad line began sounding their horns at ungodly hours. Residents started logging the noise: 1:05 a.m. 2. 2:30. 2:45. 2:53. 3:05. It continued nearly a hundred times a day. Some couldn’t sleep. A mother told the South Bend Tribune she was afraid to take her toddler outside. The problem stretched into October. Constituents phoned and emailed Buttigieg, and poured into Mayor’s Night Outs, public pow wows he routinely scheduled to discuss residents’ concerns.

At first, Buttigieg and city officials were flummoxed. The city was officially designated as a “quiet zone,” and had been for nearly 50 years. After investigating, they discovered that the Federal Rail Administration had updated their safety guidelines years earlier, preempting local bans on train horns. FRA officials had sent a letter to a South Bend city attorney outlining the measures officials needed to take to stop the train whistles, including overhauling safety devices at some 11 crossings on that side of town.

There was just one problem: The city attorney the FRA had addressed the letter to had been dead for six years.

Buttigieg called the railroad administration, and his staff worked to overhaul the crossings and quiet the horns. Then, he “waited powerlessly for the FRA to respond —all while my inbox filled with messages, and sometimes recordings, from frazzled neighbors desperate for a good night’s sleep,” Buttigieg wrote in his 2019 political memoir, Shortest Way Home. Months later in 2017, the bellowing trains finally fell silent.

“It was handled in a timely fashion from a point of hearing people’s concerns to finding the appropriate channels and then reassuring residents the steps that had been taken and then the goal met,” said Bill Karban, a 45-year-old geologist who has lived in the leafy, economically diverse Sunnymede neighborhood affected by the train whistles, for 20 years.

Now, Transportation Secretary-designate Pete Buttigieg, having ascended to Cabinet nominee, could preside over the FRA, one of 11 federal governmental bodies —employing 55,000 federal workers overseeing everything from billions of dollars in highway grants to the safety of hazardous materials at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration — that could soon be under his purview if he is confirmed by the Senate. That’s roughly 55 times the number of employees he oversaw as mayor.

He’ll be vaulting from millennial Midwestern mayor concerned about train whistles involving not even a mile of freight railway to potentially overseeing almost 140,000 route miles that support some 167,000 jobs and an $80 billion industry — not to mention passenger rail or the Federal Aviation Administration or any other aspect of his new federal fiefdom.

To some, the leap might seem more at home in a discarded plotline from “NBC’s Parks & Recreation.” Until now, Buttigieg’s experience with transportation has spanned issues like train whistles, roundabouts and South Bend’s perennial pothole problem. South Bend has only 18 bus routes and 60 buses. As mayor, Buttigieg didn’t even have sole authority over South Bend Transpo, the city’s mass transit program, but shared it with the mayor of nearby Mishawaka on the board of directors. And Black leaders criticized him this week for bus lines being shut down in the poorest parts of the city.

So, is Buttigieg up to the task? Even the former mayor’s own public works director, Eric Horvath — who occupies the same position under Buttigieg’s handpicked successor — admits Buttigieg will have a steep learning curve. “He may not have the experience right now,” said Horvath. “His experience on the national level with transportation is going to be limited coming in.”

But there are also reasons those who know Buttigieg and South Bend best say transportation is a near-perfect fit.

That train-whistle anecdote is quintessential Buttigieg, capturing the assiduously studious mayor as good as any. When Karban read online news that Buttigieg would be Biden’s nominee, he wasn’t surprised. “I think it’s fitting,” he said Wednesday. “The role offers him the exact same opportunity. To have direct deliverables that he can identify and then execute. Because of that, it makes him a strong fit.”

South Bend, like many cities in the upper Midwest where there is precipitation and temperature changes, has a vicious pothole problem: About 22,000 of them gape across the city’s streets each year. In January of 2019, residents of the city asked Domino’s Pizza for help to augment the city’s $90,000 pothole budget and won a $5,000 grant for its public works department, the only town in the state of Indiana to do so. “If Part-Time Pete Buttigieg spent as much time fixing issues in South Bend as he does running for president, Domino’s Pizza wouldn’t have to take matters into their own hands and fix the city’s pothole mess,” RNC Spokesperson Michael Joyce said at the time.

On the whole, though, Buttigieg’s selection has won bipartisan plaudits back in South Bend and across Indiana, a place that considers itself the Crossroads of America, its official motto, given its spot of the intersection of two historic highways — U.S. 40 and 41 — part of the Old National Road and highway program of 1926.

While mayor, Buttigieg focused disproportionately on transportation and infrastructure issues. He adopted Smart Streets, meaning streetscapes designed for easy and safe use by pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and public transit riders, and created $200 million in new area investments. Buttigieg’s first brush with the Department of Transportation came in 2016 for the Safer People, Safer Streets Summit, where his South Bend won a national award for Complete Streets and also the Overall Success award.

Buttigieg has long had a fascination with infrastructure. He has called wastewater “pretty sexy,” and mentioned roads and trash pickup in the same breath as the “meaning of life.” His own campaign logo was an homage to Jefferson Boulevard Bridge in South Bend. “I’ve also had a personal love of transportation ever since childhood,” he said Wednesday, a line unsurprising to any reporter who ever tagged along for one of his bus tours of Iowa or New Hampshire. Buttigieg, whom Biden called “a policy wonk with a big heart” when introducing him as his nominee at The Queen in Wilmington, Del., Wednesday, has always been, at core, an inveterate nerd. Among his favorite board games is Ticket to Ride, which involves drawing cards and connecting plastic trains across vast swaths of the United States. He knows the four-part process for filling a pothole, and could become perhaps be the only Transportation secretary in recent memory to have directly contended with the chuckholes produced by cold Midwestern winters, the nemesis of smooth streets. And throughout the campaign, Buttigieg gravitated toward public transit, taking, for example, the Des Moines Area Regional Transit bus from downtown to the Iowa State Fair. When he took me on a tour of South Bend in 2018, he talked about how driverless cars could reshape cities and streetscapes.

Last January, as a presidential candidate, Buttigieg introduced a $1.2 trillion, city-centric infrastructure proposal to create 6 million jobs across the country. “Under my administration,” he said at the time, “local governments will finally have a partner in Washington. As a former mayor, I know that priority-based budgets made locally are better than budget-based priorities set in Washington.”

Joe McGuinness, the former Republican mayor of Franklin, Ind., and now the Indiana Department of Transportation commissioner who went to new mayors’ school with Buttigieg in Indianapolis in 2011, said Buttigieg brings unique experience to the table.

“I’m not an engineer,” McGuinness said this week. “He’s not. As long as you have the trust of the folks that put you in those positions, and the resources that are around you and people that are smarter and better than you, … I think he’ll be successful.”

Elsewhere in Buttigieg’s native Indiana, Hoosiers, Republicans among them, are supportive of Buttigieg’s nomination. “As a former city leader here in Indiana, Pete understands how critical infrastructure is to growth and opportunity,” said the Secretary-designate’s fellow Hoosier, Republican Sen. Todd Young, a member of Senate leadership, in a sign he’s prepared to help smooth Buttigieg’s path to confirmation. “It will be good to have a Hoosier serving in this capacity.”

In a statement to POLITICO, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb praised Buttigieg, too. “I value the partnership I’ve had with Pete and am always pleased to see Hoosiers leading in the nation’s capital,” Holcomb said. “Improving Indiana’s infrastructure has been a top priority of mine and having someone from the Crossroads of America who understands the importance of game-changing projects like extending the West Lake Corridor and double tracking the South Shore Line will help us take Indiana to the next level.”

“I would push back [against the notion that Buttigieg is not qualified] by saying he's extraordinarily talented. He's got a lot of what we call out here Midwest common sense, he’s a hard worker,” former Sen. Joe Donnelly, whom Buttigieg once interned for, told me. “And I think he'll serve, not you know as a Democrat or Republican obviously but as somebody trying to lead all of America, every community, rural, urban, wherever to be stronger.”

It’s tempting to see Buttigieg’s quick ascent as a chance to apply a mayor’s practical problem-solving skills on a far bigger stage. He even liked to sound this note on his presidential campaign: “It’s time for Washington to work more like our best run cities, and not the other way around,” he often said on the stump.

But, in fact, what awaits him is something very different from just running a giant public-works department. The DOT's main jobs are far more abstract — funding, sustainability, public safety policy. The nation’s potholes aren’t actually filled by the federal government.

Buttigieg’s first and biggest task, however, is expected to be shepherding Biden’s infrastructure agenda, including a massive job-creating investment in infrastructure also designed to fight climate change — something the former mayor’s own hometown experienced when it faced a 1,000-year flood in 2016, which he frequently talked about while on the campaign trail. On Wednesday, Biden mentioned Buttigieg's vision of “helping cities across this country — in red states and blue states —build more climate resilient communities to deal with more extreme floods, droughts, and superstorms.”

There are also the urgent issues of rescuing a transit sector crushed by the pandemic and arresting the spread of Covid-19 on the nation’s planes, trains and automobiles. A tech-savvy young transportation secretary who’s a quick study could also bring Washington much more seriously into the conversation on new technologies like autonomous vehicles, which have been forging ahead with only patchwork oversight and regulation.

It’s easy to imagine Buttigieg using his salesmanship and Gramsci-fueled rhetorical skills to try to win support for an infrastructure package, though selling Republican lawmakers on these big items isn’t going to be a layup — no matter how many are saying positive things about Buttigieg this week.

But Horvath, the South Bend public works director, harbors no doubts about Buttigieg’s ability to deliver.

“I think it’s pretty common for people to underestimate Pete Buttigieg,” Horvath told me Tuesday evening. “They’ve been doing it for a number of years now. I think he’s proven people wrong before that have underestimated him.”

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 09:37 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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Misschien wordt het tijd dat ze eens wakker geschud worden met echte politieke besluiten.

AZ lawmakers urge Congress to count Trump electors; Groups oppose ‘botched’ Electoral College | NTD

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Op donderdag 17 december 2020 10:30 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:
Mijn familie is van plan om zich aan te sluiten bij een groep die Paul Alexander juridisch aan de schandpaal willen nagelen en hem aan willen klagen voor beraming van doodslag. Het nieuws dat er e-mails bestaan die dit bevestigen is ingeslagen als een bom.