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Why not have candidates commit themselves publicly during the election campaign as to what salary they will accept while in office, and then receive raises during and after serving at the same percentage as the average wage in the province or country if they are running federally?

The ‘Pill cam’ once swallowed, takes 2 photos every second as it passes through your digestive system. Whole new level of medical investigation. awesomerandom

It is the warmest winter in Europe for several decades. More bad news for Putin.

Soooo....we won't have to be afraid any more?

Trump is wearing black socks and underwear today as a sign of mourning.

Oh, no. It's time to find a scapegoat or scapegoats. It may come down to blaming the voters for not understanding the magnificence of the PC party and platform. Or, maybe the PCs just didn't communicate it well enough. "Doltness" is endemic to Alberta, particularly in the south.

Not hard to imagine at all. Ukraine would be no more and Trump would have been given all of Ukraine's considerable gas fields.

Diamond, Of Right-Wing Duo Diamond And Silk, Dies 'Unexpectedly' “The World just lost a True Angel and Warrior Patriot for Freedom, Love, and Humanity! Please respect the privacy of Diamond’s family! Memorial Ceremony TBA,” a post from the Diamond and Silk Twitter account on Monday read.

House Adopts Rules Weakening Speaker Kevin McCarthy WASHINGTON — Republicans on Monday approved a set of rules governing the House of Representatives that will weaken the speakership of Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). Going forward, any single lawmaker will have the power to trigger a no-confidence vote in the speaker, meaning attention-seekers like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) can threaten McCarthy with a referendum if they don’t like how he’s doing his job. The “motion to vacate” represents an enforcement mechanism for a package of other rules changes McCarthy negotiated with a group of right-wing lawmakers who argued the California Republican would be too nice to Democrats and President Joe Biden. As Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) put it Sunday on CNN, “We will use the tools of the House to enforce the terms of the agreement.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-rules-kevin-mccarthy_n_63bc8b82e4b0fe267cb2c402

First bill under Speaker McCarthy will cost taxpayers more than $100 billion Kevin McCarthy promised on his first day as Speaker of the House that Members would “read every single word of the Constitution aloud from the floor of the House.” He also promised to “fight for a strong, fiscally responsible, and free America.” Neither of those have happened yet. Instead, during his acceptance speech when he was elected Speaker on the fifteenth try, McCarthy promised, “Our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.” There is no funding for 87,000 IRS agents, as The New York Times and others have fact-checked. There is funding to replace retiring IRS agents, upgrade the agency’s technology, and cut wait times in half by hiring more agents to answer consumer phone calls. In fact, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last August, in writing, ordered the IRS to not use any of the new funding allocated to the agency to increase investigations of any American making $400,000 or less. “I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen wrote, CNN reported. “This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.” Regardless, Speaker McCarthy on Monday night will preside over legislation that cuts IRS funding back to levels before Democrats increased it last year. And it will cost Americans billions. The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin, who covers tax policy, writes that the Congressional Budget Office has scored McCarthy’s bill and says it will increase the deficit by $114 billion. “Says that the GOP IRS funding bill would reduce spending by $71.5B and reduce revenue by $185.8B,” he tweets, with “B” standing for “billion.”

Its a romp and not to be taken seriously. The actors doubtless has a hoot with their over the top performances.

Yes. Brazil has not requested Bolsonaro's extradition, but the US government is considering deporting him.

Now Bolsonaro can say that he is too ill to be deported. I'm sure its just a coincidence. Really, really sure.

🅰️

Green Bay Packers' Quay Walker Ejected Again For Bizarre On-Field Act Green Bay Packers linebacker Quay Walker needs to stop shoving guys who aren’t even wearing shoulder pads. The rookie on Sunday pushed a Detroit Lions medical staffer coming to the aid of an injured player, and was ejected. The Lions’ D’Andre Swift had caught a short pass and appeared to be struck in the head. Detroit staffers came onto the field to treat Swift, and Walker inexplicably pushed one of them from behind. He was thrown out of the game and assessed an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. The Lions continued their drive and eventually scored a touchdown for a 20-16 comeback victory to eliminate host Green Bay from the upcoming playoffs.

I sure hope the manufacturer resolved the issues that made the plane dangerous to fly in rain. Deathbed repentance.

Wagner’s Desensitized Prison Fighters Keep Staggering Into Bakhmut Like This Is a Zombie Apocalypse BAKHMUT, Ukraine—In the smoke-filled basement of a nondescript building in the city center of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, the men of the SKALA intelligence battalion are getting ready for a risky reconnaissance mission. One of them is burning a last cigarette in the dimly lit hallway. Clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, a bearded soldier wraps yellow tape around both his arms—a sign used by Ukrainian soldiers to identify each other on the battlefield. “Be careful out there, there are snipers in this area,” a portly officer warns him, rising from his office chair facing a flatscreen TV that intermittently broadcasts the live feed of a drone flying over carnage in the city. “I can’t die, my mom won’t let me,” quips the soldier with a weary smile, checking his gear one last time before heading out. The previously muffled sound of outgoing artillery becomes sharper and louder as the door to the street swings open. They take off. “The situation is pretty tense, but we’re controlling it,” says 23-year-old Alexander, clutching his American-made M4 assault rifle. “We’re holding.” With his buzzcut and boyish looks, the young man wouldn’t look out of place in a trendy nightclub in downtown Kyiv. Yet, for weeks, Alexander and the grizzled soldiers of the SKALA battalion have been weathering the storm of daily Russian assaults and shelling on Bakhmut, hunkering down in the basement and doing daily sorties in the gray zone—the stretch of land between Ukrainian and Russian positions. Named after its founder and leader Iurii Skala, the SKALA battalion is tasked with conducting air and ground reconnaissance, as well as “cleaning operations”—a euphemism meaning assaulting enemy positions and taking out the Russian soldiers manning them. “The drones are our eyes out there,” says Alexander. Out there is Bakhmut—a salt-mining town of 70,000 inhabitants known for its sparkling white wine—that has been devastated by months of relentless Russian shelling, and gruesome trench warfare that has prompted comparisons with the Battle of the Somme or Passchendaele. The town is a major transport hub and sits on a strategic highway that runs through Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet, some—including one of Ukraine’s top generals—have argued that the town’s strategic value is dubious at best. However, it is one of the few frontline areas where the Russians are still on the advance, and the success-starved Russian high command is desperate to claim a victory, at any cost. Some have theorized that the capture of Bakhmut would constitute a personal prize for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the infamous Wagner paramilitary group, whose mercenaries make up most of the Russian forces in the area. The U.S. believes Prigozhin has a financial motive: Wagner has often seized lucrative gold and diamond mines in areas where it operates in Africa, and Prigozhin may have set his sights on the salt and gypsum mines around Bakhmut. According to Rem, a former car dealer from Dnipro now correcting artillery fire with the help of his drone, most of the soldiers sent in suicidal assaults on Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut are “zeks,” or convicts, recruited by Wagner to bolster the number of Russian forces in Ukraine. “Mobiks [conscripts] are usually scared, and they scatter when they get shelled. Those guys are not scared,” he said. Of the Wagnerites, Rem says that they’re a much more effective fighting force than they’re usually given credit for: “They’re making progress, after all.” Desensitized to violence and with nothing left to lose, the prisoners—many of whom are violent criminals including murderers and rapists—are considered by Ukrainian soldiers a tougher enemy than the average army conscript. The Russian tactic of sending prison recruits to attack Ukrainian positions—allowing them to identify defenses for the artillery to pummel afterwards—has proven effective, though slow and deadly. While no major breakthrough has occurred, they have been slowly eroding Ukrainian defenses, and creeping ever closer to the eastern outskirts of the city. This assessment was echoed in late December by Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former national security adviser for Ukraine currently working on military planning, who said of the prison conscripts: “They are—I cannot say fearless—but they have nothing to lose pretty much. So, they are attacking constantly and they’ve been killed in big quantities as well.” Yet those incremental gains on the eastern approach to the city have come at a cost for Russian forces, as evidenced during Prigozhin’s well-publicized visit to the frontline over the New Year. In a series of videos released by Russian news agency RIA Novosti, the Wagner boss first visits a basement filled with the bodies of his fighters, many of them convicts, killed during the battle for Bakhmut, before complaining that “every house [in Bakhmut] has become a fortress”—and that it sometimes takes a week of fighting to take a single house. According to a U.S. official quoted by The Guardian on Thursday, out of an initial force of nearly 50,000 Wagner mercenaries, more than 4,100 have been killed in action, and 10,000 have been wounded, including over 1,000 killed between late November and early December near Bakhmut.