Zorro
Zorro's JournalGuitar Center goes bankrupt, idled by coronavirus and slower sales
Guitar Center Inc., the largest U.S. retailer of music instruments and equipment, filed for bankruptcy after the spreading COVID-19 pandemic kept customers at home and job losses made them less able to afford new gear.
The filing in the Eastern District of Virginia gives the company a break on its debts by letting it stay in business as it seeks to carry out a restructuring plan. A turnaround will be complicated by the fact that the company’s stores were shut in mid-March to help stop the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. It has reopened certain locations while maintaining e-commerce operations.
A restructuring support agreement that Guitar Center announced Nov. 13 calls for new financing backed by existing creditors as well as $165 million in new equity investments from its private equity owner, Ares Management Corp., and Carlyle Group and Brigade Capital Management.
Guitar Center, based in Westlake Village, has around 300 stores across the U.S. Sister brands include Music & Arts, with more than 200 stores specializing in band and orchestral instruments for sale and rent.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-11-22/guitar-center-goes-bankrupt-coronavirus
Biden reaches out. The GOP slaps him in the face.
Opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr.
President-elect Joe Biden’s victory offered the cheerful prospect that we might begin to detoxify our politics. Maybe we could forget Donald Trump for a while and argue with at least a touch of civility about the actual problems our country faces.
Heck, some of us dared to imagine that we might treat each other with respect. After all, Biden said over and over that he wanted to be the president of all Americans and honored the dignity of voters who had supported Trump in the past by expressing an understanding of their discontents.
Moreover, bypassing more polarizing alternatives, Biden’s own party chose the candidate most likely to be acceptable to the other side, itself a form of outreach.
And the GOP’s response to the outreach? With just a handful of exceptions, abject refusal to stand up against the anti-democratic lunacy of Trump’s efforts to nullify the results of a fair election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/biden-reaches-out-the-gop-slaps-him-in-the-face/2020/11/20/5111029e-2b76-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html
Pompeo Trolls Critics in Long Goodbye as He Looks to His Future
By the time Secretary of State Michael Pompeo was wrapping up a 10-day swing through Europe and the Middle East, he had angered Turkey’s leaders, infuriated the Palestinians and befuddled the French.
It’s a trip that seemed almost calculated to offend -- and to burnish Pompeo’s conservative credentials for a possible 2024 presidential campaign. Never one for niceties of etiquette or protocol, Pompeo’s last big tour as America’s 70th secretary of state offered provocations of those who have questioned Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy and Pompeo’s role as its No. 1 promoter.
Like President Trump, Pompeo refuses to publicly acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 election. Nonetheless, the seven-nation journey, one of the longest he’s taken as secretary, offered evidence that Pompeo is already looking past the Trump era, chockablock as the trip was with pronouncements likely to make Biden’s life difficult and setting out a platform for his own political future.
“He’s spending his last two months in office trolling the world,” said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s an odd role for the nation’s top diplomat to be playing at a rather sensitive time.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-22/pompeo-trolls-critics-in-long-goodbye-as-he-looks-to-his-future
I really despise what Trump, Pompeo, and all the rest of these arrogant administration assholes have done to deliberately weaken our international influence and standing.
Florida prosecutors reveal evidence against woman charged in 'killer clown' case
After South Florida’s killer clown slipped away three decades ago, witnesses told investigators the culprit wearing white makeup and an orange wig looked like a man.
But finally it’s been revealed that evidence found in the getaway car — a strand of burgundy head hair with the root attached — is why authorities in 2017 unmasked the clown as a woman: Sheila Keen Warren.
In court documents filed this month, Palm Beach County prosecutors gave new insights into how they intend to use DNA evidence and other findings to win a conviction in the 1990 murder of Marlene Warren.
It’s long been known that the 40-year-old victim was shot at her front door in Wellington by a person wearing an orange wig, a red bulb nose, gloves and a painted-on smile.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-22/florida-killer-clown-case-new-details
DeSantis and Bondi disappear as Trump's election challenges grow desperate and chaotic
The president’s last gasps include conspiracies about Dominion voting machines, used without a problem in Florida, a state he won.President Donald Trump, his progressively desperate legal challenges floundering from a lack of proof, welcomed two high-ranking Michigan Republicans to the White House on Friday as he zeroed in on a new strategy to subvert the election.
The latest maneuver would have Republican legislatures in critical states overrule the will of their voters and certify a different slate of electors than the ones chosen by the popular vote.
If the move sounds familiar to Floridians and Fox News viewers, it’s because Gov. Ron DeSantis was one of the first and most prominent elected officials to suggest it. Speaking on The Ingraham Angle two days after the election, DeSantis urged Trump to “fight on” and pushed legislatures to take matters into their own hands.
“Under Article II of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislatures and the schemes they create and the framework,” DeSantis said. “If there’s departure from that, if they’re not following the law, if they’re ignoring the law, then they can provide remedies as well.”
The comment landed like a grenade in an oil field. And DeSantis, a close political ally of the president, disappeared almost immediately after throwing it.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2020/11/20/desantis-and-bondi-disappear-as-trumps-election-challenges-grow-desperate-and-chaotic/
A vindictive Trump seeks to undermine Biden's presidency
It has been almost three weeks since President Trump stepped to a lectern in the White House in the early hours of Nov. 4 to declare that the election was being stolen from him. It was a fabrication designed to turn President-elect Joe Biden into an illegitimate president and has continued apace ever since. It will not stop with Biden’s swearing-in on Jan. 20.
Any thoughts Trump might have had of overturning the election were a failed enterprise from the start. On Friday, those hopes were dealt twin blows when Georgia’s secretary of state certified Biden as the winner there and Republican legislative leaders from Michigan, after meeting with the president, signaled they would do nothing to try to undermine the results. Biden has an electoral college majority, and the certification process continues to gather steam.
Through these weeks, the president and his legal team have failed to produce credible evidence of systematic or widespread fraud. Now they are resorting to wild allegations of a grand conspiracy on the part of Biden and the Democrats — charges repeatedly debunked. This effort is being led by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was once a reputable mayor of New York. These claims of fraud are in themselves a fraudulent and cynical enterprise.
Judging by his actions, Trump appears to have a motive other than overturning the election. He is determined to cripple Biden’s presidency even before it becomes official. No defeated president has ever undertaken such an audacious and anti-democratic act. There are short-term and longer-term consequences that could deeply affect Biden’s ability to govern.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-vindictive-trump-seeks-to-undermine-bidens-presidency/2020/11/21/410213ba-2bfe-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html
Trump Tweets About Voter 'Fraud' During G-20's Opening Meeting
Source: Bloomberg News
As leaders from across the globe began a virtual summit discussing issues from the coronavirus pandemic to climate change, Donald Trump’s thoughts were elsewhere -- on the tussle over the U.S. election.
The president kept his head down, staring at something on his desk out of sight during a nine-minute speech on Saturday by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, who welcomed countries taking part in a meeting of the Group of 20 nations hosted by his kingdom. The speech and footage of other leaders was shown live on the official G-20 website.
Then, within moments of the monarch ending his remarks, Trump tweeted to comment on an encounter with Republican leaders of the Michigan state legislature. He promised: “We will show massive and unprecedented fraud!”
Trump’s post was in response to a tweet by Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, who met Trump at the White House on Friday along with House Speaker Lee Chatfield. “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan,” Shirkey and Chatfield wrote in a joint statement.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-21/trump-tweets-about-voter-fraud-during-g-20-s-opening-meeting
No, Trump's sister did not publicly back him. He was duped by a fake account.
On Friday morning, President Trump shared a seemingly innocuous article on Twitter. The piece said that his sister, Elizabeth Trump Grau, had publicly voiced her support for her brother amid his baseless claims that he won the 2020 election.
“Thank you Elizabeth,” Mr. Trump wrote to his sister, who has long avoided the spotlight. “LOVE!”
There was just one problem: Ms. Trump Grau had not said what the article claimed. In fact, the article Mr. Trump shared was based on a fake Twitter account that posed as his sister.
That article, on the website of a conservative talk-radio host named Wayne Dupree, quoted a post from a Twitter account named “Betty Trump” that used a photo of Ms. Trump Grau as its profile picture.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/technology/no-trumps-sister-did-not-publicly-back-him-he-was-duped-by-a-fake-account.html
Trump's stupidity is, well, stupefying.
Georgia's recount revealed no fraud -- and just how unfit Loeffler and Perdue really are
Opinion by Editorial Board
GEORGIA OFFICIALS have concluded a painstaking audit and recount of the nearly 5 million ballots cast in this month’s presidential election. They have found errors, but no fraud and nothing that comes close to changing the results: Democratic candidate Joe Biden was the winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes. That makes all the more unforgivable the conduct of Georgia’s two Republican senators in making reckless charges about the integrity of the vote. Their attempts to undermine the election, falling in line with President Trump’s dishonest and anti-democratic machinations, should not be forgotten by Georgia voters when they go to the polls in January for two critical U.S. Senate runoff elections.
“Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have assaulted Georgia’s election system,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote in an editorial after the two senators called on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign, alleging he had mismanaged the election. They had not a shred of evidence of misconduct on his part. What they had was a fear that Mr. Trump would go after them and submarine their chances for reelection if they didn’t fall in line with his absurd — and dangerous — pretense that Mr. Biden “stole” the election. “If the president is tweeting bad things, the base is not coming out,” Rusty Paul, a former chairman of the Georgia GOP, said of the senators’ decision to scapegoat Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican who called himself a Trump supporter but has courageously refused to let partisanship influence his conduct of the election.
Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue are trying to fend off challenges from Democratic candidates in a dual runoff whose outcome will determine which party controls the Senate. Mr. Perdue is facing Jon Ossoff, a documentary producer, and Ms. Loeffler is facing the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
The Republican incumbents have joined forces, presenting themselves as a “firewall” against what they claim would be a radical Democratic agenda that would doom the country to socialism. Just as their claims about Mr. Raffensperger were specious, so are their depictions of what would happen if Democrats were to win control of the Senate along with the White House and the House of Representatives. Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock espouse positions — such as protecting affordable health care, defeating the coronavirus, criminal justice reform and safeguarding voting rights — that are in line with those of Mr. Biden. Some of the most overheated Republican fear-mongering centers on Democratic hopes to give representation in Congress to the District of Columbia’s 700,000 residents. That is not radical or socialist; it is a question of basic civil rights.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgia-recount-no-fraud-perdue-loeffler-unfit/2020/11/20/44a324e0-29ca-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html
California Wants Its Imperial Valley to Be 'Lithium Valley'
The region’s Salton Sea contains a massive trove of the metal needed for electric-car batteries.Dust storms laced with toxins sweep across California’s Imperial County, where mud volcanoes spit and hiss near the shores of the slowly shrinking lake known as the Salton Sea. The county is one of California’s poorest, most of its jobs tied to a thin strip of irrigated land surrounded by desert. San Diego and the Golden State’s prosperous coast lie only 100 miles away across a jumble of mountains, but it might as well be another world.
Yet this overlooked moonscape may hold the key to America’s clean-car future. Hot brine trapped beneath the desert floor contains potentially one of the world’s biggest deposits of lithium. Demand for the metal is soaring as automakers worldwide shift to electric cars powered by lithium-ion batteries. Most of that lithium now comes from Australia, China, and South America. The U.S. badly wants its own supply.
There’s no doubt the lithium is there. The brine containing it already flows to the surface day and night through a series of 11 geothermal power plants, clustered around the southeastern edge of the Salton Sea. The plants, operating for decades, convert the 500F water into steam to generate electricity. All that’s needed is a way to strip out the lithium before pumping the rest of the brine back underground. A March 2020 report from research organization SRI International estimated that the Salton Sea area could produce 600,000 tons of lithium a year, almost eight times last year’s global production.
But it’s one thing to extract lithium from the region’s brine as a test and another to do so in bulk, at a reasonable cost. “This is not alchemy,” says Jonathan Weisgall, vice president for government relations for Berkshire Hathaway Energy Co., which owns 10 of the region’s geothermal plants. “The lithium’s there, and we have recovered it in the laboratory. The question is, can it be done in a commercial way?”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-11-19/california-s-salton-sea-could-contain-lithium-for-electric-car-batteries
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