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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 2-3 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineers are Don, Leti, and Nibu.

Listen live on the radio, or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.)

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker [L] with Mike, just before the show. (Dec. 7, 2015)

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” ~ Frederick Douglass (Part of a speech given by Douglass in 1886 on the 24th anniversary of emancipation in Washington, DC)  

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1.  Affordable Care Act Can Stay In Effect While Under Appeal, Judge Says, By Emma Bowman |NPR |December 31, 201812:56 AM ET
   1. The federal judge in Texas who ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional earlier this month said that the law can remain in effect while under appeal.
   2. S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in his ruling filed on Sunday that “many everyday Americans would otherwise face great uncertainty during the pendency of appeal.”
   3. But O’Connor still stands by his initial decision, he wrote, that a recent change in federal tax law that eliminated the penalty on uninsured people, in turn, invalidates the entire health care law, which is also referred to as Obamacare.
   4. Before issuing the stay, O’Connor struck down the ACA on Dec. 14, siding with a group of 19 Republican attorneys general and a governor, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
   5. As Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News wrote for NPR following the district court judges decision, “The plaintiffs argued that because the Supreme Court upheld the ACA in 2012 as a constitutional use of its taxing power, the elimination of the tax makes the rest of the law unconstitutional.”
   6. … “In some ways, the question before the Court involves the intent of both the 2010 and 2017 Congresses,” O’Connor wrote in his 55-page decision. “The former enacted the ACA. The latter sawed off the last leg it stood on.” …
2. Elizabeth Warren launches exploratory committee, a major step in a possible 2020 run, By Jess Bidgood and Liz Goodwin | BOSTON GLOBE Staff  December 31, 2018
   1. CNN’s Harry Enten: Elizabeth Warren is a below-par candidate [VIDEO]
      1. Weak against Trump
      2. Massachussettes is a blue state and she “underperformed” (did worse than Hillary Clinton)
   2. Elizabeth Warren, …who has built an outsize profile as an economic populist and a progressive foil to President Trump, formally announced on Monday that she is exploring a run for the presidency in 2020.
   3. In a video released online, Warren, 69, offered a broad rebuke of Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Trump, painting a picture of a nation controlled by a small class of billionaires and corporate interests who have bought and paid for lax regulation by their party in Washington. She cast herself as the champion who will change that. …
   4. … Warren’s answer, as laid out in her announcement video, is with a laser focus on themes of unfairness and economic inequality in America. Those same themes helped fuel her rapid rise from being a respected academic with an expertise in bankruptcy law to a titan of the liberal left who is one of the top fund-raisers in the Senate. In the video, Warren also emphasized the role of race, saying that, while things have gotten tougher for all working families, minorities face a “steeper and rockier” path because of discrimination.
   5. “Corruption is poisoning our democracy,” Warren says …
3. The minimum wage is set to increase in 21 states and DC in 2019 — here’s what it will be in every state, By Andy Kiersz | COM | Dec. 29, 2018, 3:05 PM
   1. 21 states and Washington, DC are set to increase their minimum wages in 2019, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute and Wolters Kluwer.
   2.  
4. The Most Distant Place We’ve Visited – Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule — an auspicious beginning to 2019. By Alan Stern (Dr. Stern is a planetary scientist who leads NASA’s New Horizons mission.) | NY TIMES | 31, 2018
   1. … on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, an American spacecraft called New Horizons will fly by and explore the most distant place ever visited: a small world called Ultima Thule.
   2. Twenty-five hundred men and women across the United States worked to design and build New Horizons, its rocket and its nuclear power supply, and to launch it into space and to fly it across the solar system. In 2015, New Horizons became the first spacecraft to explore Pluto. Now on Ultima’s doorstep, it is a mind-boggling four billion miles from Earth.
   3. … The legacy of American leadership in space isn’t just for history books. It spurs technological development. It has inspired countless careers in science, technology, mathematics and engineering. It is a big reason we have had visionary space pioneers as diverse as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mae Jemison, Sally Ride and Carl Sagan. And it has created new knowledge that the United States continues to make freely available to anyone and everyone in the world who wishes to learn from it.
   4. … Our flyby of Ultima Thule by New Horizons … will provide an auspicious beginning to 2019, the 50th-anniversary year of Apollo’s first moon landing — perhaps, in the long view, the most important historical event of the 20th century. Ultima Thule is 17,000 times as far away as the “giant leap” of Apollo’s lunar missions. The exploration at Ultima Thule is a fitting way to honor the brash exploration and boldness that was Apollo.
5. So similar to SEARS and Toys R Us: As a grocery chain is dismantled, investors recover their money. Worker pensions are short millions. By Peter Whoriskey | COM | December 28, 2018
   1. As usual: “…its owner, a private-equity firm, began selling off the vast retail empire piece by piece.  … Marsh Supermarkets…at last filed for bankruptcy.  “It was a long, slow decline,”
      #VultureCapitalists #Sears #ToysRUs
   2. Once the Marsh Supermarkets chain began to falter a few years ago, its owner, a private-equity firm, began selling off the vast retail empire, piece by piece. The company sold more than 100 convenience stores. It sold the pharmacies. It closed some of the 115 grocery stores, having previously auctioned off their real estate. Then, in May 2017, the company announced the closure of the remaining 44 stores. Marsh Supermarkets, founded in 1931, had at last filed for bankruptcy….
   3. …“It was a long, slow decline,” said Amy Gerken, formerly an assistant office manager at one of the stores. Sun Capital Partners, the private-equity firm that owned Marsh, “didn’t really know how grocery stores work. …
   4. … For Sun Capital, this process of buying companies, seeking profits and leaving pensions unpaid is a familiar one. Over the past 10 years, it has taken five companies into bankruptcy while leaving behind debts of about $280 million owed to employee pensions. …
   5. … “They did everyone dirty,” said Kilby Baker, 70, a retired warehouse worker whose pension check was cut by about 25 percent after Marsh Supermarkets withdrew from the pension. “We all gave up wage increases so we could have a better pension. Then they just took it away from us.”
   6. Founded by two onetime colleagues at Lehman Brothers, Marc Leder and Rodger R. Krouse, Sun Capital manages billions in private-equity investments, buying and selling companies for profit. …
   7. … In a statement for this report, Sun Capital said: “Marsh was a struggling business that we worked hard to save. Our investment kept the company alive and provided jobs for its employees for 11 years.” …
   8. When a company fails, it is sometimes impossible to pay everyone who is owed money. The trouble, according to some critics, is that financial firms often extract money from losing bets to reward themselves and then, through bankruptcy, leave obligations to workers unpaid. Companies owned by private-equity firms have used bankruptcy to leave behind hundreds of millions of dollars in pension debts, according to a government estimate.
   9. “These private-equity firms buy a company, plunder it of any assets, and then send it into bankruptcy without paying employees,” said Eileen Appelbaum, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research who studies private-equity transactions. “To anyone but a bankruptcy court, this looks like a swindle.”
   10. In recent years, some in Congress have sought to change the bankruptcy laws to prevent companies from ditching pension debts through bankruptcy. …
   11. … “There’s this idea that pensions are a giveaway,” said Ryan, who expects to reintroduce the legislation in 2019. But “it’s their money. Through negotiations, workers have deferred wages for a pension down the line. For them not to get that money is theft — in a lot of ways. The workers are a pawn in the game.” …
   12. … Since bankruptcy law changed in 1978, Gotbaum said, “the business community has been inventing new uses of the bankruptcy courts. The private-equity community realized they could use Chapter 11 to do pension laundering.” …
6. The Inevitability of Impeachment – Even Republicans may be deciding that the president has become too great a burden to their party or too great a danger to the country. By Elizabeth Drew (Ms. Drew is a journalist based in Washington who covered Watergate.) | NY TIMES | Dec. 27, 2018
   1. An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase. …
   2. … A significant number of Republican candidates didn’t want to run with Mr. Trump in the midterms, and the results of those elections didn’t exactly strengthen his standing within his party. His political status, weak for some time, is now hurtling downhill. …
   3. …The word “impeachment” has been thrown around with abandon. The frivolous impeachment of President Bill Clinton helped to define it as a form of political revenge. But it is far more important and serious than that: It has a critical role in the functioning of our democracy.
   4. Impeachment was the founders’ method of holding a president accountable between elections. Determined to avoid setting up a king in all but name, they put the decision about whether a president should be allowed to continue to serve in the hands of the representatives of the people who elected him.
   5. The founders understood that overturning the results of a presidential election must be approached with care and that they needed to prevent the use of that power as a partisan exercise or by a faction. So they wrote into the Constitution provisions to make it extremely difficult for Congress to remove a president from office, including that after an impeachment vote in the House, the Senate would hold a trial, with a two-thirds vote needed for conviction. …
   6. … The current presidential crisis seems to have only two possible outcomes. If Mr. Trump sees criminal charges coming at him and members of his family, he may feel trapped. This would leave him the choice of resigning or trying to fight congressional removal. …
   7. … Republicans who were once Mr. Trump’s firm allies have already openly criticized some of his recent actions, including his support of Saudi Arabia despite the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and his decision on Syria. They also openly deplored Mr. Mattis’s departure.
   8. … It always seemed to me that Mr. Trump’s turbulent presidency was unsustainable and that key Republicans would eventually decide that he had become too great a burden to the party or too great a danger to the country. That time may have arrived. In the end the Republicans will opt for their own political survival. …
7. 3D-printed heads let hackers – and cops – unlock your phone, By Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker)/ COM /DEC 16, 2018 / 12 hours ago
8. 1. …You can …3D print a life-size replica of a human head — and not just for Hollywood. Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster commissioned a 3D printed model of his own head to test the face unlocking systems on a range of phones — four Android models and an iPhone X.
   2. Bad news if you’re an Android user: only the iPhone X defended against the attack.
   3. … [B]iometrics — your fingerprints and your face — aren’t protected under the Fifth Amendment. That means police can’t compel you to give up your passcode, but they can forcibly depress your fingerprint to unlock your phone, or hold it to your face while you’re looking at it. And the police know it — it happens more often than you might realize.
   4. But there’s also little in the way of stopping police from 3D printing or replicating a set of biometrics to break into a phone.
   5. “Legally, it’s no different from using fingerprints to unlock a device,” said Orin Kerr, professor at USC Gould School of Law, in an email. “The government needs to get the biometric unlocking information somehow,” by either the finger pattern shape or the head shape, he said.
   6. Although a warrant “wouldn’t necessarily be a requirement” to get the biometric data, one would be needed to use the data to unlock a device, he said.
   7. Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project On Government Oversight, said it was doable but isn’t the most practical or cost-effective way for cops to get access to phone data.
   8. … Those cheering on the “death of the password” might want to think again. They’re still the only thing that’s keeping your data safe from the law.
9. California commission finds PG&E falsified records for years, By Christina Maxouris | CNN | Updated 3:10 PM ET, Sat December 15, 2018
   1. (CNN)The California Public Utilities Commission may penalize one of the country’s largest utility providers after an investigation found it had been falsifying records for five years.
   2. The commission, tasked with regulating privately owned public utilities in the state, claims Pacific Gas & Electric Co. violated California law by failing to locate and mark their natural gas pipelines in a timely manner.
   3. The commission’s safety and enforcement division found PG&E pressured supervisors and other workers to falsify data so that the locating and marking work would not appear as late. The investigation also found the company did not have enough employees to regularly locate and mark natural gas pipelines.
   4. “Excavators, including construction crews, rely on PG&E to inform them exactly where PG&E underground natural gas infrastructure is located,” CPUC stated. “If PG&E fails to meet its legally imposed responsibilities to locate and mark the required deadline of the excavating contractor’s request, a contractor may simply commence digging despite the danger.” …

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