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BREAKING: MASS SHOOTING IN BALTIMORE: 8 Shot Including A Toddler…Manhunt Underway [Video] | East Baltimore was the scene of a mass shooting tonight that included a 3-year old toddler as one of the victims. The shooter is on the loose. No description of the suspect yet The location of the shooting is near a senior apartment building and the brand new @OpenWorksBmore cowering space that formally opened just this week. This appears to be a gang hit. No word from Black Lives Matter yet VIDEO FROM THE SCENE OF THE CRIME:Police say a 3 y/o and her dad are among 8 shot in East Baltimore. All are expected to survive. Limited suspect info. #WBAL pic.twitter.com/zFuvGQF50a Vanessa Herring (@VanessaWBAL) September 25, 2016 | 1real |
HOW PRESIDENT EISENHOWER Solved The Illegal Immigration Problem In America | Since this article was written in 2006, the illegal immigration crisis in America has exploded. Barack Obama, his fellow Democrats, leftist organizations (and even some Republicans beholden to corporations who desire cheap labor in America), have desperately tried to shame Americans into accepting amnesty as the only option to solve this crisis. One doesn t have to look too far to see how miserably they have failed. Americans are not interested in giving up our jobs, our national security or the future of our country so the Democrat party can have a monopoly on voters, or to make it easier for business and corporations to hire cheap labor. It is no accident that Donald Trump experienced a meteoric rise in the polls after he boldly proclaimed he would make building a wall on our southern border a priority. The media tried to shame him, only causing him to double down, claiming he would not only build the biggest and best wall on our southern border, but he claimed that Mexico would pay for it. This article is for all of the naysayers who believe the illegal immigration crisis can t be solved. The problem can be solved. We just needed a President with a backbone, who loves his country, is willing to take bold moves to secure our nation and most of all, a President who truly believes Americans come first.Over fifty years ago, when newly elected Dwight Eisenhower moved into the White House, America s southern frontier was as porous as a spaghetti sieve. As many as 3 million illegal migrants had walked and waded northward over a period of several years for jobs in California, Arizona, Texas, and points beyond.President Eisenhower cut off this illegal traffic. He did it quickly and decisively with only 1,075 United States Border Patrol agents less than one-tenth of today s force. The operation is still highly praised among veterans of the Border Patrol.Although there is little to no record of this operation in Ike s official papers, one piece of historic evidence indicates how he felt. In 1951, Ike wrote a letter to Sen. William Fulbright (D) of Arkansas. The senator had just proposed that a special commission be created by Congress to examine unethical conduct by government officials who accepted gifts and favors in exchange for special treatment of private individuals.General Eisenhower, who was gearing up for his run for the presidency, said Amen to Senator Fulbright s proposal. He then quoted a report in The New York Times, highlighting one paragraph that said: The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican wetbacks to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government. Years later, the late Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower s first attorney general, said in an interview with this writer that the president had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration when he took office.America was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale, Mr. Brownell said. When I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without restraint. Although an on-and-off guest-worker program for Mexicans was operating at the time, farmers and ranchers in the Southwest had become dependent on an additional low-cost, docile, illegal labor force of up to 3 million, mostly Mexican, laborers.According to the Handbook of Texas Online, published by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association, this illegal workforce had a severe impact on the wages of ordinary working Americans.The Handbook Online reports that a study by the President s Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas in 1950 found that cotton growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where most illegal aliens in Texas worked, paid wages that were approximately half the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.Profits from illegal labor led to the kind of corruption that apparently worried Eisenhower. Joseph White, a retired 21-year veteran of the Border Patrol, says that in the early 1950s, some senior US officials overseeing immigration enforcement had friends among the ranchers, and agents did not dare arrest their illegal workers.Walt Edwards, who joined the Border Patrol in 1951, tells a similar story. He says: When we caught illegal aliens on farms and ranches, the farmer or rancher would often call and complain [to officials in El Paso]. And depending on how politically connected they were, there would be political intervention. That is how we got into this mess we are in now. Bill Chambers, who worked for a combined 33 years for the Border Patrol and the then-called US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), says politically powerful people are still fueling the flow of illegals.During the 1950s, however, this Good Old Boy system changed under Eisenhower if only for about 10 years.In 1954, Ike appointed retired Gen. Joseph Jumpin Joe Swing, a former West Point classmate and veteran of the 101st Airborne, as the new INS commissioner.Influential politicians, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D) of Texas and Sen. Pat McCarran (D) of Nevada, favored open borders, and were dead set against strong border enforcement, Brownell said. But General Swing s close connections to the president shielded him and the Border Patrol from meddling by powerful political and corporate interests.One of Swing s first decisive acts was to transfer certain entrenched immigration officials out of the border area to other regions of the country where their political connections with people such as Senator Johnson would have no effect.Then on June 17, 1954, what was called Operation Wetback began. Because political resistance was lower in California and Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.Unlike today, Mexicans caught in the roundup were not simply released at the border, where they could easily reenter the US. To discourage their return, Swing arranged for buses and trains to take many aliens deep within Mexico before being set free.Tens of thousands more were put aboard two hired ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south.The sea voyage was a rough trip, and they did not like it, says Don Coppock, who worked his way up from Border Patrolman in 1941 to eventually head the Border Patrol from 1960 to 1973.Mr. Coppock says he cannot understand why [President] Bush let [today s] problem get away from him as it has. I guess it was his compassionate conservatism, and trying to please [Mexican President] Vincente Fox. There are now said to be 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the US. Of the Mexicans who live here, an estimated 85 percent are here illegally.Border Patrol vets offer tips on curbing illegal immigration One day in 1954, Border Patrol agent Walt Edwards picked up a newspaper in Big Spring, Texas, and saw some startling news. The government was launching an all-out drive to oust illegal aliens from the United States.The orders came straight from the top, where the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, had put a former West Point classmate, Gen. Joseph Swing, in charge of immigration enforcement.General Swing s fast-moving campaign soon secured America s borders an accomplishment no other president has since equaled. Illegal migration had dropped 95 percent by the late 1950s.Several retired Border Patrol agents who took part in the 1950s effort, including Mr. Edwards, say much of what Swing did could be repeated today. Some say we cannot send 12 million illegals now in the United States back where they came from. Of course we can! Edwards says.Donald Coppock, who headed the Patrol from 1960 to 1973, says that if Swing and Ike were still running immigration enforcement, they d be on top of this in a minute. William Chambers, another 50s veteran, agrees. They could do a pretty good job sealing the border.Edwards says: When we start enforcing the law, these various businesses are, on their own, going to replace their [illegal] workforce with a legal workforce. While Congress debates building a fence on the border, these veterans say other actions should have higher priority.1. End the current practice of taking captured Mexican aliens to the border and releasing them. Instead, deport them deep into Mexico, where return to the US would be more costly.2. Crack down hard on employers who hire illegals. Without jobs, the aliens won t come.3. End catch and release for non-Mexican aliens. It is common for illegal migrants not from Mexico to be set free after their arrest if they promise to appear later before a judge. Few show up.The Patrol veterans say enforcement could also be aided by a legalized guest- worker program that permits Mexicans to register in their country for temporary jobs in the US. Eisenhower s team ran such a program. It permitted up to 400,000 Mexicans a year to enter the US for various agriculture jobs that lasted for 12 to 52 weeks. Via: CS Monitor | 1real |
“I SERVED WITH ROY MOORE IN VIETNAM”…Letter From Veteran Sets Record Straight On “Honorable, Decent, Respectable, Patriotic Commander and Soldier” | If it wasn t for people like Vietnam veteran William E. Staehle, who made the decision to publicly defend the character of Roy Moore in an op-ed, the only picture the American people might have of the former judge, is the one painted by the leftist media and the rabid Democrat Party, that struggles to identify a single legitimate reason for Alabama voters to support their candidate Doug Jones.I served with Roy Moore in Vietnam in 1971-72, where I knew him to be an altogether honorable, decent, respectable, and patriotic commander and soldier. I have had no contact with him since.He and I were captains and company commanders in the 504th Military Police Battalion, stationed at the base camp called Camp Land, just west of Danang.I knew him well in my first four months in-country before I was re-assigned within the battalion to another location. During that time, I grew to admire him.I am Bill Staehle, residing in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I am an attorney, practicing law continuously for 42-years. I began my career as an assistant United States attorney, and for the past 32 years, I have been the managing trial lawyer for the staff counsel office of a major insurance company.Allow me to relate to you one experience involving Roy that impressed me.While in Vietnam, there came a time when another officer invited Roy and me to go with him into town after duty hours for a couple of beers. That officer had just returned from an assignment in Quang Tri Province north of Danang, and we were interested to learn of his experiences.I had not met him before, and I don t believe Roy had either. On other occasions with other officers, we would go to the officers club at the air force base, but on this occasion, he told us he knew of another place in town.When we arrived at the place and went inside, it was clear to Roy and me that he had taken us to a brothel. That officer appeared to know people there, as he was greeted by one or two young women in provocative attire.The place was plush. There were other American servicemen there. Alcohol was being served. There were plenty of very attractive young women clearly eager for an intimate time.In less time than it took any of the women to approach us, Roy turned to me and said words to this effect, We shouldn t be here. I am leaving. We told the officer who had brought us that we wanted to leave. He told us to take his jeep and that he could get a ride back later, which he did. Roy and I drove back to camp together.That evening, if I didn t know it before, I knew then that with Roy Moore I was in the company of a man of great self-control, discipline, honor, and integrity. While there were other actions by Roy that reinforced my belief in him, that was the most telling.I reject what are obvious, politically motivated allegations against Roy of inappropriate dating behavior. What I saw, felt and knew about him in Vietnam stands in stark contrast to those allegations.I sincerely doubt that Roy s character had changed fundamentally and dramatically in a few short years later. He deserves, in my view, to be heard on the issues that are important to the people of Alabama and our country.Roy was a soldier for whom I was willing to put my life on the line in Vietnam if the occasion ever arose. Fortunately, it did not.I was prepared to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him then, and I am proud to stand by Roy now. William E. Staehle, Asbury Park, New JerseyVia: Yellow Hammer | 1real |
Trump Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Gets HUMILIATED On First Day By Another Judge | Welcome to the big leagues, kid.Donald Trump s Supreme Court Justice only made it through Senate confirmation because Republicans changed the rules so they could complete their robbery of the seat from President Obama pick Merrick Garland.Neil Gorsuch now sits on the high court and his first day was Monday. And of course, just like Trump, he embarrassed himself from the get-go.Gorsuch s first case involved a Census Bureau worker who had been dismissed and filed a lawsuit over it.The former government employee s lawyers want the entire case to be allowed to move forward instead of only part of it being heard by the federal appeals courts. Rather than keep his mouth shut and learn, Gorsuch apparently decided to try to prove that he belonged there.And he didn t waste time. Gorsuch was argumentative and spent lots of time on wording. In other words, it looks like Gorsuch is going to be an asshole judge who is going to base every decision he makes on exact wording and his interpretation of those words. He s going to nitpick and decide cases on technicalities.But then Gorsuch decided to go even further by changing the decorum of the court. Channeling Trump, Gorsuch literally accused attorney Chris Landau of lying in open court.According to Bloomberg,Landau asked the court to let the man s entire suit go forward in a federal district court, rather than waiting for part of the case to be addressed first by a federal appeals court. When Landau said he wasn t asking the court to break any new ground, Gorsuch gave a pointed response. No, just to continue to make it up, Gorsuch said.But Landau is correct. As Bloomberg points out, there is plenty of precedent of the Supreme Court allowing such lawsuits to move forward in their entirety. So Landau really isn t asking the high court to do anything different than it has before. He s asking them to uphold precedent, something Gorsuch clearly has no interest in doing regardless of what the law says.But Justice Elena Kagan was quick to put Gorsuch in his place and humiliated him in the process. This would be kind of a revolution, she began. I mean, to the extent you can have a revolution in this kind of case. The room laughed as everyone recognized a good Supreme Court burn.So just like Donald Trump, Gorsuch is an embarrassment.Frankly, not only should Trump be impeached, Gorsuch should be impeached as well. He doesn t belong in the position he currently holds. It s clear he has no respect for Supreme Court decorum and that he will make partisan decisions regardless of precedent and the law. And Republicans are the ones to blame for this. They chose Trump to be their leader and they forced Gorsuch upon the Supreme Court. It s up to Democrats to fix both of these embarrassments as soon as they take back control of Congress.Featured Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images | 1real |
Skating, and Scoring, for God’s Glory - The New York Times | NORTH ARLINGTON, N. J. — College roller hockey teams from across the Northeast, including Pennsylvania State University, competed at an indoor arena here recently, shooting, skating and stickhandling with gusto as they battled to climb the standings and win for their teammates and for school pride. But one team, the Maccabees of Yeshiva University, was playing for something loftier — religious devotion and the quest to bring glory to Orthodox Jews. “When we go out there, wearing Yeshiva across our chest, it reflects not just on our school but on our whole religion,” Avi Margulies, 22, one of the team’s founders, said after the team improved its record to . In their second season, the Maccabees, named for a band of ancient Jewish freedom fighters, are doing their faith proud and bringing athletic acclaim to this college in northern Manhattan better known for training religiously devout students than turning out powerhouse sports teams. This unlikely band of Orthodox Jewish students is tearing up the Eastern Collegiate Roller Hockey Association, against teams with few or no Jewish players and more resources. The squad was founded last season with little fanfare or financial assistance from the university. The players spend most of their time immersed in intense studies of the Talmud and the Torah, but Sundays are for hockey. Because of Sabbath restrictions, they cannot play the usual Friday and Saturday games scheduled by the league. Instead, they must play multiple games Sunday mornings, starting as early as 7 a. m. and playing up to four games, sometimes back to back against fresher teams. On a recent Sunday morning at the New Jersey rink, the Maccabees’ fans far outnumbered — and stood out — from those rooting for the other teams. The men wore skullcaps and the women dressed in prim dark skirts. Joe Klein, part of a group of classmates at the rink, said the team’s credo was “Play hard to pray hard” and likened the team to a biblical David bringing down Goliaths. “They live for the fact that they’re going to be the underdogs,” said Akiva Blumenthal, another Yeshiva student. After all, most of the teams at the rink hailed from large universities like Penn State and the University of Delaware, with hockey programs that receive money from their schools and are unencumbered by religious strictures. The Yeshiva team showed up at the rink before 7 a. m. and squeezed into a cramped locker room. Putting on a uniform included pulling a helmet over a yarmulke and strapping padding over a white, tasseled religious shawl, known as a tallit. They had already finished a lengthy prayer session and were facing a grueling three games. Last season, they played in Division 4, which is for newer teams. They lost one game all season and won the league championship, earning them the right to play this season in the more competitive Division 2 league against teams like Boston University and Northeastern. Still, they are currently in first place and are a favorite to win the league championships in March in Pennsylvania. The Maccabees will most likely qualify for the national championship in Florida in April, said William Bourque, the commissioner of the Eastern Collegiate Roller Hockey Association, and their performance there could enable them to move to the top division, whose teams have bigger budgets that include team buses and plane travel to games. Mr. Bourque said he was impressed by the team’s quick success, especially since new teams typically struggle to achieve a winning record. “It’s very rare that a team comes in and becomes a top team right away,” he said. “They’re probably the team out there. They probably don’t have the most talented players, but they have the best teamwork. They want it more than anyone else. ” The game is essentially played on an ice hockey rink with a hard surface. Body checking is forbidden but play is still scrappy, with plenty of contact. Players use a hard plastic puck and wear skates and padding. Maccabee players and supporters regard the team’s unlikely accomplishment as something of a miracle. “Growing up as an Orthodox kid, you can’t play in the roller hockey leagues because they don’t cater to the orthodox lifestyle,” said Amir Gavarin, who also helped start the team and is the captain. “So you wonder if you can play with the gentiles. We’re trying to prove to the community that we can hang with them. ” The team is largely an outgrowth of the avid floor hockey scene in orthodox high schools in and around New York City. Some top players who ended up attending Yeshiva University were recruited by Mr. Margulies and Mr. Gavarin. Many of the players, including one of the goalies, Joseph Robin, had to develop skating skills. Two of the team’s stars, Avi Edell and Ari Drazin, grew up in Canada playing ice hockey and had to learn how to play on wheels instead of blades. Being a club rather than a varsity sport means the team is not eligible for athletic department funding, school officials said. Still, the team is hoping to persuade the school to provide some financing, Mr. Gavarin said. The players had to raise money to buy uniforms and equipment, pay league fees, cover travel expenses and even to hire a coach, Ely Gemara. League officials warned the Yeshiva players that holding games on Sunday mornings could mean having to play before sunrise. “We told them, ‘Guys, it’s going to be really, really hard,’ but they’ve taken everything in stride,” Mr. Bourque said. Because of the players’ rigorous study schedules, it has been tough to schedule practices, and rental fees are steep at rinks on Long Island and in New Jersey. They also practice at an outdoor public rink on First Avenue in Manhattan. This season, the team had to skip preseason games because they fell during the High Holy Days in October. Players said their travel logistics could be as challenging as their opponents. While other teams show up in team vans, the Maccabees scramble to assemble car pools. With kosher and Sabbath restrictions, even hotel stays are tricky. Team members often stay with orthodox families, sometimes sleeping on attic floors or in cold garages. There was also the necessity of packing their own kosher food — which usually meant cold meals — and fitting morning, afternoon and evening prayer sessions between car trips to games across the Northeast. The toll of travel hit the team at its very first game, in Rhode Island. After praying in a cold, dark parking lot, the team seemed in a daze as their opponents scored 15 seconds into the game. The Maccabees, however, woke up and rallied to a lopsided victory. By season’s end, several of the players won league honors, but could not attend a Friday night banquet. Instead, league officials presented the awards the following Sunday in a locker room. There have been awkward moments. Last season, at a rink on Long Island, the opposing team could not conceal its surprise after walking into a locker room to find the Maccabees in prayer together in Hebrew. “You should have seen the shock on their faces,” Mr. Gavarin said. Some fans travel hours to road games. At the rink in New Jersey, they were crestfallen when the team blew a lead against Stony Brook University, and lost in overtime. But they revived when the Maccabees beat Delaware University and trounced Penn State in a game that featured Mr. Drazin and Jesse Gordon combining on a dazzling Maccabees goal. The two players initially met while studying the Talmud in Israel before playing together. Now they make up the team’s first offensive line. Mr. Gavarin acquired his love for the game from his father, Barry Gavarin, who began playing a primitive form of hockey at his own yeshiva in the 1960s, first kicking the puck on an outdoor makeshift ice rink and then buying sticks and skates with his classmates as a break from religious study. The younger Mr. Gavarin said he and his teammates considered being both devout Jews and ferocious competitors a way to encourage other young observant Jews to break out of the often “insulated” world of Orthodox Jewish life. “We’re opening up a whole new viewpoint and worldview for Orthodox kids,’’ Mr. Gavarin said, “because they can see that if you work hard enough you can play with anybody. ” | 0fake |
White House: Congress would have most impact on fighting tax avoidance | ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) - The White House said on Thursday that the best way for the government to fight tax avoidance would be for Congress to take action after the U.S. Treasury Department issued major new rules on tax inversions on Monday. “I know that if they are working on any future actions the most impactful thing we could do is if Congress took some action here,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters when asked if the Treasury Department would issue more regulations on tax avoidance. U.S. drug maker Pfizer Inc agreed on Tuesday to terminate its $160 billion agreement to acquire Allergan Plc in a victory for the Obama administration’s push to stop tax-dodging mergers. (Story corrects quote to reflect spokesman saying Congress would have most impact on countering tax avoidance, not that Treasury is working on more action.) | 0fake |
The right turns on Paul Ryan: Yesterday’s conservative savior is today’s moderate wimp | Rush Limbaugh: “I don’t remember a vice presidential pick that has so energized a campaign as this choice of Paul Ryan.”
Glenn Beck: “Mitt Romney has picked a solid, smart conservative for his vice-presidential running mate.”
Laura Ingraham: “More than anything today, we need a man with courage and clear-thinking. Ryan has both.”
Fast forward just three years and those same commentators are now raising doubts about Ryan, when not outright trashing him in public. Ryan’s sudden sin? Not being sufficiently conservative; not passing the purity test.
Limbaugh: “This whole Ryan thing hasn’t made any sense to me from the first moment I heard about it.”
Beck: “The ‘fix’ the republic needs is Paul Ryan? The man who never met a bailout he didn’t like? A man who asked to be made king? 100% support and you can’t vote him out? Your solution is MORE POWER FOR THE SPEAKER?!?!?!?”
Ingraham: “From misrepresenting the outrageous Fast Track &TPP to amnesty & foreign workers, list of demands, Ryan’s possibly the worst Spkr choice.”
Ryan’s amazing free-fall from grace seems to be part of a larger race to the radical right, not only among powerful forces with the Republican Party, which now seem to be fundamentally opposed to governing and legislating, but also within key portions of the right-wing media. There seems to be a mini-stampede underway towards an extremist destination rarely seen in mainstream American politics. And for parts of the conservative media that means now demonizing former heroes like Paul Ryan.
“Conservative talk show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have already denounced him as a dangerous moderate,” according to Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times. “Tea party organizations are already raising money from supporters with appeals to stop any more Ryanesque budget deals.”
One of the many layers of irony here is that in 2012, the right-wing media defended Ryan from Democraticclaims that he was too far to the right and outside of the mainstream. Today, many conservative commentators are attacking Ryan for not being far enough to the right.
Yet “Ryan hasn’t undergone any sort of David Brockian-type worldview change that would warrant labeling him an apostate,” wrote conservative Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast. He added that while “Ryan’s voting record has its blemishes,” Ryan would “certainly be the most conservative Speaker of the House in modern history.” He still believes in privatizing social security and Medicare. He still believes that social programs are a “hammock.” He still believes that the Social Security survivor benefits that he and his family received throughout his adolescence cause dependency on other people and their families. A portion of the conservative press, of course, has never been in love with an establishment-type players like Jeb Bush, so his lack of support this year hasn’t been surprising. But Paul Ryan? He’s “the Republican party’s intellectual leader” as The Weekly Standard once touted. The conservative press could barely contain its universal glee when Ryan got the VP nod just three years ago. ‘He’s one of us,’ seemed to be the collective cheer. “Fox News, the most powerful right-wing media outlet in the country, has spent years praising Ryan as a ‘star,’ a ‘genius,’ and a man of ‘courage,'” Media Matters noted in 2012. -“He is the wrong man at the wrong time.” [American Thinker] -“Paul Ryan represents one of the absolute worst outcomes for conservatives.” [Conservative Review] -“Despite his portrayal by the media as being conservative, most actual conservatives in the House know that Ryan isn’t a conservative.” [Breitbart] Breitbart, in particular, has become a clearinghouse of often-inaccurate analysis regarding Ryan, such as claiming the Republican’s bid for the speakership had recently collapsed. Breitbart even warned readers that Media Matters “has Paul Ryan’s back,” as proof the Republican cannot be trusted. In a sign of how fractured and radical the conservative movement has become, it appears fewer and fewer media players have Ryan’s back. Even though they cheered him as a savior in 2012. | 0fake |
Interview 1222 – New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato | 10/27/2016 at 11:56 pm
Apologies for the poor audio quality of this one. As I mentioned in today’s video technical gremlins ate our recording today and this is all I was able to salvage (no video for this one). I hope you’re able to get something out of it anyway. | 1real |
YOU CAN ADD INSIDER TRADING To The List Of Hillary’s Crimes [Video] | Wow! Yet more insider deals with the Clinton Grifters! These people should NEVER be in politics again EVER! The Clinton corruption machine is gobbling up millions while the little people get stuck with the tab. Hillary s son-in-law is taking after his father who was in federal prison for bank fraud! CLINTON FAMILY CORRUPTION RUNS DEEP It s disgusting!It s NO coincidence that three of the biggest investors in the Greek bailout were the California Public Sector Employee pension fund, the head of Goldman Sachs or Chelsea Clinton s old boss from another hedge fund.You can be sure they got a heads up alerting them to take their profits and jump ship when the bailout scheme collapsed, leaving all the little guys to suffer.Much like Hillary s magical investment in cattle futures where she turned a $1,000 investment into a $100,000 windfall. Stock markets don t create money, they merely transfer it from the losers to the winners.So when someone with insider help scores big, it s by taking money out of the pockets of everyone who doesn t have special access to privileged information.That s why insider trading is a federal crime!Hedge fund manager Marc Mezvinsky had friends in high places when he bet big on a Greek economic recovery, but even the keen interest of his mother-in-law, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wasn t enough to spare him and his investors from financial tragedy.In 2012, Mezvinski, the husband of Chelsea Clinton, created a $325 million basket of offshore funds under the Eaglevale Partners banner through a special arrangement with investment bank Goldman Sachs. The funds have lost tens of millions of dollars predicting that bailouts of the Greek banking system would pump up the value of the country s distressed bonds. One fund, exclusively dedicated to Greek debt, suffered near-total losses.Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in 2013 to run for president. But newly released emails from 2012 show that she and Clinton Foundation consultant, Sidney Blumenthal, shared classified information about how German leadership viewed the prospects for a Greek bailout. Clinton also shared protected State Department information about Greek bonds with her husband at the same time that her son-in-law aimed his hedge fund at Greece.That America s top diplomat kept a sharp eye on intelligence assessing the chances of a bailout of the Greek central bank is not a problem. However, sharing such sensitive information with friends and family would have been highly improper. Federal regulations prohibit the use of nonpublic information to further private interests or the interests of others. The mere perception of a conflict of interest is unacceptable.Through its press representative, Eaglevale declined to comment for this story. Clinton s campaign press office did not respond to a request for comment.A former Goldman Sachs broker himself, Mezvinsky formed Eaglevale Management with two ex-Goldman Sachs partners in October 2011. As a global macro firm, Eaglevale s strategy is to seek profit opportunities in politically volatile situations. Mezvinsky set up several funds in the Cayman Islands, a secretive tax haven, with Goldman Sachs serving as Eaglevale s prime broker and banker. The giant brokerage firm has a checkered history of manipulating the value of Greek debt to the detriment of Greece. The same month that Eaglevale incorporated its offshore arm, Gary Gensler, the head of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which polices hedge funds, emailed Clinton that a bailout by the European Central Bank could turn market sentiment in favor of Greek bonds.Gensler had previously worked as co-head of finance at Goldman Sachs; he is now the financial director of Clinton s election campaign. Goldman Sachs has donated up to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation and $860,000 to Hillary Clinton s political campaigns. Shortly after Clinton resigned, Goldman Sachs paid her $675,000 in speaking fees.Clinton s deputy in charge of economic policy was Robert Hormats, a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs. Hormats and Clinton shared an extensive email trail about the possibility of bailing out Greece, including classified materials, and internal state department memos about the debt from the U.S. ambassador to Greece.Again, monitoring Greece was part of Clinton s job description, but, ethically, that does not mean that a family member should make bets that depend upon the actions of another family member leaving aside the question of whether insider information was divulged to Mezvinsky by Blumenthal or his parents-in-law.During 2011, Secretary of State Clinton lobbied the leaders of European governments to bail out the Greek financial system. She advocated imposing austerity measures on Greece raising taxes, cutting public employee salaries and eliminating social welfare programs to make the investors holding the debt happy.Driven by investor s belief that Greece would be bailed out, the speculative value of its debt climbed into the stratosphere in late 2011 and early 2012. The bonds gradually sank to 2008 levels by the end of the year, with temporary spikes, as investors alternately gained and loss confidence in the prospect of a bailout. In other words, there were multiple opportunities for Greek-bond hedge funds to buy cheap and sell dear.At a February 2012 summit meeting about the Eurozone debt crisis in Munich, Clinton urged leaders of the European Union to commit to a Greek bailout.In April, Eaglevale booked $19 million from a dozen investors. California s public employee pension fund, CalPERS, reportedly invested $13 million. Goldman Sach s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, jumped in with his own money, as did Chelsea Clinton s former boss, Marc Lasry, who specializes in buying distressed debt.In May, Blumenthal, emailed two confidential memos about the Greek debt situation to Clinton. Hormats was included in the email loop.The first memo, Blumenthal told Clinton, is based on conversations with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble and those close to him the information comes from an extremely sensitive source and should be handled with care. This information must not be shared with anyone associated with the German government. The unnamed spy reported that in secret meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Schauble had searched for a politically acceptable way to bail out the Greek debt in order to avoid collapsing the economies of Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland.The second memo was classified and blacked out by State Department censors when Clinton s emails were released. No doubt, it was informative.In June, Clinton s deputy, Jake Sullivan emailed her a depressing snapshot of reports that Greek banks were failing and that Merkel was against a Greek bailout. The next day, he reported re: Greece that Ambassador Dan Smith just spoke to the Central Bank Governor and assessed that the economic situation was ok for now provided that small depositors put money back into the banks. A few days later, Clinton asked Sullivan for a confidential state department report, Solidarity Bonds Greece Revised. He sent it to her adding, If you like, send it on to WJC, presumably a reference to William Jefferson Clinton.Clinton ordered an aide, Pls print two copies of the Greek bond report. The report was blacked out as a protected document when the emails were made public.Did Mezvinsky benefit from his family connection?The emails show that Clinton did at least one official favor for her son-in-law. In August 2012, she forwarded Deputy Secretary Thomas Nides an email from Mezvinsky lobbying on behalf of his former Goldman Sachs colleague, Harry Siklas. Via: Blur Brain | 1real |
Sean Spicer Just Gave Trump Credit For Something Obama Did, White House DESPERATE (TWEET) | Donald Trump has basically built his life around doing nothing and taking credit for the accomplishments and work of others and that definitely has not changed since he won the election and got into the White House. The crazy thing is, he continues to claim the successes of his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, whom Trump has repeatedly criticized and trashed in the past.The GOP has undermined Obama s soaring track record for the past eight years. They ve trashed everything Obama improved from the economy to his employment record and now, they re more than happy to take credit for his hard work. Earlier today, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer showed just how desperate and pathetic the White House is when he tweeted this horrible message: Great news for American workers: economy added 235,000 new jobs, unemployment rate drops to 4.7% in first report for @POTUS Trump. Trump hasn t even been in office for two full months. These numbers are NOT a reflection of his work! It s also worth nothing that those job numbers for February 2016 (237,000) are nearly identical to the ones in February 2015 (238,000). Clearly, this is Obama s doing not Trump s. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job gains have averaged 209,000 per month. Trump and his team are so delusional, they seriously think they can take credit for the job numbers in February, when they didn t even get into the White House until January 20th.Under Obama, America saw the longest consecutive job creation streak in 75 years completely dismantling the GOP s assertion that he didn t do anything for the country and left it worse than what he started with. Despite the fact that data shows that Obama greatly improved our country, Trump has still promised the American people that he would fix our jobs. Honestly, the best thing Trump could do is just not mess up Obama s work.Featured image via Alex Wong / Getty Images | 1real |
Changes at helm of U.S. bank agency signal new Trump era | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Wednesday took its first step in replacing Obama-era banking regulators, naming a veteran financial lawyer as interim head of the watchdog for federally chartered banks. Keith Noreika, a partner at law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, will be first deputy comptroller at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and will run the OCC on an interim basis when Comptroller Thomas Curry leaves on May 5, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. Former banker Joseph Otting, who worked with Mnuchin at Californian lender OneWest, is considered the lead contender to permanently replace Curry, several people familiar with the matter have said. That appointment requires Senate confirmation and analysts said they expected Noreika to be in charge for much of this year. U.S. President Donald Trump wants to overhaul regulation of the financial services system to make it easier for banks to lend and has asked Mnuchin to review the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law by June 3. The OCC is one of several regulators that monitors the health of Wall Street banks but has a particularly influential role in scrutinizing lending practices. Under Curry, OCC bank examiners have clamped down on what they perceive as overly risky loans, particularly the type used to fund private equity buyouts. Curry used his position to warn banks when he thought they were talking on too much risk in loans to energy firms and property developers. “Curry did use the bully pulpit to warn banks against risky activity and I think you’re likely to see less of that going forward,” said Ian Katz, financial policy analyst at research firm Capital Alpha. The appointment of Noreika and the expected nomination of Otting meant limits on how much banks can lend to highly indebted companies may be loosened in the future, said Jaret Seiberg, analyst at Cowen Washington Research Group. “This is the most bullish sign yet for the biggest banks that the Trump administration will pursue a traditional Republican approach of financial regulation rather than adopt a more populist tone that could include high leverage capital requirements,” Seiberg said. Trump’s plans to overhaul regulation are being held up by the government’s current lean crew of regulators. While the Senate voted on Tuesday to confirm attorney Jay Clayton to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, the OCC’s changing of the guard might not be so smooth. Democrats have criticized practices at OneWest, the lender created by Mnuchin after the 2008 housing crisis that foreclosed on 36,000 California families. Mnuchin hired Otting as chief executive of the bank in 2010 and he held that role until it was bought by CIT Group in 2014. Noreika’s background as a lawyer who has advised banks on M&A, including Ant Financial’s acquisition of Moneygram, as well as on the Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks from making speculative bets, is also controversial. “It is disturbing that the President is rushing to replace Mr. Curry with an acting appointee who has clear conflicts of interest, and lacks any experience in running such an important agency,” Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement. Noreika’s appointment does not require Senate approval. Curry, a career regulator, was appointed by the Obama administration for a five-year term that expired last month and has since been serving under an extension. While Curry took a tough line on risky lending, the agency did come under fire for its failure to tackle a sales practice abuse scandal at Wells Fargo & Co. The OCC is also trying to establish itself as a regulator of online lenders and financial technology firms. State authorities have argued that is their job and are suing the OCC, arguing it lacks the legal authority to offer a banking charter for technology companies. There are also three vacant spots on the Federal Reserve Board, including the post of vice chair of supervision, which will play a key role in any overhaul of bank regulation. Earlier on Wednesday, Mnuchin told a conference of community bankers that Trump had signed off on a nominee to fill the vice chair role but did not name the person. Reuters had previously reported that Randal Quarles, who worked as under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury under President George W. Bush, was a leading candidate. Mnuchin said the administration was also close to naming the two other Fed selections. | 0fake |
Trump’s Ineptitude Causes HUGE Drop In Investment, Future Of Our Nation Is In Peril (DETAILS) | America s creditors are now thinking twice about investing in our nation because Donald Trump s policies have turned us into a bigger credit risk.On Election night, as the returns came in favoring Trump for president the stock market took a hit and the dollar dipped in value. It soon bounced back but markets around the world and in the United States are nervous about what will happen as long as Trump continues to push an economic policy that significantly lowers taxes on the rich, slashes regulations, boosts spending like never before, and antagonizes American and foreign businesses.Trump s escalation of confrontations with Iran and China, along with European fear of an invasion by Russia have also left the future of the world economy in doubt.Trump has been erratic, paranoid, and quick to whine on Twitter and has shown a willingness to attack businesses that make decisions he disagrees with.And Donald Trump s unpredictability is forcing foreign investors to stop investing in United States Treasuries.According to Bloomberg,Across the world, foreigners are pulling back from U.S. debt like never before. From Tokyo to Beijing and London, the consensus is clear: few overseas investors want to step into the $13.9 trillion U.S. Treasury market right now. Whether it s the prospect of bigger deficits and more inflation under President Donald Trump or higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve, the world s safest debt market seems less of a sure thing particularly after the upswing in yields since November. And then there is Trump s penchant for saber rattling, which has made staying home that much easier.Bloomberg goes on to point out that any consistent drop-off in foreign demand could have lasting consequences on America s ability to finance itself cheaply, which means the cost of running the federal government could skyrocket and fall upon the shoulders of struggling working class Americans who will see their taxes rise as the wealthy escape their own responsibility for providing revenues to the government.And as Trump continues to initiate trade wars against China, Japan, and other nations, it could further justify foreign investors from investing in the United States.We could be looking at an impending economic catastrophe as long as Trump continues to make America a credit risk. He wants to double down on the failed trickle-down economic policies Republicans are obsessed with and if he repeals the Affordable Care Act, that will create further chaos as the wealthy pay less in taxes and the deficit increases. Our economy is primed to implode and foreign investors see it coming. Investing in America is too risky right now, and it is only going to get worse. And Trump is to blame.Featured image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images | 1real |
Exclusive: Trump administration considering separating women, children at Mexico border | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Women and children crossing together illegally into the United States could be separated by U.S. authorities under a proposal being considered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to three government officials. Part of the reason for the proposal is to deter mothers from migrating to the United States with their children, said the officials, who have been briefed on the proposal. The policy shift would allow the government to keep parents in custody while they contest deportation or wait for asylum hearings. Children would be put into protective custody with the Department of Health and Human Services, in the “least restrictive setting” until they can be taken into the care of a U.S. relative or state-sponsored guardian. Currently, families contesting deportation or applying for asylum are generally released from detention quickly and allowed to remain in the United States until their cases are resolved. A federal appeals court ruling bars prolonged child detention. President Donald Trump has called for ending “catch and release,” in which migrants who cross illegally are freed to live in the United States while awaiting legal proceedings. Two of the officials were briefed on the proposal at a Feb. 2 town hall for asylum officers by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum chief John Lafferty. A third DHS official said the department is actively considering separating women from their children but has not made a decision. HHS and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement to Reuters, DHS said: “The journey north is a dangerous one with too many situations where children - brought by parents, relatives or smugglers - are often exploited, abused or may even lose their lives. “With safety in mind, the Department of Homeland Security continually explores options that may discourage those from even beginning the journey,” the statement said. U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat whose district includes about 200 miles (320 km) of the border with Mexico, slammed the proposal. “Bottom line: separating mothers and children is wrong,” he said in a statement. “That type of thing is where we depart from border security and get into violating human rights,” he said. About 54,000 children and their guardians were apprehended between Oct. 1, 2016, and Jan. 31, 2017, more than double the number caught over the same time period a year earlier. Republicans in Congress have argued women are willing to risk the dangerous journey with their children because they are assured they will be quickly released from detention and given court dates set years into the future. Immigrant rights advocates have argued that Central America's violent and impoverished conditions force mothers to immigrate to the United States and that they should be given asylum status. (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2m4aPAs) Implementing the new policy proposal “could create lifelong psychological trauma,” said Marielena Hincapie, executive director at the National Immigration Law Center. “Especially for children that have just completed a perilous journey from Central America.” Hincapie said the U.S. government is likely to face legal challenges based on immigration and family law if they decide to implement the policy. The policy would allow DHS to detain parents while complying with a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals order from July 2016 that immigrant children should be released from detention as quickly as possible. That order said their parents were not required to be freed. To comply with that order, the Obama administration implemented a policy of holding women and children at family detention centers for no more than 21 days before releasing them. Holding mothers in prolonged detention could also strain government resources, said Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based non-profit. “You are talking about a pretty rapid increase in the detention population if you are going to do this,” Capps said. “The question is really how much detention can they afford.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly last week ordered immigration agents to deport or criminally prosecute parents who facilitate the illegal smuggling of their children. Many parents who arrive on the U.S.-Mexico border with their children have paid smugglers to guide them across the dangerous terrain. | 0fake |
Facts about the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president | (Reuters) - With his left hand on a Bible used by Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th U.S. president around noon (1700 GMT) on Friday and give an address at the west front of the U.S. Capitol before leading a parade to the White House. Here are some facts about his inauguration: * Weather is forecast to be wet and unseasonably warm. The National Weather Service predicts temperatures nearing 47 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius) and rain tapering off by midafternoon. * After breakfast and a church service, Trump and his wife, Melania, will meet outgoing President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at the White House. Following tradition, Trump and Obama will ride together down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. * Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will swear in Mike Pence as vice president. Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the oath of office to Trump. * Trump will give an inaugural address expected to last about 20 minutes. His spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump will give “a very forward-thinking, very inspiring, together-oriented speech” on solving such problems as creating jobs. * As many as 900,000 people are expected to turn out for the event, including thousands of protesters. After the ceremony, the Obamas will leave the Capitol to begin their post-White House lives. Trump and Pence stay for lunch. * Starting around 3 p.m. (2000 GMT), Trump, Pence and their families will lead a parade up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Inaugural organizers expect more than 8,000 people to take part, including high school and university marching bands, equestrian corps and veterans groups. * Donald and Melania Trump may step out of their limousine briefly along the parade route to wave to well-wishers. Three inaugural balls are scheduled in the evening. * Following tradition, Obama will leave his successor a letter in the Oval Office desk. Its contents have not been divulged. * While 20 minutes may seem short for an inaugural address, it would not be the shortest. George Washington’s second inaugural speech in 1793 consisted of about 130 words. * The honor of longest inaugural address goes to William Henry Harrison, whose March 4, 1841, speech contained more than 8,440 words and lasted an hour and 45 minutes. Harrison, who gave his speech in a howling snowstorm without a hat or a coat, died of pneumonia a month later. | 0fake |
How Did An Illegal Immigrant Who Said She Wanted To Eat “White Invaders” Become A Lawyer In U.S.? | The new progressive American dream: An Undocumented, Unafraid, Unapologetic, Queer, Unashamed illegal immigrant, or lawbreaker who practices defending legal cases in our US courtrooms..She s in the United State illegally.She helped cause the immigration crisis happening right now that some are calling an invasion.And now, she s a lawyer.Prerna Lal, a radical leftist and self-described Undocumented, Unafraid, Unapologetic, Queer, Unashamed illegal immigrant who once talked about killing, roasting and eating white invaders bragged on her Twitter account that she s now officially an attorney here in the United States.Lal proves that in Obama s America, not only are there are no legal consequences for being a loud and proud illegal immigrant. Lal seems completely unconcerned about hopping back and forth across our borders at will. In another post on her Twitter page, Lal talks about going back home to her native Fiji.Lal also is one of the people responsible for the current massive influx of children and asulym seekers overwhelming our nation s borders.As reported on Breitbart News in September 2013, Ms. Lal is a respected, published immigration reform activist. She s a prominent Dreamer activist one of the young illegal aliens brought to the United States by their parents who are leading the fight for comprehensive immigration reform.Lal is one of the co-founders of the DreamActivist.org site that Breitbart News has reported gave illegal immigrants a lesson in how to lie about their immigration status. That tactic has commonplace now. Via: The brilliant Lee Stranahan | 1real |
NYTimes Editor Defends Paper's Coverage of Trump, Claims Fox News and CNN Are "Bad for Democracy" |
So this is new.
Via the Financial Times , New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet is coming out hot against CNN and Fox News:
“This mix of entertainment and news, and news masquerading as entertainment, is kind of funny except that we now have a guy who is a product of that world nominated as Republican presidential nominee."
Politico noted that Baquet also called out CNN for hiring Corey Lewandowski, and called Fox News “not a journalistic institution” at heart. He did compliment Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, calling them great journalists.
Earlier this week, the Times published a major story detailing Trump's Twitter insults, which are also available on Twitter: Get the magnifying glass: 2 full pages in 3-pt type of NYT listing hundreds of Trump's insults pic.twitter.com/AylrTa2ScJ — Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) October 24, 2016
Not to be deterred, Baquet also dropped a fun burn, claiming cable news coverage in 2016 has been:
“bad for democracy and those institutions.”
Ouch! | 1real |
TEXAS COUNTY SWITCHES TO PAPER BALLOTS AFTER ELECTRONIC VOTING GLITCHES | Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › TEXAS COUNTY SWITCHES TO PAPER BALLOTS AFTER ELECTRONIC VOTING GLITCHES TEXAS COUNTY SWITCHES TO PAPER BALLOTS AFTER ELECTRONIC VOTING GLITCHES 0 SHARES
[10/26/16] ADAN SALAZAR – A county in Texas has switched to “emergency paper ballots” after electronic voting machines in the region suffered technical glitches.
Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne issued a press release Tuesday night announcing electronic voting would be suspended until the glitches affecting voting machines could be corrected.
“The Straight Party vote for both the Republicans and Democrats did not automatically select one race on each ballot,” states the press release.
“The error was caused in programming by ES&S (Election Systems and Software Inc.), the vendor who programs the election software used in Chambers County.”
“The Straight Party vote for both the Republicans and Democrats did not automatically select one race on each ballot,” states the press release.
“The error was caused in programming by ES&S (Election Systems and Software Inc.), the vendor who programs the election software used in Chambers County.”
“Immediately, Hawthorne contacted ES&S and advised them of the issue. Hawthorne then contacted the Secretary of State’s office, the office overseeing the elections in Texas, and was informed to create emergency paper ballots to be used until the problem could be fixed.”
Hawthorne claims she discovered the problem Monday morning after she cast her own vote and reviewed the electronic ballot.
“Moving temporarily to paper ballots in such a situation is standard protocol,” Hawthorne reportedly told 12NewsNow .
On Wednesday, Hawthorne issued another press release claiming the machines had been fixed.
“Using paper ballots in the interim, as prescribed by the Texas Election Code, allowed our vendor to resolve the issue quickly,” she wrote.
Elsewhere in Texas , in towns such as Arlington and Amarillo, other voters have reported witnessing their votes flipped from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.
Election officials in those places, however, blamed users for the errors.
Earlier in the week, Infowars attempted to speak with the Texas Director of Elections Keith Ingram about public concerns over possible voter fraud, but he didn’t want to talk to us. Post navigation | 1real |
Democrats Caught in Major Lie About DREAMERS [Video] | Democrats have been spouting the narrative that DACA recipients are overwhelmingly serving in the military. That s a lie! Fewer than 900 DACA recipients out of 800,000 are serving in the armed forces. The Democrats have been lying about who makes up DACA but this is a HUGE glaring lie.Breitbart News reports that fraud is rampant for DACA:Fraud is rampant and huge for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a former official with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency alleges. Under DACA, nearly 800,000 illegal aliens were given temporary protected status and work permits to remain in the United States. Experts have told Breitbart Texas that during the Obama Administration, background screening was lax.In an interview with LifeZette, former USCIS manager of the agency s investigative unit, Matt O Brien, alleged that the fraud rate for DACA is roughly 40 to 50 percent and potentially even higher : Based on what I had seen and what I discussed with my colleagues, the fraud rate is 40 to 50 percent. It s possible that it was higher, he told LifeZette this week.IN CASE YOU WANT MORE INFO ON DACA: WATCH AG Jeff Sessions Explain Why Obama s Unconstitutional Act Has Harmed Americans US Attorney General Jeff Sessions brilliantly lays out the case for America and against those who believe it s okay to break our laws, as long as you have lawmakers who are willing to look the other way The Department of Homeland Security will stop processing any new applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program. I am here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday at a Justice Department news conference.Sessions was critical of the Obama program implemented through executive order in 2012 to give work authorization and government benefits, like Social Security to nearly a million illegal aliens. MRCTV Watch: The brilliant Jessica Vaughan, from the Center for Immigration Studies, shared these important facts about DACA recipients in America, compiled by Harvard University researcher Roberto G. Gonzales, called the National UnDACAmented Research Project. There are important (self-acknowledged) caveats to the findings: The research is based on an online survey of just over 2,000 self-described DACA-eligible respondents and about 200 follow-up interviews. Gonzales believes that for a variety of reasons, the respondents are more educated and well-off than the DACA population as a whole.Nevertheless, the findings are interesting. Here is a sample:73 percent of DACA recipients he surveyed live in a low-income household (defined as qualifying for free lunch in high school); 22 percent have earned a degree from a four-year college or university; 21 percent have dropped out of high school; 20 percent have no education beyond high school and no plans to attend college; 59 percent obtained a new job with a DACA work permit, but only 45 percent increased their overall earnings; 36 percent have a parent who holds a bachelor s degree; and 51 percent were already employed before DACA. None of this is to suggest that these individuals should not be considered for an amnesty or legalization program, but to suggest that the arguments in favor of such a program are largely political rather than economic. Immigrants who are not highly educated and who are working in low-paying jobs are more likely to access welfare and other public assistance programs over the course of their lives. | 1real |
Germany says Putin move on U.N. peacekeepers in Ukraine a 'step' | BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany welcomed on Wednesday a suggestion by Russian President Vladimir Putin that armed U.N. peacekeepers could be deployed to eastern Ukraine to help protect ceasefire monitors, but said any prospect of lifting sanctions was still a way off. Putin said on Tuesday that Russia intended to draft a U.N. Security Council resolution to this end, saying it would help resolve the problem in eastern Ukraine, though he also said preconditions would have to be met before any deployment. German government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said any deployment would have to be across the whole area of conflict, not just on the contact line between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists. The war between the two sides has killed more than 10,000 people in three years. The president s suggestion is a step, said Demmer, adding many further steps were needed before sanctions could be lifted. For a complete lifting of sanctions to be discussed, there would need to be the full implementation of the Minsk ceasefire agreement, she added. Ukraine believes external peacekeepers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should be deployed throughout separatist-held territory and on the sections of the Ukraine-Russia border that are not under Kiev s control. Kiev accuses Moscow of sending troops and heavy weapons to the region, which Russia denies. Putin also said on Tuesday that any decision by the United States to supply defensive weapons to Ukraine would fuel the conflict. | 0fake |
Amid Spain attacks, Trump says U.S. ready and borders secure | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States was prepared for any possible “trouble” and its borders were secure, as authorities in Spain grappled with an attempted attack near Barcelona one day after another attack left more than a dozen dead. “Homeland Security and law enforcement are on alert & closely watching for any sign of trouble. Our borders are far tougher than ever before!” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter on Friday. | 0fake |
India's Modi to meet Obama, address Congress next month | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington next month to discuss security and other issues and the Indian leader will be granted the rare honor of addressing both houses of Congress. The White House said Obama and Modi will discuss economic growth, climate change, clean energy, and security and defense cooperation during their June 7 meeting. It will be Modi’s fourth trip to the United States since he became prime minister in 2014. “The visit will highlight the deepening of the U.S.-India relationship in key areas,” the White House said in a statement on Friday. The two countries’ partnership is seen as critical in Washington, which is seeking to counterbalance China’s increasing power. Modi will address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, an opportunity extended to few foreign leaders, the day after the White House meeting, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a tweet. The invitation is a sharp turnaround for Modi, who was once barred from the United States over massacres of Muslims. Last year there were only two joint addresses to Congress - by Pope Francis and by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, another important U.S. ally in Asia. In 2005, then-U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration denied Modi a visa, citing a 1998 U.S. law barring entry to foreigners who have committed “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in sectarian riots in Gujarat in 2002 when Modi had just become the state’s chief minister. Modi has denied any wrongdoing, and India’s Supreme Court in 2010 ruled there was no case. Obama, who has adopted a “pivot to Asia” strategy and is keen to encourage a greater Indian military role in East Asia, quickly dismissed the issue by inviting Modi to the White House as soon as he called to congratulate him on winning the 2014 election. The United States is also keen to encourage greater business and trade with India. Progress has been only gradual, but in late March, the chief executive of U.S. nuclear reactor maker Westinghouse Electric said he expected to sign a deal in June to build six reactors in India after marathon negotiations that began more than a decade ago. The deal would be the first nuclear commercial power project since the United States and India agreed in 2008 to cooperate in the civil nuclear arena. Westinghouse is owned by Japan’s Toshiba Corp. | 0fake |
Atheists Found A Truly Genius Way To Troll The Creationists Building A $101m Noah’s Ark In Kentucky (IMAGE/VIDEO) | An atheist group has found a truly genius way to troll christian conservatives over their $101m Noah s Ark being built in Kentucky by crowdfunding mock billboards for the christian theme park. Author and columnist Dan Arel writes in Pathos that a group called the Tri-State Freethinkers are raising $2,000 to place billboards which name the Ark Adventure Genocide and Incest Park. Image via IndiegogoThe Indiegogo page for the project states:The billboards are likely to serious annoy the Ark Adventure team, who have lurched from one crisis to another in their attempts to set up the site.Australian-born Creationist Ken Ham and his fundamentalist Christian organization Answers in Genesis (AiG) are looking to build a $101m Ark Adventure in Kentucky, with the centerpiece of a reconstructed Ark. The problem is, they want you the taxpayer to pay for it.According to Newsweek, AiG purchased a 99-acre plot of land just outside Williamstown, Kentucky got the city for just a dollar five years ago. But since then, the project has hit one hurdle after another. Many, of Ham s own making.The principal issue at stake now, is that Ham and AiG want the taxpayer to pick up the bill for around a quarter of the construction costs of the project in the form of tax rebates. The group sought to exploit subsidies provided by the state to boost tourism through the Tourism Development Incentive program. Projects of $1 million and upwards can recover 25% of project development costs by recouping their sales taxes.After much debate on their initial application, Kentucky approved the site for the scheme so long as AiG agreed to non-discriminatory hiring practices. This means, they could only recover the cash if they recruited people of all faiths and none. They could not specifically hire Creationists.A few bumps down the road later, and Ham and AiG had to significantly strip back their pans for the park. They were unable to gather together the funds and investment to create the full theme park. Due to the substantial changes to the plans, they had to resubmit their application to Kentucky for the tax rebate. This time is was denied. Why? Because apparently, honesty and integrity mean nothing to this group of creationists.Despite their reluctant agreements to get their hands on state cash, AiG had released a decidedly discriminatory recruitment policy for the Ark Adventure. The website demanded a salvation testimony and a creationist statement of faith from all prospective job applicants clearly ruling out non-believers.So now, Ken Ham and AiG are suing Kentucky for the money claiming religious discrimination. Greg Lipper, senior litigation counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State points out the muddled-thinking that AiG is applying in this case. AiG is confusing what they have the right to do as a private organization with what taxpayers are required to fund, They re saying Kentucky taxpayers should pay for them to expand a religious ministry. That kind of argument would make Thomas Jefferson turn in his grave. No one is telling Ham as a private citizen, who or how he can hire. It is only as a recipient of state funds, an agreement which he is free to enter or not, that he is required to follow the stipulations that would be applied to any organization or individual doing the same. Just like chances of his theory of genesis being true, Ham s chances of getting his lawsuit through are slim to none.And his Ark hasn t escaped the attention of social media users either I just realised that America's immigration policy doesn't weed out Australian Ark Building Lunatics. #kenham Michael (@gotapulse) January 3, 2016If #KenHam could get a 500 yr old dude & his kids to build the Ark themselves w/o modern technology I would give the park more credit. Uncle John (@azmoderate) January 18, 2016If the universe was capable of giving Ken Ham and his cohorts a sign that their project was doomed to failure, this comedy of errors and public embarrassments would be it. Featured image via Flickr Creative Commons | 1real |
REFUGEE RAPE Is Such A Risk In Sweden That The Police Are Giving This Shocking Warning To Women | Since Sweden became the #1 destination for diversity and multiculturalism, they ve become the rape capital of the world yes, the world! Rape has skyrocketed as refugee resettlement has vastly increased. The Swedish police are warning the Swedish women not to go out after dark. It s just too dangerous! Can you believe that? Officers in picturesque stersund issued the astonishing warning after gangs of foreign men went on the rampage, attempting to rape women in the street and even groping a group of 10-year-old girls at a bus stop.The shocking announcement will heighten concerns around the effects of mass migration on Sweden, which has been struggling to integrate more then 150,000 predominantly Muslim migrants.Women in the tiny lakeside town of stersund, in central Sweden, have been terrorized by sex attacks with six such incidents being recorded in the last two weeks. In all of the cases the male attackers, often acting in gangs, were described as being of foreign appearance .The attacks come as Swedish authorities have begun sending increasing numbers of migrants to a refugee reception centre in the small town because all accommodation further south has already been filled.Speaking at an extraordinary press conference yesterday police chiefs issued a stunning warning to women, telling them stersund is now so unsafe they should not go out after dark alone. Regional police chief Stephen Jerand said the attacks were unusual because none of the perpetrators appeared to be drunk, adding that officers have witnessed a worrying trend in the town.He said: The cases of the sexual harassment and attempted rapes have involved groups of up to three people. What stands out is also that none of these perpetrators have been under the influence. Now the police are going out and warning women against travelling alone in the city. We have seen a worrying trend. This is serious, we care about the protection of women and that is why we are going out and talking about this. The most recent assault took place in the early hours of Sunday morning, when three young men attempted to rape a woman in the town centre. Read more: Express | 1real |
LA TIMES COLUMNIST Slammed For Mocking Sarah Sanders In ‘Sexist’ Article…What About The Cartoon? | A political reporter for the Los Angeles Times is under fire from all sides for making sexist remarks about White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders in his latest anti-Trump column .WHAT ABOUT THE CARTOON???While David Horsey issued a lame apology for his article, he still has a cartoon up with the article that s a disgusting portrayal of Sarah Sanders. We hope you ll let Mr. Horsey know his lack of ethics is deplorable: David Horsey LA TimesEven left-leaning columnists ripped into Horsey for his body shaming and very snarky remarks against Sanders:California resident, Claire Adida, said: Hey, @latimes and @davidhorsey, you can do better. How about you focus on what she says rather than how she looks? While Adam Serwer, Senior Editor for The Atlantic, wrote: Genuinely confused as to how this column got past an editor. Teen Vogue columnist, Lauran Duca, further added: Things that are true at the same time: 1) Sarah Huckabee Sanders is an unabashed enemy of the truth 2) This profile of her is sexist trash. NASTY ARTICLE:In the article Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the right mouthpiece for a truth-twisting president published Wednesday morning, David Horsey compared Sanders to a chunky soccer mom who organizes snacks for the kids games. Horsey criticized Sanders, who was appointed the role back in July, for not meeting up to Trump s standards, as he suggested the aide does not look like the kind of woman (he) would choose as his chief spokesperson. While the columnist pointed out positive aspects of Sanders part in the Trump administration following the leave of Sean Spicer Horsey veered into the misogynist comments.He said: Rather than the fake eyelashes and formal dresses she puts on for briefings, Sanders seems as if she d be more comfortable in sweats than running shoes. Then added: Yet, even if Trump privately wishes he had a supermodel for a press secretary, he is lucky to have Sanders. WHAT A NASTY MAN! DAVID HORSEY S EMAIL | 1real |
Zimbabwe's Mnangagwa adds to calls for Mugabe to go | HARARE (Reuters) - Ousted Zimbabwean vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa added his voice on Tuesday to those demanding 93-year-old President Mugabe resign, saying he needed to heed the clarion call of his people and step down. Mnangagwa, who said he fled Zimbabwe because of a threat to his life after being purged from the ruling party, said he had been in contact with Mugabe and invited to return but would not do so until his personal security could be guaranteed. I told the President that I would not return home now until I am satisfied of my personal security, because of the manner and treatment given to me upon being fired, he said in a statement. | 0fake |
The Changing Face of Mainstream Media? | 21st Century Wire says One of the biggest trends running through this election season has been the migration of elements formerly on the fringe of politics into the center, or mainstream.Only a few short months ago, Breitbart News, fowas formerly classed as an element of the far right-wing of the media spectrum, and vanguard of the Alt Right . It is now occupying the front row of the West Wing alongside press stalwarts like the CNN, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and TIME Magazine.The following is a photo taken from the preparation hours before President Donald Trump s news conference which was held in the East Room of the White House in Washington DC yesterday.Times are indeed changing Haha Breitbart front row ! pic.twitter.com/ibgaDo1itn RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) February 15, 2017SEE ALSO: From the Fringe to the Center: #FakeNews in the Context of Left-Right DialecticsREAD MORE MSM NEWS AT: 21st Century MSM Watch Files | 1real |
Times Names Wall Street Journal Editor to Its Masthead - The New York Times | Rebecca Blumenstein, deputy editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, has been named a deputy managing editor of The New York Times, one of the top leadership positions at the newspaper. Ms. Blumenstein will become one of the women in The Times’s newsroom. She will join three other deputy managing editors — Janet Elder Clifford Levy, who was promoted last week and Matthew Purdy. In a note to the staff announcing the appointment on Tuesday, Dean Baquet, the executive editor, and Joe Kahn, the managing editor, said that Ms. Blumenstein, 50, would help the newsroom “do all the big things we intend to do in 2017 and beyond. ” In particular, they said, Ms. Blumenstein “will focus on making sure we remain an essential destination for readers interested in business, finance, economics and technology. ” In recent months, the newsroom has had a dearth of female leaders. In September, Susan Chira stepped down as deputy executive editor to write about gender issues, and in December, Lydia Polgreen, an associate masthead editor, left to become the top editor at The Huffington Post. Ms. Blumenstein’s appointment will quite likely be seen as a positive step, though it is notable that The Times named an outsider rather than promoting a woman from within. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Kahn said it was “absolutely not the case’’ that they could not find a woman within The Times to play a role in newsroom leadership. “This is about Rebecca, who I think has a skill set, a perspective and the experience running a big newsroom that Dean and I and the others at the top of the masthead felt that we needed, to make sure that we’re putting our best foot forward in terms of this digital transition,” Mr. Kahn said. He added that there would be other masthead announcements soon. Ms. Blumenstein was seen as a potential successor to Gerard Baker, the editor in chief of The Journal, and news of her departure was met with surprise and sadness in the Journal newsroom, where she is known for her passion for breaking news. Asked how it felt to lure someone of Ms. Blumenstein’s caliber from a highly respected competitor, Mr. Kahn was circumspect in his reply. “I can only say that I follow and deeply admire The Journal’s coverage, and they’re a fierce competitor and a constant source of concern for us,” Mr. Kahn said. “So of course it’s meaningful to have one of their top editors come and join us. ” In a note to employees, Mr. Baker called Ms. Blumenstein “a peerless exponent and advocate of the very highest quality journalism. ” “She has been a singularly principled and dignified leader and a great mentor and friend to so many colleagues here,” he wrote. The appointment comes as both news organizations work to determine a strategy for an increasingly digital world. Both have initiated sweeping newsroom strategy reviews that have left employees anxious and uncertain about their futures. Last month, The Times released the findings of its review in a report that called for rapid change. Ms. Blumenstein has worked at The Journal since 1995, where she has held numerous senior positions, including managing editor of WSJ. com and international editor. As the newspaper’s China bureau chief, she led her team to a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. China was also where she and Mr. Kahn, who worked in the Beijing bureau for The Times, got to know each other, Mr. Kahn said. “She was unrelenting in pushing her team hard to beat us,” he said. | 0fake |
Donald Trump Just Threw 60 YEARS Of Inaugural Tradition Out The Window, And Something’s Fishy | Donald Trump has decided to throw out 60 years worth of tradition for his inauguration by replacing the man who s done the announcing for presidential inaugurations since Eisenhower s in 1957, Charlie Brotman. That might not seem like a big deal, but given that his voice is so familiar for this, it s hard to understand why they would make such a move.And it s not like it s a relief for Brotman; he s heartbroken about it. He had already started preparing for his role in the ceremonies, saying he was told he wouldn t be involved in an email. At first I was destroyed, he said, according to D.C. s ABC affiliate, WJLA. I ve been doing this for 60 years. That s eleven inaugurations for which he s worked. At 89, he might be old, but he s still healthy and apparently still perfectly able to do this, given that he was already preparing.The Presidential Inauguration Committee issued a statement that said: Since 1957, millions of Americans and countless entertainers have come to recognize Charlie Brotman as the voice of the inaugural parade. The Presidential Inaugural Committee will be proud to honor Charlie as Announcer Chairman Emeritus on January 20th. We are thrilled for Steve Ray to be introducing a new generation of Americans to the grand traditions of the inaugural parade. That s not the same as having him actually do it, and he s weighing whether to even accept that, or the VIP seat he s been offered. This is something that would be more appropriate had Brotman said he was retiring, or was otherwise unable to do it again.Steve Ray is a freelance announcer who has done a lot of work, including promotional spots for the Washington Nationals, but one fishy point about this is that he helped with for Trump s campaign.Trump has been working hard to grant favors to people who worked on his campaign, giving many of them high positions within his transition team. Did he tell the inauguration committee to find someone who had worked for him? Did he tell them that he knew Ray and that Ray should do the announcing?Brotman believes it s more likely ageism at work: Maybe they re afraid I might drop dead at the mic. Right now, nobody s really explaining this decision. Regardless, unlike Trump, who s petty and childish as all fuck and would scream about betrayal on Twitter while wishing for his replacement to fall flat on their face, Brotman wishes Ray no ill-will. In fact, he s flat said that he wants Ray to do spectacular, and that he wishes Ray luck in this.Featured image by Ethan Miller via Getty Images | 1real |
Hillary and Trump Could Both Be Criminally Charged After The Election | Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have made headlines recently for their alleged problems with the law . Trump, who in April of 2016 was named as the defendant in a lawsuit filed by Katie Johnson, is scheduled to appear before a court on December 16, 2016. The lawsuit alleges Trump, along with former banker billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, raped Johnson when she was thirteen. The incident allegedly happened in the 1990s. Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution in 2008, has also been associated with former President Bill Clinton, whose name appears in “ flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the ‘Lolita Express, ’” a term used in association with Epstein’s Boeing 727 jet. The jet was allegedly set up with beds where Epstein and guests “ had group sex with young girls .” The lawsuit was first filed in April , but U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Stevenson threw the suit out in May because Johnson then failed “ to state a civil rights claim .” The plaintiff was representing herself at the time, claiming to be unemployed and having only $276 to her name. In June, Johnson went on to refile the suit in the Manhattan federal court. This time around, Johnson filed the suit under the name “Jane Doe,” asking $75,000 plus attorney fees. But in September, Johnson dropped her lawsuit, only to have it refiled weeks later with three affidavits instead of two. While Trump is scheduled to appear in court for a status conference in December in reference to this case, it still requires more information before it leads to a trial or settlement. In contrast to Trump’s case, Clinton’s brush with the law is taking place at a different, more advanced level — but is still not close enough to conviction to ruin her chances of being elected. Just over a week before Americans head to the polls to cast their ballots, the FBI announced it would be reopening its the probe into presidential nominee and former secretary of state Clinton’s use of a private email server. The announcement followed the discovery of an email stash found on a laptop that belonged to former congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a longtime Clinton aide. She claims to have been unaware that her emails were on Weiner’s device. Though the FBI has announced it obtained a warrant to review the 650,000 emails, it is unlikely the agency’s investigation will achieve any results before election day. The FBI is seeking to determine whether the messages found on Weiner’s computer include any classified information or evidence that may indicate Clinton undermined U.S. national security. In an article for Law Newz , Ronn Blitzer attempts to answer some of the questions the public might raise now that the FBI has announced the probe, attempting to determine how Clinton’s legal future will look if she’s elected president. While the law “ is hazy, ” Blitzer writes , he goes over several scenarios. First, he explains “ it’s highly unlikely that an indictment would come before November 8 .” If it happened, however, “ the indictment itself wouldn’t mean that Clinton could no longer run, as an indictment is only an accusation, not a convictio n.” Theoretically, he continues , “ the Electoral College could … go rogue and not vote for Clinton, even if their states tell them to .” Another possibility is that Clinton would be pressured, either by the DNC or the public, to “ give up her candidacy. ” In the case Clinton wins but is indicted before her inauguration, “ she could try to play beat-the-clock and hope to take office before her case concludes .” But if she’s both indicted and convicted before the inauguration and then sentenced, “ she may be deemed incapacitated, in which case Section 3 of the 20th Amendment kicks in and the Vice President-Elect, in this case Tim Kaine, would become President .” But if Clinton wins the election and is inaugurated as the investigation is carried on, “ Clinton would luck out ,” Blitzer explains , “ due to the philosophy that Presidents — and only Presidents — [sic] are immune from prosecution while in office .” Since the House of Representatives determined in 1873 that a president may only be impeached over offenses committed after their inauguration, Blitzer writes , impeachment over the email scandal isn’t likely to take place. And even if she’s convicted after moving to the White House, “ President Hillary Clinton could pardon herself .” These scenarios could all play out fairly similarly in Trump’s case, assuming the rape lawsuit filed against him leads to a conviction. But whether Clinton or Trump is elected, their federal or FBI probes may result in nothing more than footnotes in the grand scheme of things — especially once we’re faced with the realization that elected officials are required to meet lower standards of conduct than the rest of us . Only after the FBI probe is finalized will we know if Congress is willing to tackle the presidential immunity rules. source: | 1real |
COVER-UP? New Details from Orlando Shooter’s Crisis Call Casts Light on FBI | Shawn Helton 21st Century WireEarlier this week, the FBI released new details regarding an apparent crisis negotiation call made between Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen and authorities.Will this new release reveal anything new about the Orlando shooting case, or will it continue a trend of unanswered questions regarding the incident? SCRIPT CHANGE OR TRUE MOTIVE? The FBI has released more details regarding a crisis call said to have been placed by Omar Mateen (Photo illustration: 21WIRE s Shawn Helton)Crisis Call Motive According to the Washington Free Beacon [unredacted] transcripts were released by Orlando police Friday after a Florida court hearing held in response to a lawsuit filed by several news organizations. The new details supposedly reveal a motive in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.Here s an excerpt from the alleged shooter Mateen s negotiation call featured in the Beacon: Yo, the air strike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago that s what triggered it, okay? said Mateen, who earlier in the conversation identified himself as a follower the Islamic State terror group. They should have not bombed and killed Abu Wahid, the former security guard declared. Do your fucking homework and figure out who Abu Wahid is, okay? The shooting suspect allegedly discussed concern over US airstrikes in Syria, supposedly stating the following: They need to stop the U.S. air strikes. You have to tell the U.S. government to stop bombing. They are killing too many children, they are killing too many women, okay? Given Mateen s profile as stated by media and officials since June, the idea that he would be concerned with the lives of innocent civilians is patently absurd making this latest, rather timely release, extremely suspect.Mateen s alleged crime confession via a crisis negotiation call, also smacks of another rewrite in the Pulse shooting saga, an event that displayed elements of foreknowledge and planning beyond that of a lonewolf. In addition, it was an incident littered with a number of anomalies and numerous intelligence connections. Although one cannot absolutely prove the scripted nature of this latest FBI release regarding the Pulse shooting, several quotes in the conversation stand out, falling in line with an all to familiar Western policy perspective regarding Syria and Iraq.Interestingly, after a number of strange motives were initially attached to the Orlando shooting, we re conveniently told it was triggered by an airstrike apparently killing Abu Wahib in May of this year. Wahib was an al-Qaeda/ISIS leader well-known to authorities and according to the controversial intelligence linked media blog Long War Journal. He had been detained by US officials in 2006 and sentenced to death in 2012, only to mysteriously escape from Tikrit Central Prison after a large jailbreak: Abu Wahib, whose full name is Shakir Wahib al Fahdawi al Dulaimi, has been waging jihad in Iraq for more than a decade. He was detained by US forces in Ramadi in 2006 during the height of al Qaeda in Iraq s insurgency.The LWJ article continued by stating the following: Wahib was sentenced to death and transferred to Tikrit Central Prison. In November 2012, he escaped along with 110 inmates after the Islamic State of Iraq assaulted the prison. That jailbreak and others like it infused the Islamic State of Iraq with leaders and fighters who were captured during US and Iraqi military operations. Given Wahib s lengthy criminal background and unexplained escape from prison, is it possible he may have been a Western intelligence asset released back into the public?The theory may not be as far-fetched as it seems when considering there is a historical precedence for such activity In the aftermath of 9/11 up until 2006, the CIA operated a facility that was used to train terrorists to be double agents to supposedly infiltrate Al Qaeda terror cells. This program was called called Penny Lane.Penny Lane was named after the Beatles tune and was connected to another secret facility called Strawberry Fields, a name also taken from the British rock group.We were told that operation had been successful in its scope but by 2013, the CIA had lost touch with many of its newly trained double agents.The Penny Lane facility was unlike any other building in the Guantanamo Bay prison area, as it was said to have beds, kitchens and a patio for its prisoners. The money to pay informants and double agents was also provided for by the CIA under the codename Pledge. But how does this relate to the Orlando club shooting?Drills & Informants Shortly after the Pulse shooting attack it was revealed that Mateen had been attending services at a Mosque, meeting with a known FBI informant named Marcus Dwayne Robertson (see left also played role in 1993 WTC bombing), a former US Marine turned bank robber turned radical imam. Here s this passage from Fox News describing Robertson s role: It is no coincidence that this happened in Orlando, said a law enforcement source familiar with Robertson s history of recruiting terrorists and inciting violence. Mateen was enrolled in [Robertson s online] Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary.Robertson and several associates were rounded up for questioning early Sunday, according to law enforcement sources, a development his attorney refused to confirm or deny. DISNEY MONEY BOMB? Heavily orchestrated fundraising campaigns follow almost every dramatized mass shooting in America. (Image Source: fox13news)Fast-tracked Fundraisers Interestingly, on September 27th, the Orlando Weekly revealed that Each of the families of the 49 victims killed in the massacre at the gay nightclub Pulse will get $350,000 from the OneOrlando Fund this week, though privately, they still have to iron out who will get what funds. The Weekly also disclosed the total charitable amount received: The OneOrlando Fund received $29.5 million from various sources, which will now be divided between families and survivors of the mass shooting. The funds will be distributed through the end of this week, Martins says. Additionally, the article continues, stating that even uninjured patrons the night of the shooting will receive quite a large sum from the fund: The families of the deceased victims received a larger share of the funds, totaling about $17.2 million. The 37 survivors who were hospitalized after the shooting will receive anywhere from $65,000 to $300,000 depending on how many nights they spent at the hospital, while 31 people who required outpatient treatment for their injuries will get $35,000 each. An additional 182 patrons of Pulse who were there when the shooting began but not injured will received $25,000 each. The amount granted to Orlando victims is strangely, nearly the same amount given to all of the Charleston church families affected by the suspicious shooting involving Dylann Roof. It turned out, that the Department of Justice fast-tracked $29 million dollars from the Crime Victim Assistance Formula Grant program, shortly after the tragedy.According to OneOrlando s own website, The OneOrlando Board, chaired by Orlando Magic President Alex Martins, was developed to provide oversight and guidance to ensure that funds are dispersed in a timely, accountable and transparent manner. Other members of the board include the following as stated on OneOrlando s website:Rena Langley, Senior Vice President, Public Affairs & Worldwide Government and Industry Relations, Walt Disney World Diane O Dell, Vice President of Community Relations, Universal Orlando Resort Stephanie Ghertner, Director, Darden Foundation & Community Affairs Mark Meyer, Industry Manager, JPMorgan ChaseOn another note, a woman claiming to have been injured at Pulse the night of the shooting, was denied funds, leading her to sue OneOrlando. Here s the Orlando Sentinel on the matter: Jillian Amador, who filed the suit asking for an audit, was at Pulse with friends on June 12. She initially filed the complaint on Friday in Orange County Circuit Court, but a judge tossed it because the respondents were not served. She refiled the petition Tuesday, seeking an emergency order to stop the payout, but Circuit Judge John E. Jordan again denied the request. VICTIM OR ACTOR? The purported Pulse nightclub victim shown above was carried to the corner where he was seen walking off without assistance while still on camera. (Image Source: www.wftv.com)Revisiting The Orlando ShootingBack in June, here at 21WIRE, we discussed how the most important aspect of the FBI supplied 911 transcript had gone virtually unnoticed as there was nothing in the contents of the transcript that discussed an actual shooting occurring inside of the Pulse nightclub.While the report was a basic outline of America s largest mass shooting it failed to account for any of the shootings said to have occurred within the interior of Pulse. There was no mention of bar patrons being shot or reportedly shot at in the FBI s official narrative. It s as if the mainstream media and authorities left out the biggest piece of the investigation, as the implications of who shot who and when are extremely significant forensically speaking.While the description of the Orlando shooting included mention of the Orlando Police Department (OPD) pulling an air conditioning unit out of a Pulse dressing room to evacuate victims, a multi-call crisis negotiation, the alleged shooter s outrageous claims of a bomb-laced vest and authorities breaching the back wall of the nightclub with an explosive charge there was no mention of additional shots fired at club goers inside Pulse? CRIME SCENE PROTOCOL? Multiple officials seen coming in and out of Pulse nightclub with and without CSI attire. (Image Source: boingboing)In recent years, media press conference rituals backed by law enforcement officials have shaped a narrative within the first hours of a mass casualty event and even if that story turns out to be mostly false, the media runs with it anyway, whether or not new information and crime scene analysis belies the original story pushed by media. The most clear example of this happened during the aftermath of the WTC 1993 bombing, where major media outlets exposed it as an FBI run sting with their operators in control yet still, media anchors still called it an al-Qaeda led attack.Aspects of the orchestrated bombing in 1993 played out in another high profile case dubbed the Newburgh Sting In May of 2009, the investigative tactics of the FBI came into question, none perhaps more suspect than the Newburgh sting an incident that involved the entrapment of four men in a fabricated terror event created by the bureau.Here s another look at a 2011 passage from The Guardian describing how an FBI informant named Shahed Hussain coerced four others to be involved in a fake terror plot: The Newburgh Four now languish in jail. Hussain does not. For Hussain was a fake. In fact, Hussain worked for the FBI as an informant trawling mosques in hope of picking up radicals.Yet far from being active militants, the four men he attracted were impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh s grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. One had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign country.Hussain offered the men huge financial inducements to carry out the plot including $250,000 to one man and free holidays and expensive cars.As defence lawyers poured through the evidence, the Newburgh Four came to represent the most extreme form of a controversial FBI policy to use invented terrorist plots to lure targets. There has been no case as egregious as this. It is unique in the incentive the government provided. A quarter million dollars? said Professor Karen Greenberg, a terrorism expert at Fordham University. So when you consider what happened in Orlando, one should question the lack of shooting details, in addition to conflicting eyewitness testimony- why have portions of this story still been left open for interpretation when every other part of the official timeline of events appears to be accounted for?Here s a portion reviewing the FBI s summary of events that excludes any mention of shots fired within Pulse: Based on OPD radio communications, there were no reports of shots being fired inside Pulse between the initial exchange of gunfire between responding officers and shooter, and the time of the final breach. During this time, the shooter communicated with an OPD 911 operator and an OPD crisis negotiator, and OPD radio communications reported that victims were being rescued. Here s a more basic chronology of the Orlando shooting, as told by the FBI: 2:02 a.m.: OPD call transmitted multiple shots fired at Pulse nightclub.2:04 a.m.: Additional OPD officers arrived on scene.2:08 a.m.: Officers from various law enforcement agencies made entrance to Pulse and engaged the shooter.2:18 a.m.: OPD SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) initiated a full call-out.2:35 a.m.: Shooter contacted a 911 operator from inside Pulse.3:03 a.m.: Second crisis negotiation call occurred lasting approximately 16 minutes.3:24 a.m.: Third crisis negotiation call occurred lasting approximately three minutes.4:21 a.m.: OPD pulled an air conditioning unit out of a Pulse dressing room window for victims to evacuate.4:29 a.m.: As victims were being rescued, they told OPD the shooter said he was going to put four vests with bombs on victims within 15 minutes.5:02 a.m.: OPD SWAT and OCSO Hazardous Device Team began to breach wall with explosive charge and armored vehicle to make entry.5:14 a.m.: OPD radio communication stated that shots were fired.5:15 a.m.: OPD radio communication stated that OPD engaged the suspect and the suspect was reported down. The Orlando shooting details state multiple shots [were] fired at Pulse nightclub at 2:02 am, as Additional OPD officers arrived on scene, at 2:04 am, with law enforcement engaging the shooter at 2:08 am again, there is no other mention of shots fired until police exchange fire with the alleged suspect after breaching the wall at 5:15 am.Matten s weapons of choice during the apparent attack were a Sig Sauer MCX .223 caliber rifle and a Glock 17 9mm semi-auto pistol and according to the official story, and he was far more accurate than most well-trained law enforcement agents, defying statistical averages as examined by the Rand Corporation below.Question: Would it have really been possible for the alleged gunman Omar Mateen to have accurately shot over 100 people, take hostages and then engage in a fire fight with officers in just a 6 minute time frame?This scenario is hardly likely, if not impossible.Here s another look at an extensive study conducted by Rand Corporation that involved the NYPD: According to a 2008 Rand Corporation study evaluating the New York Police Department s firearm training, between 1998 and 2006, the average hit rate during gunfights was just 18 percent. When suspects did not return fire, police officers hit their targets 30 percent of the time.Many other such studies and risk assessments exist throughout law enforcement organizations nationwide, and most come to very similar conclusions as the RAND study. The odds are almost zero that the Pulse event was so drastically different unless there was an intentional, or staged element at play here.Did the Police Kill Most of the Club Goers?Another aspect of the Orlando shooting attack was the possibility that many patrons could have been injured by authorities, something that also seemed to be absent from the official story. Here s a passage from WFAA8, an ABC affiliate discussing that point: Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other law enforcement officers offered new details about the shooting, including the possibility that some victims may have been killed by officers trying to save them. I will say this, that s all part of the investigation, Mina said. But I will say when our SWAT officers, about eight or nine officers, opened fire, the backdrop was a concrete wall, and they were being fired upon. Police also used an explosive charge and a Bearcat armored vehicle to breach the wall as civilians were allegedly holed up in a bathroom. This has led some critics to consider the possibility that non-combatants could have become collateral damage during the SWAT siege at Pulse.Below is YouTube clip from TRUNEWS displaying FOX News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano discussing how no one had died in the Pulse club prior to the SWAT building breach READ MORE ORLANDO SHOOTING NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Orlando FilesREAD MORE WAR ON TERROR NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire W.O.T FilesHelp support us by becoming a 21WIRE Member at: 21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Paul Ryan: Clinton should not continue to receive classified briefings during FBI investigation | Print
Speaker Paul Ryan blasted Hillary Clinton over the Friday news that the FBI is launching a new review into her use of a private email server while secretary of State.
In a statement released minutes after the news broke , the Wisconsin Republican reasserted his call for Clinton to be denied the classified briefings she receives because she is the Democratic presidential nominee.
“Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame. She was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information,” he said.
“This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators. I renew my call for the Director of National Intelligence to suspend all classified briefings for Secretary Clinton until this matter is fully resolved.” | 1real |
Defying the Politics of Fear : | Defying the Politics of Fear By Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday evening at a rally in Philadelphia for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka.
November 08, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Truth Dig " - No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They will not sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with all of the oppressedpeople of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murderor you stand with none of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. They know this is the cost of the moral life, a life that is not abandoned even if means you are destined to spend generations wandering in the wilderness, even if you are destined to fail.
I was in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1989 during the revolutions, or in the case of Romania an interparty putsch. These revolutions were spontaneous outbursts by an enraged population that had had enough of communist repression, mismanagement and corruption. No one, from the dissidents themselves to the ruling communist parties, anticipated these revolts. They erupted, as all revolutions do, from tinder that had been waiting years for a spark.
These revolutions were led by a handful of dissidents who until the fall of 1989 were marginal and dismissed by the state as inconsequential until it was too late. The state periodically sent state security to harass them. It often ignored them. I am not even sure you could call these dissidents an opposition. They were profoundly isolated within their own societies. The state media denied them a voice. They had no legal status and were locked out of the political system. They were blacklisted. They struggled to make a living. But when the breaking point in Eastern Europe came, when the ruling communist ideology lost all credibility, there was no question in the minds of the public about whom they could trust. The demonstrators that poured into the streets of East Berlin and Prague were aware of who would sell them out and who would not. They trusted those, such as Václav Havel , who had dedicated their lives to fighting for open society, those who had been willing to be condemned as nonpersons and go to jail for their defiance.
Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.
It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industrys savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.
Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.
Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says this is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power, he writes, have rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often [have been] below it. The question is how do we build forces to restrict the despotism of the powerful. There is a moment in Henry Kissingers memoirsdo not buy the bookwhen Nixon and Kissinger are looking out at tens of thousands of anti-war protesters who have surrounded the White House. Nixon had placed empty city buses in front of the White House to keep the protesters back. He worried out loud that the crowd would break through the barricades and get him and Kissinger. And that is exactly where we want people in power to be. This is why, although he was not a liberal, Nixon was our last liberal president. He was scared of movements. And if we cannot make the elites scared of us we will fail.
The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.
A bankrupt liberal class, as was true in Yugoslavia when I covered the war and as was true in Weimar Germany, is the great enabler of fascism. Liberals, in the name of the practical, refuse to challenge parties that betray workingmen and women. They surrender their values for political expediency. Our [failure] to build a counterweight to the Democratic Party after it abandoned the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was our gravest mistake.
Hillary Clinton embodies the detested neoliberal establishment. She can barely fend off one of the most imbecilic and narcissistic candidates in American history. Matched against a demagogue with brains and political skill, she would lose. If we do not defy the neoliberal order, championed by Clinton and the Democratic Party elites, we ensure the conditions for a terrifying right-wing backlash, one that will use harsh and violent mechanisms to crush the little political space we have left.
The tactic of strategic voting begs the question Strategic for whom? Our money-drenched, heavily managed elections are little more than totalitarian plebiscites to give a veneer of legitimacy to corporate power. As long as we signal that we are not a threat to the established order, as long as we participate in this charade, the neoliberal assault will continue towards its frightening and inevitable conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that when citizens can no longer participate in a meaningful way in political life, political populism is replaced by a cultural populism of sameness, resentment and mindless patriotism and by a form of anti-politics he called democratic despotism. The language and rituals of democracy are used to mask a political system based on the unchallenged supremacy of corporate power, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.
We must build structures of open defiance to the corporate state. It may take as long as a decade for us to effectively confront corporate power. But without a potent counterweight to the neoliberal order we will be steadily disempowered. Every action we take, every word we utter must make it clear that we refuse to participate in our own enslavement and destruction. The rapid disintegration of the ecosystem means resistance cannot be delayed.
Our success will be determined not by the number of votes we get in this or any other election but by our ability to stand unequivocally with the oppressed. The enemies of freedom throughout history have always charged its defenders with subversion. The enemies of freedom have often convinced large parts of a captive population to parrot back mind-numbing clichés to justify their rule. Resistance to corporate power will require fortitude, an ability to march to the beat of our own drum.
No revolutionary abandons, no matter what the cost, those he or she defends. We cannot betray those murdered by police in our marginal communities. We cannot betray the courageous dissidentsJulian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the great revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal . They have not betrayed us. We cannot betray the dissidents in North Dakota who are defying a fossil fuel industry that is orchestrating the sixth great mass extinction , melting the polar ice caps and raising carbon emissions to over 400 parts per million. We cannot betray the 2.3 million men and women locked in cages across this nation for years and decades. We cannot betray the Palestinians. We cannot betray the Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we have destroyed by state terror. If we betray them we betray ourselves.
We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state. Our job is to destroy it. We think we are the doctors, Alexander Herzen told anarchists of another era. We are the disease.
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence. [This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed. Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment of the systems downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience. Vote Green. If we win 5 percent we win. Five percent becomes the building block for the years ahead. A decade ago Syriza, the ruling party in Greece, was polling 4 percent. And after you vote, join some movement, some protest, some disruption, Black Lives Matter, the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, an anti-fracking demonstration. Courage is contagious. Revolutions begin, as I saw in East Germany, with a few Lutheran clergy holding candles as they marched through the streets of Leipzig in East Germany. It ends with half a million people protesting in East Berlin, the defection of the police and the army to the side of the protesters and the collapse of the Stasi state. But revolutions only happen when a few dissidents decide they will no longer cooperate, when they affirm what we must all affirm, when, as Havel said, they choose to live in truth.
We may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried. The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy our lives. They will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children. They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans. I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Chris Hedges: The End of the Election Will Not Mean the End of Public Anger Posted on Nov 8, 2016
In a 30-minute interview with Sophie Shevardnadze at RT, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges discusses who will be the real loser in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
Sophie Shevardnadze: Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author, welcome to the show once again, great to have you back. Hillary was seemingly cruising to victory just after the debates - some polls gave her a 10 point lead - and now theres virtually nothing separating the candidates. Today, if you had a million bucks whod you bet it on - Clinton or Trump?
Chris Hedges: Its impossible to tell you, because it really will depend on the mood, on the emotions of the voters on election day. That's all these campaigns are about, because they both essentially are neo-liberal candidates who will do nothing to impede imperial expansion and corporate power. The whole campaign has descended to, you know, not surprisingly, to the level of a reality TV show, with presidential debates featuring women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault being brought in by Donald Trump; videos - I'll go back to the primaries - of the size of people's genitals. I mean, it's just appalling, but all of that is emblematic of a political system in deep decay and one that no longer revolves around fundamental issues. We know from the Wikileaks emails, the John Podesta emails that were leaked from Hillary Clinton, that there was a calculated effort on a part of a Clinton campaign to promote these fringe candidates - like Trump, and they particularly wanted Trump, because the difference between Hillary Clinton and a more mainstream Republican candidate, like Jeb Bush, is so marginal. So if you had to ask me, I don't think Trump will win, but I don't rule out the possibility that he will win - we have to look at the Brexit polls in Britain...
SS: Right.
CH: ...And same kind of anger is underway here.
SS: The FBI is extending its investigation into the Clinton email case - after obtaining a warrant to search the laptop of Clintons closest aide Huma Abedin. The Clinton campaign says the move is political - is the FBI guilty of swaying the vote, like Hillary suggests?
CH: To be fair to FBI, they were put in a very difficult position - there are tens of thousands, they say 660,000 emails, we don't really know how many of those, but if the FBI made this discovery and did not make it public, they would be accused, of course, of aiding Clinton campaign. I don't know the motives, but I think we do have to recognise that the FBI, I think, felt correctly, that given the volatility of the campaign and the fact that they had, after the investigation of the Clinton email - she had used a private server - while they certainly felt that it was inappropriate to exonerate her of criminal activity that they felt kind of a responsibility to be transparent.
SS: Another FBI investigation showed that the bureau didnt find any evidence that Trump is tied to the Kremlin, like the Clinton campaign implied - has Hillarys attempt to play the Russian card failed?
CH: I don't know that it's failed, because the media has been quite obsequious in terms of parroting back this narrative, and one of the frustrations of the Wikileaks email dumps, the John Podesta emails, he is her campaign manager, runs her campaign - is that the contents were often overlooked to essentially ask the question: "Is Russia trying to influence the elections?", and as a former investigative reporter for the New York times, this is just not a legitimate question. I spent many-many years, 15 years with the Times, I was elated all sorts of information by all sorts of governments, from the French Intelligence agency to the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, to the U.S. government - and these people were not leaking it because they cared about democracy or an open society, they were leaking this information because it was in their interest to do so, and my job, as a reporter, was to determine whether this leaked information was true or untrue - and that's really the only thing the reporter should do with the leaked information on the Podesta emails. But one of the things that as a reporter, as a former investigative reporter, that has disturbed me is that they have - I'm talking about the press, especially about the electronic, commercial corporate press - they have effectively ignored much of what is in the emails to carry up this speculation. Meanwhile, of course, nobody has offered us any evidence that the Trump campaign is linked in any way to Russia or that Russia is responsible for the email dump.
SS: Were used to the fact that ordinary Americans dont really care about foreign policy, but this campaign has focused a lot on foreign issues and Russia in particular. Are candidates trying to unite the nation by creating the image of a foreign threat?
CH: Yeah. It's very disturbing on many levels, the kind of neo-conservative foreign policy cabal led by Robert Kagan and others that is around Clinton. The very people who gave the disastrous Iraq war, are now proposing policies to bait Russia. You know, it makes absolutely no sense to those of us who spend as many, as I did, two decades abroad as a foreign correspondent, except that it plays well politically into this very stunted, peculiar, neocon vision of the world, and that is that everybody out there only understands one language, and that's force. That's how you see these 15 years now of war, the longest war in U.S. history. It's been an utter disaster, utter failure, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course, Syria, and Libya - and yet, what's the response? More bombs, more bombs, more bombs, which created the problems in the first place.
SS: Yeah, and do Americans like being scared by a foreign adversary?
CH: No, I don't think they "like" it, but it's a very effective form of control. Fear works, and Americans are hardly the only people to use it. Terrorism, the specter of Russia...whatever it is! Fear is a form of social control, and when you have essentially two political parties that are doing corporate bidding that serves the interests of corporate global elites, at the expense of the citizens - they need fear, they need to manufacture fear, and I think that's what we're seeing.
SS: Trump has said things along the lines of this election is rigged and hes hinted that he may contend the results, which is kind of like admitting hell be defeated. Is this talk backfiring and scaring away voters? Why would people head to the ballots if they think their voice doesnt count anyway?
CH: The Trump's base, primarily white lower-working class, which has been dispossessed through de-industrialisation, is going to head to the polls. They are attempting to work within the system. If the race is close and Trump loses, I think, everything we have seen, given the volatility of Trump, suggests that he will charge that the elections were rigged. We certainly have seen evidence now, from in particular the leaked emails, of the rigging of the primaries on the part of the Democratic National Committee, on behalf of the Clintons. It's pretty clear that Nevada Caucus was stolen, they blocked independents from voting in many of the primaries, in many of the states, and independents were Bernie Sanders' primary base. We just saw a few days ago, a day or two ago, that Clinton was actually leaked questions that would be given to her at a staged... I mean, they call them "Townhalls", they're totally Potemkin-like reality shows, totally scripted - so, its enough to look into the inner workings to suggest that these people, the Clinton machine, the Democratic party do not play fair. So, yeah, I think that that is the danger and the danger becomes then, when enraged Trump supporters believe that the system is rigged, the system is broken, it doesn't function fairly - and that becomes dangerous, because these people will resort to kind of anarchic levels of violence.
SS: Filmmaker Michael Moore, who you cant call a Republican-friendly figure exactly, called Trump a human Molotov cocktail which desperate poor voters can throw at the system that stole their lives from them. How come a Republican candidate is the candidate of the dispossessed, shouldnt Hillary be the one taking care of them?
CH: Yeah. That is the whole idea, that a billionaire developer is somehow the voice of the dispossessed, but he has tapped into this right-wing populism. This is coupled with a kind of xenophobia, kind of exalted nationalism, and a statement - which is true, of course - that the elites have betrayed the ordinary citizenry. So, when Donald Trump goes to Michigan and stands before the executives from car manufacturers, who are moving their plants over the border, courtesy of NAFTA, to Mexico, and says that if you try to make cars in Mexico, I'll put a 35% tariff on it - this is something that no candidate, in either party, has been saying, and there are many-many really struggling... I mean, half of this country now lives in poverty, people who have been waiting a long time for somebody to stand up and defy these corporate executives and CEOs who have destroyed their lives, the lives of their communities, destroyed the lives of their families. So, in that sense, Trump is not a traditional Republican which is why the Republican establishment itself has united with the Democratic establishment to try and destroy the Trump presidency - much as in 1972, the left-wing insurgent candidate George McGovern saw the establishment of the Democratic party unite with the establishment of the Republican party to elect Richard Nixon.
SS: The election is estimated to have cost 6.6 billion dollars so far -thats including the House and Senate campaign spending, and is likely to end up being even more pricey than that. Thats the whole budget of Bahrain. Elections in India have four times as many voters and cost one billion less. Is this price tag cutting off any truly independent candidate, like Bernie Sanders?
CH: You can't compete, unless you can raise that kind of money, unless you can get into debates. Bernie Sanders actually raised significant sums, he didn't do it through corporations, his average campaign contribution was $27 - but yeah, you can't play in this game of political theater, unless you're bankrolled to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the part of the way they lock out third-party candidates, like the Green party candidate Jill Stein.
SS: The Democratic party managed to fend off an anti-system challenger - Sanders - how come the Republicans couldnt find anyone who could defeat Trump?
CH: Because the establishment itself is so deeply hated, so when the Republican establishment finally did - they didn't take him seriously in the beginning, and when they did turn on him, they trotted out the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney to attack him, and people just laughed. It's the Romneys, the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, it's that establishment that people are turning against - which is why Hillary Clinton is having such a difficult time competing against such an imbecilic, undisciplined and impulsive and, frankly, ignorant candidate.
SS: I'm just wondering - why is the media, even the right-leaning media, which created Trumps phenomenon - turning on him in this campaign?
CH: Two reasons. One - he is attacking the trade agreements, which is how the elites make their money, and secondly, he's a public relations disaster for the U.S. I think those are the two reasons. Maybe, the third reason is that they don't know what they're getting with Trump - nobody knows what they're getting with Trump. Trump doesn't know what he's getting with Trump, and they know that Clinton will maintain both the imperial overreach and the design of the corporate state. So, Clintons a sure bet and Trump is just too volatile a candidate, and that's why the establishment has turned on him.
SS: PresidentObama has hit the campaign trail to endorse Hillary Clinton - hes warning that all the progress will go out the window if we dont make the right choice. Do you think everything Obama achieved will really go out the window if Trump gets elected?
CH: I don't think Obama has achieved very much. His healthcare program which is essentially forcing citizens to buy defective corporate products and we're watching now massive increases, on an average of 22%, and people that have the bronze plan, different levels of plans cannot even afford the kinds of premiums and copayments... - I mean, the whole system is a disaster. His assault on civil liberties has been worse than under Bush, he has expanded imperial wars, in places like Libya, create more failed states. I don't think Obama has much of a legacy. He'll walk out and get rich and will start his own Foundation like the Clintons - there's almost a complete continuity between Bush and Obama.
SS: A recent CNN ORC poll says Obamas approval rating is higher than at any time during his presidency - why is he doing so great now that hes leaving? Is that his Hillary campaigning paying off?
CH: You know, these people run very skilled public relations operations which revolve not around policy but around creating manufactured personalities, and that has been very difficult for Clinton - and that's why Clinton has the second-highest disapproval rating of any Presidential candidate as far as we know in American history, with the exception, of course, of the person she's competing against - Donald Trump. We have to look at what American politics is - it's really about creating feelings, emotions, getting voters to confuse how they are made to feel with knowledge. It is not about actual policies, and both Michelle Obama who has a very high kind of favourability rating and Barack Obama have been skilled in doing that. It's much more difficult, that's part of the problem, for the Clinton campaign.
SS: Looking back at the beginning of Obama's presidency, the Nobel committee handed Obama the peace prize in 2009 - not for his accomplishments, but for his intentions. But the promised peace didnt come to Afghanistan, didnt come to Iraq, were seeing the unravelling of other Middle Eastern states - did Obamas peace vision not only fail but make things worse?
CH: Oh yeah, of course, look at Libya, look at Syria, look at Somalia, look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan, look at Pakistan. No, it's a complete catastrophe. I've spent seven years in the Middle East, I was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, and what we've done is, I would argue, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, and it's one that Obama aided and abetted. The whole idea of him as a peace candidate is... I mean, I kind of gave up on the Nobel Prize Committee, I have no idea why this was done. As you correctly pointed out, he hadn't even done anything.
SS: Was it a genuine inability to make things better, were his hands tied?
CH: No. He was an establishment candidate, he was selected, anointed and promoted by the Democratic Chicago political machine, which is one of the dirtiest in the country, he got more money in 2008 from Wall St. than the Republican candidate who was against him - McCain. No, he's very cynical...bright, talented, unlike George Bush, but deeply cynical candidate. He brought in the old establishment, including the old Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who had been the Secretary of Defence under Bush, he brought in old these figures like Larry Summers and Geithner who are Wall St. marionettes. No, Obama knew very well what he was doing from the very beginning and effectively... Look, he won Advertising Age's top annual award which was "Marketer of the Year". His campaign did, because the professionals knew just what he done - he functioned as a brand for the corporate state, a very powerful and a very effective one.
SS: On the other hand America has restored relations with Cuba and reached a nuclear deal with Iran - both seemed unachievable just a couple of years ago. Do you count those as a Obama's foreign policy successes?
CH: Yeah, they are foreign policy successes, but we have to understand that the Pentagon had long fought the neocons call for war with Iran, even under the Bush administration they put a stop to it. So, there was no appetite within the American military establishment for war with Iran anyway. So that wasn't really an option, despite Israeli pressure. In terms of Cuba, it just got to the point of absurdity - the boycott of Cuba, and we must also remember that the second generation of Cuban Americans did not have that kind of hatred towards Fidel Castro and towards the Cuban regime, and so it was politically safer for the Democratic party because the new generation, just like the new second and third generation of Jewish Americans don't have that loyalty to Israel - it wasn't as politically volatile a decision.
SS: Obama made global zero a strategic objective - however he failed to get America to ban nuclear tests by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, while the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight - that is to a nuclear war. Why did Obamas promise to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in American foreign policy backfire?
CH: Because the military-industrial establishment is so powerful in the United States that politicians serve its interests. They don't dictate what the interests of that industry is - officialy, it swallows about 53% of our discretionary budget, but that, of course, masks huge other expenditures, including for our nuclear weapon systems, which isn't counted for Veteran's affairs, which is huge for, if you want to count, the security and surveillance state, which is officially hidden, but probably at least a hundred billion dollars... We're starving the rest of society to do that, and you can't fight these wars. Indeed, if you were watching the Bernie Sander's campaign, Sanders did not take on imperial adventurism or the military establishment - because you can't, within the American political system - and Obama, I think, is an example of that.
SS: Police shootings of unarmed black men have sparked massive protests and the Black lives matter movement - does Obama being the first black president actually mean little for race troubles in the U.S.?
CH: It means nothing, because you have de-industrialised urban centres, i.e. places that once had factories and jobs, which are now in ruins - you walk through them and it's boarded up factories and pothole streets and crumbling infrastructure, dysfunctional schools, and there are no jobs. So you have created mini police states in these marginal communities, where police can serve, as we see, as Judge, Jury and Executioner - three in one. Americans, almost all poor people of colour, are shot by police in this country every day, and it's a form of social control, along, of course, with mass incarceration. We have 25% of the world's prison population and 4% of the world's population - most of those imprisoned are poor people of colour. So, when you've taken away the possibility for jobs and with it the possibilities for hope, for advancement, for inclusion within both the economic and political system - then you need these very harsh forms of controls in order to keep people, essentially, fenced in. That's why these killings don't stop, it doesn't matter how many protests are carried out, and Obama has quite sadly betrayed, if we go back especially to 2008 and even to 2012, his primary base - African-Americans voted in staggering numbers for Obama, I think, 90% or something. Almost that high, and yet life for African-Americans, I would argue, after 8 years of Obama, is worse than when he took power.
SS: We've been talking to Chris Hedges, author, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, talking about the ups and downs of 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign, and the end of the Obama era as the Americans are gearing up to choose their next President tomorrow. We'll of course be watching the vote closely. That's it for this edition of SophieCo, I will see you next time. | 1real |
Caroline Kennedy Is Eyeing A White House Bid | Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John F. Kennedy, has left her post as Ambassador to Japan. After being forced out by the incoming Trump Administration (with no replacement) Kennedy is returning back to civilian life in New York.According to the New York Post, Kennedy is eyeing a potential Senate bid in New York for 2018, in which she would face popular incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney.But the sources from the Post also say Kennedy s eye is going even further, which includes a White House bid in 2020. Should Trump still be in office (and seek a second term), Kennedy would be seen as a liberal alternative to the populist billionaire.According to one source, who is close to the Kennedy family and Caroline Kennedy herself: Caroline had a successful ambassadorial run in Japan and feels really very confident about putting her hat in the ring for a New York congressional or Senate seat, with even possibly bigger political objectives down the road. Another source added: Caroline is seen in some quarters as the next Hillary Clinton. She has the Kennedy name but no Clinton baggage. After serving as Ambassador for three years, Kennedy oversaw an expansion of relations between the U.S. and Japan, which included controversial stances against whaling, and ending nuclear arms expansions.During Kennedy s tenure, her office came under intense scrutiny from the Inspector General s office. The report, which was described as damning, alleges that Kennedy, like Hillary Clinton, used a private email server and mismanaged many aspects of her office. Kennedy has defended her use of private email, as well as her handling of the Ambassador s office.Before becoming a diplomat, Kennedy had been a steadfast advocate for many progressive issues, including her uncle Ted s mission in life universal healthcare. Kennedy also holds progressive views on a variety of social issues, which include supporting abortion rights and LGBT causes. She has called for reauthorizing the assault weapons ban, and says NAFTA needs to be re-examined. One issue that bogged Clinton down in the primary was her initial support for the Iraq War, but Kennedy claims to have opposed it from the beginning.While Kennedy has the money (her net worth lies between $80 million and $500 million), the name recognition, and the support to run, nothing has been set in stone. Everything is speculative.Aside from Senator Cory Booker, Kennedy has become the first rumored potential candidate for the 2020 election season.Featured image via Slaven Vlasic via Getty Images | 1real |
LOL! CNN Host Don Lemon Tells Viewers: “We will not insult your intelligence” By Reporting On Susan Rice Spying Scandal [VIDEO] | The most laughable news network in America just proved how unreliable they are when it comes to honestly covering the news. CNN s leftist propagandist host Don Lemon actually told viewers they would not be covering the most important story in the news because fake news publication The Washington Post says, there is no evidence that the Trump team was spied on illegally. He also claimed the story is nothing more than a diversion . In other words, we don t want you to believe that this scandal is real so we re not going to report about it Watch: | 1real |
Another of the strange sounds in Slovakia 31.10.2016 | Another of the strange sounds in Slovakia 31.10.2016 # Timotei Simon 0
Since the beginning of 2012, the Internet began to emerge records of mysterious unexplained sounds. Many people are not at that time been associated with the end of 2012, which had come under "guaranteed" reports the end of the world. Sounds But there was also this year, and even experts have not yet reached a clear explanation of where sounds originate and what causes them. Tags | 1real |
INTOLERANT GAY COUPLE Kicked Off Flight For SCREAMING At Ivanka Trump And Her Children | From TMZIvanka Trump just had a bumpy start to her Xmas holiday an out-of-control passenger on her flight began verbally berating her and jeering at her 3 kids.Ivanka was on a JetBlue flight leaving JFK Thursday morning with her family when a passenger started screaming, Your father is ruining the country. The guy went on, Why is she on our flight? She should be flying private. The guy had his kid in his arms as he went on the tirade. A passenger on the flight tells TMZ Ivanka ignored the guy and tried distracting her kids with crayons. JetBlue personnel escorted the unruly passenger off the flight. As he was removed he screamed, You re kicking me off for expressing my opinion?! EXCEPT THE OBNOXIOUS PASSENGER TWEETED AN HOUR EARLIER THAT HE WAS HARASSING IVANKA TRUMP:The husband of the unruly passenger tweeted an hour before the plane took off, Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass them. :BTW Ivanka, her family and bunch of cousins were all in coach.JetBlue later released a statement, saying, The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly. If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. Our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight. A passenger sitting in front of Trump entourage made it clear that he felt the flight crew made the right call. He said the irritated passenger could be seen visibly shaking. the secret service was on the plane but stayed out of the disturbance.The intolerant left proved yet again that they are unhinged losers! | 1real |
MOTHER WRITES SCATHING LETTER TO HILLARY: “You have made it easy to teach my daughter who she does not want to aspire to be” | Dear Mrs. Clinton,Congratulations on securing the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. It s historical! It s liberating to women! You ve broken the glass ceiling!But at what cost?As the mother of a beautiful young daughter, my desire is to teach her every day that she is priceless, valuable and precious beyond anything else in this world. I tell her that God has placed her on this earth for a very specific reason. I make sure that she never doubts her place here.How exciting it would be for us to celebrate the accomplishments of the first woman ever to receive the presidential nomination of a major political party! Wouldn t it be amazing if I were able to point my daughter to someone she could look up to and admire? Unfortunately for myself, my daughter and millions of other women in this nation, I can t.Sadly, Mrs. Clinton, you have shown not only my daughter but all daughters and not only in this country but globally that in order to, in your words, shatter the gla you have to lie, cheat, abuse, insult, bully and ignore. You threaten others along with disrespecting yourself.Mrs. Clinton, how can I possibly tell my daughter to follow you as an example after you allowed your husband to assault and demean multiple women throughout his political career? Were those women not important? Tell me, will you fight for my rights like you fought for those womens ? Ummmm, I hope not. What about the sisterhood, Mrs. Clinton? Did you expose your husband for his abuse? No! Instead, you enabled him as the abuser and tried to silence his victims. How can you live with yourself? Female empowerment? Nice try!How can you get up and speak about income equality and then pay your own male executives considerably more than your female staff? How can you receive donations from countries that publicly abuse, shame and even execute their own women? Yet you continue to boast about how you stand for women s rights. Double standard?You try your best to relate to those of us who work hard every day to achieve the American dream. You, however, know nothing of struggle. That $12,000 Armani jacket? Those $250,000 speaking fees? They speak volumes. Hypocrisy?How could I possibly ask my daughter to look up to and trust you? Do you honestly think that you are an example to American children? My daughter watches the news. She has heard about the Americans who were attacked and slaughtered in a foreign land while you stood by and did nothing. Then, with their blood on your hands, you did everything you could to cast the blame on others, eventually telling Congress, What does it matter now? Dishonesty?The fact of the matter is, Mrs. Clinton, that you are no champion of women. You are selling the women of this country a false bill of goods. Unfortunately, many are buying in. I don t want you fighting for me or my daughter. You have the interests of only one woman in mind here: your own. You have done nothing to bring the United States together. Quite the contrary you have done your best to divide, and you have succeeded. Congratulations. You crave power, and you will do whatever it takes to get it. You have lied, cheated and let down your own country.My prayer, Mrs. Clinton, is that I would be able to teach my daughter how to be a true woman. A strong woman. A self-respecting woman. A woman who sees herself through the eyes of her Creator. I pray that she would be a woman of compassion, kindness, service, selflessness. One who has integrity and looks out for the needs of others.In a way, I guess I should thank you, Mrs. Clinton. You have made it easy to teach my daughter who she does not want to aspire to be. Now may I have the courage to stand up and show her the woman she does want to be.Sincerely,Helen WickertP.S. By the way, I will pray for the next U.S. president, whether it is Donald Trump or you. God tells us to do so, and He can turn any heart toward righteousness and truth.Via: courageousmotherhood | 1real |
STATE’S ATTORNEY LIED: BALTIMORE POLICE HAD PROBABLE CAUSE DUE TO A WARRANT FOR GRAY’S ARREST | Marilyn Mosby held a press conference today in which she said police officers had no probable cause to arrest Freddie Gray. That s a lie Freddie Gray had an active warrant out for his arrest so Baltimore police had every reason to bring him in. | 1real |
WHY AG LYNCH Should Recuse Herself From Clinton E-mail Probe ASAP! [Video] | INFLUENCE PEDDLING is what the Clintons do and this time it could (hopefully) have consequences. | 1real |
Jordan Frees Soldier Who Killed 7 Israeli Schoolgirls in ’97 Rampage - The New York Times | JERUSALEM — The fragile treaty between the two former enemies was not even three years old when a Jordanian soldier went on a shooting rampage and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls visiting a park in a border area known as the Island of Peace. On Sunday, almost 20 years after that March 13, 1997, attack, the Jordanian authorities released the soldier, Ahmed Daqamseh, a former corporal, after he effectively completed his term. Amid the grief and outrage over what became known as the Island of Peace massacre, King Hussein, then the ruler of Jordan, managed to salvage the spirit of reconciliation and provide some balm. The king paid a rare visit to Israel and made condolence calls to each of the bereaved families. Kneeling to speak with them as they sat on the floor in their homes as part of the Jewish mourning custom of shiva, he apologized and said: “Your daughter is like my daughter. Your loss is my loss. ” While the visit angered many in Jordan, it was seen as a gesture of friendship and humility by many in Israel and the West. Two decades later, Mr. Daqamseh’s release rekindled some of those emotions. The peace has proved firm and lasting, but it still exists mainly at the government level and has not been popularly embraced. The Island of Peace, about 12 miles south of the Sea of Galilee, was formally returned to Jordan when it made peace with Israel in fall 1994, but was then leased back to an Israeli kibbutz. Mr. Daqamseh fired on the girls, who were on a class outing, from a border post in Jordanian territory. After the attack, a Jordanian medical team gave Mr. Daqamseh a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder a military court sentenced him to life in prison. Life sentences are not in Jordan, and can essentially be commuted after 20 years. Mr. Daqamseh, who also injured five other girls and a teacher in the rampage, said at the time that the seventh and eighth graders had mocked him as he was performing his prayers. Early on Sunday, Mr. Daqamseh returned to his family’s home in Ibdir, a village in the governorate of Irbid in northern Jordan. Roya News, an independent Jordanian station, broadcast video of his homecoming, and photographs spread widely in the local news media. Israeli radio and news sites described the reception Mr. Daqamseh received from his family and other as a hero’s welcome, also posting photographs and video of the local celebrations. A Jordanian military spokesman confirmed the release, but the government appeared to be trying to keep it low key. The police prevented reporters from reaching Ibdir later on Sunday, citing orders from the local governor, who demanded that journalists obtain permission from the Ministry of Interior. Mr. Daqamseh, now in his 40s, emerged from prison with patches of gray hair and sunken eyes. He was defiant and showed no remorse. In his first statement to the news media from his home, he said, “There is no country named Israel,” adding that any normalization of ties with Israel and the notion that the conflict would be resolved by means of a solution were both “lies. ” Some Jordanians continued to see Mr. Daqamseh as a symbol of an movement against the treaty. The Israeli government and the bereaved families had protested earlier calls in Jordan for Mr. Daqamseh’s prison term to be cut short. There was no immediate comment from Israeli officials on Sunday, and relatives who spoke to the news media appeared mostly resigned to his release. “I always say that our peace with Jordan is with the royal family, not the people or their parliament,” Yisrael Fatihi, whose daughter, Sivan, 13, was killed in the attack, told Ynet, a Hebrew news site. Hezi Cohen, the father of Nirit, 13, another victim, described his family’s daily pain. On one hand, he said, Mr. Daqamseh had served his full sentence. On the other, he said, “If he had received 20 years for each girl he murdered, he would have rotted in prison for the rest of his life. ” | 0fake |
House May Have to Vote Again on American Health Care Act - Breitbart | House Republicans may have to vote again on the American Health Care Act (AHCA) after narrowly passing the bill earlier this May. [House Speaker Paul Ryan has not sent the AHCA to the Senate yet because the bill may have to be reworked, depending on how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores the bill. House leadership wants to ensure that the bill conforms with the Senate’s rules for budgetary reconciliation, a mechanism that allows the Senate to pass bills with a simple majority. The House quickly pushed through the AHCA after they added the MacArthur amendment, which allows states to obtain waivers to repeal Obamacare regulations that raise the cost of premiums. The House rushed the AHCA through without a CBO score that would allow lawmakers and the American people to evaluate the bill’s effects on costs and health insurance coverage. Previous CBO scores of the AHCA estimated that 24 million Americans could lose insurance by 2026, while the previous version would save $150 billion between 2017 and 2026 compared to the original bill, which would have saved $337 billion. The AHCA waivers that allow states to disregard certain Obamacare regulations could allow citizens to sign up for cheaper insurance. The bill’s $138 billion in funding for pools could drastically change the cost of premiums and health insurance coverage for millions of Americans. According to several Congressional aides and procedural experts, if Republicans send the bill to the Senate and the CBO confirms that the bill does not save at least $2 billion, the Republicans would have to restart the repeal process with a new budget resolution. Congressional rules would prevent Republicans from fixing the AHCA after the bill moves to the Senate. The Senate’s rules require that the AHCA must hit a separate $1 billion in spending cuts in the Finance Committee as well as the health committee. Republican aides added that falling short of those targets would force the House to rewrite portions of the bill, even if the AHCA meets the overall deficit reduction targets. If the House leadership holds onto the bill until after the CBO unveils their score, then the House can still address the problems explained by the CBO through another vote on the House floor. Ryan told radio host Hugh Hewitt last week that he does not think that the House will need to vote again on the AHCA. Speaker Ryan said, “We just want to, out of an abundance of caution, wait to send the bill over to the Senate when we get the final score. ” House Republicans could cloak the vote through arcane procedural votes, although the vote will still be weighed down by the CBO’s latest revelations about the bill’s impact on health insurance coverage and cost. Greg Walden, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, urged caution regarding the CBO’s score. “We’ve got to wait for the CBO score. To prove that you meet the reconciliation test. ” Congressman Dennis Ross ( ) was not aware that House leadership was holding onto the bill. Ross, a member of the House leadership whip team, said, “I had no idea. ” Ross added that the prospect of another vote “does concern me. ” Democrats were critical of House Republicans’ unwillingness to delay the vote on the AHCA until the CBO released their scoring of the health care bill. Louise Slaughter, the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, chided her Republican colleagues. She said, “Every school child knows that when you pass a bill in the House, you send it to the Senate. You don’t hide it in a drawer somewhere for two weeks, while you wait for information that you should have had before you passed it. ” | 0fake |
WOMAN HOSPITALIZED, UNABLE TO FEEL HER LEGS After FEMALE SOMALI IMMIGRANT Attacks Her For Walking “Unclean” Dogs | Liberals would like everyone to believe that Muslims who immigrate from the Middle East to the West are interested in becoming part of the communities where they live. Nothing could be further from the truth. The attack on an innocent woman walking her dogs by a young Muslim woman, who considered her dogs to be unclean , reminds us of how diametrically opposed our cultures truly are, and how things will never be the same again for these welcoming communities.A middle aged woman had to be hospitalised in Vienna following a brutal beating in broad daylight by a veiled Somali asylum seeker offended by her pet dogs.The victim, named only as Ingrid T., described how she was talking with neighbours at the gate of her garden, accompanied by dogs her deaf, almost-blind, three-legged Collie mix sitting peacefully alongside while 10-month-old Poco meandered along an alleyway towards her parents house when she saw a pretty, veiled woman approaching slowly. I knew some people from these countries do not like dogs, so I went to Poco and wanted to pull him back, the 54-year-old told Krone from her hospital bed in the Austrian capital.The 18-year-old Somali asserted, The animals are unclean, Ingrid recalled, stating that her attacker then grabbed me, spun me around and scratched me until both women fell to the floor.It took the efforts of three men to manage to pull the asylum seeker away from the Austrian dog owner, who told Krone the assault left her unable to feel her legs.Staff at Wilhelminen Hospital had to operate twice on Ingrid who her knee smashed in the attack required an artificial knee to be surgically implanted.The Vienna native told Krone she believed her ordeal came about as a result of clashing cultures, revealing that she had heard the Somali s husband say: We don t want dogs they are filthy! With her recovery expected to take a long time, and the migrant attacker lacking any type of liability insurance, Ingrid s lawyer said it is unclear who will pay for damages caused, and noted This will probably be a precedent. Breitbart | 1real |
GERMANY: Afghan “Teen” Refugee Who RAPED and KILLED Female Med Student and Refugee Volunteer Is Actually 33-Years Old…And There’s MORE! | On September 5, 2017, the Daily Mail reported:Afghan asylum seeker accused of raping and murdering EU official s teenage daughter attacked her to satisfy his sexual urges before leaving her unconscious in a river to drown Hussein Khavari, 22, who claims to be from Afghanistan has been accused of ambushing Maria Ladenburger, 19, as she cycled home after a party, raping her and then drowning her in Freiburg, Germany last October.He was linked through his DNA to medical student Maria, who volunteered at various shelters that house migrants in her spare time in Freiburg.Hussein claimed to be Afghani but the court heard that there is evidence he is Iraqi. And his claim to be 17 at the time of the offense was disputed by a specialist saying he was at least 22. According to Bild newspaper, during a morning session of hearings in which press and public were excluded, he claimed to be 19.He said he claimed to be 16 upon his arrival in Germany in 2015 because the situation is better here for underage migrants. The court must decide if he is to be tried as a juvenile or an adult.A murder conviction as a juvenile would mean a maximum ten-year jail term, as an adult a possible life sentence.As it turns out, the fake teenager who admitted to raping and murdering the actual teenager, is pretty far removed from his teenage years. According to the Voice of Europe, the Afghan refugee, who is now on trial for the rape and murder of the medical student Maria Ladenburger in October 2016, is older than previously thought.Hussein Khavari entered Germany in November 2015 without identity papers. He told authorities that he was born in 1999 in Afghanistan and that his father was killed during the war.But it now appears that his father is still alive. According to German media source, Bil.de, his father said his son was born in 1984 and that he is 33-years-old.The Local Germany says about it: Prosecutors were able to track down Hussein K. s father when they came across a contact on his mobile phone. The defendant told them that they could contact his mother on the number. But when an interpreter called the number in the presence of two judges, the person who picked up was his father .Maria Ladenburger s father is a senior legal adviser to the European Commission in Brussels. Maria herself was volunteering as a refugee worker in various shelters and asylum homes. | 1real |
Obama to sign customs, trade enforcement bill into law: White House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will sign into law a bill that will strengthen trade enforcement rules and provide new tools to address currency manipulation, the White House said on Thursday. The legislation, known as the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, was part of a package of trade legislation originally presented to Congress in June. | 0fake |
REPORTER CONFRONTS State Department Over DC Visit By Al Qaeda Tied Terror Group [Video] | Could this guy be any more clueless? Is it that this administration is this clueless or this evil? Al Qaeda tied leaders who ve been vetted by the Saudis are visiting DC do we trust the Saudis at all? If this guy knows this man had been vetted by the Saudis then why doesn t he know more? The Obama administration has been using the tactic of ignorance of situations since day one. Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson and others have lied and claimed they have no clue but will look into a problem. Here s yet another example of this tactic: | 1real |
After Yesterday’s STUNNING Acquittal Bundys Remain in Jail Because… | Pinterest
Despite being acquitted by a federal jury Tuesday, Bundy brothers Ammon and Randy still remain in jail.
The brothers, as well as a number of other co-defendants, were acquitted in the case involving the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The band of ranchers and farmers had commandeered the refuge at the start of the year to protest what they felt was the illegal seizure of land by the federal government.
After the standoff eventually ended in late January, federal prosecutors charged them with “conspiring to impede federal workers from their jobs,” as reported by Fox News , but as Tuesday’s news demonstrates, the charges did not stick.
Sadly for the Bundy brothers, however, the story is far from over.
It turned out that the Bundys still face charges in Nevada stemming from a previous standoff, this one at their father’s ranch in 2014. Ergo, U.S. District Judge Anna Brown could not release them; instead she approved the U.S. Marshals’ request to take them into custody.
When the marshals attempted that, however, a scuffle broke out between them and Ammon Bundy’s lead attorney, Marcus Mumford:
After the verdicts were read, an attorney for group leader Ammon Bundy demanded his client be immediately released and repeatedly yelled at the judge. U.S. marshals tackled attorney Marcus Mumford to the ground, used a stun gun on him several times and arrested him.
Mumford later explained to reporters what exactly had transpired:
Also speaking with reporters, another one of Ammon’s attorneys reportedly shared his belief that an acquittal would be achieved in the Nevada case as well.
“When the jury here hears the whole story, I expect the same result,” attorney Daniel Hill reportedly told the Associated Press, adding that he intended to ask for “client’s release from federal custody pending trial in Nevada.”
According to The Oregonian , the Bundy brothers’ trial is set to begin Feb. 6, 2017. Their notorious father, Cliven Bundy, is slated to go on trial that day as well. | 1real |
WaPo: Trump Tried To Get Sessions To Let Racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio Off The Hook Months Ago | Donald Trump just threw a match on this tinder box of a nation when he decided to pardon former Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This guy is a racist who was convicted in court of contempt for refusing to follow an order to stop racially profiling and detaining people. Arpaio terrorized that county for years with impunity and without consequence, and now it seems that he will be able to carry on being awful.Now, there is even more nefarious news out there regarding this. It seems that Trump tried to get Jeff Sessions Department of Justice to let Arpaio off the hook by dropping the case against him altogether. It seems that Sessions told Trump that such an action would not be the appropriate thing to do. Having no other choice, Trump waited until Arpaio was convicted, and THEN decided to wait for the perfect time to issue a pardon. One White House official says of Trump s thinking on the Arpaio matter: We knew the president wanted to do this for some time now and had worked to prepare for whenever the moment may come. Of course, we mustn t forget that Arpaio and Trump have been political partners in crime ever since they started the birtherism nonsense, in which they promoted the racist lie that President Obama was not born in the United States. They both doggedly tried to prove that the nation s first Black President was not a legitimate Commander-in-Chief all because he s Black.In short, they are two racist peas in a pod, so of course Trump wasn t going to let his man go to jail, even though if there was ever someone who deserves to rot in jail, it s this racist, abusive former Sheriff.One good thing came out of this, though: It showed that when Trump is willing to do something truly egregious, the Department of Justice has maintained at least a little independence and is willing to push back. However, in this instance, said pushback had no real effect.Come on, Congress, Mueller, whomever please get rid of this lawless president while we still have a nation left.Featured image via Ralph Freso/Getty Images | 1real |
Trump attacks 'fake news' following Kushner reports | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump attacked the news media and dismissed leaks from the White House as “fake news” on Sunday, following reports his son-in-law tried to set up a secret channel of communications with Moscow before Trump took office. Shortly after Trump’s remarks on Twitter, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly made the rounds of Sunday television news shows to praise any so-called back channel communications, especially with Russia, as “a good thing.” The Republican president returned to the White House after a nine-day trip to the Middle East and Europe that ended on Saturday to face more questions about alleged communications between Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington. “It is my opinion that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media,” Trump wrote in a series of Twitter posts on Sunday. In a statement later on Sunday night, carried by the New York Times, Trump praised Kushner and the work he has done in the White House. “Jared is doing a great job for the country,” he said. “I have total confidence in him. He is respected by virtually everyone and is working on programs that will save our country billions of dollars. In addition to that, and perhaps more importantly, he is a very good person.” The White House faces mounting questions about potential ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign, which are also the subject of criminal and congressional investigations. Trump officials were preparing to establish a “war room” to address an issue that has begun to dominate his young presidency. Aides said Trump was expected to meet with lawyers as early as Sunday, the New York Times reported. Two Republican U.S. senators played down the Kushner reports on Sunday, while the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, took a darker view of such contacts with representatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “My dashboard warning light was clearly on and I think that was the case with all of us in the intelligence community - very concerned about the nature of these approaches to the Russians,” Clapper told NBC’s “Meet The Press.” Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, had contacts with Moscow in December about opening a secret back channel of communications, according to news reports published while Trump was away on his trip. The 36-year-old Kushner, a real estate developer with no previous government experience, had at least three previously undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, seven current and former U.S. officials told Reuters. “Whenever you see the words ‘sources say’ in the fake news media, and they don’t mention names,” Trump wrote, “it is very possible that those sources don’t exist but are made up by fake news writers. #FakeNews is the enemy!” Contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials during the campaign coincided with what U.S. intelligence agencies concluded was a Kremlin effort through computer hacking, fake news and propaganda to boost Trump’s chances of winning the White House. White House officials defended the concept of secret communications channels without commenting specifically on the Kushner case. National security adviser H.R. McMaster told reporters on Saturday that so-called back-channeling was not unusual. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, carried the same message on Sunday. “It’s both normal, in my opinion, and acceptable,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “Any way that you can communicate with people, particularly organizations that are maybe not particularly friendly to us, is a good thing.” Kelly told “Fox News Sunday” there was nothing wrong with the Trump transition team trying to build relationships with the Russians as they prepared to take over the White House. U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said such secret channels may be used in situations including peace talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan or for the release of American hostages. “But for people associated with the campaign after that campaign has ended and where the Russians during that campaign were helping you, to try to establish a back channel and hide it from your own government, that’s a serious allegation,” he said. Schiff was particularly concerned about a Washington Post report that the back channel would have been conducted at a Russian diplomatic facility to avoid monitoring in U.S. communications systems. “You have to ask, well, who are they hiding the conversation from?” he said on ABC. Schiff said he expected Kushner, who serves as an unpaid adviser to Trump, to appear before his committee and suggested his security clearance be reviewed. Kushner initially had come to the attention of FBI investigators last year as they began scrutinizing former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s connections with Russian officials, the two sources told Reuters. Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN he doubted the Kushner reports were accurate. Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, noted that Kushner has been willing to answer questions. “They reached out to us yesterday to make sure that we knew that was the case and I’m sure he’s willing to do so,” Corker said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Though he had not seen evidence of collusion when he stepped down on Jan. 20, Clapper said all the signs made an FBI investigation not only appropriate but necessary. “Russia, at least for my money, is our primary adversary,” he told NBC. “They are not our friends. They are in to do us in.” | 0fake |
The Militarized Police at Standing Rock is Working for This Man | The Militarized Police at Standing Rock is Working for This Man The months long Dakota Access Keystone XL pipleine protest at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/the-militarized-police-at-standing-rock.html The months long Dakota Access Keystone XL pipleine protest at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation by Native Americans and those sympathetic to protection of our water supply has been met with heavy-handed and brutal clamp down by police and national guard. Militarized goons in battle dress have stormed protector camps with LRAD sonic weapons, attack dogs , tear gas, tazers , and even live ammunition ( killing horses ), while politicians and mainstream media do their best to ignore this growing atrocity, hoping to wait it out until the protestors give up. But, as the saying goes, Water Is Life , and the issue of life and death is at the root of this protection movement, therefore, for people concerned with life, giving up on this is simply unthinkable. The root issue justifying state oppression of the protest is capitalism, and the perception that money is more important than life itself.When the police and national guard attack U.S. citizens on private property to protect corporate interests, who are they really working for? The corporate dream of the Keystone XL pipeline is to create a profit stream for a small number of people at the expense of the natural world and anyone in the way. At the top of this pyramid of profit is Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for the project. So who is Kelcy Warren? A native of East Texas and graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington with a degree in civil engineering, Warren worked in the natural gas industry and became co-chair of Energy Transfer Equity in 2007. With business partner Ray Davis, co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Warren built Energy Transfer Equity into one of the nation’s largest pipeline companies, which now owns about 71,000 miles of pipelines carrying natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined products and crude oil. The company’s holdings include Sunoco, Southern Union and Regency Energy Partners. Forbes estimates the 60-year-old Warren’s personal wealth at $4 billion. Bloomberg described him as “among America’s new shale tycoons”— but rather than building a fortune by drilling he “takes the stuff others pull from underground and moves it from one place to another, chilling, boiling, pressurizing, and processing it until it’s worth more than when it burst from the wellhead.” [ Ref. ] Shockingly, in 2015 the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appointed Warren to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission which is an insult to environmentalists working to protect Big Bend National Park and surrounding sacred tribal lands from another $770 million pipeline project .“According to the governor’s office, the state parks and wildlife commission “manages and conserves the natural and cultural resources of Texas,” along with ensuring the future of hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation opportunities for Texans.” [ Ref. ] This glaring conflict of interest has inspired Environmental Science major at UTSA and former Texas State Park Ambassador Andrew Lucas to begin a drive to have Warren removed from this environmental post. His petition is described here : Most people may know Kelcy Warren as the man behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The Dallas-based billionaire and CEO of Energy Transfer Partners has been making headlines for fast-tracking a 1100 mile crude oil pipeline across the Midwest and under the Missouri River, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. No environmental impact assessment, no respect for cultural sites, and no regard for the local and widespread communities living along the river. A similar story is unfolding out in West Texas, where Warren’s company has split through the pristine Big Bend region with the 200 mile Comanche Trail Pipeline and nearly-complete 143 mile Trans Pecos Pipeline. These Pipelines mark the way for massive natural gas and oil developments in the Trans Pecos region. With untold damages unfolding for cultural and environmental resources at the hands of Energy Transfer Partners, it would surprise most to know that nearly a year ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott appointed Kelcy Warren for a 6 year term as 1 of the 10 commissioners who preside over Texas Parks And Wildlife… Why? Probably the $550,000 in campaign contributions Abbott received from Warren. ( Read More… ) Footage of militarized police using the Long Range Acoustic Device ( LRAD ) crowd control weapon against protectors at standing rock on October 27th, 2016: Final Thoughts Warren is listed as number 150 on Forbes list of wealthiest Americans with an estimated net worth of $4.2 billion in September of 2016. He is the head of the Dakota Access Pipeline snake. If you are scratching your head wondering why militarized police and private security contractors are beating, gassing and attacking peaceful resistors, including women, children and the elderly, the answer is, they are doing it to protect the interests of Kelcy Warren and others invested in this pipeline project. By Isaac Davis, Waking Times About the author: Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here . Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
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Bannon role in Trump administration sets off critical firestorm | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White supremacists and neo-Nazis have rarely, if ever, in recent history been so enthusiastic about a presidential appointment as Donald Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon to be his chief White House strategist. Before he took over as chief executive of Trump’s campaign in August and led it to victory last week, Bannon headed Breitbart News, a website and voice for the alt-right movement, a loose right-wing confederation that includes hardcore nationalists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites. Five days after Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump rewarded Bannon, 62, a former Goldman Sachs banker and a Navy veteran, by appointing him senior counselor and chief strategist - jobs not subject to U.S. Senate confirmation. Democrats, rights activists and minority groups were outraged and said Trump, himself accused of racism and misogyny during the campaign, had just flung open the White House doors to hatemongers. Many urged him to reconsider. “Bringing Steve Bannon into the White House is an alarming signal that President-elect Trump remains committed to the hateful and divisive vision that defined his campaign,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement on Monday. “There must be no sugar-coating the reality that a white nationalist has been named chief strategist for the Trump administration,” Pelosi said. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League and the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) also denounced Bannon. Bannon, who grew up in a Democratic family, has a reputation of trying to tear down a Republican Party establishment that he deemed too soft and too entrenched. As a senior adviser to the Republican Trump, Bannon will be expected by far-right groups to champion their views and make sure that Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, keeps such campaign promises as building a wall on the southern U.S. border, cracking down on Muslims entering the country and restricting the influx of Syrian war refugees. “Perhaps ‘The Donald’ is for real,” Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party, told CNN. David Duke, a longtime leader of Ku Klux Klan movements, and Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who runs the National Policy Institute, were among the leading alt-right figures to praise Bannon’s appointment. In remarks published in the New York Times on Tuesday, Bannon ascribed his interest in populism and American nationalism to a desire to curb what he views as the corrosive effects of globalization. He rejected what he called the “ethno-nationalist” tendencies of some in the movement. “It’s not that some people on the margins, as in any movement, aren’t bad guys - racists, anti-Semites. But that’s irrelevant,” he told the Times. Political commentator Armstrong Willliams, a close associate of former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, said Bannon was “one of the finest and most honorable people I’ve ever met” and not bigoted in any way. The Trump campaign had been struggling to manage Trump’s unconventional candidacy when Bannon took over. He stayed behind the scenes and devised the strategy for the final days of the campaign that kept Trump on message and enabled him to upset Clinton in crucial states such as Michigan. It was Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who invited three women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to attend a presidential debate in hopes of unnerving Hillary Clinton. Bannon, looking typically unkempt with mussed hair and stubbly chin, grinned from the back of the room as Trump and the women held their pre-debate news conference. “Bannon is a legitimately sinister figure,” Ben Shapiro, who had been editor-in-chief of Breitbart under Bannon, wrote in August on the dailywire.com conservative news website which he founded. “He is a vindictive, nasty figure ... He will attempt to ruin anyone who impedes his unending ambition and he will use anyone bigger than he is - for example, Donald Trump - to get where he wants to go,” Shapiro wrote. ANTI-SEMITISM ACCUSATIONS While Bannon was at Breitbart, it had stories with headlines such as “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy,” “Political correctness protects Muslim rape culture” and “Hoist it high and proud: The Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage.” The site’s pro-Trump agenda featured speculative stories questioning Hillary Clinton’s health and accusing her close aide Huma Abedin of being a Saudi spy. Bannon was charged with domestic violence and battery in 1996 after his then-wife, Mary Louise Piccard, said he grabbed her by the throat and arm during an argument. The case was dropped when she did not appear in court. In 2007 Piccard said in court documents Bannon did not like the school the girls attended because it had too many “whiny brat” Jewish students. Bannon had a varied and profitable career before joining Breitbart. He earned degrees from Virginia Tech, Georgetown University and Harvard Business School and served four years in the Navy. It was his Navy experience, he said, that led him to shed his family’s Democratic allegiance and become an admirer of Republican Ronald Reagan. He was at Goldman Sachs before starting his own investment firm, which specialized in media. Through negotiating a studio sale, he obtained a stake in the royalties for the popular television show “Seinfeld,” a money-making powerhouse in syndication. He was an executive producer of the feature movies “Titus” and “The Indian Runner” before producing, directing or writing conservative-oriented documentaries such as “Clinton Cash” about the Clinton Foundation, “Generation Zero” about the global economic crisis of 2008-2009 and “The Undefeated” on former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. | 0fake |
WATCH: ACTOR JAMES WOODS Shares HILARIOUS Video Montage Of Reactions By So-Called “Journalists” To Trump’s Win On Election Night | This is a MUST WATCH and SHARE!If anyone s wondering why the media won t give up their obsession (fantasy) that somehow President Trump colluded with Russia to win the election, you only have to watch this pathetic video montage of reactions by so-called journalists to their worst nightmare coming true on November 8, 2016.There is no lie too big to push, no bar too low to slither under. The media is in an all-out war with President Trump and anyone who dares to support him, and it all started on this night:Just love watching this still. These are supposedly all objective, responsible journalists pic.twitter.com/Vmq1CK24ZC James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 6, 2017James Woods is not only a brilliant actor, he s also an outspoken conservative who goes out of his way on social media to expose the very people most of his friends in the entertainment business embrace. Kudos to James Woods for having the courage to take on the left, while living in the shark infested waters of liberal Hollywood | 1real |
RUBIO DOUBLES DOWN ON Putting Illegal Aliens Before Americans | If Rubio isn t smart enough to see that Trump s catapult to the top of the GOP contenders happened the moment he took a strong stand against politicians putting illegal aliens before Americans, then is he really smart enough to run our nation? And maybe even more importantly, if Rubio does recognize the majority of voters across the board want to elect a President who will stop the invasion of illegal aliens into our country, who is he planning to represent if he were to get the nomination?Sen. [score]Marco Rubio[/score] (R-FL) is doubling down on his support for in-state tuition for illegal aliens.On ABC, George Stephanopoulos asked Rubio about his work in the Florida statehouse in which he co-sponsored legislation to provide in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants. Stephanopolous asked Rubio directly: Do you stand behind that position now? Rubio said that he absolutely stands behind that legislation:RUBIO: It was a very narrowly drafted bill. You had to have a certain GPA, you had to live in the U.S. a long time, you had to graduate from a Florida high school. It was very narrowly tailored to high-performing students who found themselves in a situation where they were brought here by their parents when they were 5, didn t even speak another language except English and therefore couldn t attend college because they were being charged like they were from out of state. They still had to pay for college but they paid for what people paid when they lived in Florida. They had to be high school graduates of Florida.STEPHANOPOULOS: So you stand behind that?RUBIO: Yes, of a narrowly tailored bill like that, absolutely.In theory, this legislation means that an American student wishing to attend a Florida state university, who is from the neighboring state of Georgia, would have to pay higher tuition costs than an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, who has been living unlawfully in Florida and attending American public schools for the past thirteen years on the taxpayer dime. Illegal aliens are also eligible for generous child tax credits, a benefit protected in the Gang of Eight bill. Indeed, the taxes requirement in the Gang of Eight bill would have meant illegal aliens could receive tax payments in the form of free cash from the IRS, since poor illegal aliens have no tax liability.Rubio s plan to discount college tuition for illegal aliens will serve as a further magnet to new illegal immigration, and will also increase competition for college slots and post-college jobs for American youth who are already struggling. Moreover, due to affirmative action policies, these illegal aliens will not have their tuition discounted but their applications given preferential treatment as well.By contrast, front-runner Donald Trump told NBC s Chuck Todd that same day that he opposes Rubio s legislation to give illegal aliens taxpayer-funded tuition discounts.TODD: Senator Rubio sponsored a bill back in Florida (back when he was in the State House) to give in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants. There s a lot of states that allow in-state tuition for the children of undocumented immigrants. I ve not heard your position on that.TRUMP: I m opposed to it.TODD: Totally opposed?TRUMP: They re here. They re not here legally. I m opposed to itTODD: Even kids born to illegal immigrants?It is perhaps interesting to note that Chuck Todd seems a bit confused about U.S. immigration policy illegal alien tuition discounts are for foreign-born youth who are themselves illegal immigrants. Under current policy, the US-born children are automatic birthright citizens, meaning no legislation is required to make them eligible for all the benefits enjoyed by Americans. Indeed, illegal immigrants primarily access welfare programs through their U.S.-born children. As a September 2015 report from the Center for Immigration Studies noted, analysis shows that legal immigrant households make extensive use of most welfare programs, while illegal immigrant households primarily benefit from food programs and Medicaid through their U.S.-born children. Regardless, Trump made clear in the interview he would ensure that neither illegal alien youth (DREAMers) or birthright citizenship children, would be eligible for such benefits. Trump made clear he would move to eliminate birthright citizenship so that the US-born children of illegal aliens would no longer made automatic citizens. Again, by contrast, Rubio supports birthright citizenship a position which is supported by only 20% of Republicans according to the most recent Rasmussen Reports immigration survey issued on December 27, 2015.Rubio s Sunday endorsement of discount college tuition for the foreign-born illegal alien youth is in keeping with his longstanding support for DREAM amnesty proposals, which have been a passion of Gang of Eight co-member [score]Dick Durbin[/score].While Rubio briefly distanced himself of his support for DREAMer amnesty in 2010 in order to get elected to the U.S. Senate and indeed attacked attacked his opponent [score]Charlie Crist[/score] specifically for his support of the DREAM Act upon arriving in the U.S. Senate, Rubio quickly used his new position of power to begin working on a plan to legalize so-called DREAMers. In 2012, Rubio wrote: They re not in compliance with immigration law, and, thus, not American citizens. But they are culturally as American as anyone else s children Rubio s statement might be news to Laura Wilkerson whose 18-year-old son, Joshua, was gruesomely murdered by his DREAMer classmate. In her Congressional testimony last summer, Wilkerson told lawmakers how her son was, beaten, strangled, tortured until he died. He was tied up, thrown in a field, and set on fire [During his trial], we had to hear this kid on the stand muttering about, In my country In my country never to finish that sentence. We listened to him tell us repeatedly that his killing skills took over . Wilkerson told lawmakers, You cannot you cannot stand by and ignore our families our American families. You re elected by Americans, not any other country. You should be for Americans. Yet Rubio remains so committed to amnesty for illegal immigrants who allegedly entered as minors that he has said he will not immediately revoke President Obama s lawless 2012 executive amnesty for DREAMers. In a Spanish-language interview with Jorge Ramos, Rubio said: Well, DACA is going to have to end at some point. I wouldn t undo it immediately. The reason is that there are already people who have that permission, who are working, who are studying, and I don t think it would be fair to cancel it suddenly. But I do think it is going to have to end. And, God willing, it s going to end because immigration reform is going to pass. Rejected-Majority Leader [score]Eric Cantor[/score] similarly supported Rubio s efforts to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants. Cantor declared, One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents. This prompted Cantor s then-primary challenger Rep. [score]Dave Brat[/score] (R-VA) to describe Cantor s declaration as one of the most radical pro-amnesty statements ever delivered by a sitting representative. Brat wrote, In what was billed as a new agenda for the Republican Party, Cantor declared that citizenship for illegals was required by the great founding principles of our country. With this remark, Cantor declared his support not only for amnesty now, but amnesty forever. Ken Palinkas, the former head of the nation s immigration caseworkers Citizenship and Immigration Services has similarly explained how the DREAM Act would represents a promise of perpetual amnesty :If it is improper to apply immigration law to one specific group of illegal aliens, then why should we expect future illegal aliens in this group to be treated any differently?Indeed, government reports have documented how the 2014 illegal alien minor surge on our southern border was caused, in large part, by the promise of amnesty for alien youth.As Senator [score]Jeff Session[/score] has written, It cannot be the policy of the United States that any of the 2 billion people in the world who have yet turn to turn 18 have a right to illegally enter the United States and claim residency. Polling data suggests that in the event Rubio s position on this controversial DREAMer amnesty begins to receive large-scale media coverage something that has not happened yet it could pose problems for him in New Hamspshire, where he is currently in second place. As The Hill reported in 2014, More people in New England oppose illegal immigration compared to the rest of the country Nearly 80 percent of people in that region said illegal immigrants threaten U.S. beliefs and customs, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.New Hampshire also voted for Pat Buchanan in 1996 who, like Trump, is opposed to both the cheaper foreign labor and cheap foreign imports Senator Rubio has sought to import.Via: Breitbart News | 1real |
China says it will handle North Korea trade issues for benefit to peace, stability | BEIJING (Reuters) - China s Commerce Ministry said on Thursday it will continue to handle North Korean trade issues in a way that benefits peace, stability and denuclearization on the Korean peninsula. Ministry spokesman Gao Feng made the comment at a routine media briefing. | 0fake |
A MUST WATCH VIDEO: STEVE BANNON “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken.” | Steve Bannon gets it He knows what s going on with all of the fuss with Trump. The press and politicians are doing their best to bring him down.Bannon knows the deep state and all of the evil within government. He knows we re in trouble in America and need to take our Country back.Please go to the 16:00 point and hear Bannon speak about the evil that is in Washington: It s not only not going to get better It s going to get worse | 1real |
US Naval False Flags: A Brief History | Corbett • 10/29/2016 • 2 Comments
The official story : On October 15th the USS Mason picked up two targets believed to be cruise missiles, forcing it to deploy (undisclosed) “counter measures.”
Notice the words “believed to be” in that last sentence? The Pentagon hopes you didn’t, because, as it turns out, they’re not so sure now. As USNI News reported last week, the Pentagon is “still unsure” if the Mason was actually attacked at all on the 15th. “We actually have not confirmed that happened and we’re going back and looking at all the information to see what might or might not have happened and that’s where we are,” said Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should…
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House Republicans Plan Secret Meeting To Discuss Overthrowing Paul Ryan | By Jason Easley on Tue, Nov 1st, 2016 at 9:38 pm The more things change, the more they stay the same. The House Freedom Caucus is planning a secret meeting, which in typical Republican fashion was leaked to the press, to discuss ousting Paul Ryan and demanding more ransom from GOP leadership. Share on Twitter Print This Post
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The House Freedom Caucus is planning a secret meeting, which in typical Republican fashion was leaked to the press, to discuss ousting Paul Ryan and demanding more ransom from GOP leadership.
Politico reported , “One of the most pressing questions preoccupying Washington is what the group will do about Paul Ryan. The Wisconsin Republican has said he intends to seek another term as House speaker but has rankled members of the group of several dozen Republican lawmakers that drove John Boehner out of the Speakership last year. The Freedom Caucus is also weighing proposals meant to empower its members, some at the expense of GOP leadership’s authority.”
There have been early rumblings that Speaker Ryan may be open to making a few deals on policies like tax reform with Hillary Clinton if she wins the election. One of the reasons why these deals may never happen is because of the ability of far right Republicans to cause trouble.
If Ryan’s Republican majority shrinks, he will be an even bigger hostage to the far-right wing of his caucus. The dysfunctional dynamic in the House is going to continue even if Hillary Clinton wins the election. Ryan has run into the same hurdles that John Boehner faced. House Republicans are deeply divided and unable to agree on much of anything.
The fact that the Freedom Caucus is holding a secret meeting is a sign that nothing is going to change. If Paul Ryan doesn’t cave to their demands, they will force Ryan out of the Speaker position.
A group of House Republicans is plotting new ways to keep the House from working properly before a new president has even been elected.
This is a reminder that Washington is fine. It’s the Republican Party that’s broken. | 1real |
Donald Trump Calls Out ‘Professional Anarchists’ After Berkeley Riots | President Donald Trump reacted again to the aftermath of the Berkeley riots in response to a scheduled speech by Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos. [“Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday. Rioters caused an estimated $100, 000 in property damage in Berkeley on Wednesday, and only one person was arrested. Bank windows and ATMs were smashed, a Starbucks was looted, graffiti was painted on store fronts, Molotov cocktails were thrown, and garbage fires were lit in the streets. On Thursday, Trump responded to the rioting by threatening to cancel federal funding for colleges that failed to protect the right of free speech. “If U. C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Trump wrote on Twitter. | 0fake |
Colombia's ELN rebels willing to extend ceasefire if talks progress | BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia s leftist ELN rebels said on Sunday they are willing to extend a ceasefire set to expire next month if there is sufficient progress at peace talks with the government. The National Liberation Army (ELN) and the government have been in public peace talks in Quito for 10 months, after a long exploratory phase of negotiations, in a bid to end more than 53 years of war. The group s first-ever ceasefire began in October and is set to expire Jan. 9. It is being supervised by the Catholic Church and the United Nations. We are willing to agree a new ceasefire once we have jointly evaluated at the negotiating table the progress, confidence and results of the current one, the group said in an open letter to the U.N. posted on the ELN s Twitter account. The ELN added that it would also assess the government s willingness to overcome hurdles at the talks. The 2,000-strong ELN, which has regularly bombed oil infrastructure and taken hostages, has continued kidnapping despite the ceasefire. An indigenous leader in Choco province died in October after being detained by the group. | 0fake |
Kuwait foreign ministry orders its nationals to leave Lebanon immediately: KUNA | RIYADH (Reuters) - Kuwait s foreign ministry ordered its nationals to leave Lebanon immediately, according to a statement on Thursday carried by state news agency KUNA. The decision came hours after Saudi Arabia warned its citizens against traveling to Lebanon and asked those in the country to leave as soon as possible. | 0fake |
How A Communist Brainwashing Method Came To The US | How A Communist Brainwashing Method Came To The US CIA learns from communists Image Credits: Luo Shaoyang via Flickr .
During the height of the Cold War, the CIA attempted to develop mind control techniques with the MKULTRA program.
As it happens, the Communists already had a leg up on them. We’ll explore how this was done, along with some new twists.
The criticism and self-criticism technique in history
The technique of “criticism and self-criticism” (kritika i samokritika) was developed during the early days of the Soviet Union. This got results. When the early Soviet show trials and purges took place, the targets would confess to committing treason—the details stretching credulity—and beg for execution. The Maoists (Chinese Communists) used it too, typically during “struggle sessions.” Also, forced confessions were required in Vietnam for prisoners in reeducation camps.
What happened wasn’t much different from a medieval inquisition. Those targeted would be badgered until they confessed to whatever it was they supposedly did. Of course, physical forms of coercion were also an option. These weren’t actual trials; their fates were already decided. | 1real |
Obama Just Did Something To Spite Trump On The President-Elect’s Very First Visit To The White House | By Jameson Parker Election 2016 , Politics November 10, 2016 Obama Just Did Something To Spite Trump On The President-Elect’s Very First Visit To The White House
Nobody is more disgusted and disappointed in the election results than President Barack Obama, whose legacy of progress is poised to be undone overnight by a belligerent con man. And apparently the first meeting between current and future presidents was off to a rocky start – culminating with Obama abruptly breaking with tradition and not giving Trump the satisfaction of a publicity win on this sad day.
According to reporters at the White House , Obama cancelled a planned “photo op” with Trump shortly after meeting him, depriving the president-elect of the chance to appear alongside the current president and gain an air of legitimacy.
The Obamas canceled a photo-op of the current and future first couples outside the south entrance of the White House. In his first visit to the White House after the 2008 election, Mr. Obama and first lady Michelle Obama posed for the cameras alongside President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush. The decision not to participate in this tradition illustrates how bitter the campaign was, particularly for Mrs. Obama who delivered some of the most emotional arguments against electing Mr. Trump.
It may also suggest that Obama’s first meeting with Trump went about as badly as expected. The president had hoped to press Trump on the importance of governing the country with a semblance of dignity, as well as making the case that spending his first day in office signing a bunch of executive orders to erase Obama’s legacy out of spite would be a horrific start to his time in office. It appears that Trump was not in the a mood to listen.
Mr. Earnest said Mr. Obama would go through with Mr. Trump the policies he has implemented that he hopes his successor won’t undo. But Mr. Trump is expected to attempt to unravel much of Mr. Obama’s legacy, with plans to reverse his policies on health care, climate change, immigration and government regulations, and to dramatically shift his foreign-policy approach.
The fact that Obama would break this tradition – a symbolic gesture of the peaceful transition of power – implies he is keenly aware that the man about to take over is a walking, talking disaster. A pathological liar and narcissist who has surrounded himself with a team of goons that he can count on to tell him what he wants to here and claw their way up his coattails at every chance. No photo op is going to change this tragedy from unfolding.
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Moscow may demand U.S. cut diplomatic staff in Russia to 300 or below: RIA | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia does not rule out ordering the United States to cut its diplomatic staff in Russia to 300 people or fewer, RIA news agency quoted senior Foreign Ministry official Georgy Borisenko as saying on Wednesday. In July, Moscow told the United States to slash the number of its diplomatic and technical staff working in Russia by around 60 percent, to 455, in a further sign of souring relations. The figure of 455 was meant to mirror the total number of Russian diplomats working in the United States, but also included Russian nationals working at the United Nations in New York, Borisenko, head of the Foreign Ministry s North America Department, told RIA. The fact that in the summer we took into account the people working for Russia s mission at the U.N., this was good will, Borisenko said. If they haven t appreciated this, we have the full right to reduce ... the number of U.S. diplomats, he said, adding that Moscow could stop taking Russian U.N. staff into account when calculating what parity between the two countries meant. In this case, the number of American personnel in Russia should decline to a level of 300 or below. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said Washington hoped that complying with the Russian requirements would mean both countries could stop trading retaliatory measures, RIA later reported. The deterioration of relations does not serve the interests of either side. We hope that the downward trend in relations has come to an end, RIA quoted embassy spokeswoman Maria Olson as saying. | 0fake |
Macri vows now, "mature" relationship with the U.S. | BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentine leader Mauricio Macri said Wednesday’s state visit by U.S. President Barack Obama marked the start of new “mature” relations in which the countries would cooperate on issues ranging from trade to fighting international drug trafficking. | 0fake |
HOW COLLEGES PUNISH HIGH ACHIEVERS: Check “African American” On SAT Test, ADD 230 Points…Check “Asian,” DEDUCT 50 Points | This is a stunning story of how the Left gets away with punishing hard work and accomplishment all in the name of fairness. Who decides which minority population is more important than another? In a windowless classroom at an Arcadia tutoring center, parents crammed into child-sized desks and dug through their pockets and purses for pens as Ann Lee launches a PowerPoint presentation.Her primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.Then she eases into a potentially incendiary topic one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid. Let s talk about Asians, she says.Lee s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term bonus to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant s race is worth. She points to the first column.African Americans received a bonus of 230 points, Lee says.She points to the second column. Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points. The last column draws gasps.Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission. Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes, Lee says. Zenme keyi, one mother hisses in Chinese. How can this be possible?College admission season ignites deep anxieties for Asian American families, who spend more than any other demographic on education. At elite universities across the U.S., Asian Americans form a larger share of the student body than they do of the population as a whole. And increasingly they have turned against affirmative action policies that could alter those ratios, and accuse admissions committees of discriminating against Asian American applicants.Everyone works hard and struggles. But there s this feeling that it s going to be harder for us. Lawrence Leonn, 16HERE is a perfect example of how Americans have allowed Asian minority status to be discounted in favor of the more vocal Black students on campus:And there is the case of the young Asian reporter who dared to attempt to cover University Of Missouri s Black Lives Matter event. There was certainly no media outcry at the bullying and the horrible treatment he received by students and faculty alike. Click HERE for the full story and video.That perspective has pitted them against advocates for diversity: More college berths for Asian American students mean fewer for black and Latino students, who are statistically underrepresented at top universities.But in the San Gabriel Valley s hyper-competitive ethnic Asian communities, arguments for diversity can sometimes fall on deaf ears. For immigrant parents raised in Asia s all-or-nothing test cultures, a good education is not just a measure of success it s a matter of survival. They see academic achievement as a moral virtue, and families organize their lives around their child s education, moving to the best school districts and paying for tutoring and tennis lessons. An acceptance letter from a prestigious college is often the only acceptable return on an investment that stretches over decades.Lee is the co-founder of HS2 Academy, a college prep business that assumes that racial bias is a fact of college admissions and counsels students accordingly. At 10 centers across the state, the academy s counselors teach countermeasures to Asian American applicants. The goal, Lee says, is to help prospective college students avoid coming off like another cookie-cutter Asian. Being of Asian descent, the junior says, is a disadvantage. The problem, she says, is in the numbers.Asian families flock to the San Gabriel Valley s school districts because they have some of the highest Academic Performance Index scores in the state. But with hundreds of top-performing students at each high school, focusing on a small set of elite institutions, it s easy to get lost in the crowd.Of the school s 4,000 students, nearly 3,000 are of Asian descent, and like Yue are willing to do whatever it takes to gain entrance to a prestigious university. They will study until they can t remember how to have fun and stuff their schedules with extracurriculars. But there s an important part of their college applications that they can t improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity.In the San Gabriel Valley, where aspirationally named tutoring centers such as Little Harvard and Ivy League cluster within walking distance of high schools, many of them priced more cheaply than a baby-sitter, it didn t take long for some centers to respond to students and parents fears of being edged out of a top school because of some intangible missing quality. I don t want to be racist or anything, Lawrence said. Everyone works hard and struggles. But there s this feeling that it s going to be harder for us. Complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students. In November, a group called Students for Fair Admissions filed a suit against Harvard University for admissions policies that allegedly discriminate against Asian Americans. The group cited the 2004 Princeton study and other sources that offer statistics about Asian Americans test performance.At the University of Texas at Austin, an affirmative action policy that allows admissions committees to consider the race of prospective applicants has been argued all the way to the Supreme Court. (The policies were upheld by a lower court, but that court s decision was voided by the Supreme Court. Another court upheld the policies and another appeal is pending.)Those who defend holistic admissions policies insist that considering a broader range of variables ensures that all applicants are judged fairly. And the Princeton study Lee refers to has been widely criticized by academics who argue that it relies too heavily on grades and test scores to draw conclusions about racial bias and that the data the study uses are too old to be relevant.Still, anxiety over racial admissions rates is peaking as cash-crunched public universities increasingly favor high-paying out-of-state and foreign students at the expense of local applicants of every ethnicity. A 2014 bill that would have asked voters to consider restoring race as a factor in admissions to public California colleges and universities sparked multiple public protests and scathing editorials in Chinese newspapers. The bill, Senate Constitutional Amendment 5, was shelved last year. That same ethic causes parents and students to agonize over which box, if any, to check on the race and nationality section of the application. One parent asked Zell whether it would help to legally change the family name to something more Western-sounding.Last year, a rumor that Harvard University would stop accepting any more Asian American students from San Marino High School spread like a trending hashtag.Mollie Beckler, a counselor at San Marino High School, says that Harvard never imposed such a rule. School counselors are continually trying to dispel myths like these, she says, if only in hopes of slightly lowering the huge stress students shoulder because of their intense focus on elite schools. The feeling of failure they get from trying to reach such high standards, she said, is very concerning to us in the counseling world. Only a few of the San Gabriel Valley s tutoring centers confront the ethnic admissions issue head-on.Jamie Aviles, a counselor at the ACI Institute, doesn t teach ways to overcome perceived racial bias, she says. But she and many other counselors do agree on at least one thing.As Aviles puts it: It sucks to be a kid in the San Gabriel Valley. Via: LA Times | 1real |
ISIS Claims Responsibility for Istanbul Nightclub Attack - The New York Times | ISTANBUL — The Islamic State on Monday issued a rare claim of responsibility for an attack in Turkey after a New Year’s Day shooting at an Istanbul nightclub that killed at least 39 people, describing the gunman who carried out the assault — and who has not been identified or captured — as “a hero soldier of the caliphate. ” The Turkish authorities are still searching for the gunman, who killed a police officer guarding the Reina nightclub before going on a shooting rampage with a rifle, but the state news media reported that eight suspects had been detained in connection with the attack. The authorities on Monday released two photographs of the person suspected of being the gunman, captured by security cameras, that showed a cleanshaven man in a dark winter coat. The government’s spokesman, Numan Kurtulmus, said at a news conference that investigators believed they found the assailant’s fingerprints and that they were close to identifying him. Mr. Kurtulmus did not mention the Islamic State specifically, but he said Turkey would press the fight against terrorism. Referring to the attack, which happened just after midnight on Sunday morning, Mr. Kurtulmus said: “The fact that it was done during the first minutes of 2017 gives an important message. The message is, ‘We will go on to menace Turkey in 2017.’ And we say to them, we will break into your caves wherever you are. ” The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported on Monday that the gunman might be from Kyrgyzstan or elsewhere in Central Asia. The Russian news agency Interfax quoted Aiymkan Kulukeyeva, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Kyrgyzstan, as saying, “According to preliminary information, this information is doubtful, but we are checking all the same. ” The Islamic State asserted in a statement that the attack had been carried out “in continuation of the blessed operations that the Islamic State is conducting against Turkey, the protector of the cross. ” “A hero soldier of the caliphate attacked one of the most famous nightclubs, where Christians celebrated their pagan holiday,” read the statement from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “They used hand grenades and a machine gun and transformed their celebration to mourning. ” In an apparent reference to Turkey’s role in the conflict in Syria, the statement warned that “the government of Turkey should know that the blood of Muslims, which it is targeting with its planes and its guns, will cause a fire in its home by God’s will. ” The statement did not name the assailant, and it was not clear whether the Islamic State had organized the attack or had merely inspired the gunman. But the shooting came just days after a State group, the Nashir Media Foundation, published the latest in a series of messages calling for attacks on clubs, markets and movie theaters. The Islamic State’s claim of responsibility came after years of complex relations between the Turkish state and the jihadist group operating across its southern border. Several terrorist attacks in Turkey over the last year have been attributed to the Islamic State, but the militant group rarely claims responsibility for major attacks in the country. A rare exception came in November, when the group claimed to be behind a deadly car bombing in southeastern Turkey. Analysts said that the Islamic State has walked a fine line in Turkey, trying to balance its goal of destabilizing the country without antagonizing the government to the extent that it would crack down heavily. For years, Turkey looked the other way, according to analysts and regional diplomats, as jihadist groups moved fighters and supplies across the border, establishing deep networks in Turkish border towns. Committed to supporting the uprising against President Bashar of Syria, Turkey felt the jihadists could be managed while they fought with forces loyal to the Syrian government. But that policy ultimately changed, as Turkey worked to secure its borders, under pressure from its allies as it took in millions of Syrian refugees and as terrorist attacks rocked the country. Turkey began a military intervention in northern Syria in August that put its forces on the front lines against Kurdish militants as well as Islamic State fighters. This turned the jihadists decidedly against Turkey, prompting their leaders to call for attacks there. The Turkish military said on Monday that it had struck Islamic State targets in Syria, killing at least 22 militants. American intelligence officials had recently expressed concern about a possible attack in Turkey, warning in a statement on Dec. 22 that extremist groups were “continuing aggressive efforts to conduct attacks throughout Turkey” in areas where American citizens and expatriates lived or visited. That warning came three days after a gunman, described by Turkish officials as a police officer, assassinated Andrey G. Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, at an art gallery in the capital, Ankara. The gunman shouted “God is great!” and “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!” during the attack, which was captured on video. The Anadolu news agency said that 38 of the 39 people who died in the attack on Sunday had been identified, The Associated Press reported. At least two dozen of the people killed were said to be foreigners. | 0fake |
Hot Mic Captures Humiliating Moment Trump Tells Christie To Leave Stage (VIDEO) | Thankfully, Chris Christie proved he was beyond shame when he endorsed Donald Trump for president, but this moment had to sting a little bit.In a humiliating moment for the one-time Republican presidential candidate, a hot mic captured the way Donald Trump treats his new lap dog and it isn t pretty.At a rally, Christie seemed to think he would share the stage with Trump during Trump s portion of the event, but apparently the idea of sharing a spotlight with a former rival wasn t something Trump was about to let happen. Shaking Christie s hand, Trump leans in and whispers, Get on the plane and go home. It s over there. Go home. Christie at first continues waving, then simply says Okay and walks towards the exit.Here s the video:Whether Trump was trying to be nice by sparing Christie yet another stump speech is not clear, but what is clear is that Trump would much prefer it if his friends avoided trying to take too much of the attention away from him.It s probably a tough pill to swallow, but Christie must surely realize by now that by endorsing Trump, he doesn t get to share in the Republican front-runners spotlight. Viciously jealous, astoundingly egotistical, Trump has always been a one-man operation. He will share his fame with no one.Christie, of course, knows all of this. Months ago he was loudly suggesting that Trump was not presidential material. And just 19 days before saying this There is no one who is better prepared to provide America with the strong leadership that it needs both at home and around the world than Donald Trump, Christie said, he is looking at the five people on that stage last night the clear standout and the person who will do exactly what needs to be done to make America a leader around the world again. Christie was saying this Bravado, by itself, is not a plan, he said, I like him, he s a good person, he s just not the right person to be President of the United States and not the person that we d want representing our country. Now that Christie needs to take orders from Trump, mockery was quick on social media.Trump to Christie. https://t.co/MWgqPSr2sF deray mckesson (@deray) February 28, 2016Too good. https://t.co/dtSXNDji3l Michael Moore (@MMFlint) February 28, 2016And now Trump appears to tell Christie to go home https://t.co/ePO3KdfAia Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 27, 2016Christie's face when Trump tells him to go home .Crestfallen. https://t.co/3GTvTwaqqY Peter Hasson (@peterjhasson) February 28, 2016Will Christie be relieved to go back home to New Jersey? It doesn t seem likely. Having been on the road for the last few months, Christie has gotten the luxury of forgetting the mess that he left behind in the state he is supposed to be governing. But now it appears he doesn t have much choice. Get on the plane and go home, Christie.Featured image via ABC News screengrab | 1real |
Re: WE’RE NOT NASTY! Like all Democrats, Sally Kohn proves how little she thinks of women with this tweet | WE’RE NOT NASTY! Why does Sally Kohn hate women so much? Posted at 4:56 pm on October 27, 2016 by Sam J. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
So tired of the notion that women have to be nasty to make a dent in this world, that women have to be hateful or mean to get things done.
Women who do not live life as a caricature are fully capable of getting “sh*t” done without having to be unkind, mean, disingenuous OR nasty.
And the fact that Sally Kohn and other Democrats don’t get this is just more evidence of how little they really think of women in general.
Take for example this tweet from Sally herself:
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) October 27, 2016
Oh look a mom with her daughter instilling in her the same awful idea, that women have to be nasty to get something done. Trending The McAuliffe -- FBI -- Clinton payoff story just got a whole lot worse
Stupid. Moms are fully capable of teaching their daughters how to get things done without being horrible. Of course that probably just confuses the Left but the stereotypical “ME WOMAN ME ROAR” is ridiculous in the real world and most moms know this.
Awww, but then the Left doesn’t really live in the real world now do they? @sallykohn @RebeccaSoffer And exactly what has Hillary gotten done?
— Calamity Jan (@janetbfitzgeral) October 27, 2016
Besides set women back years with this nonsense about being nasty?
She did leave four Americans to die in Benghazi and illegally keep a server in her home before deleting tens of thousands of emails, but we digress. | 1real |
BURN! NYT TAKES JAB AT FOX NEWS…Watch How FOX Got Even in a Big Way! [Video] | Sometimes, the left just makes it far too easy to win.It is a well-known fact that President Trump is a big fan of FNC s FOX & Friends, tweeting about it often. New York Times James Poniewozik recently ran a hit piece criticizing the show for its friendly relationship with the president, stating that President Trump is the show s subject, its programmer, its publicist and its virtual fourth host. The stars offer him flattery, encouragement and advice. While furthering his point, Poniewozik complimented the morning show by calling it the most powerful TV show in America due to Trump s support. Instead of getting mad, FNC got even. They purchased ads in the New Yorks Times featuring its own accidental compliment. A Fox News source confirmed that the advertisement was in direct response to the article. But the sweet revenge didn t end there. After hearing about FNC s clever move in response to Poniewozik s piece, President Trump tweeted his own jab at the New York Times:Wow, the Failing @nytimes said about @foxandfriends .the most powerful T.V. show in America. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2017 FOX & Friends host Steve Doocy held up the ad on air to share the victory with viewers. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt gave the show s viewers all the credit, saying we have the best viewers. You guys are so awesome. Long-time host Brian Kilmeade joked that it must have been tough for the Times to admit the success of the show before stating the ad was also featured in the New York Post.Looks like Trump isn t the only one in town who can go head to head with the liberal media and come out on top.Read more: Biz Pac Review | 1real |
The Big Squeeze: This election year, it’s all about the money | MIDDLETOWN, CONN. - Two years ago, Judy Konopka and Craig Diangelo lost their jobs in the IT department of what was then known as Northeast Utilities, a regional electricity provider, when the company decided to replace about 220 employees with guest workers from India. In order to receive a more lucrative separation package, they had to train their foreign replacements both here and overseas. Both had trouble finding new work. Konopka, 56, is still looking. Diangelo, 64, is working as a contractor for a company that provides no benefits, making substantially less than he did before. He views himself as a victim of globalization, a casualty of offshoring—and he credits Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who has cast himself as the champion of displaced and disaffected U.S. workers, for bringing the issue to light. “I’ll vote for him,” says Diangelo, over dinner at a Thai restaurant on this town’s Main Street. Two others at the table murmur in assent. He continues, his voice rising: “I wasn’t planning on retiring early. I wasn’t planning on making $35,000 less. I’ve had to cut back a lot. I basically live paycheck to paycheck.” “I could never vote for Hillary Clinton,” Diangelo says, citing Clinton’s support of the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed while her husband, Bill, was president, as well as her advocacy of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact that’s still being negotiated by the Obama administration. (Challenged by Bernie Sanders, Clinton has since retracted her support of TPP.) Even Konopka, who favors Clinton (she calls Trump “the biggest idiot”), has to admit Clinton’s support of trade deals such as NAFTA gives her pause. When Northeast Utilities fired her after 21 years, “I felt betrayed.” Konopka took advantage of a federal trade assistance program to improve her skills in web design, then discovered she couldn’t compete with designers outside the country who were willing to work for much less. Now, to get by, she sells vintage books on the web. “It’s starting to get really scary,” she says. This presidential election is, purportedly, the Year of the Angry Voter, with images of scuffles at Trump rallies occupying cable-news screens. But as befitting someone who lives in a place called Middletown, Konopka is more typical of voters: consumed by a stomach-churning uncertainty, a vague sense of something lost, and an inescapable belief that an array of powerful forces—corporations, politicians, government—aren’t looking out for them. Economists and pundits have been struggling to explain why, with unemployment below 5 percent and a bounty of positive economic indicators, voters seem so dismayed, so distrustful. It might be something as simple as bargaining power. In his best-known book, The Art of the Deal, Trump advises every negotiator to “use your leverage.” But increasingly, U.S. workers, white-and blue-collar alike, feel they have none. They’ve seen their power erode as they are tossed into a global labor pool, as companies consolidate and shed jobs to please Wall Street, as unions wither, state budgets tighten, technology advances and iconic brands such as Nabisco pack up and move to Mexico. The squeeze is on. “There’s a feeling among workers that not only are they replaceable, but that they will be replaced,” says Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts. “That there is no security anymore, that someone is making a profit by letting them go.” “Trump,” he adds, “has tapped into that very well.” According to Reuters/Ipsos polling, 71 percent of Trump supporters either have had to take a lower-paying job in the last few years, have a family member who has had to do so, or have a family member whose home has been threatened by foreclosure. In a sign of how widespread the phenomenon has become, 63 percent of Clinton supporters reported the same dismal tally. “People feel more insecure about trade than terrorism,” Chaison tells me. “Everyone knows someone who has lost their job.” What bothers Diangelo most is that he was let go by a company that still valued his skill—just not him. “The sad part is that my job is still there,” he says. “It didn’t go away. I went away.” None of this should feel particularly new. The United States has been bleeding middle-class workers—especially in the industrial and manufacturing sectors—as long as Bruce Springsteen has been around to sing about it. Candidates adorned with hard hats vowing to bring back factory jobs have become a set-piece of modern politics. The United States has lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs in the past 15 years as the trade deficit has mushroomed, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington. Wage growth in almost all sectors has flatlined over that time, including for the bottom 70 percent of fouryear college graduates—and growth overall has been anemic, at under 2 percent. And while the 9 million jobs vaporized in the flash of the Great Recession have been recovered, the majority of them are of lesser quality than the ones they replaced. Perhaps most fundamentally, the relationship between employee and employer has shifted. Workers’ share of the pie has decreased substantially since the 1970s, when the country’s corporate and industrial base began to erode. Last year, workers’ share dropped to 75.5 percent of corporate income, even as technology has made workforces more productive and efficient. U.S. corporate profits, meantime, returned to pre-recession levels in 2012. Workers “sense that the recovery is only partial. It helps employers more than it helps workers,” Chaison says. If workers’ sense of slippage seems familiar, the way their discontent is rippling through our politics feels newly transformative. Voters threw out the Republicans running Congress in 2006, then two years later elected the first African-American president, an outsider who vowed reform. Souring on him, they replaced Democrats then controlling Congress with another set of Republicans in 2010 and 2014, making governance as unstable as the business sector. In a period of war, terrorism and economic chaos, all that churn might best be viewed as a deeply frustrated electorate trying to use what little leverage they have to change a system they consider to be otherwise unaccountable. Trump has been the main beneficiary of that frustration. He makes those in the crowd feel like they matter, that they finally have a bully of their own who can push back at what they view as an alliance of unprincipled corporate culture and an enabling government. “You’re looking at a situation where the jobs are being ripped out of our states, out of our country, like candy from a baby,” Trump said at a rally this spring. It has been Trump, along with Democrat Sanders, who has pushed the issue of job losses to countries such as China, Mexico and India to the forefront. Trump has threatened to slap a tax on imports and tear up trade deals. In Indiana earlier this year, he ripped air conditioner manufacturer Carrier for announcing it would lay off 2,100 workers and move its operations to Mexico. He gave Nabisco the same treatment, pledging he would no longer eat Oreos. He has slammed companies such as Apple and Boeing for their overseas operations, as well. Few presidential candidates have such temerity to challenge well-known American brands, but clearly it is resonating. “They might not like everything he says, but they believe he says what he thinks,” Lewis Gossett, president of the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, told me last summer. “I think we’re repeating a time in history when the very rich are removed from the very poor.” Michael Smith is one of the Americans Trump rallies for. Smith was among 600 Nabisco employees laid off at the bakery on Chicago’s South Side earlier this year, after the company announced it was transferring some work to Mexico. He got the news at 3 a.m. “It was,” Smith tells me, “a dark night when all your livelihood passes in front of you, and you feel like you’ve been given the royal shaft.” Smith operated the machines that wrapped Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers. With overtime, he could clear $85,000 a year. He’s 59 and wasn’t thinking he would have to re-enter the job market. The day before, Smith had shown up at a shareholders meeting in Chicago to confront Irene Rosenfeld, the chief executive of Mondelez International, the holding company that oversees the Nabisco brand, about the move to Mexico. While sympathetic, Rosenfeld said it was her duty to maximize the corporation’s value to its shareholders worldwide by cutting costs. “There are two types of CEO mindsets,” Smith responded, “those who care about shareholders and those who care about the shareholders and the people.” In our conversation, Smith didn’t begrudge the company’s legal right to relocate the jobs, but he questions a CEO who earned more than $40 million in compensation over the last two years exhorting the virtues of cost-cutting to a room full of laid-off blue-collar workers. “That’s not good citizenship,” he says. “Wealth comes from the workers. That profitability comes from us.” Clinton met with a small group of the Nabisco workers in March, the day before the Illinois primary. But the visit didn’t leave Smith with much hope that as president she could do much either for the workers’ situation or to reverse the demands of a globalized economy. In part, that’s due to Clinton’s support of NAFTA, which Smith terms an “infection,” but also because of the lobbying might of Mondelez, a $30 billion company, and other big corporations. Smith is the unusual American voter who says he hasn’t decided between Clinton and Trump. He’ll focus on the election later. First, he has to keep his household afloat and his daughter in school at Columbia College in Chicago. He has six months’ salary to cushion him. He’s trying to stay optimistic about finding work, saying his wife and daughter are counting on him. But, he concedes, “I think I have been a little bit in denial. Even people of faith have bouts of depression.” Angela Valero gives a one-word reply when I ask her about a potential Clinton-Trump matchup: “Ugh.” I might as well be asking about who’s going to win the next regatta on Mars, so far is the election from her daily concerns. Valero’s dream job was to be a corrections officer. She was finally hired on by the state of Connecticut last fall. The single mother of an 8-year-old girl thought that, at last, she had a reliable, stable position with benefits. But after completing an academy training course and being posted as a guard at the state maximum-security facility in nearby Uncasville, she found out this spring that she was being laid off, a consequence of a decision made by Connecticut’s Democratic governor, Dannel Malloy, and the state legislature to not raise taxes on the wealthy to cover a budget shortfall. Lawmakers worried that the state’s richest residents would relocate to Florida, which has no state income tax, or other states with lower taxes. During the downturn, Connecticut lost a bevy of high-paying jobs in the financial services sector in the corporate hub of Stamford and elsewhere. The jobs created during the recovery were less lucrative, resulting in lower tax revenue. In addition, the state was spooked when General Electric, responding to an effort by the legislature to raise business taxes, announced it was relocating its headquarters from Fairfield to Boston. Aetna, the health insurer based in Hartford, also threatened to leave the state. That shelved any notion of new taxes. The state looked to trim its public workforce instead. “Easy targets,” says Lori Pelletier, president of the state AFL-CIO. Rape counselors, child-service workers, prison guards began receiving pink slips. Ultimately, 2,500 or more state workers could be let go. Pelletier contrasted that with the 200 jobs GE is moving to Boston—something that drew substantial media attention. The state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston helped recruit GE with a generous benefit package, including $25 million in property tax relief for a corporation that critics have long held pays little in U.S. taxes. “Angela last year paid more taxes than GE,” Pelletier says. “And she’s the one losing her job.” Valero tells me she has little faith that anyone in Washington can help her. She doesn’t sleep more than four hours a night, kept up by worrying about paying the electric bill and keeping her house. She has no idea whether she’ll ever be recalled to work. Throughout the interview, she stays stoic, determined, like the corrections office she was trained to be. Only at the end of our conversation does she slip a bit. “I held back the tears,” she says with relief. Ron Ozer greets me at the door with the sheepishness of someone who isn’t used to being at home during the workday. Ozer, 53, was laid off from DuPont Co. in January after a 23-year career. A Ph.D in chemical engineering, he has more than 20 patents to his name. He worked on long-term projects at the DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware, one of the more storied research facilities in the country, where products such as nylon, Lycra and Kevlar were created. “Some of the great developments in American industry came out of that site,” Ozer says. “It was a time when America was growing so dramatically.” But a lack of growth and pressure from investors forced DuPont to announce a merger with another giant, Dow Chemical. In advance of the merger, it has begun to shed jobs. In Delaware alone, DuPont plans to dump 1,700 workers—many in the area of long-term research, which can be expensive without yielding immediate rewards to shareholders. Ozer’s group was eviscerated. The $130 billion merger of DuPont and Dow blends two U.S. companies that date back to the 19th century. Barry Lynn, an economist at the New America think tank, says that industry consolidation chills the labor market, sapping demand for skilled workers such as Ozer. Dominant companies can use their market power to charge customers more or make suppliers pay less—all without having to grow and create jobs to survive. Indeed, the push from Wall Street is to cull and cut, not grow. And when companies do expand today it’s largely through acquisition, not investment. “That’s a huge amount of the energy that’s behind Trump,” Lynn says, “the sense of power being consolidated and being out of control and harming me and my family and my community.” Ozer will try to take advantage of his contacts at DuPont to become a consultant, but admits that’s a gamble. Asked if he thinks he can replicate the six-figure salary he enjoyed at DuPont, he laughs. “I’m not confident of that.” His chief concern is his two daughters, both of whom are out of college. In order to give his youngest a leg up in the market, he sent her to private Haverford College in Pennsylvania (tuition: $46,000)—going deep into debt to do so. “I have a lot of possibilities, but I need things to start turning into dollars soon,” he says. For Sara Blackwell, representing U.S. workers displaced by the federal H1-B visa program began as a gig. Now, it’s a full-blown cause. The Tampa lawyer has been giving away clients who would distract her from her work. She jokes she’s stopped sleeping and exercising. Recently, she launched a website called ProtectUSworkers.com. “I speak to an average of 10 people a day who are victims of this,” she tells me. “The more I learn about this, the more I have to fight.” She began by representing IT workers at Walt Disney World in Florida who were replaced by guest workers from India brought in on temporary visas by outsourcing firms that contracted with Disney. She has filed a long-shot conspiracy lawsuit in federal court. Blackwell contends that the practice of outsourcing low-end, back-office IT jobs to cut costs has become endemic. Globalization, she says, is systematically lowering the standard of living of American workers. “It’s a race to the bottom,” she says. The Disney case garnered the attention of some in the U.S. Senate, including Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who now is at the forefront of a fight against the American tech industry, which wants to expand the guest-worker program citing a lack of domestic qualified engineers and programmers. But those tech companies are at the back of the line. According to Ron Hira, a professor at Howard University who tracks applications, outsourcing firms have been crowding out tech companies in the race to acquire the highly coveted H1-B visas, which are capped at 85,000 a year. Sessions, who is also a fierce opponent of immigration reform, was one of the first U.S. politicians to embrace Trump—and Blackwell has spoken out against the program at several Trump rallies. She also has consulted with the outsourced employees who worked at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut, including Craig Diangelo. Part of Diangelo’s frustration—and part of what is driving him toward Trump—is that Washington has done so little to curb what he views as abuses of the H1-B program. There is a greater push now on Capitol Hill to broaden the program rather than rein it in. “There’s nobody to help us,” he tells me. “There’s nobody to say you can’t do this.” Richard Blumenthal, a U.S. senator from Connecticut, has been part of efforts to expand the program, but also to reform it. “It’s a desperately serious problem,” he says. He told me that even though there is some bipartisan consensus on reform, efforts still aren’t moving forward, consumed by the same paralysis that’s stalling everything else. “There are powerful forces against us,” Blumenthal says, “including the companies that exploit these programs.” To Diangelo, that’s the dilemma of the modern, middle-class voter. He worked hard for years, lost his job when his only transgression was being too old and making too much money, was humiliated when he had to train his replacement, and then watched how state and federal politicians have been able to do nothing to help him. Why shouldn’t he support Donald Trump? What’s worth preserving? He’s a tech worker, sipping Pinot Grigio over pad thai. He’s no militant or conspiracist. Yet... “There is going to be an uprising,” he says. “People are starting to say: `I’ve had enough of this. I’ve really had enough.’” This report first appeared in “The American Voter,” Reuters’ special election issue, available on iTunes or Google Play. | 0fake |
Winners and losers from the 7th Republican presidential debate | Seven of the eight leading Republican presidential candidates gathered in Iowa on Thursday night for the seventh debate of the race. Donald Trump, the race's clear front-runner, was less than 10 miles away from the debate site — holding his own counter-rally after deciding not to participate for decidedly vague reasons.
I watched the whole thing. (We also annotated it!) Below is my take on the best and the worst from the night that was.
• Rand Paul: Maybe the senator just needed to take a debate off. After not making the main stage in the sixth debate (and refusing to appear in the undercard debate), Paul was a major player in this one. He showed off his trademark willingness to needle the other candidates — he went after Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz at various points — but also offered nuanced thoughts on racial profiling and abortion. This was the Paul whom many political observers — myself included — thought we might see in this campaign: A candidate willing and able to speak to issues his party has struggled to address in recent years. Too little, too late. But, at least he had a moment.
• Megyn Kelly: There has rarely been a debate moderator who has come under as much scrutiny as Kelly has during the course of this campaign. Despite all of that negative attention, Kelly showed on Thursday night why she is the face of Fox News. She was pointed, tough and well-versed on the issues. And, more important to me? She showed her sense of humor and a willingness to not take herself too seriously. That she performed so well with so many eyes on her speaks incredibly highly of her abilities.
• Jeb Bush: If you had any doubt about how much Donald Trump is in Bush's head, this debate should have cleared it up. The former Florida governor was, from the get-go, more relaxed and more forceful in this Trump-less debate than he has been in the previous six debates where Trump was included. He owned his family's political legacy unapologetically. He fought Rubio to a draw in an immigration back and forth. He regularly was the only candidate — aside from Paul — who answered the questions asked of him. Bush is still a somewhat (okay, very) awkward candidate — his halting closing statement was painful — who doesn't really like going on the attack. But, without Trump looming over him, Bush looked positively presidential.
• Video reels of past candidate statements: Fox ran video clips of both Rubio and Cruz saying things in the past that they have run away from in this campaign. And it was great! This is what debates should be about. Holding candidates accountable. Asking them to explain why what they said four years ago isn't what they are saying now. I only wish Fox did this for all of the candidates.
• Commercials: Thank you, Fox News! A commercial every 30 minutes or so worked nicely both with my bathroom needs and my desire to consume somewhere between 100 and 120 Oreos. #blessed
• Ted Cruz: He did the thing I hate the most in debates — complain about the rules — when he tried to game a bit more talking time and got shut down by moderator Chris Wallace. The senator's joking threat that if he kept taking incoming from the other candidates he might leave the stage (Trump reference!) fell flat. He was on the wrong end of a scolding by Paul over his conservative righteousness. And, time and time again, Cruz found himself insisting that on a panoply of issues — military spending, immigration etc. — everyone was either wrong about his position or didn't understand it well enough. That's too much defense for Cruz to play — especially in a debate without Trump.
• Ben Carson: Whoa boy. Carson swung from barely being asked any questions to providing answers that often bordered on incoherence. His response to a question about how to deal with Russia simply made no sense — further adding to the narrative that he is far, far out of his depth on foreign policy. At one point, he seemed stunned to even get a question, which isn't the best look for a guy running to be the leader of a 300-million-person country. Carson looked out of his league tonight.
• Chris Christie: The New Jersey governor felt a little like a Johnny One-Note tonight. For every question he was asked, the answer was how terrible Hillary Clinton is, was and will be. Okay, I get that bashing Clinton is never a bad idea in a Republican primary, but the strategy made Christie look very two-dimensional and brought to my mind memories of Rudy Giuliani's campaign in 2008. And not in a good way.
* Fox News Channel: The simple fact is that from an entertainment perspective, this debate was less interesting than virtually all of the previous six. The reason? Trump wasn't there. That, of course, is not entirely (or even mainly) Fox's fault. But, my guess is that the ratings for this debate will be significantly lower than the other Republican debates on major cable channels. And, if you don't think ratings are the way networks judge success, I have a whole mess of compact discs — they're the future of music! — to sell you. | 0fake |
Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch Heads to Senate Confirmation Hearings - Breitbart | WASHINGTON — Senate Judicial Committee members will decide this week whether to propel Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U. S. Supreme Court, in what would be a lasting and major victory for President Donald Trump. [At 11:00 AM on Monday, Chairman Chuck Grassley ( ) will gavel the Senate Judiciary Committee to order for the Gorsuch confirmation hearings. The entire day is expected to consist of opening statements by the committee members. Gorsuch will be the sole witness before the committee on Tuesday and Wednesday, giving millions of Americans an opportunity to hear from the nominee in his own words. Outside witnesses will then testify before the committee on Thursday, with both friendly and hostile witnesses. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ( ) suggested strong Democratic opposition to Gorsuch, arguing that the current federal appeals judge “harbors a special interest agenda. ” However, no line of attack has gained significant traction. The polished and genial Colorado native appears on a clear path to confirmation. Tentative plans currently call for a committee vote on the nomination on April 3. The White House and Senate Republicans hope to have a final vote of the full Senate to confirm Gorsuch on April 10, in time for the new justice to participate in the Supreme Court’s last sitting of this annual term, which will begin on April 17. Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski. | 0fake |
Sentencing for Murderer of Rare Book Dealer | This past week, on Monday, Oct. 24, 2016, a judge with the Oxford Crown Court in the United Kingdom sentenced Michael Danaher to life in prison for murdering rare book dealer, Adrian Greenwood. The purpose of the crime was to steal a rare first edition of the book, “The Wind in the Willows.” Danaher argued he killed Greenwood in self-defense, yet it only took two hours to render a unanimous guilty charge. Adrian Greenwood, 42, was found dead after being stabbed 30 times at his Oxford home in April.
Prosecuting Attorney Oliver Saxby told the court that this was a “brutal” murder that included stab wounds to the “chest and neck and a deep wound to his back.” There was also evidence of torture and blunt wounds indicating Greenwood had been “stamped on.” The sentence Danaher received for murdering the rare book dealer was life in prison or no less than 34 years. Saxby explained to the court that Danaher stabbed Greenwood until the knife broke, after which he began beating him. Saxby went on to say that Danaher, “cool as you like, he helped himself to that first edition of ‘The Wind in the Willows,’ and Adrian Greenwood’s phone, and his laptop and his wallet.”
The book is valued at £50,000 but Danaher listed it on eBay for only £2,000 after returning home from murdering Greenwood. Danaher learned that Greenwood was in possession of the book after he tried selling a copy on eBay in August of 2015. Danaher had been planning the crime for some time. He also had a list in an Excel file on his laptop titled “Enterprises” of other wealthy persons who were targets. It included their addresses, the method to be used like “stun gun” and the “expected take” from each target. Next to Greenwood’s name on the list Danaher wrote “Modus: Any!! Expected take: rare books.”
Saxby, the prosecutor, told the jury the wealthy targets on Danaher’s list “exudes a sense of resentment. It is almost as if these people who, because of their wealth . . . deserve to be subjected to what he has planned.” The jury was comprised of four women and eight men. The names on the list included Simon Cowel, Kate Moss, Jeffery Archer and others. About two weeks before Danaher’s attack on Greenwood, he tried to break into wealthy businessman Adrian Beecroft’s house pretending to be a delivery man, but Beecroft’s wife believed the man to be suspicious and “raised the alarm,” which caused Danaher to flee. He later drafted a letter on his laptop to Mrs. Beecroft demanding 200 bitcoin or about £96,000 for leaving them alone. The letter was never sent.
The sentencing handed down by the Oxford Crown Court for murdering book dealer Greenwood over “Wind in the Willows” is perhaps a relief to those who were on his list. The author of the book is Kenneth Grahame and it was published in 1908. “Wind in the Willows” is a children’s book known for its “mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality and camaraderie.” Its text is available online for free as part of Project Gutenberg.
By Joel Wickwire
Sources:
BBC News – Man Guilty of Murdering Adrian Greenwood Over “The Wind in the Willow” Book
The Guardian – Alleged Killer of Antiques Deal Had List of Famous Targets, Jury Told
The Las Angeles Times – British Book Dealer Slain for His First Edition of “The Wind in the Willows”
Top and Feature Image Courtesy of Ken Wilcox’s Flicker Page – Creative Commons License
In-Line Image Courtesy of Karen Cox’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
book | 1real |
Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5 Billion Cash Infusion - The New York Times | SAN FRANCISCO — In its quest to build a global empire, Uber has turned to the Middle East for its biggest infusion of cash from a single investor. Uber said on Wednesday that it had raised $3. 5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s main investment fund, in one of the investments into a privately held . The money was part of the giant’s most recent financing round and continued to value Uber at $62. 5 billion. The investment, which was months in the making, does not cash out any of Uber’s existing investors. Uber, which has viewed the Middle East as an important area in its expansion, said the investment further aligned the company with Saudi Arabia as the kingdom planned to transform its economy, reducing its dependence on oil and improving employment. Until now, Saudi Arabia has not been known for venture capital investing, though some members of its royal family have made some deals. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, for instance, has invested in Lyft, a competitor of Uber. “We appreciate the vote of confidence in our business as we continue to expand our global presence,” Travis Kalanick, one of Uber’s founders and its chief executive, said in a statement. “Our experience in Saudi Arabia is a great example of how Uber can benefit riders, drivers and cities and we look forward to partnering to support their economic and social reforms. ” The investment came together after David Plouffe, an Uber board member, traveled to the Middle East in March and was invited to the Saudi fund for a briefing. The discussions heated up thereafter, culminating in the deal. Uber, which is Silicon Valley’s most valuable private business, has collected more than $11 billion from investors since its inception. The company has redefined private drawing hundreds of millions in new cash at a rapid pace of once every six months or so, to fuel its operations globally. Uber has drawn capital from a wide variety of investors, including traditional venture capital firms, mutual fund giants like BlackRock and wealthy clients of firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Other sovereign wealth funds, like that of Qatar, have also invested. Other tech darlings have been busy raising money from private investors as well, pushing back any need to join the public stock markets. The messaging company Snapchat raised $1. 8 billion in its most recent round, according to a regulatory filing last month. Among Snapchat’s new investors in the round were the Alibaba Group of China and the investment firms General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price and Lone Pine Capital. Other tech have not fared as well in raising money over the last several months. Some unicorns — businesses valued at more than $1 billion — have struggled, and several, like the wearables maker Jawbone, have had to raise money at lower valuations. Uber has been spending not only to expand but also to defend its territory — which covers 460 cities in more than 69 countries — against incumbents in regions like Southeast Asia and Europe. China, in particular, is a difficult battleground, as Uber is spending millions in a subsidy war with Didi Chuxing, the dominant in the country. The Middle East is among Uber’s increasingly important overseas markets the company has already said it plans to invest $250 million there. Uber has rolled out its service in 15 cities and nine countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia. The said that it now has over 395, 000 active riders in the Middle East, up fivefold from a year ago, and 19, 000 drivers. Uber said expanding its service may be a boon for Saudi Arabia, a country where women are not allowed to drive because of fatwas, or religious edicts, issued by conservative Muslim clerics that uphold a distinct segregation between the sexes. There is no formal law prohibiting women from driving in the region. “Of course we think women should be allowed to drive,” said Jill Hazelbaker, an Uber spokeswoman. “In the absence of that, we have been able to provide extraordinary mobility that didn’t exist before — and we’re incredibly proud of that. ” Still, Uber did not say that it planned to hire women drivers in the country, unlike in most other regions where the company operates. Roughly 80 percent of Uber’s riders in Saudi Arabia are women, according to the company. Uber has sought to aid the kingdom’s Vision 2030 plan, which includes more than doubling the number of women in the overall work force by 2030, to 30 percent. Princess Reema bint Bandar who sits on Uber’s public policy advisory board, has worked with Uber to usher the service into the country and has the support of female users of the service, said in an interview that the investment was a clear sign of change coming to the region. Saudi Arabia has looked for ways to expand its economy beyond oil, with the Public Investment Fund — which is expected to grow to $2 trillion under management after the country’s oil company goes public — serving as a crucial part of that strategy. The $3. 5 billion investment in Uber is out of the Saudi fund’s roughly $750 billion in total United States assets. Investing in an American company like Uber, however, could run counter to Saudi Arabia’s threat to sell off investments in the United States, issued during discussion about a bill in Congress that would allow the kingdom to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Part of Uber’s possible attraction in bringing in a sovereign wealth fund like Saudi Arabia’s is that such investors have far longer investment horizons than venture capitalists, who generally seek to cash out their investments after seven to 10 years. As part of the investment, the managing director at the Public Investment Fund, Yasir Al Rumayyan, will take a seat on Uber’s board, joining Mr. Kalanick and other directors, including Arianna Huffington. “We’ve seen firsthand how this company has improved urban mobility around the world, and we’re looking forward to being part of that progress,” Mr. Al Rumayyan said in a statement. | 0fake |
Myanmar says two Reuters journalists remanded in custody | YANGON (Reuters) - The two Reuters journalists who were detained in Myanmar on Dec. 12 have appeared in court and been remanded in custody, a police spokesman said on Thursday. Yes, they were sent to the court, said police colonel Myo Thu Soe. The remand has already been obtained. The case is under the Burma State Secrets Act ... so, for now, they are not allowed to meet with anyone and they are being investigated. Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been in detention for nine days with no detail on where they are being held. They have not had access to visitors or lawyers. Pan Ei Mon, Wa Lone s wife, said she was told by police on Thursday that both journalists were well and she was allowed to leave food and clothes for them. The authorities are investigating whether they violated the country s colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years. The two journalists had worked on Reuters coverage of a crisis in the western state of Rakhine, where an estimated 655,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from a fierce military crackdown on militants. The Ministry of Information said last week that Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, had illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media . A spokesman for Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi said on Wednesday that the police had almost completed their investigation, after which a court case would begin and the reporters would have access to a lawyer and be able to meet members of their families. The spokesman said he was told by the Ministry of Home Affairs and police that the two men were being detained in Yangon, Myanmar s largest city, were in good condition and had not been subject to illegal questioning. A number of governments and human rights and journalist groups have criticized Myanmar s authorities for holding the pair incommunicado since their arrest, with no access to a lawyer, colleagues and family members. Myo Thu Soe, the police spokesman, said: During the investigation by the police force, we are not torturing them nor doing anything that is not in line with human rights. | 0fake |
Trump draws ire after urging Russia to find 'missing' Clinton emails | MIAMI/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican Donald Trump on Wednesday invited Russia to dig up tens of thousands of “missing” emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the U.S. State Department, vexing intelligence experts and prompting Democrats to accuse him of urging foreigners to spy on Americans. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, told reporters. Trump made the remark at a testy news conference at his Doral golf resort in Florida that allowed him to steal some of the limelight from the Philadelphia convention where Clinton on Thursday will accept the Democratic presidential nomination for the Nov. 8 election. The Clinton campaign shot back that Trump was posing a possible national security threat by encouraging a foreign power to conduct espionage in the United States. Some intelligence experts said the comments raised questions about Trump’s judgment. A spokesman for Trump, Jason Miller, tried to tamp down the storm of protest, saying Trump did not urge Russia to hack Clinton’s emails. Trump said on Twitter that if anyone had Clinton’s emails, “perhaps they should share them with the FBI!” The criticism of Trump’s comments reverberated at the Democratic National Convention where speakers brought up the episode to try to intensify Democratic support for Clinton, who is running neck and neck with Trump in the polls. “Donald Trump today once again took Russia’s side. He asked the Russians to interfere in American politics,” longtime Clinton supporter and former CIA Director Leon Panetta said. “Donald Trump ... is asking one of our adversaries to engage in hacking or intelligence efforts against the United States of America to affect the election.” Another speaker, retired U.S. Rear Admiral John Hutson, said of Trump: “This morning, he personally invited Russia to hack us. That’s not law and order, that’s criminal intent.” Trump was referring in his remarks to a private email system Clinton kept while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. She handed over thousands of emails in 2015 to U.S. officials probing that system, but did not release about 30,000 emails she said were personal and not work-related. A Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of the issue found no basis for criminal charges, but FBI Director James Comey said this month there was evidence Clinton was “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information. Trump dismissed suggestions that WikiLeaks’ release of embarrassing Democratic Party emails last week was engineered by Russia to help nudge the U.S. election toward Trump, who has been called “very talented” by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It’s just a total deflection, this whole thing with Russia,” said Trump. “I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is.” The Democratic Party chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned on Sunday after the leaked emails showed party leaders favoring Clinton over her rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, for the presidential nomination. Cyber security experts and U.S. officials have said there was evidence that Russia engineered the release of the sensitive party emails in order to influence the presidential election. Throughout a day of campaigning, Trump suggested the culprit could be China or even, as he said in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “a 400-pound person lying in bed.” ‘FOUR-LETTER WORDS’ Russia has brushed aside suggestions it was involved. “I don’t want to use four-letter words,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday. Trump has alarmed European allies and many U.S. national security experts with talk of forcing NATO nations to pay more for the U.S. security umbrella. “By the way, if they don’t pay, bye bye,” he said in Toledo, Ohio, on Wednesday night. He has praised Putin in the past and said this week that if elected, he would seek an alliance with Moscow to take on Islamic State militants. But he sought to distance himself from Putin at his news conference, saying his closest interaction with Russia was selling a Florida home to a Russian for more than he paid for it. A U.S. State Department spokesman declined to comment on Trump’s remarks on Wednesday. Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, took a different approach from the Republican nominee, saying he expected the FBI to get to the bottom of the matter. “If it is Russia, and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties and the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences,” Pence said in a statement. During the news conference, which lasted more than an hour, Trump also called Barack Obama, a Democrat, the most “ignorant” president ever and said Vice President Joe Biden was not bright. Asked if he would recognize Crimea as Russian territory, Trump said he would be “looking into that.” Crimea has long been part of Ukraine, but Russia annexed it in 2014 after pro-Russian separatists and special forces took over the region. The U.S. government considers it still part of Ukraine. | 0fake |
Instant View: Comey accuses Trump administration of defaming him | (Reuters) - Former FBI Director James Comey on Thursday accused the Trump administration of defaming him, but declined to offer his opinion on whether President Donald Trump sought to obstruct justice by asking him to drop an investigation into the former national security advisor. The hearing could have significant repercussions for Trump’s presidency as special counsel Robert Mueller and several congressional committees investigate alleged Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election and whether Trump’s campaign colluded with this. * Comey said Trump had repeatedly told him he was doing a great job. * Comey said administration chose to defame him and FBI by saying organization was in disarray. Comey said “those were lies, plain and simple’. * Comey said he has no doubt Russia interfered with U.S. election. Comey says he is confident no votes cast in 2016 election were altered * Comey says it is not for him to say whether Trump tried to obstruct justice in their conversations * Comey says found conversations with Trump very disturbing * Comey says Trump did not ask him to stop Russia investigation * Comey says FBI became aware of Russia cyber intrusion in late summer of 2015 SCOTT WREN, SENIOR GLOBAL EQUITY STRATEGIST, WELLS FARGO INVESTMENT INSTITUTE, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: “From the statement released yesterday, just from the headlines, it sounded like it was pretty benign, so the action in the market, not just so far today, but in general over the last couple of months is the market certainly doesn’t think there’s going to be much that comes out of this, and I think largely that’s because if there was something that’s going to come out, as leaky as things seem to be, we would have heard something more than what we’ve been hearing so far. “So I think the market thinks that’s the likely outcome.” JOHN CANAVAN, MARKET STRATEGIST, STONE & MCCARTHY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY “He didn’t offer that much that was new. He confirmed all the previously reported concerns. Concerns about the interactions (between Comey and Trump) remain. There was a very muted market response. “It leaves us where we were before. It becomes that much more difficult for the Trump administration to put together a fiscal stimulus package. Anything they could put together with tax reform and infrastructure spending would be a lot smaller than had been expected. You are also pushing back the timing on any fiscal stimulus into 2018, possibly in 2019. “A lot of the initial euphoria for strong fiscal stimulus has already been unwound, primarily in the bond market. Even without fiscal stimulus, the economy would be able to maintain its current momentum. We are looking for steady growth next year. In our view, this would allow the Fed to raise next week and likely one more time this year either in September or in December.” DAN SCAVINO JR., WHITE HOUSE DIRECTOR OF SOCIAL MEDIA, ON VERIFIED TWITTER ACCOUNT “Sorry Dems- nothing here. No votes were altered by Russians in the 2016 election. POTUS or team NEVER asked to stop election investigation.” ART HOGAN, CHIEF MARKET STRATEGIST AT WUNDERLICH SECURITIES IN NEW YORK “To the extent it doesn’t seem to be a ‘gottcha’ moment here, the market’s plodding along.” “Unless something comes out that’s outside the realm of the expected, that’s what we should expect. I wouldn’t say the market’s taking action either way here. “The market looked at this as one of three major events today. Along with this you’ve got the ECB and the UK election. It’s a pretty catalyst filled day.” “It feels like Comey is pretty good at staying in the middle of the fairway in his responses. “If they haven’t been able to tease anything out of him in the first two hours they’re probably not going to get more. I think the market is looking at this as a non-market moving event much like the ECB meeting was.” THOMAS SIMONS, MONEY MARKET ECONOMIST, JEFFRIES & CO., NEW YORK “(The testimony) doesn’t appear to be super substantive. My read on the prepared remarks yesterday was that there was nothing particularly stirring there. “I think the market is taking less of an alarmist review of this situation because there is no smoking gun here that there has been any illegal activity by high-ranking officials, so it’s not particularly impactful for thinking about the impact for Trump’s economic agenda to go through or anything like that.” JON ADAMS, SENIOR INVESTMENT STRATEGIST AND PORTFOLIO MANAGER AT BMO GLOBAL ASSET MANAGEMENT IN CHICAGO. “We would need to see more evidence as far as explicit direction from the president for there to be a more significant market reaction. We’ve been worried about complacency in the market around political risk as investors have become immune to the daily noise out of Washington. We ask ‘does this impact economic growth or earnings growth?’, and so far the answer is no to both of those questions.” OMER ESINER, CHIEF MARKET ANALYST AT COMMONWEALTH FOREIGN EXCHANGE IN WASHINGTON. “So far we haven’t had any major surprises or any kind of bombshells released. The dollar-yen ran up a little bit as the testimony got underway, suggesting a little bit of a relief on the fact that we are not likely to get a smoking gun from James Comey that we did not already know. “We are not likely to get any new revelation that suggests that the President’s behavior was anything other than maybe inappropriate and certainly likely fell short of the bar for obstruction of justice. “Outside of a little bit of a move higher in dollar-yen, there’s really not much that is going on.” STEPHEN MASSOCCA, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AT WEDBUSH SECURITIES IN SAN FRANCISCO “It’s the James Comey show. Nobody cares. None of this is going to matter. The Republicans are going to say there is nothing to see here, move along. There is no ‘there,’ there, in my opinion, which is why stocks aren’t reacting.... At best what we have here is a president who has zero political experience probably said something he shouldn’t have said. I don’t see it becoming a bigger issue. “I don’t think this is going to move any needle in any direction. It’s not significant enough that the Republicans are going to bail on Trump and the Democrats are going to make a lot of noise about it. But at the end of the day people care about unemployment, job growth and more important issues than this, in my opinion.” BUCKY HELLWIG, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AT BB&T WEALTH MANAGEMENT IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “The hearings should be mostly a non-event for stocks unless there is some kind of unforeseen ‘smoking gun’ either way – detrimental to the president or beneficial to him.” “Because the president did not invoke executive privilege, it raises the likelihood that nothing happens during the hearings; i.e., there is nothing secret or detrimental to keep out of the hearings.” “Separately, it looks like the market is looking for excuses to go higher as it dances around all-time highs. Earnings are rising, rates are falling (supporting higher PEs), and the technical indicators show the market in an uptrend, so if the hearings maintain the status quo, it could move money off the sidelines into stocks.” TOM DI GALOMA, MANAGING DIRECTOR, SEAPORT GLOBAL HOLDINGS, NEW YORK: “At the end of the day, former FBI Director Comey hasn’t really revealed anything new, in my view, so bond prices are either treading water to heading lower.” DONALD TRUMP JR., SON OF U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP ON VERIFIED TWITTER ACCOUNT “Hoping and telling are two very different things, you would think that a guy like Comey would know that. #givemeabreak” FAIZA PATEL, CO-DIRECTOR, LIBERTY & NATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM AT THE BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE IN NEW YORK CITY “Comey’s notes will be very useful for Mueller. They are detailed, close in time notes so will carry weight, even potentially legal weight. They were made before Comey was fired and so he had no grudge against Trump when he wrote them.” ALAN DERSHOWITZ, PROFESSOR EMERITUS HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MA “Nothing I’ve heard so far changes my view that the president did not obstruct justice.” LAURA DONOHUE, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER, PROFESSOR OF LAW, WASHINGTON D.C. “If the President directed Comey to drop the investigation, with an improper purpose, then it is a violation of the law.” “TIM KAINE, DEMOCRATIC US. SENATOR FROM VIRGINIA, ON VERIFIED TWITTER ACCOUNT “Trump and his team brought their own cloud in with them. It’s not the investigation that’s the cloud. It’s their own actions. #ComeyDay” TERRY SANDVEN, CHIEF EQUITY STRATEGIST AT U.S. BANK WEALTH MANAGEMENT IN MINNEAPOLIS. “Today is about Washington and the drama surrounding former FBI director James Comey’s testimony and the talk about the demise of President Trump’s presidency or growth agenda seems premature, short of a smoking gun. “I think after today’s testimony, focus will quickly shift back to his pro-growth agenda, mainly less regulation, tax reform, healthcare reform and infrastructure spending. “But clearly all eyes are on Washington and I expect equities to generally trend sideways today short of any new revelations coming out of the testimony.” STOCKS: Stocks were little changed as Comey’s testimony kicked off, trading slightly lower-to-flat, then moved slightly ahead. BONDS: U.S. Treasury prices were lower ahead of Comey’s testimony and pared losses as he testified. FOREX: The dollar strengthened against a basket of currencies and then pared gains slightly as Comey’s testimony began. | 0fake |
Appeals court rules against Obama’s immigration plan | A federal appeals court on Monday ruled against President Obama’s plan to shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, dealing another blow to the administration’s effort to remake immigration laws and likely setting up a final battle in the Supreme Court next year.
The 2-to-1 ruling from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans — to uphold a lower court’s injunction that blocks the administration from implementing a deferred-action program — was not unexpected. It came several months after the same court had denied an emergency stay request from the Justice Department.
The decision means that one of Obama’s signature immigration initiatives remains on hold nearly a year after he announced it through executive action and leaves in doubt whether the program will begin before his term expires in January 2017. Republican presidential candidates have pledged to dismantle the program, creating additional urgency within the Obama administration to get it started.
“The president must follow the rule of law, just like everybody else,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement Monday. Texas led a coalition of 26 states that brought the lawsuit. “Throughout this process, the Obama Administration has aggressively disregarded the constitutional limits on executive power.”
Immigration advocates, who feared time was running out to get the case before the high court next year, called on the administration to appeal quickly and maintained confidence that the Supreme Court would issue a favorable ruling by next June.
“Every single day that goes by means further delays,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, who has closely followed the case. “Once the green light is given [by the Supreme Court], it will make it that much more difficult for any administration, Republican or Democrat, to undo the program.”
A White House official said the administration strongly disagreed with the court decision and was reviewing its legal options.
“This lawsuit is preventing people who have been part of our communities for years from working on the books, contributing to our economy by paying taxes on that work, and being held accountable,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally. After House Republicans blocked a comprehensive immigration bill last year, Obama announced plans to use executive action to dramatically expand a 2012 program that deferred the deportations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the United States illegally as children. Under the new program, the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens would be eligible to remain and apply for three-year work permits, provided they had not committed other crimes and lived in the country at least five years.
But 26 states, most with Republican governors, sued to block the program, arguing they would incur fees associated with the issuance of driver’s licenses to the immigrants and asserting the Obama administration had failed to abide by federal rulemaking requirements. In February, a U.S. District Court judge in Brownsville, Tex., ruled that the program could not get underway as he continued to review whether the program was constitutional, stopping it just days before the Department of Homeland Security was to begin accepting applications.
The 5th Circuit panel that ruled Monday included two judges — Jerry Smith and Jennifer Elrod, both appointed by Republican presidents — who had ruled against the administration’s stay request in May and maintained their stances. A third judge, Carolyn Dineen King, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, was not on the earlier panel, and she dissented Monday, ruling in favor of the Obama administration.
In a 135-page decision, Smith wrote that District Judge Andrew Hanen’s decision in February to issue an injunction on Obama’s program was “impressive and thorough.” The appeals court dismissed the administration’s argument that Texas lacked legal standing to challenge a federal immigration program.
“Today’s ruling is a slap in the face to the good people in America who have also been waiting for Congress and the courts to act with justice, humanity and common sense on the issue of immigration reform,” said Angelica Salas, executive director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. | 0fake |
[WATCH] Hillary Clinton’s “Crazy Eyes” Surface AGAIN! | There’s something seriously wrong with this woman… Hillary Clinton's crazy eyes caught again, this time at #AlSmithDinner . pic.twitter.com/jiUyS4QNgi | 1real |
Soros and Democrat Mega-Donors Meet to Plot Their War Against Donald Trump | 21st Century Wire says After investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the failed campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, elite liberals and money men gathered in Washington, D.C., to plot a way bring down President-elect Donald Trump in his term in the White House.The conference, sponsored by the Democracy Alliance donor club, featured keynote presentations from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), and as well as social engineering mogul billionaire George Soros.The next war in being planend as we speak Zero HedgeAccording to Politico, the meeting, which began on Sunday night at Washington s Mandarin Oriental hotel, is sponsored by the influential Democracy Alliance donor club and will include darlings of the left such as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman Keith Ellison.Politico reports:The meeting is the first major gathering of the institutional left since Trump s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in last week s presidential election, and, if the agenda is any indication, liberals plan full-on trench warfare against Trump from Day One. Some sessions deal with gearing up for 2017 and 2018 elections, while others focus on thwarting President-elect Trump s 100-day plan, which the agenda calls a terrifying assault on President Obama s achievements and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation. Yet, the meeting also comes as many liberals are reassessing their approach to politics and the role of the Democracy Alliance, or DA, as the club is known in Democratic finance circles. The DA, its donors and beneficiary groups over the last decade have had a major hand in shaping the institutions of the left, including by orienting some of its key organizations around Clinton, and by basing their strategy around the idea that minorities and women constituted a so-called rising American electorate that could tip elections to Democrats.The Democracy Alliance has fed upwards of $500 million toward liberal activist groups and candidates since Soros co-founded the group in 2005.All members of DA are required to give $200,000 a year to recommended activist groups and pay annual dues of $30,000 to fund the DA staff and its meetings.Gara LaMarche, the president of the DA, told donors Sunday evening that some reassessment is in order for the Democratic party. You don t lose an election you were supposed to win, with so much at stake, without making some big mistakes, in assumptions, strategy and tactics, LaMarche said, according to prepared remarks he provided to Politico.LaMarche would add that the reassessment must take place without recrimination and finger-pointing, whatever frustration and anger some of us feel about our own allies in these efforts, and he said It is a process we should not rush, even as we gear up to resist the Trump administration. While focusing on preserving ObamaCare and other achievements of the Obama administration that are threatened by a Donald Trump presidency, the DA s agenda includes panels on rethinking polling and the left s approach to winning the working-class vote. The group will also stress funneling cash into state legislative policy initiatives and races where Republicans took over last week This article originally appeared at Zero HedgeREAD MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files | 1real |
Obama lauds Denver Broncos, Peyton Manning for Super Bowl win | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama welcomed the Denver Broncos to the White House on Monday to congratulate the Super Bowl champions for their victory over the Carolina Panthers and send off retiring quarterback Peyton Manning with words of praise. “I have to say I’m so pleased to be able to host Peyton here at the White House before I left. Anybody who has been a football fan has watched what is one of the greatest Hall of Fame careers ever,” Obama said, with the team standing behind him in the White House Rose Garden. “We were all obviously a little disappointed to see him hang it up this spring. But as somebody who is just a little bit older than he is, I was sympathetic to the idea that running around with these guys, it takes its toll,” Obama, 54, said of Manning, 40. Obama leaves office in January. As he often does, Obama noted he remained a fan of his hometown team, the Chicago Bears, but he conceded that the Broncos had a good year. “I will continue to root for the Bears,” he said to laughter. “But I’ve got to give this organization credit for having done an extraordinary job. And this is a well-deserved celebration of an extraordinary season.” The Broncos won their third National Football League championship with a 24-10 win over Carolina in the Super Bowl in February. The following month, Manning retired after an 18-year career with the Indianapolis Colts and Denver that established him as one of the game’s greatest quarterbacks. | 0fake |
Veterans may face higher risk of suicide during first year home | ‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Veterans may face higher risk of suicide during first year home By Arnaldo Rodgers on October 29, 2016 Veterans
By www.foxnews.com
Veterans may be more likely to commit suicide during the first year after they leave the military than after more time passes, a U.S. study suggests.
Compared with people still on active duty in the military, veterans out of the service for up to three months were 2.5 times more likely to commit suicide, the study found. Veterans who had left the service from three to 12 months earlier had almost triple the suicide odds of current members of the military.
“Family members and community can be proactive to reach out to veterans if they recently experienced stressful events – not just limited to the stressful events we can capture in the data such as divorce or separation from the military,” said lead study author Yu-Chu Shen, a researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Read the Full Article at www.foxnews.com >>>> Related Posts: The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on October 29, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments
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“I’m Not With Crooked Hillary”: VIRAL VIDEO Shows Young Mexican-American Explain Why He’s Voting For Trump | Don t buy into the media lie that every LEGAL Mexican-American is against Trump. Those who came here legally want the same things every other American wants jobs, freedom and liberty. I'm Mexican American and I'm voting for Donald Trump. Watch the video that's gone viral via @Keith_Avila #Trump2016https://t.co/KuMitwGMSH Veterans For Trump (@Veteran4Trump) June 6, 2016 | 1real |
Some Republicans see attacking Obamacare through regulation | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional Republicans are looking for the quickest ways to tear down Obamacare following Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, including rapidly confirming a new health secretary who could recast regulations while waiting for lawmakers to pass sweeping repeal legislation. Trump’s victory on Tuesday means Republicans will control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives. But congressional Democrats are expected to put up a huge fight against Republican efforts to repeal the 2010 law considered President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement. The Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, has provided 25 million previously uninsured Americans with health coverage. Republicans have launched repeated legal and legislative efforts to dismantle the law, which they call a government overreach. Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, a member of Senate Republican leadership, said one way for the incoming president and Congress to attack Obamacare immediately after Trump takes office on Jan. 20 would be to quickly confirm a new secretary of Health and Human Services, the official who writes the rules and regulations that enforce the law. “We could confirm someone on Jan. 20 who could come in immediately and could be working right now on rewriting rules and regulations to give more freedom and choice to the states, to insurance companies and to businesses that are trying to provide affordable care to their workers,” Barrasso said in a telephone interview. Barrasso noted that the Senate needs only a simple majority vote in the 100-seat chamber to confirm Cabinet members, as opposed to 60 votes to overcome procedural hurdles the Democrats could present to repeal legislation. Passing repeal legislation “is not a ‘Day One’ activity. But a new secretary of HHS going after the regulations can be a ‘Day One’ activity,” Barrasso added. Trump during the campaign called Obamacare “a disaster” and joined fellow Republicans in vowing to repeal and replace it with proposals like tax-free health savings accounts. His transition website says Trump wants a solution that “returns the historic role in regulating health insurance to the states.” In repealing Obamacare, congressional Republican may have to resort to a special procedure known as reconciliation to get around Democrats in the Senate, where rules protect the rights of the minority party. Republicans in Congress used reconciliation to try to undo large chunks of Obamacare in January, but Obama vetoed the legislation. The bill would have wiped out tax subsidies provided to help people afford insurance coverage, as well as tax penalties on people who do not obtain insurance as required by the law, and would have eliminated expansion of the Medicaid insurance health insurance program. Republican Representative Chris Collins of New York, one of Trump’s earliest supporters on Capitol Hill, said he hopes Congress can pass a similar bill gutting Obamacare within Trump’s first 100 days in office, a promise Trump made during the presidential campaign. But some changes will doubtless be phased in over time, Collins said. “There’s nothing that we will be able to do or would want to do that would impact anyone’s health insurance plan for 2017,” Collins said in an interview. “From a replacement standpoint, our position has always been as Republicans to move forward in a step-by-step fashion,” Barrasso said. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Friday, Trump said he was considering retaining parts of Obamacare including provisions letting parents keep adult children up to age 26 on their insurance policies and barring insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. While waiting for Congress to act on legislation, the new HHS secretary could be reworking Obamacare regulations, Barrasso said. For example, regulations could give U.S. states more flexibility under a provision that lets states seek waivers from key provisions of the law, such as exemptions from the so-called individual mandate requiring Americans to obtain insurance and the employer mandate to provide it. Kim Monk, an analyst at Capital Alpha Partners, which provides policy research to financial institutions, said Trump’s HHS might be able to tighten up the rules governing special enrollment periods for Obamacare. Insurers complain that these periods have allowed some people who initially skipped buying insurance to sign up after becoming ill. HHS might also be able to alter the language on “essential benefits” that the law requires insurance plans to cover, which include trips to the emergency room, maternity and newborn care, and mental health services, Monk said. “The law requires they have to cover 10 essential health benefit categories, but how that gets defined, a lot of that is interpretative,” Monk said. “And of course, everything the Obama administration interpreted was more, more, more, more expensive coverage, and all these things lead to premium increases.” Collins, a member of the Trump transition team’s executive committee, said the job of HHS secretary or surgeon general “would be great for Ben Carson,” referring to the neurosurgeon who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination and later endorsed Trump. | 0fake |
FANTASTIC! TRUMP’S 7 POINT PLAN To Reform Healthcare Begins With A Bombshell! | Since March of 2010, the American people have had to suffer under the incredible economic burden of the Affordable Care Act Obamacare. This legislation, passed by totally partisan votes in the House and Senate and signed into law by the most divisive and partisan President in American history, has tragically but predictably resulted in runaway costs, websites that don t work, greater rationing of care, higher premiums, less competition and fewer choices. Obamacare has raised the economic uncertainty of every single person residing in this country. As it appears Obamacare is certain to collapse of its own weight, the damage done by the Democrats and President Obama, and abetted by the Supreme Court, will be difficult to repair unless the next President and a Republican congress lead the effort to bring much-needed free market reforms to the healthcare industry.Congress must act. Our elected representatives in the House and Senate must:1. Completely repeal Obamacare. Our elected representatives must eliminate the individual mandate. No person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to.2. Modify existing law that inhibits the sale of health insurance across state lines. As long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements, any vendor ought to be able to offer insurance in any state. By allowing full competition in this market, insurance costs will go down and consumer satisfaction will go up.3. Allow individuals to fully deduct health insurance premium payments from their tax returns under the current tax system. Businesses are allowed to take these deductions so why wouldn t Congress allow individuals the same exemptions? As we allow the free market to provide insurance coverage opportunities to companies and individuals, we must also make sure that no one slips through the cracks simply because they cannot afford insurance. We must review basic options for Medicaid and work with states to ensure that those who want healthcare coverage can have it.4. Allow individuals to use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Contributions into HSAs should be tax-free and should be allowed to accumulate. These accounts would become part of the estate of the individual and could be passed on to heirs without fear of any death penalty. These plans should be particularly attractive to young people who are healthy and can afford high-deductible insurance plans. These funds can be used by any member of a family without penalty. The flexibility and security provided by HSAs will be of great benefit to all who participate.5. Require price transparency from all healthcare providers, especially doctors and healthcare organizations like clinics and hospitals. Individuals should be able to shop to find the best prices for procedures, exams or any other medical-related procedure.6. Block-grant Medicaid to the states. Nearly every state already offers benefits beyond what is required in the current Medicaid structure. The state governments know their people best and can manage the administration of Medicaid far better without federal overhead. States will have the incentives to seek out and eliminate fraud, waste and abuse to preserve our precious resources.7. Remove barriers to entry into free markets for drug providers that offer safe, reliable and cheaper products. Congress will need the courage to step away from the special interests and do what is right for America. Though the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector, drug companies provide a public service. Allowing consumers access to imported, safe and dependable drugs from overseas will bring more options to consumers. | 1real |
Scarlett Johansson Rips Republicans A New One For Trying To Kill Planned Parenthood | The Black Widow just delivered a super smackdown of Republicans for messing with women s health.Republicans on the federal and state level have repeatedly assaulted Planned Parenthood for years now, with some GOP-controlled states actually going so far as to strip funding from the women s healthcare provider, rendering them helpless to provide services that women need.The attacks against Planned Parenthood stem from the Republican effort to ban abortion and punish anyone who gets one or performs one, even though the procedure is legal and a constitutionally protected right.But in trying to destroy Planned Parenthood, Republicans are also taking away crucial medical serives such as cancer screenings. STD treatments, and access to the contraception that would prevent abortions in the first place by preventing unwanted pregnancies.And that makes Republicans a bunch of evil anti-women villains who need a serious ass-kicking.During an interview with Cosmopolitan on Thursday, Johansson provided that ass-kicking by defending Planned Parenthood.She began by criticizing Republicans for focusing so much on defunding Planned Parenthood when there are so many problems in the world that need immediate attention. There are countries at war, there s terrorism, global warming, and we re like, We should definitely cut the budget for Planned Parenthood. Let s take away the availability of women s health initiatives! It s nuts, Johansson said. We re talking about preventing cervical and breast cancers. Johansson also explained that she and some of her friends have relied on Planned Parenthood for their healthcare needs and blasted Republicans for trying to take away the only healthcare that millions of women have access to and can afford, and if they lose it, women who need an abortion will risk their lives to get one. Growing up, I used [PP s] services. All my girlfriends did not just for birth control but for Pap smears and breast exams. You read about the rise of back-alley abortions, women having to mutilate themselves and teenagers having to seek help in unsafe conditions, and for what?! We re moving backward when we re supposed to be moving forward. Johansson just stood up on behalf of women and wiped the floor with Republicans in real life and you can watch her kick ass on the big screen as the Black Widow when Captain America: Civil War arrives in theaters on May 6, 2016.Featured image: Pinterest | 1real |
RUSSIA Mocks Sore Loser Obama For Trying To Destroy U.S.-Russian Relations Before Trump Takes Office [VIDEO] | President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday it s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things after the Obama administration issued sanctions against Russia for its alleged 2016 election hacking. It s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things, Trump said in a written response released four hours after the announcement. Nevertheless, in the interest of our country and its great people, I will meet with leaders of the intelligence community next week in order to be updated on the facts of this situation. The Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia s intelligence services, while ejecting dozens of intelligence operatives from the U.S. as part of a response to what it says are efforts by Moscow to influence the election.Using an executive order, President Obama sanctioned the GRU and the FSB two of Russia s intelligence services as well as other entities and individuals associated with the GRU. The cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the hack of its emails earlier this year concluded the hacking came from the Fancy Bear group, believed to be affiliated with the GRU, Russia s military intelligence agency.In addition to the sanctions, the State Department has declared 35 Russian intelligence operatives persona non grata in the U.S., giving them 72 hours to leave, and is shutting down two Russian compounds in Maryland and New York.Russian President Vladimir Putin s spokesman said in response to the announcement that Moscow will consider retaliatory measures. We think that such steps by a U.S. administration that has three weeks left to work are aimed at two things: to further harm Russian-American ties, which are at a low point as it is, as well as, obviously, to deal a blow to the foreign policy plans of the incoming administration of the president-elect, Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.The Russian Embassy in the UK took a different approach, tweeting out a picture of a lame duck and blasting what it called Cold War deja vu. President Obama expels 35 diplomats in Cold War deja vu. As everybody, incl people, will be glad to see the last of this hapless Adm. pic.twitter.com/mleqA16H8D Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) December 29, 2016The Treasury Secretary meanwhile has named two individuals Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev and Aleksey Alekseyevich Belan it says were involved in malicious cyber-enabled activities. These actions follow repeated private and public warnings that we have issued to the Russian government, and are a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior, Obama said in a statement.Obama also announced that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI will release declassified information on Russian cyberactivity to help identify, detect and Russia s global campaign of malicious cyber activities. Obama also said that the administration will be providing a report to Congress in the coming days about Russian attempts to interfere in the election, as well as previous election cycles.The president also hinted that his administration intends to do more to hold Russia accountable. These actions are not the sum total of our response to Russia s aggressive activities, Obama said. We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized. U.S. intelligence services have concluded that the Russians interfered in the election to try and help President-elect Donald Trump win. Trump has dismissed the conclusions. Russia does not share America s interests. In fact, it has consistently sought to undermine them, sowing dangerous instability around the world. While today s action by the administration is overdue, it is an appropriate way to end eight years of failed policy with Russia, Ryan said.Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schemer, D-NY., also praised the move in a statement late Thursday. FOX News | 1real |
’No Border Wall’ Mural on State Property Depicts ICE Agent Choking ’Mexican Worker’ - Breitbart | A mural painted on state property near San Diego — depicting an ICE Agent strangling a Mexican worker as he sends money home — is stirring up a new controversy, according to a San Diego Union Tribune news story. [The new mural is located on the south support pillar under Coronado Bridge at the Interstate 5 underpass in what is now called, “Chicano Park. ” The location of the park was scheduled to become a new CHP substation in the early 1970’s, but protestors from the “Barrio Logan” community staved off the plan, facing off against the state — seizing the land for “chicanos” and demanding that a park be constructed to showcase chicano art. The mural — painted by Salvador “Sal” Barajas — one of the artists who painted the first “Historical Mural” in the park in 1973 that highlights key figures and history of the Chicano movement, was commissioned by a border activist group known as Border Angels. Border Angel’s founder, Enrigue Morones has been trying to raise the $10, 000 for nearly a decade — but credits Trumps election with the new enthusiasm. Morones spoke to NBC 7 — a local NBC affiliate out of San Diego: “Since November 8 things have changed … People are outraged, more volunteers, more funds. ” He added, “We’re totally opposed to the wall … We know that the wall kills people. ” Not everyone is happy about the new mural. Some San Diego county residents are outraged — calling the mural ‘incendiary’ and ‘ .’ Suellen Shea of Vista, who took issue with some of the imagery Barajas used, told the : “The artist has talent, but, in my opinion, much of it is offensive and especially the ICE agent choking the migrant worker,” Shea reportedly said via email. “American Citizens want safety sovereignty (enforced borders) for our country. Nothing strange or racist about that — Mexico does too. ” Mural painter Barajas thinks the graphic violence depicted is justified, according to the the Los Angeles Times: “One hand represents U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for deporting people from the U. S. [and t]he other hand represents Mexican government officials, whose corruption makes it necessary for Mexicans to migrate for work. ” Barajas admits that the “text ‘No Border Wall’ was one of the last things added to the piece,” and is likely what inspired donors to put up the money to denounce the looming border wall. San Diego has become the locus of the fight over President Trump’s wall over the past few months — as prototypes will soon be constructed nearby in order to meet DHS’s June 1st target date. Organized protests and violent resistance is expected by the agency — and contractors are required to provide adequate security as part of their bids. A number of Californians have taken to social media to make their opposition known reports the LA Times. “San Diego has many parks,” wrote Carol Hamilton, of Imperial Beach. “Only one is splattered with garish posters and slurs — Chicano Park. A national shrine? I don’t think so. It’s time to whitewash it and use it as a park and not for politics. ” Chicano Park is not under the control of the city or county of San Diego — the land on which it stands is part of a state easement controlled by CalTrans, who reportedly could revoke the right for any mural to be on California state property. Tim Donnelly is a former California State Assemblyman and author who is doing a book tour for his new book: Patriot Not Politician: Win or Go Homeless. He ran for governor in 2014. FaceBook: https: . facebook. . donnelly. Twitter: @PatriotNotPol | 0fake |
Spurs’ Tim Duncan Retires After 19 N.B.A. Seasons and 5 Titles - The New York Times | After 19 years and five championships with the San Antonio Spurs, Tim Duncan announced Monday morning that he would retire at age 40. Duncan was an elite player on an excellent Spurs team for his entire career. The Spurs made the playoffs every year in his tenure, never with a winning percentage lower than . 610, and won five titles, with Duncan the finals’ most valuable player in three of them. He also won the league M. V. P. Award twice. A relative latecomer to basketball growing up in the Virgin Islands, the Duncan was initially a swimmer. He was the No. 1 pick in the N. B. A. draft after four years at Wake Forest. (The Spurs had the top pick as a result of a rare down season largely caused by an injury to David Robinson.) The player selected just after Duncan, Keith Van Horn, has been out of the league for a decade. Duncan initially starred in a “twin towers” lineup with Robinson, winning two titles. After Robinson’s retirement in 2004, Duncan carried on as the team’s star, winning three more N. B. A. crowns, most recently in over the Miami Heat in LeBron James’s last year there. Duncan’s nature often kept him out of the spotlight, but the sheer force of his accomplishments pushes him onto just about every list of the greats. Duncan ranks fifth in career blocked shots (3, 020) sixth in rebounds (15, 091) seventh in games played (1, 392) and 14th in points (26, 496). Duncan’s playing time had gradually been reduced in recent years, and he had ceded his starring role on the Spurs to Kawhi Leonard. Though he started 60 of the 61 games he played this season, he hit career lows in just about every category. But he was an as recently as 2015. Duncan’s retirement was as quiet as Kobe Bryant’s was colorful and protracted. The Spurs released a statement highlighting his achievements, but without a quotation from the player. That did not stop many others from singing his praises on Monday: Now Duncan is highly likely to join Bryant in the Hall of Fame in 2021. | 0fake |
Alabama insurgent's victory emboldens U.S. anti-establishment Republicans | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The anti-establishment wave that propelled Donald Trump to the White House is developing into a political force that perhaps even the president cannot control and could shake his Republican Party ahead of next year’s congressional elections. That became clear on Tuesday night when Trump’s favored candidate in an Alabama Senate primary, Luther Strange, was soundly defeated by Roy Moore, an archconservative who cast himself as an inheritor of Trump’s insurgent mantle. Moore’s win is expected to encourage more outsider candidates to challenge Republican incumbents ahead of the November 2018 elections, where the party will seek to maintain its control of the Senate and House of Representatives, crucial to enacting Trump’s agenda. Conservative donors were “ecstatic” and “beside themselves” after Moore’s victory, said Ken Cuccinelli, head of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which spent about $121,000 in Alabama to help Moore. Cuccinelli said he believed conservatives could build on Moore’s victory. “It will have ripple effects - it’s going to have effects all across the country,” he said. Trump, who appeared at a campaign rally for Strange last week, congratulated Moore on his win and wished him success against Democrat Doug Jones in the December special election to fill the seat held by Jeff Sessions before he became U.S. attorney general in February. Strange had been appointed to fill the seat until the election. “Congratulations to Roy Moore on his Republican Primary win in Alabama. Luther Strange started way back & ran a good race. Roy, WIN in Dec!” Trump wrote on Twitter. Establishment Republicans have been wary of insurgent firebrands since the 2010 congressional elections. That year, donations from conservative groups helped bring about primary wins by ultra-conservative candidates Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada. But both suffered crushing defeats to Democrats in the general election. In November 2018, elections will be held for all 435 seats in the U.S. House and 33 seats in the 100-member Senate, including 23 Democrats and eight Republicans in fights that will likely be cast as a referendum on Trump’s legislative agenda. The Republican establishment poured millions of dollars into the Alabama nominating primary to help Strange, giving him a $10 million money advantage over Moore. Some Republican strategists fear that if more extreme Republicans win primaries, it would give Democrats a better chance of winning in the general election. That is less of a concern in conservative Alabama, where Moore will likely prevail, but is a bigger risk in states with greater numbers of moderate voters, such as Arizona and Nevada, where Republican Senators Jeff Flake and Dean Heller are already top targets for conservative groups. Also this week, Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee said he would not run again in 2018, a decision that was widely seen as trying to avoid a potential primary fight. “I know we are all listening and watching very closely, trying to understand the message that’s being sent,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said of the Alabama result. While Trump endorsed Strange, his former adviser Steve Bannon backed Moore, as did several outside political groups that support the president’s agenda. Bannon, and his influential news site, Breitbart, are poised to spearhead attacks on Republican incumbents, while political groups aligned with Trump that can raise unlimited sums of money will help those challengers compete with better-financed establishment candidates. Having served as a high-profile state Supreme Court justice for years, Moore was better known than most insurgent candidates, allowing him to neutralize attacks from establishment groups, said Constantin Querard, a conservative Republican strategist in Arizona. The road will be tougher for outsiders in Arizona and Nevada, he said. Still, candidates such as Flake will be hampered by their ties to the D.C. establishment, especially with the failure this year by Republicans to deliver on long-standing promises to repeal the Obamacare healthcare law despite controlling the White House and Congress. Querard said that Flake “is seen as the poster child for everything that is wrong in Washington.” Jonathan Gray, a Republican consultant in Alabama, said Moore’s win should frighten vulnerable Republicans worried about primary challenges not so much because Trump’s endorsement failed to sway voters, but because the money spent at the behest of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to back Strange was fruitless. “The people of Alabama saw Washington telling them what to do, and they thumbed their nose at it,” Gray said. | 0fake |
Four killed as militants attack airport security camp in Indian-controlled Kashmir | SRINAGAR (Reuters) - Indian police on Tuesday killed three suspected militants in army uniforms after they infiltrated a security camp beside the main airport in the disputed region of Kashmir, officials said, an assault claimed by an Islamist group. One Indian security official was killed and three wounded in a gun fight that followed. Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammad has taken responsibility for the attack, Kashmir police chief Muneer Khan said. Under cover of darkness, the militants cut a fence to enter the camp in the early hours of Tuesday, he added. The security camp of India s Border Security Force shares a boundary wall with the airport in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir. Its main gate was about 500 meters (0.3 miles) from the airport. Airport flight operations were briefly disrupted. Militants have targeted police camps in Kashmir in recent months. Eight Indian police officials were killed when Jaish-e-Mohammad militants attacked a security camp in southern Kashmir in August. India accuses Pakistan of training and arming militants and helping them infiltrate across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir. Pakistan denies those allegations. The South Asian neighbors have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947 over Muslim-majority Kashmir, which both claim in full but each rules in part. | 0fake |
Probe of Clinton's email driven by facts, not politics: White House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Thursday said the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email use is being driven by facts and should be free of political interference. “The rule of law is paramount,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at a daily press briefing following reports that the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a meeting with former President Bill Clinton. | 0fake |
LIBERAL LUNACY: A Real Tom Turkey You’ll Get A Kick Out Of! | This picture is for anyone who needs proof that liberalism is a mental disorder. The Free Range FoolNothing says Happy Thanksgiving like a liberal tool.Courtesy of PETA | 1real |
HOW OBAMA MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR ISIS To Erase 2,000 Years Of Christianity From Iraq [VIDEO] | ISIS stormed into Mosul, Iraq last summer. Much of what took 2,000 years to build has been lost in a matter of months. There are no Christians left in Mosul Surely, our intelligence community warned Obama this would happen. If our President is so concerned about the welfare of Muslims (mostly men) supposedly escaping persecution by ISIS, why did he abandon these Christians in Iraq?Nothing is sacred to these monsters. Christian relics and books from the 1st century have been destroyed by ISIS. Christian homes in Mosul have been marked by ISIS. If you are a Christian and ISIS puts their mark on your home, it signifies you are expected to either convert to Islam, pay an extortion fee or face the sword. Unfortunately, democracy in Iran brought a new wave of persecution for Christians. When the US withdrew from Iraq completely, the situation became dire. The government was not capable of taking care of the Christian population and ISIS moved in to eradicate the Christian population and erase any trace of Christianity. Where Christians have been living for over 1,000 years, there is nothing but silence empty building and homes. | 1real |
Arizona ballot-collection law put on hold until after election | (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday put a restrictive Republican-backed Arizona ballot-collection law on hold until after Tuesday’s election, handing Democrats a victory in an intensifying state-by-state legal battle over access to the polls. Arizona’s legislature earlier this year passed the law prohibiting advocacy groups from collecting completed early ballots from voters and delivering them to election offices as part of get-out-the-vote efforts. Plaintiffs in the case, including the Democratic National Committee, argued the law is unconstitutional because it unfairly impacted the ability of minorities to vote. Polls have shown Republican Donald Trump with a small lead in Arizona over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week agreed to revisit a ruling that had refused to block the law and hear the case before an 11-judge panel. That panel voted 6-5 on Friday to prohibit Arizona from enforcing the law now, court records showed. Arizona filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court later on Friday, asking it to reverse the 9th Circuit’s order. Democrats have accused Republicans of enacting state laws intended to make it harder for minorities and others who tend to back Democratic candidates to cast ballots. Republicans have called these laws necessary to guard against voting fraud. Judge Sidney Thomas, the 9th Circuit’s chief judge, wrote that the court’s action would not disrupt Arizona’s ability to conduct the U.S. presidential election. “It simply would enjoin enforcement of a legislative act that would criminalize the collection, by persons other than the voter, of legitimately cast ballots,” Thomas wrote. He was joined by five other judges appointed by Democratic presidents. Five dissenting 9th Circuit judges, all Republican appointees, argued that the court should not have interfered with Arizona law so close to Election Day, while early voting is already underway. The 9th Circuit covers nine Western states, including Arizona. “We are disappointed in this decision as it will confuse voters and depress turnout,” Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan said in a statement. A representative for the Democratic National Committee could not immediately be reached for comment. Acting in another voting case on Friday, a U.S. judge in Ohio ordered Trump’s campaign not to verbally harass voters near polling places or take pictures of them in the key battleground state. | 0fake |
Trump LITERALLY Picks A Friend Of Vladimir Putin To Be Secretary Of State | Donald Trump just did Russia a big favor to thank them for rigging the election in his favor.As the fallout continues from a CIA assessment that Russia hacked into our election system and helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton, Trump continued to make it clear that he will nothing more than Vladimir Putin s puppet in the White House by selecting a longtime friend of the Russian leader for America s top diplomatic officer.Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson has apparently been offered the job of Secretary of State after weeks of speculation and concern.But unlike some of the other choices for the position, Trump literally picked a guy who has a huge conflict of interest when it comes to Russia. Not only does Tillerson and Big Oil stand to profit mightily from closer ties with Russia, Tillerson is a close friend of Putin and will likely treat Russia in a way that goes entirely against American interests and security.According to the New York Times,Mr. Tillerson has worked to strengthen Exxon Mobil s ties with Russia. The company has various joint ventures with the oil giant Rosneft around Russia, and has contributed to social programs in education and health.So Tillerson is deeply connected in Russia just like Donald Trump. And like Trump, Tillerson also wants to remove sanctions against Russia that were put in place after Putin attack Ukraine and seized the Crimea.In fact, the intelligence community and national security experts are already concerned about Trump s pick.Intelligence expert Malcolm Nance appeared on MSNBC on Saturday to warn about the danger the choice of Tillerson represents to the nation. Do we want a Secretary of State who is going to be working hand in hand first and foremost for the U.S. and Russian petrochemical industries? Nance asked. Most importantly, he has a very deep relationship with Vladimir Putin that extends back to when Putin was the director of the FSB, which is the modified version of the KGB. Does this person who speaks very highly of Putin, who has got the Order of Friendship from Russia, will he accurately represent the interests of the United States first or will he still be part of that cabal from the Kremlin that Donald Trump appears to have assembled in his cabinet? Here s the video via VidMe.Donald Trump s connections to Russia make him a threat to national security and our NATO alliances and he just proved that by choosing Tillerson as his Secretary of State, a friend of Putin s who will be reluctant to stand against Russia if Putin makes aggressive moves toward our European allies.It won t be Trump making the decisions for our country. It will be Putin.Featured Image: Screenshot | 1real |
Obama Says Republicans Should Withdraw Support for Trump - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — In an extraordinary denunciation of Donald J. Trump’s temperament and competence, President Obama urged leaders of the Republican Party on Tuesday to withdraw their endorsements of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, flatly calling him “unfit to serve” as the nation’s 45th president. Speaking in the East Room of the White House while Mr. Trump rallied supporters in a nearby Virginia suburb, the president noted the Republican criticism of Mr. Trump for his attacks on the Muslim parents of an American soldier, Capt. Humayun Khan, who died in Iraq. But Mr. Obama said the political recriminations from Republicans “ring hollow” if the party’s leaders continue to support Mr. Trump’s campaign. “The question they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?” Mr. Obama said. “What does this say about your party that this is your ?” The president’s condemnation of Mr. Trump, and his direct appeal to Republicans to abandon their candidate, were stunning even in a city where politics has become a brutal and personal affair. Mr. Obama seemed eager to go beyond his past interventions in the race, which have included forceful rejections of Mr. Trump’s statements and policy proposals. The last time a sitting president was as openly critical of the other party’s candidate, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, was when President Harry S. Truman mocked Dwight D. Eisenhower during the 1952 campaign. And once Eisenhower was elected, Truman said he did not know “any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday. ” “It’s a reflection of just how radical and dangerous President Obama feels that Trump is,” Mr. Brinkley said. Using the formal backdrop of a joint news conference with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore, Mr. Obama suggested that Mr. Trump would not abide by “norms and rules and common sense” and questioned whether he would “observe basic decency” should he reach the Oval Office. The president said he would have been disappointed to lose in 2008 or 2012, but added that he had never doubted whether his Republican rivals in those races, John McCain and Mitt Romney, could function as president or had the knowledge to make government work. “That’s not the situation here,” Mr. Obama said. As Mr. Obama condemned Mr. Trump, the Republican candidate — apparently unaware of the president’s remarks — repeatedly criticized his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the president in an hour of remarks. He called Mrs. Clinton a “liar” and a “thief” and said the country would be “finished” if voters chose four more years of a presidency like Mr. Obama’s. Mr. Trump also accused Mrs. Clinton of repeatedly lying over the weekend when she told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” that James B. Comey, the F. B. I. director, had said her statements about her private emails were truthful. “I mean, she lied,” Mr. Trump said, prompting cries of “Lock her up!” from his supporters. “She, pure and simple, she only knows to lie. She really does. She only knows to lie. But she lied, and it’s a big story. ” Mr. Comey, testifying last month to Congress, said that “we have no basis to conclude she lied to the F. B. I. ” But he also said he could not say whether Mrs. Clinton’s many public statements on the issue were truthful. Mr. Trump, in a written statement meant to respond directly to the president’s remarks, called Mrs. Clinton “unfit to serve in any government office. ” He also accused Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton of allowing Americans to be slaughtered in Benghazi, Libya letting veterans die waiting for medical care and releasing immigrants into the United States to kill innocent people. “Our nation has been humiliated abroad and compromised by radical Islam brought onto our shores,” Mr. Trump’s statement said. “We need change now. ” The dueling appearances by the president and the Republican candidate seeking to replace him escalated the heated political rhetoric in a race that had already devolved into a series of personal attacks and character assassinations. Mr. Obama cited Mr. Trump’s reaction to Captain Khan’s parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, as a principal reason for his extended remarks. Mr. Trump had criticized the Khans after they honored their son at the Democratic National Convention and urged people to vote for Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama lamented what he called an attack on a “Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country. ” He said he did not doubt that Republicans were outraged about the statements Mr. Trump and his supporters had made about the Khan family in the last several days. “But there has to come a point at which you say somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn’t have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding, to occupy the most powerful position in the world,” Mr. Obama said. The president did not limit his criticism to Mr. Trump’s treatment of the Khan family. Mr. Obama said the Republican nominee had repeatedly demonstrated that he was “woefully unprepared to do this job. ” The president said Mr. Trump had proved he lacked knowledge about Europe, the Middle East and other parts of Asia. “This isn’t a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily,” Mr. Obama added. “There has to be a point at which you say, ‘This is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party.’ The fact that that has not yet happened makes some of these denunciations ring hollow. ” Mr. Trump, who spoke at a boisterous rally at Briar Woods High School in Ashburn, Va. began his remarks there by saying a veteran had given him a Purple Heart medal earlier in the day. “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart,” said Mr. Trump, who received five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War. “This was much easier. ” Throughout his speech, Mr. Trump argued his case that Mrs. Clinton was “unfit” for the presidency, accusing her of being dishonest, weak on foreign policy and corrupt. He accused the president of doubling the national debt and said the Iraq war exit was a “disaster. ” “Let Obama go to the golf course,” Mr. Trump said. “But you know what? We’d be better off. ” At one point during the rally, a crying baby interrupted Mr. Trump’s speech. “Don’t worry about that baby. I love babies,” Mr. Trump said at first. “I hear that baby crying, I like it. What a baby, what a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. ” A few beats later, he changed his tune. “Actually, I was only kidding,” Mr. Trump said. “You can get that baby out of here. ” Laughs and a few gasps escaped from the crowd. “Don’t worry, I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking,” Mr. Trump added. “That’s O. K. People don’t understand. That’s O. K. ” Even as Mr. Obama discussed trade policy and security issues with the Singaporean prime minister, Mr. Trump criticized world leaders. He said he would ask Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany “what went wrong” in her country. And he criticized Mrs. Clinton for what he called “terrible relations” with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. At the White House, Mr. Lee of Singapore responded to a question about Mr. Trump with diplomacy, and said Singapore would look forward to working with whomever Americans chose as president. “Many pressures build up during the election campaign, and after the elections in a calmer, cooler atmosphere, positions are rethought, strategies are nuanced, and a certain balance is kept in the direction of the ship of state. It does not turn completely upside down,” Mr. Lee said. “The Americans take pride in having a system with checks and balances,” he added. “So, it is not so easy to do things, but it is not so easy to completely mess things up. ” | 0fake |
Live Report from Dakota Access Pipeline Protest | Lincoln
October 31, 2016 – STANDING ROCK SIOUX TRIBE CONTINUES TO DEAL WITH ONSLAUGHT BY LAW ENFORCEMENT CANNON BALL, NORTH DAKOTA
As tensions remain high from Thursday’s violent assault from law enforcement, those in camp remain dedicated to ensuring the Dakota Access Pipeline is exposed for its disregard for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s sacred and cultural sites. Lincoln
Oct 31, 2016 Huge North Dakota Spill Proves #NoDAPL Activists Right for Fighting Pipeline
This spill is part of the reason. Imagine, if you will, tens of thousands of gallons of oil pouring into the river that provides the drinking water for over 10 million people. Would you want to drink it? or swim in it? or eat anything from it? Daniel “No Passport” Bruno
These pictures showing Humvees in desert paint are worth a thousand words. Military equipment on the scene, against Native Americans…on Obama’s watch. And Leonard Peltier continues to rot in jail after 40 years…no pardon for him. Good work, Robert Barsocchini. Donate | 1real |
Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley – Who Can ‘Flip Flop’ The Most | 21st Century Wire says US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tells us that the war on Syria can only be solved through a political process . Wait, didn t Nikki Haley just say getting Assad out is not the only priority, we don t see a peaceful Syria with Assad in there . Our strategy in Syria, our priority is first to defeat ISIS , says Tillerson. Again Haley outlines multiple priorities and there s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime . Deliberate flip flopping on policy or problematic internal communication at the White House, which in the last 24 hours has seen a scramble to re-soften its approach via Rex Tillerson on Syria.More on this report from RT RTUS Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said the Syrian crisis can only be solved through a political process, claiming it s not regime change but the defeat of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorist group that Washington is seeking in Syria. Our strategy in Syria, our priority is first to defeat ISIS, the US official said in an interview with ABC s This Week host, George Stephanopoulos, which was aired Sunday.Saying that once the battle with the terrorist group is concluded, which according to the US official is going quite well, Washington plans to turn its attention to achieving ceasefire agreements between the regime and opposition forces. Bringing the parties to the table for political discussions clearly requires the participation of the regime and the support of their allies, Tillerson said in another Sunday interview to the American media, speaking to John Dickerson on CBS s Face the Nation. Once a ceasefire becomes a reality in Syria, we will have the conditions to begin a useful political process, he said. It is through that political process that we believe the Syrian people will ultimately be able to decide the fate of Bashar Assad, he told ABC.Tillerson reiterated the same on CBS, saying that Washington hoped to work with its coalition members and with the UN, in particular through the Geneva process, to be able to navigate a political outcome in which the Syrian people will in fact determine Bashar Assad s fate and his legitimacy. The US Secretary of State underlined the Russian role in the process, saying that the US hoped it could work together with Russia and use their influence, and that Moscow will choose to play a constructive role in supporting ceasefire through their own Astana talks, but also through Geneva. READ MORE: Russian FM & US Secretary of State discuss US strike on Syria in phone call I m hopeful we can have Russia be supportive of a process that will lead to a stable Syria. Clearly they are Bashar Assad s current ally, they should have the greatest influence on Bashar Assad, he told Stephanopoulos, but he warned that Russia should be thinking carefully about its continued alliance with Bashar Assad. Inaccurate and inconclusive : Lavrov slams US accusations of Assad regime using chemical weapons in Idlib https://t.co/TU2XP6YAeB pic.twitter.com/iwy1vXa4Rx RT (@RT_com) April 8, 2017 Every time one of these horrific attacks occurs, it draws Russia closer into some level of responsibility, he said in an apparent reference to a recent alleged chemical attack in Syria s Idlib province. Washington blamed the Syrian government for the incident, while Moscow has said there has been no evidence presented to support such claims. LEARNING LIBYA LESSON Speaking of the US missile strike on a Syrian airbase, ordered by President Donald Trump in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons, Tillerson told CBS that clearly the message is that the violation of international norms, the continuing ignoring of UN resolutions and the continuing violation of agreements will no longer be tolerated. The airstrike is only related to the alleged chemical attack, the US official claimed, adding that Washington has learned its lesson of what it looks like when you undertake a violent regime change, referring to Libya. Obviously the United States own founding principle is self-determination, and what the US and our allies want to do is to enable the Syrian people to make that determination We ve seen what violent regime change looks like in Libya and the kind of chaos that can be unleashed and indeed the kind of misery that it enacts on its own people, he said on CBS. I think we have to learn the lessons of the past, he emphasized on ABC, adding, Any time you go on and have a violent change at the top, it is very difficult to create the conditions for stability [in the] longer term... Continue this report at RTREAD MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire SYRIA FilesSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Former Corinthian college students await loan relief: U.S. states | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Education Department has left thousands of student-loan borrowers who were defrauded by Corinthian Colleges Inc in limbo by prolonging a process created by the Obama administration that was supposed to speedily cancel their debts, according to 20 state attorneys general and regulators. In the final months that President Barack Obama, a Democrat, was in office the department finalized a regulation easing the way for students from struggling for-profit colleges such as Corinthian and ITT Tech to quickly receive debt relief that they were entitled to by law. In a letter sent on Monday to U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the state attorneys general said they were concerned about growing backlogs of applications for the relief and of loans approved for discharge that simply need a sign-off. The letter, signed by the top lawyers of Illinois, California, Massachusetts and other states, was released on Tuesday. They said they were particularly troubled that some borrowers had been notified their loans were eligible for fast discharge under the regulation but that the cancellation has not yet happened. According to the letter, the Department stated in January it had notified 23,000 borrowers that their loan forgiveness should be complete within the 60 to 120 days, but in many cases loans have not been canceled. That means some of Corinthian’s students could still be on the hook for monthly payments or possibly face debt collection. Work on discharging loans that have been approved is underway, according to Education Department Press Secretary Liz Hill. “We are working with servicers to get these loans discharged as expeditiously as possible,” Hill said in a statement. “Some borrowers should expect to obtain discharges within the next few weeks.” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said about 5,000 past Corinthian students in the state received letters last December directing to apply on-line for relief. Since then, his office has received queries about delays in the process. “Delay in canceling this debt, especially for students who have already been approved, could put even greater financial strain on students in Virginia and around the country,” he said in a statement. Amid federal and state investigations in 2015 into its post-graduation rates, for-profit Corinthian filed for bankruptcy and abruptly closed its 28 schools. | 0fake |
Kiefer Sutherland Returns. This Time the Oval Office Is His. - The New York Times | TORONTO — Kiefer Sutherland was playing tour guide. On the set of the new ABC series “Designated Survivor” here earlier this month, he clutched a pack of Camels and walked, slapping, through a replica of the West Wing, pointing out where the president’s chief of staff sits, running his hand along the curved wall of the Oval Office. In front of a painting of George Washington, he offered this historical nugget: “He was actually quite handsome but the painter hated him. Unflattering. ” Later, while ruminating on President Washington’s dental problems, Mr. Sutherland stood in a hallway with his back to another presidential portrait: his own. The placard beneath read Tom Kirkman. After spending nearly a decade protecting the president on the Fox series “24,” Mr. Sutherland now requires his own detail. On “Designated Survivor” he plays a cabinet member who ascends to the Oval Office when Congress is wiped out by an attack during a State of the Union address. The actor leaves behind the antics of the counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer to play a policy wonk thrust into a job he never wanted. Mr. Sutherland hasn’t exactly disappeared since “24” ended its regular series run in 2010. Among other gigs, he did two “24” projects, and appeared in fare, including Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” and “Forsaken,” a western with his father, Donald Sutherland. And in August, he released his first album, “Down in a Hole,” filled with country songs that he helped write. He’s been touring extensively, recently appearing at the Grand Ole Opry. But these have mostly been quiet endeavors, at least relative to the cultural noise generated by “24. ” Mr. Sutherland’s first network series the “Touch” on Fox, failed to find an audience, and was canceled after two seasons. If the public wants a repeat of Mr. Sutherland leading a slick drama that giddily seizes the political moment, then “Designated Survivor” — a glossy of political thriller, “The West Wing” nation building and domestic drama — might be the show that delivers him back to the affections of the mainstream. Mr. Sutherland, 49, sat on a leather couch in the president’s private office — slight his arms tattooed prone to long, circular sentences — remarking on the difficulty of not appearing too presidential amid such surroundings (even if they are fake). “The set’s so good that you can’t help standing a little straighter,” he said. “There’s something about how significant that office is. We watched Kennedy’s kids play there, Nixon getting himself out of Watergate. It does have an impact on your performance. ” With an narrative driving this election cycle, Mr. Sutherland’s respectful nostalgia for political office seems surprisingly . Television politicians these days are mostly venal, their cutthroat egoism wrung for drama on “Scandal” and for laughs on “Veep. ” “BrainDead,” this summer’s satire from the creators of “The Good Wife,” targeted elected officials by planting space bugs in their skulls. But “Designated Survivor” leans more toward the idealism of “The West Wing. ” David Guggenheim, a writer known for “Safe House,” had long been intrigued by the concept of the designated survivor, the person in the presidential line of succession selected to wait in a secure, undisclosed location when all other members of government are gathered elsewhere. After his usually encouraging friend Simon Kinberg (a producer of films, including “The Martian”) expressed little enthusiasm about one of his movie pitches in a email exchange, Mr. Guggenheim — hoping to redeem himself — pulled out the designated survivor idea and hit send. Mr. Kinberg loved it, and Mr. Guggenheim wrote the script in two weeks. They took it to Mark Gordon, a veteran producer (“Grey’s Anatomy”) who immediately envisioned Mr. Sutherland as the lead. “Most actors are known for the thing that made them famous,” Mr. Gordon said. “Jack Bauer was active and macho, but Kiefer’s actually such a gentle, gracious guy. He can be the idealized president that we all wish we had. ” In Hollywood, an Everyman in the White House is often played for laughs: Chris Rock in “Head of State” Kevin Kline in “Dave. ” But the “Designated Survivor” premise — an entire government up in flames — is almost shockingly grim. Mr. Guggenheim needed Mr. Sutherland to tilt the story away from tragedy. “We were killing people right off the top but I didn’t want the show to live in that darkness,” he said. “I did want Tom to represent optimism. We pointed Kiefer toward ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. ’” The common sense that drives President Kirkman is, said Mr. Sutherland, a retort to cynics. “The lack of knowledge and understanding of how difficult it is to govern has led to some very poor ideas in our society,” he said. “Maybe showing the rebuilding of a government in action will help dial down the rhetoric that’s out there. ” Mr. Sutherland has found himself in the political fray before. “24” made its debut in November 2001 amid intense anxiety. Jack Bauer’s propensity for grisly torture methods meant “24” was read by some as a revenge fantasy for a grieving country, and eventually criticized by others for wallowing in violence at a moment where “enhanced interrogation techniques” became a national ignominy. “Once I was in an airport waiting to get on a plane and a woman looked at me and said: ‘How can you make that show?’ It’s like: What are you talking about? We had the first president on TV we had the first female president on TV,” Mr. Sutherland said. ‘‘When Jack Bauer was on his deathbed he didn’t ask for a priest he asked for an imam to apologize. I wish the show hadn’t become so politicized in the end, but I have no regrets. ” He may be particularly sensitive to the label because in Canada he’s considered royalty. To Americans, he’s known as Donald Sutherland’s son, but to many Canadians, he’s the grandson of Tommy Douglas, the Saskatchewan premier who brought universal health care to Canada and helped form the federal party that would become the New Democratic Party. As children, Mr. Sutherland and his twin sister, Rachel, spent time in Canada’s parliament in Ottawa. “I remember eating hot dogs in the House of Commons and waiting for my grandpa,” he said. “I loved the debates. ” His mother, the actress Shirley Douglas, continued the activist tradition. In 1969, when she was involved with the Black Panther Party, she was arrested in Los Angeles, said Mr. Sutherland, not without pride. Mr. Sutherland’s parents divorced when he was 4, and Ms. Douglas relocated the family to Toronto four years later. The city now passes for his hometown he takes the subway to the suburban set every day, and his mother and sister live here. But as a student Mr. Sutherland attended six schools in five years. He dropped out at 16 when he was cast in the Canadian film “The Bay Boy,” arriving in Hollywood soon after. The welcome mat was out for Packers: He roomed with Robert Downey Jr. and rose quickly, landing a string of 1980s hits: “Stand By Me,” “Lost Boys,” “Young Guns. ” “You think: ‘This is great, this is going to be the rest of my life.’ Then somewhere around 30 you get a knock back and realize, ‘Oh no, you should have held on tight. ’” He married and divorced young his daughter, Sarah Sutherland, now 28, plays Julia ’s daughter on “Veep. ” The career lull of Mr. Sutherland’s early 30s was followed by “24,” a show that Natascha McElhone had never seen when she signed on to “Designated Survivor” as first lady. She didn’t know what friends meant when they joked: “Jack Bauer becomes president?” “Kiefer has large reserves of vulnerability,” she said. “There’s something quite breakable inside, which I think is not just endearing but unusual. He’s also quite a worker bee. ” An executive producer on the show, Mr. Sutherland has made suggestions that have been incorporated into it, including having Kirkman wear glasses (for a Clark Kent effect) and making Kirkman an independent (circumventing Republican and Democratic baggage) according to Mr. Guggenheim. For a Canadian with a green card, Mr. Sutherland is oddly smitten with the mythic American West. In the 90s, he had a ranch in Montana, and roped in rodeos, feeding on country like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. After listening to one of Mr. Sutherland’s early efforts at songwriting, his friend and writing Jude Cole, encouraged him to record. “I said: ‘There’s a heartbreaking quality to your voice. No, you’re not this fantastic singer, but there are a lot of smooth singers out there, and there’s not a lot of Kris Kristoffersons,’” Mr. Cole said. An actor who crosses over into music can invite mockery or oblivion, but Mr. Sutherland was willing to take that risk. After years of playing guitar in his trailer, and with Mr. Cole running a music label, Ironworks, he was ready to put his own music out there. “I was prepared for a brutal beating, but the nice thing about finally getting to the age where I’m at is, well, as long as they’re not going to kill me, O. K. ” (The reviews have been mostly positive, if begrudging: “ … actually kind of decent,” read the headline on the A. V. Club’s take.) Loss and drinking are common themes the title track is about a friend who drank himself to death. Mr. Sutherland’s drinking has been a tabloid punch line in the past: In 2005, he hurled himself at a decorated Christmas tree in a London hotel lobby and a D. U. I. arrest led to a brief jail stint. Yet he seemed ambivalent when asked if his relationship to alcohol had changed. “It’s been a part of my life, there’s no denying that,” he said. “It’s not something I do alone. I like going out with friends after work. It’s a way of letting loose. Having said that, I can tell you that if I look back on my life any of the negative things that have happened usually have [drinking] as a root cause, whether it was a D. U. I. or fighting, or a breakup, a relationship not working. There’s a price to pay for it. If you take a look at the songs, none of them are positive. ” As an actor, Mr. Sutherland is used to telling other people’s stories. But the album is intensely personal a “journal,” he has said. The song “Calling Out Your Name” is about his split from Julia Roberts in 1991. Even after decades in the public eye, Mr. Sutherland said he found this level of exposure new, and perhaps liberating. “I would never ordinarily be that confessional, and when I first got onstage, it took me a moment to surrender,” he said. “But when I did that became one of the great experiences of my life. I’m grateful for how gracious people have been. It’s affected how I approached this part. I could let a bit more of myself into the character. It’s more personal. ” Whether this incarnation of Kiefer Sutherland — or any — can ever eclipse one of the most roles in television history, only the public will decide. | 0fake |
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