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A Classified Matter at the White House: Obama’s Star-Studded Galas - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — There are plenty of perks to being president of the United States. One of them is glamorous birthday parties. For the past seven years, from the ages of 48 to 55, President Obama has celebrated the annual occasion with a growing collection of celebrities, sports stars, business executives, movie moguls and politicians — all dancing into the small hours of the morning. On Friday night and well into Saturday, Mr. Obama did it again, celebrating his 55th birthday — his last as commander in chief — with a big White House party. East Wing staff members were told to expect to be working until 4 a. m. Guests were asked not to tweet pictures (some did anyway) or spill any details. One birthday guest, who normally has a very good memory, insisted late Saturday that he had imbibed too much to remember a thing. (It’s not clear what the guest was drinking, but Mr. Obama favors Grey Goose martinis.) Another birthday friend recalled only seeing Alonzo Mourning, a retired Miami Heat basketball star, and watching Stevie Wonder perform. Magic Johnson tweeted a picture of himself and his wife on Friday evening. “Cookie and I getting ready to go to President Obama’s birthday party!” he wrote. The Rev. Al Sharpton tweeted at 1:10 a. m.: “Leaving the White House after the celebration of President Obama’s birthday. His last birthday as President. ” Others spotted at the White House before the party included the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres Grant Hill, a former N. B. A. star George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars” and a collection of former Obama aides and media celebrities. The Nick Jonas tweeted afterward: “Tonight was a night I will never forget. #BarackObama #happybirthday. ” Paul McCartney was also a guest. The president has demonstrated little interest in the political schmoozing and official social life of the nation’s capital and spends hours each weeknight largely alone, working in his private office in the White House Treaty Room. It is safe to say that more than a decade ago, when he was a state senator in Illinois, he would not have expected one of the Beatles to sing him “Happy Birthday. ” But like the Kennedys, the Reagans and the Clintons, the Obamas have reached outside Washington and embraced an elite, moneyed stratum of American life. In his second term, Mr. Obama has been going to, or hosting, small dinner parties with actors, intellectuals, scientists, tech giants and billionaires. Two years ago in Rome, the architect Renzo Piano, the particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti and the chairman of Fiat, John Elkann, were at his table. The Obamas have also insisted on keeping the partying as secret as possible. Names of those invited to nonofficial parties at the White House are never made public, and what does come out is usually from tweets from guests, like Mr. Johnson and Mr. Sharpton. In June 2015, Mr. Obama had a private party at the White House for 500 people, including Wall Street executives, Washington lobbyists, movie stars, members of his cabinet and others. Prince performed at the weekend bash, 10 months before his death from an accidental drug overdose. The White House had not provided notice of the party on Mr. Obama’s public schedule, and when word leaked out — through a tweet by Mr. Sharpton that said, in part: “Awesome to see Prince and Stevie Wonder on keyboards together. Unbelievable experience. ” — there was an outcry from the White House press corps. The White House was unmoved. “The president and first lady are going to reserve the right to host private parties at the White House,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said at the time. This time, the White House made a formal announcement of the birthday party a few hours before it started. “This evening the first lady is hosting a 55th birthday celebration for the president at the White House,” a statement said. “The guest list includes a large number of family members and friends to mark the occasion. The private event will be paid for with the family’s personal funds. ” White House officials say all similar private events are paid for by the Obamas, though it is unclear whether those costs include security and staff workers, who would be on hand at the White House anyway. But one thing is certain to change: The address for Mr. Obama’s next birthday party won’t say 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. | 0fake |
Ruling Means Most of Hillary Clinton’s Emails Will Come Out After Election - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday ordered the State Department to finish preparing roughly 1, 000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails for release by Nov. 4, a more protracted timetable that means the bulk of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that were uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation will not be released until after the election. In August, the judge, James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court, raised the prospect of a flood of Clinton emails being released during the final weeks of the campaign, when he ordered the State Department to accelerate the release of nearly 15, 000 new emails. But Judge Boasberg acknowledged the burden for the department’s lawyers in reviewing thousands of emails, as well as responding to multiple lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act that seek documents relating to Mrs. Clinton, her aide Huma Abedin, and the Clinton Foundation. Under the order issued on Friday, in a lawsuit brought by the conservative group, Judicial Watch, the State Department will release 350 pages of emails by Oct. 7, 350 pages by Oct. 21, and another 350 by Nov. 4. After that, it will produce 500 pages a month. Judge Boasberg summoned the lawyers for another status report on Nov. 7, the day before the election. Questions about Mrs. Clinton’s private email address and server have hung over her presidential campaign for more than a year, even after the F. B. I. ’s director, James B. Comey, said in July that her conduct did not warrant criminal charges for mishandling of classified information. Mr. Comey said the F. B. I. had discovered thousands of emails that Mrs. Clinton had not voluntarily turned over to the State Department before its investigation. Of the nearly 15, 000 emails the F. B. I. turned over to the State Department in late July, roughly 9, 400 were purely personal, according to the department’s lawyers. They will therefore not be released. That leaves about 5, 600 emails to be reviewed. But roughly half of those may be wholly or largely duplicates of emails that have already been released. Duplicates could take the form of a previously released email, which Mrs. Clinton may have forwarded to her aides with orders to print it out. In some cases, the emails were part of long chains, on which Mrs. Clinton was copied at the beginning, but later left off the list of addressees. “We are currently processing these documents for release,” said the State Department spokesman, John Kirby. “As we have done so, we have noticed that some personal emails remain within the approximately 5, 600 documents, so the number may be further reduced. ” Each email generates roughly 1. 8 pages of print, a government lawyer said, which means about 10, 000 pages will be released in total. Only about 10 percent will be made public before the election, which prompted a complaint from Judicial Watch. “The public deserves to know what is in those emails, well before Nov. 8, and the State Department should not continue dragging its feet on producing them,” the group’s president, Tom Fitton, said in a statement. “The American people need to pressure State to stop sitting on these new Clinton emails for political reasons and release them as the law requires. ” | 0fake |
How Planned Parenthood could shut down the government | A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups. | 0fake |
TALENTLESS Gigi Hadid Makes Ridiculous “Apology” For Mocking Immigrant Melania’s Accent: “I believe Melania understands show business” | Here s Gigi Hadid s ridiculous apology to Melania, where she basically says she s been mocked before too and Melania should understand and deal with it. Apparently no one ever taught Hadid how to offer an actual heartfelt apology:pic.twitter.com/6NuxjKx68o Gigi Hadid (@GiGiHadid) November 22, 2016 | 1real |
North Korea images suggest missile capable of hitting all America: U.S. experts | WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) - Images released by North Korea on Thursday appeared to show it has succeeded in developing a missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon anywhere in the United States and it could be only two or three tests away from being declared combat ready, U.S.-based experts said on Thursday. North Korea released dozens of photos and a video after Wednesday s launch of the new Hwasong-15 missile, and leader Kim Jong Un declared the country had finally realized the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force . U.S.-based experts, some of whom have been skeptical about past North Korean claims to have put all of the United States in range, said data from the latest test and the photos appeared to confirm North Korea has a missile of sufficient power to deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere in America. Experts and U.S. officials say questions remain about whether it has a re-entry vehicle capable of protecting a nuclear warhead as it speeds toward its target and about the accuracy of its guidance systems. In an analysis for the Washington-based 38 North think tank, missile expert Michael Elleman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies said the North Korean photos showed a missile considerably larger than its predecessor. Initial calculations indicate the new missile could deliver a moderately sized nuclear weapon to any city on the U.S. mainland, Elleman said. Elleman said the missile was large and powerful enough to carry simple decoys or other countermeasures to challenge U.S. missile defenses. A handful of additional flight tests are needed to validate the Hwasong-15 s performance and reliability, and likely establish the efficacy of a protection system needed to ensure the warhead survives the rigors of atmospheric re-entry, Elleman wrote. Only two or three more tests might be needed if North Korea could accept low confidence in the missile s reliability. Another missile expert, whose employer does not allow him to speak publicly to the media, agreed with Elleman s assessment. If North Korea does not make high demands on the reliability or accuracy of the missile ... two or three more tests would suffice. So long as North Korea can hit U.S. cities with thermonuclear warheads, they probably don t need the ability hit every city they target or target specific aim points within those cities to convince the U.S. leadership that war with North Korea would be too expensive to contemplate. In a call with U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said the missile was North Korea s most advanced so far. But it was unclear if Pyongyang had the technology to miniaturize a nuclear warhead, and it still needed to prove other things, including re-entry technology. U.S. based experts said North Korea had almost certainly developed a warhead light enough to be carried by the Hwasong- 15, which Elleman said should be capable of delivering a 1,000 kg payload. Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of Strategic Studies said on Twitter the Hwasong-15 was so big that the warhead wouldn t need to be miniaturized. On Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis acknowledged the missile went higher than any previous test and was part of a North Korean effort to continue building ballistic missiles that can threaten everywhere in the world, basically. North Korea said the missile soared to an altitude of about 4,475 km (2,780 miles), more than 10 times the height of the International Space Station, and flew 950 km (590 miles) during its 53-minute flight before landing in the sea near Japan. The missile s large size was immediately apparent in the photos, which analysts said allowed for a more powerful propulsion system. This is a very big missile, said Michael Duitsman, a research associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies. And I don t mean big for North Korea. Only a few countries can produce missiles of this size, and North Korea just joined the club. U.S. experts and officials said the missile still appeared to be powered by liquid fuel, something that made it vulnerable as it could take to up to two hours to fuel on-site before launching. Earlier, one U.S. official told Reuters the missile could have been powered by solid fuel, but experts said North Korea could still be a few years away from being able to field a more versatile solid-fueled ICBM. The photos appeared to show the missile with at least two large nozzles on its first stage, instead of the one large and several smaller nozzles on the Hwasong-14. The first stage seems to use essentially the same case (as the Hwasong-14) but has two engines, said David Wright, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S.-based nonprofit science advocacy group. The second stage looks like it can carry more than twice as much propellant. The combination of those two things means it really is a new, more capable missile. While the photos show a mobile erector vehicle being used to position the missile upright, it is not seen in photos of the launch itself. U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the test missile was fired from a fixed position, not a mobile launcher, three U.S. officials said. The massive vehicle was 100 percent a domestic product of North Korea, state media quoted Kim Jong Un as saying. Western analysts said it is more likely the truck was one of about half a dozen vehicles obtained years ago from China, which North Korea has modified since then. (For a graphic on Rocket science click tmsnrt.rs/2j2S5T3) (For a graphic on North Korea's missile and nuclear tests click tmsnrt.rs/2vXbj0S) | 0fake |
PHILIPPINES: 2016 Washington’s Fury as Philippine’s Elections Threaten US Anti-China Policy | Duterte takes clear lead in Philippine elections. (Photo: IBT)Andrew Korybko The DuranMay 2016: As Filipinos choose their next President on Monday, prospect of election of anti-establishment candidate threatens the geopolitical viability of the US s Pivot to Asia.The Philippines votes for its next President on Monday. Whilst the rest of the world pays little attention, strategists in Washington are worried.The electoral frontrunner is Rodrigo Duterte, an eccentric, no-nonsense former mayor from the southern island of Mindanao who commands a Trump-like popularity and an equally loyal following. He has shaken Philippine politics to its core over the past couple of months, defying establishment pundits who just as they did with Trump wrongly predicted that his campaign would fizzle out over the course of each passing week.Having totally underestimated just how dissatisfied most Filipinos are with the status quo, Duterte s rivals missed the chance to outshine him by his anti-system rhetoric. With the race in its final days that is now too late. Instead also paralleling what happened with Trump there are desperate calls for coalitions and deals to stop him.Should these fail and should Duterte win on Monday, he promises a geopolitical revolution unlike anything the Philippines has ever seen in its history. Pivoting To Asia Through The PhilippinesThe US s Pivot to Asia was announced by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2011 with the unstated but obvious goal of containing China. Key to this strategy is the rebalancing as the Pentagon calls it of an estimated 60% of its overseas forces to the Asia-Pacific theatre. Such a major deployment requires many more bases than the US currently has in the region. The US has therefore sought the help of the loyal leader of its former Philippines colony, Benigno Aquino III, to find a way to re-open its bases in the Philippines which under popular pressure were closed in the 1990s.Using the China threat as the plausibly justifiable reason for doing so, but aware that the Philippines people still resent their former coloniser and are proud of having forced the US to close its Philippines bases at the end of the Cold War, the US has devised what it calls an Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that allows for the rotational presence of American troops in at least five separate bases, one of which is located on the strategic island of Palawan that abuts the South China Sea.Although not legally permanent or officially controlled by the US, this wink-and-a-nod arrangement would in reality allow the US to redeploy its forces to the Philippines, returning the Philippines archipelago to the role of the US s second unsinkable aircraft carrier (alongside Japan) which it had during the Cold War.The China Containment Coalition The Pentagon plans to use the Philippines as the maritime lynch of its China Containment Coalition (CCC), gathering all of its allies navies together and deploying them within provocative striking range of China s claimed islands.The other three members of the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Japan, India, and Australia would find their own way to rotate their military units throughout the Philippines islands as well, thereby forming the core of the CCC.To add a regional element to this mix, the plan is for the Philippines and Vietnam, both of which contest some of China s maritime claims, to intensify their strategic cooperation to the point of a mutual defence treaty. This would draw Vietnam into the network of the anti-China coalition being built up by Washington by using the defence ties between Vietnam and the Philippines to making the members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue de facto allies of Vietnam.Altogether, the Pentagon plan is to produce a critical mass of hostile states near China s southern maritime border which backed by the US could quickly counter any moves by Beijing thereby containing it to the East Asian mainland.Duterte s RevolutionEverything was proceeding according to plan until Duterte began to question the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement . While his running mate has said Duterte would honour the agreement, he added that he would do so from a position of strength .Back in October 2014, Duterte went on record to say the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement should be scrapped if it allowed US servicemen in the Philippines to avoid justice for any crimes they committed.This pinpoints an issue very sensitive for Filipinos who have vivid memories of how US troops were able to escape punishment for acts of gross misbehaviour whilst the US military occupied its bases in the Philippines. Public anger over this issue was one of the key factors in mobilising local opposition to the bases and explains why many Filipinos oppose their return.Since it is impossible to imagine such an incident not arising at some point, it is all but inevitable that a situation will occur which will fulfil Duterte s criterion for scrapping the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement Taken together with Duterte s assertion that he intends to deal with the US from a position of strength it is easy to see how this might trigger the process of revoking the agreement.No Filipino politician has previously spoken about the US in this way. Moreover other things he has said also suggest an intention to send a strongly independent line.Not surprisingly the Pentagon-affiliated publication Starts and Stripes , which writes for US servicemen servicemen and their families, published a scathing critique of Duterte just last week. Here are some excerpts: With Filipinos set to choose among five candidates on May 9, Duterte, the incumbent mayor of Davao City who has said the U.S. should not meddle in our affairs, holds a strong lead, according to the most recent poll released Sunday.Duterte is very popular now because people are sick and tired of the same old, same old, said Virginia Bacay Watson, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. He s kind of a fresh face, fresh perspective, compared to the other elites who are running. Duterte has presented himself to voters as a straight-talker who is not part of the Manila elite someone who can get things done even if he needs to bend the rules to do so. That includes the country s foreign affairs. He feels that American influence is too strong, that we re too dependent on U.S. intervention in anything we do, said Babe Romualdez, an opinion columnist for The Philippine Star newspaper who has interviewed the candidates one-on-one about their platforms on the U.S. military and relations with China. He was an activist when he was a student and young lawyer, Romualdez said. I get a sense that he s saying the same things that most of the militants say. In Romualdez s interview with the front-runner, the candidate said we really don t need the Americans to deal with the Chinese because the Chinese want to talk to us alone. If I become president I m going to reach out to the Chinese and talk to them alone without American intervention, he said.Duterte publically opposed the Visiting Forces Agreement with the U.S. of which the EDCA was an amendment and claimed in 2013 that he had rejected a request by the U.S. to establish Davao as a base of operations for drones.Earlier this year, he was quoted saying that although the country was now bound by the EDCA, he had reservations about the presence of foreign troops. He added, We will not allow the building of structures. Clearly, Duterte is not the sort of leader the Pentagon envisaged for the Philippines. If he becomes Philippine President there will inevitably be concern in Washington that its elaborate plans for an anti-Chinese coalition in the region could be scuttled.The New Silk Road Pays A Pit Stop To The PhilippinesWorse still for the US Duterte is saying the Philippines and China could have peaceful and pragmatic relations with each other, engaging in bilateral dialogue over their disputes without the meddling interference of the US.What that would mean for the US is that the Philippines might become a tacit Chinese ally, which would completely upend the regional strategic balance.That is not what Duterte is actually calling for, but he did say is that he not only would be open to talking to Beijing, but would even further and engage in joint exploration in the South China Sea. Further, in seeking to develop the decades-neglected infrastructure of one of the most promising economies of Asia, Duterte has suggested that he would be open to inviting China to build a railroad and other types of connective projects that Beijing has become globally renowned for. This would of course mean replacing US contractors traditionally heavily entrenched in the Philippines with cheaper and possibly more efficient Chinese ones potentially causing US companies to lose out from billions of dollars of construction deals.Joint maritime exploration and infrastructure cooperation between the Philippines and China has the potential to turn the entire Philippines archipelago into the latest pit stop for China s New Silk Road, presenting the US with its biggest geopolitical setback since the reunification of Crimea with Russia.Concluding ThoughtsThe entire future of the US s Pivot to Asia hangs in the balance as Filipinos go to the polls in what is shaping up to be the most pivotal election in their country s history.While the US and its allied politicians are preaching a campaign of anti-Chinese fear mongering and war, Rodrigo Duterte is bucking the system and preaching the benefits the Philippines could reap from more pragmatic policies.By questioning the need for the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement and subtly threatening to subvert it, Duterte has made himself the US s enemy number one amongst politicians from the Asia-Pacific. No other individual is speaking out in this way and unlike others who have come before him, he seems to command a high level of genuine people support.If Duterte succeeds in winning the Presidency, it could represent a paradigm shift in Philippine history and the region s geopolitics, resulting in the US losing its second unsinkable aircraft carrier and having its Pivot to Asia ie. its plan to contain China fail before it has even properly got underway.***READ MORE PHILIPPINES NEWS AT 21ST CENTURY WIRE S: PHILIPPINES FILESSUPPORT OUR WORK BY SUBSCRIBING & BECOMING A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
OOPS-a-daisy! Watch Team Hillary FREAK over NYT piece on her ‘gay marriage flip-flop’, from #PodestaEmails21 | OOPS-a-daisy! Watch Team Hillary FREAK over NYT piece on her ‘gay marriage flip-flop’, from #PodestaEmails21 Posted at 11:55 am Sam J. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
A large part of Hillary’s campaign has been pandering … er … reaching out to the LGBT community insisting she is with them, and supports their love and most of all she supports their “right” to get married.
Of course not quite 20 years ago, she felt very differently and is quoted as saying, “I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been. Between a man and a woman.”
Oops.
— Jordan (@JordanChariton) October 28, 2016
Shockingly the New York Times did a piece on her epic flip-flop on gay marriage, which clearly freaked her team out. Best piece, “Can we point those who are writing this to the 2013 video,” basically trying to control what the writer would include. Of course they missed the part that the story is really the change in her policy, not that she’s had an epiphany about gay people. Trending won't
Democrats just figured out they needed this demographic, so they all magically change their minds. See Obama and his “evolution” on gay marriage – same deal. Obamas was categorically against gay marriage during his campaign then changed his mind. when Hillary changed her mind lol she's pandering.
Actually that just means they are both pandering. You’re welcome.
Makes you wonder, is Hillary privately against gay marriage? Dear LGBTQ, Did you know that Hillary is still 'privately' against Gay Marriage? #Wikileaks #PodestaEmails21 https://t.co/1XGlvpSJSO | 1real |
AWESOME: TRUMP TWEETS THE TWO RULES That Will Guide The Trump Administration | The link to Instagram was the photo below: | 1real |
Boiler Room EP #111 – Build-a-World-Order-Burger | Tune in to the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR) for another LIVE broadcast of The Boiler Room tonight 6:00 PM PST | 8:00 PM CST | 9:00 PM EST for this special broadcast. Join us for uncensored, uninterruptible talk radio, custom-made for bar fly philosophers, misguided moralists, masochists, street corner evangelists, media-maniacs, savants, political animals and otherwise lovable rascals.Join ACR hosts Hesher and Spore along with Jay Dyer from Jays Analysis, Randy J (21WIRE & ACR contributor), Andy Nowicki of Alt-Right Novelist and Basil Valentine (21WIRE & ACR contributor) for the hundred and eleventh episode of BOILER ROOM. Turn it up, tune in and hang with the ACR Brain-Trust for this weeks boil downs and analysis and the usual gnashing of the teeth of the political animals in the social reject club.This week on the show we re talking about Builderberg 2017, Zbigniew Brzezinski s role in social engineering, Feminists galloping around Stockholm as horses (in protest of we re not really sure what) and breaking news of the death of Noriega.Direct Download Episode #111Please like and share the program and visit our donate page to get involved! Reference Links: | 1real |
Several Bars Will Be Opening Early Thursday For Comey’s Hearing, Serving Cheap Russian Vodka | If you are looking for somewhere to drink while you watch former-FBI Director James Comey s testimony on Thursday morning, then it seems like your prayers have been answered. At least three bars in Washington DC will be opening early for the event.Shaw s Tavern at 520 Florida Ave NW will be hosting The Comey Hearing Covfefe. Opening at 9:30 am, Shaw s will have five screens showing Comey s testimony and will be serving $5 Stolichnaya Vodka flavors, as well as some house specials for the day, including the FBI sandwich, consisting of Fried chicken breast, Bacon and Iceberg lettuce on a toasted bun with fries for $10. If you d prefer breakfast, then there is another FBI available French toast, Bacon and Ice cream, also for $10.Duffy s Irish Pub, situated at 2106 Vermont Ave NW, will have their James Comey Show featuring the Covfefe Cocktail. Although few details are known about the event or the contents of the Covfefe Cocktail, Duffy s is decked out with 15 screens and serves what have been voted The Best Wings in DC, hopefully all left ones.Another option is The Partisan, located at 709 D St NW, and their Comey Viewing Party. The Partisan will be opening at 10 am for all of the Comey action, but suggest grabbing breakfast at Red Apron Butcher s D Street location first. After that, you can pull up a seat in The Partisan and watch it all go down while enjoying either a Last Word or Drop The Bomb cocktail at $6 each.Unfortunately, not everyone wanting to watch the show with an early morning drink will be in Washington, however, those in Houston, TX, will be in luck with Axelrad at 1517 Alabama St playing host to the Comey Testimony Viewing the SUPER BOWL of Washington. Axelrad will open at 8:45 am and will be offering $1 off their political drinks including impeachmint and bad hombre. Muffins, granola, and coffee will also be available.Who said you had to stay home to enjoy all of the Comey testimony fun on Thursday morning?Featured image via Eric Thayer/Getty Images | 1real |
New York Daily News Cover SAVAGES White House For Spicer’s Hitler Gaffe (IMAGE) | The New York Daily News is not known for subtlety when it comes to its covers. The snarky newspaper pulled no punches when it came to using its cover to go after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer for calling concentration camps Holocaust Centers and invoking Nazi butcher Adolf Hitler when talking about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Wednesday morning s cover reads: Nazis murdered 2.7 million Jews, gassing 6,000 a day in Auschwtiz alone FORGOTTEN BY WHITE HOUSE Here is the image of that cover via New York Daily News Twitter:Of course, The New York Daily News isn t the first to go after Spicer for these remarks. The Anne Frank Center has called on Donald Trump to fire Spicer, as has House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Further, this is part of a disturbing pattern of anti-Semitism from Team Trump. During the campaign he regularly retweeted white supremacists, most infamously when he tweeted a picture of Hillary Clinton over a pile of money with a Star of David that said, Most Corrupt Candidate Ever. This tweet caused such an uproar that House Speaker Paul Ryan was forced to speak out about it. After he was elected, Trump s White House deliberately left any mention of Jewish people out of their Holocaust Remembrance Day statement. And, of course, no one can forget that we have avowed white supremacists working in the West Wing.To that end, if this administration doesn t want to be called bigots, they need to stop acting like it. Get rid of the racists, homophobes, xenophobes, and other assorted overtly bigoted people.Don t hold your breath on that one, though. We ll have four years of this kind of stuff. The only silver lining may be that in the end, the GOP can no longer say that they don t traffic in bigotry, since it s right there in the White House for all to see, while their party is in charge.Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images | 1real |
Democrats gird for fight with Trump in U.S. Rust Belt states | CLEVELAND/NEW YORK - Bracing for a general election fight with Donald Trump, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and her allies are putting resources into industrial states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania to try to block Trump from making inroads with working-class voters there. Labor leaders, progressive groups and Democratic operatives told Reuters in interviews that they took seriously Trump’s appeal with white working-class voters and were studying how to respond to his promises to create jobs and negotiate better trade deals. The desire to stop the presumptive Republican presidential nominee from wresting away the support of unionized workers has even led a group organized to back Bernie Sanders, Labor for Bernie, to consider its next steps if Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination. “It may well be our task to work hard to reach out to our (labor union) members who support Trump and begin an important dialogue,” said Rand Wilson, a staunch Sanders supporter and Labor for Bernie spokesman. The Rust Belt, which includes Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and West Virginia, has suffered heavy job losses in sectors such as autos, coal and steel that have faced fierce competition from abroad. The region, home to many unionized workers, has been a stronghold for Democrats. The exceptions are socially conservative West Virginia, which has gone Republican in the past four presidential elections, and Indiana, which has gone Democratic only twice since 1940. Ohio has switched back and forth. Trump has aggressively courted working-class voters ahead of the Nov. 8 election to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama. He has criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and promised to rip up the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. He has also said he will consider raising the minimum wage and backing higher taxes on the wealthy. On Monday, Trump sought to backtrack from those comments on taxes. “Now if I increase it on the wealthy, that means they’re still going to be paying less than they are paying now,” he told CNN. “I’m talking about increasing it from my (original) tax proposal.” Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told Reuters the campaign was targeting industrial states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, which have voted Democratic in presidential elections since 1992. Working America, an advocacy group affiliated with the AFL-CIO labor federation, is expanding operations in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and plans to open an office in Wisconsin. Its first mission is talking to voters about jobs and the economy and trying to gauge where they are leaning in the presidential race. Later in the campaign, the group will work more aggressively to win over voters. In Ohio, the Democratic Party has doubled its field operation over the past month, thanks to an infusion of cash raised by the Clinton campaign for the national and state parties. Clinton, who has a strong lead over Sanders but has yet to secure the Democratic nomination, has already hired state directors in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Working America field director Soren Norris knocked on doors on the west side of Cleveland last week as part of an effort to gauge voter sentiment. At the first house, Tamara Phillips, 44, told Norris she was not enthusiastic about either Clinton or Trump but that she would vote for the New York businessman if forced to choose. Phillips, who works in publishing, said taxes on her commission income rose during former President Bill Clinton’s administration. But she said she had reservations about Trump’s “gruff” demeanor. With an eye toward voters across the Rust Belt, Clinton visited Appalachia last week with stops in West Virginia and Ohio. She apologized for previous statements related to shutting down the coal industry and told protesters she was committed to solving their economic problems even if they did not support her. Union activists said their strategy for undercutting Trump’s support would be pointing out discrepancies in his positions. His comment that he is open to raising the minimum wage comes after he said in a November debate that “wages are too high” and that an increase would hurt the economy. Although Trump rails against trade deals and businesses that move operations to Mexico, critics say that items such as ties and suits in his clothing line were made in China. “The best way to go after Trump is to make him run against himself,” said political strategist Brad Bannon, who advises labor unions. Tom Buffenbarger, a Clinton surrogate to labor and the past president of the machinists’ union, said Democrats would have “a lot of fun” highlighting Trump’s inconsistencies, although he acknowledged the Republican candidate presented a threat in some Rust Belt states. “Are we concerned about the industrial states in the upcoming election?” Buffenbarger said. “Yeah, Donald Trump’s done a good job complaining about the trade deal while he continues to ship work from the U.S. to China.” | 0fake |
Niger, Mali leaders seek funding for new anti-jihadist force | NIAMEY (Reuters) - Mali and Niger, two of the West African nations worst affected by jihadist violence, appealed on Wednesday for international funding for a regional force they have set up to counter Islamist insurgencies. Mali s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and Niger s Mahamadou Issoufou said the force assembled by the G5 Sahel bloc Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad was crucial to fighting a threat that went well beyong their borders. We bring this combat against terrorism not only to protect our own people and countries but for the whole world, Issoufou told a news conference in Niger s capital Niamey. For terrorism knows no border. It will go to Europe, it will go to the United States, he said. The world has to be mobilized. The idea of the G5 force was first dreamed up in 2015, but only in July last year did the countries set it up. It is expected to comprise around 5,000 troops. French President Emmanuel Macron has said he expects it to be operational by the autumn. Islamist groups, some with links to al Qaeda, seized Mali s desert north in 2012. French-led forces scattered them the following year but they still attack peacekeepers, soldiers and civilian targets in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. Issoufou said a multinational force in the Lake Chad region, including soldiers from Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon, had had some success against Islamist Boko Haram militants, but that this was financed by Africa s biggest economy, Nigeria, whereas no country in the G5 had sufficient resources. It is important that the international community takes note of this and gets together to give us resources to ensure our mission can be accomplished, he said. Analysts see the G5 force as the basis of an eventual exit strategy for around 4,000 French troops deployed to the region on counter-insurgency missions, mostly in Mali. We have only limited means, but if we mutualize our power, our sovereign elements will have more force, more vitality than we imagine, Malian President Keita said. Issoufou said the force would be divided into three deployments across the Sahel region: an eastern one consisting of Chadian and Nigerien forces, a central one with forces from Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, and a Western one with troops from Mali and Mauritania. | 0fake |
Obama's UN Ambassador: Cuba is Right About Our Human Rights | Obama's UN Ambassador: Cuba is Right About Our Human Rights October 29, 2016 Daniel Greenfield
You may remember Ambassador Samantha Power from the time she proposed invading Israel. Since then she's gone on to a glorious career of representing the Castro regime at the UN. Or is it the Obama regime. It naturally gets confusing when the US Ambassador to the UN sides with the enemy against her own country.
"For more than 50 years, the United States had a policy aimed at isolating the government of Cuba. For roughly half of those years, UN Member States have voted overwhelmingly for a General Assembly resolution that condemns the U.S. embargo and calls for it to be ended. The United States has always voted against this resolution. Today the United States will abstain. [Applause.] Thank you."
Under Obama, Power was told to abstain from opposing a resolution critical of the United States. And they say Obama is some sort of anti-American traitor. I don't see it. If he were, we would be seeing signs of it by now.
Anyway, Power then went on to audition for the job of the UN ambassador from Cuba by claiming that critiques from a brutal Communist dictatorship about our human rights are well-founded...
"Let me be among the first to acknowledge – as our Cuban counterparts often point out – that the United States has work to do in fulfilling these rights for our own citizens. And we know that at times in our history, U.S. leaders and citizens used the pretext of promoting democracy and human rights in the region to justify actions that have left a deep legacy of mistrust."
Somehow though siding with Communist dictatorships who are the enemy while betraying our allies in the region does not create any mistrust. Only opposing the left does. | 1real |
Freedom Rider: Russophobia: War Party Propaganda | By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley T he world’s most reactionary regime, the head-chopping, terror-sponsoring Saudi Arabian kleptocracy, was awarded the chair of the UN Human Rights Council, while Russia has been kicked out. The travesty was engineered by the Superpower of Lies to punish Moscow for resisting the U.S.-led war of sectarian massacre and regime change in Syria. The War Party is on the march, to the cheers of corporate media – and Hillary hasn’t even been elected yet. “All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people.” Did Russia invade Iraq and kill one million people? Does Russia have a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world? Did Russia occupy Haiti after kidnapping its president? Are Russian police allowed to shoot children to death without fear of repercussion? Is Russia entering its 20 th year of a terror war against the people of Somalia? All of these crimes take place in or at the direction of the United States. Yet the full force of propaganda and influence on world opinion is directed against Russia, which whatever its shortcomings cannot hold a candle to America in violating human rights.
Simply put, Hillary Clinton must be denied a victory of great magnitude and any opportunity to claim a mandate. The dangers presented by a Hillary Clinton presidency cannot be overstated. She and the war party have been steadily working towards a goal that defies logic and risks all life on earth. Regime change [3] is once again their modus operandi and they hope to make it a reality against Russia. Nearly every claim of Russian evil doing is a lie, a ruse meant to put Americans in a fighting mood and lose their fear of nuclear conflagration. It isn’t clear if Clinton and the rest of the would-be warriors actually realize they are risking mushroom clouds. Perhaps they believe that Vladimir Putin will be easily pushed around when all evidence points to the contrary. “Regime change is once again their modus operandi and they hope to make it a reality against Russia.” The unproven allegations of interference in the presidential election and casting blame on Russia as the sole cause of suffering in Syria are meant to desensitize the public. It is an age old ploy which makes war not just acceptable but deemed a necessity. The usual suspects are helping out eagerly. The corporate media, led by newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post , are front and center in pushing tales of Russian villainy. Human Rights Watch and other organizations who care nothing about abuses committed by the United States and its allies are also playing their usual role of choosing the next regime change victim. Russia lost its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council in part because of American pressure and public relations assistance from the human rights industrial complex. The UNHRC is now chaired by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that funds the jihadist terrorist groups who caused 500,000 Syrian deaths. The Saudis are causing dislocation, death and starvation in Yemen, too, but they are American allies, so there is little opposition to their misdeeds. The openly bigoted Donald Trump has been the perfect foil for Hillary Clinton. That is why she and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership preferred him as their rival. He made the case for the discredited lesser evilism argument and his sensible statements about avoiding enmity with Russia made him even more useful. “Newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, are front and center in pushing tales of Russian villainy.” The United States and its allies are the cause of Syria’s destruction. Their effort to overthrow president Assad created a humanitarian disaster complete with ISIS and al Nusra fighters who love to chop off heads for entertainment. Far from being the cause of the catastrophe Russia left its ally to fight alone for four years. They even made overtures to negotiate [4] Assad’s fate with the United States. All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people. The people of east Aleppo are being shelled by American allies but one wouldn’t know that by reading what passes for journalism in newspapers and on television. The American role in the slaughter is barely mentioned or is excused as an effort to protect the civilian population. The bloodshed was made in the U.S. and could end if this government wanted it to. Nearly every claim of Russian evil doing is a lie, a ruse meant to put Americans in a fighting mood and lose their fear of nuclear conflagration. It isn’t clear if Clinton and the rest of the would-be warriors actually realize they are risking mushroom clouds. Perhaps they believe that Vladimir Putin will be easily pushed around when all evidence points to the contrary. The anti-Russian propaganda effort has worked to perfection. NATO is massing troops on Russia’s borders in a clear provocation yet Putin is labeled the bad guy. He is said to be menacing the countries that join in threatening his nation. The United States makes phony claims of Russian war crimes despite having blood on its hands. The latest Human Rights Watch canards about prosecuting Assad come straight from the White House and State Department and have nothing to do with concern for Syrians living in their fifth year of hell. “Donald Trump has been the perfect foil for Hillary Clinton.” There is no lesser evil between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. She is fully supported by the war party in her desire for a more “muscular” foreign policy. That bizarre term means death and starvation for millions more people if Clinton wins in a landslide. She must be denied a victory of that magnitude and any opportunity to claim a mandate. Peace loving people must give their votes to the Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. They are alone in rejecting the premise of an imperialist country and its endless wars. The United States is the most dangerous country in the world. If it has a reckless and war loving president the threat becomes existential. That is the prospect we face with a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the role of villain is cast on the world stage she is the star of the show. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/russophobia_war_party_propaganda | 1real |
HOUSE INTEL CHAIR ON OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SPYING: “Surveillance reports I’ve seen are concerning” [VIDEO] | 1real | |
Watch: Liberal American Woman in Hot Water After She Attacks Danish Man for Wearing a MAGA Hat…In Denmark [Video] | First hand account of a crazy liberal attacking a danish guy for being a Trump supporter: An American woman wanted to sit at my table. I was wearing a MAGA cap. She became visibly angry with my presence, so my friend started recording her. This took place at Unibar near Aarhus University, Denmark.We chose to take legal action the following day. A case has been opened and she will be charged with politically motivated assault (a hate crime).Political violence is never acceptable no matter ones political affiliation.Yes, she s in trouble and should be. What s wrong with these triggered babies on the left?It s like a cult of people where everyone has to follow. You can t have a free thought or else you re a bad person . This woman ripped into a man who supports OUR president Think about it. He s not even an American but a Danish citizen!Does this remind you of the last few months of the campaign last year? trump supporters were repeatedly assaulted in so many ways but the media refused to acknowledge it. We saw Trump supporters pelted with eggs, chased and tackled and punched. The woman above felt she could get away with doing the same thing. Not so fast! She s in hot water after what she did to this Danish Trump supporter. | 1real |
Russia says 'will consider' U.S. resolution on North Korea but with caveats | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia is ready to consider a new U.S. resolution on North Korea provided it does not escalate military tensions and focuses on finding a diplomatic solution, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday. Russia s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Lavrov had conveyed that stance to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a phone call initiated by the U.S. side. The ministry said Lavrov had also spoken of the merit of involving U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres in helping find a diplomatic solution to the North Korea crisis. | 0fake |
Rubio campaign urges supporters in Ohio to back Kasich | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s campaign urged a tactical vote against party front-runner Donald Trump on Friday, saying Rubio supporters in Ohio should vote for the state’s governor, John Kasich, next week. Ohio is one of five states holding Republican primary contests on March 15. “If you’re a Republican primary voter in Ohio, and you don’t want Donald Trump to be the nominee, John Kasich is your best bet,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant told CNN in an interview. “If you’re a Republican primary voter here in Florida and you don’t want Donald Trump to be your nominee, Marco Rubio is your best bet. That is indisputable,” he added, referring to the U.S. senator’s home state. Rubio, Kasich and Ted Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, are battling to stop Trump from winning the nomination to represent the party in the Nov. 8 presidential election. Some Republicans, most notably 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, have urged conservatives who oppose Trump to vote for which ever alternative candidate is most likely to win certain states in the upcoming primary contests. (Reporting by Susan Heavey and Tim Ahmann; Editing by Frances Kerry) This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production. | 0fake |
What the Clintons Did to Haiti | Tweet Widget by Nathan J. Robinson
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s role in the “remaking” of Haiti after a devastating earthquake and foreign occupation is “indefensible,” according to the author’s article, “Superpredator: Bill Clinton’s Use and Abuse of Black America,” from which this piece is excerpted. “Many Clinton projects “have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and the island’s ruling elite.” Other projects simply fizzled. “The money donated and invested was extraordinary, but nobody seems to know where it has gone.” What the Clintons Did to Haiti by Nathan J. Robinson
This article previously appeared in Global Research and Current Affairs .
“She intended to ‘make Haiti the proving ground for her vision of American power.’”
Bill and Hillary Clinton had long shared a personal interest in Haiti, dating back to the time of their honeymoon, part of which was spent in Port-au-Prince. In his autobiography, Bill says that his understanding of God and human nature were profoundly transformed when they witnessed a voodoo ceremony in which a woman bit the head off a live chicken. Hillary Clinton says the two of them “fell in love” with Haiti and they had developed a “deep connection” to the country. So when Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she consciously made the redevelopment of Haiti one of her top priorities. The country, she announced, would be a laboratory where the United States could “road-test new approaches to development,” taking advantage of what she termed “the power of proximity.” She intended to “make Haiti the proving ground for her vision of American power.” Hillary Clinton selected her own chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to run the Haiti project.
Mills would be joined by Bill Clinton, who had been deputized by the U.N. as a “special envoy” to Haiti. Bill’s role was not well-defined, and Haitians were curious about what was in store. Mills wrote in an email to Hillary Clinton that Haitians saw Bill’s appointment as “a step toward putting Haiti in a protectorate or trusteeship status.” Soon, “joking that he must be coming back to lead a new colonial regime,” the Haitian media “ dubbed him Le Gouverneur.”
The project was heavily focused on increasing Haiti’s appeal to foreign corporations. As Politico reported , Clinton’s experiment “had business at its center: Aid would be replaced by investment, the growth of which would in turn benefit the United States.”
“Clinton announced that Haiti would be a laboratory where the United States could road-test new approaches to development, taking advantage of ‘the power of proximity.’”
One of the first acts in the new “business-centered” Haiti policy involved suppressing Haiti’s minimum wage. A 2009 Haitian law raised the minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, from 24 cents an hour previously. Haitian garment manufacturers, including contractors for Hanes and Levi Strauss, were furious, insisting that they were only willing to agree to a seven-cent increase. The manufacturers approached the U.S. State Department, who brought intense pressure to bear against Haitian President René Préval, working to “aggressively block” the 37-cent increase. The U.S. Deputy Mission Chief said a minimum-wage increase “did not take economic reality into account” and simply “appealed to the unemployed and underpaid masses.” But as Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review explained , the proposed wage increase would have been only the most trivial additional expense for the American garment manufacturers:
“As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year, and presumably it would pass on at least some of its higher labor costs to consumers. Or better yet, Hanesbrands CEO Richard Noll could forego some of his rich compensation package. He could pay for the raises for those 3,200 t-shirt makers with just one-sixth of the $10 million in salary and bonus he raked in last year.”
“U.S. Deputy Mission Chief said a minimum-wage increase ‘did not take economic reality into account” and simply ‘appealed to the unemployed and underpaid masses.’”
The truth of the “economic reality” was that the Haitian undergarment sector was hardly likely to become wildly less competitive as a result of the increase. The effort to suppress the minimum wage was not solely a Clinton project. It was also a “concerted effort on the part of Haitian elites, factory owners, free trade proponents, U.S. politicians, economists, and American companies.” But it was in keeping with the State Department’s priorities under Clinton, which prioritized creating a favorable business climate. It was that same familiar Clinton move “from aid to trade.” Bill Clinton’s program for Haitian development, designed by Oxford University economist Paul Collier, “ had garment exports at its center.” Collier wrote that because of “propitious” factors like “poverty and [a] relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” But the Clintons’ role in Haiti would soon expand even further. In 2010, the country was struck by the worst earthquake in its history. The disaster killed 160,000 people and displaced over 1.5 million more. (The consequences of the earthquake were exacerbated by the ruined state of the Haitian food economy, plus the concentration of unemployed Haitian farmers in Port-au-Prince.) Bill Clinton was soon put in charge of the U.S.-led recovery effort. He was appointed to head the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which would oversee a wide range of rebuilding projects. At President Obama’s request, Clinton and George W. Bush created the “Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund,” and began aggressively fundraising around the world to support Haiti in the earthquake’s aftermath. (With Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State overseeing the efforts of USAID, the Clintons’ importance to the recovery could not be overstated; Bill’s appointment meant that “at every stage of Haiti’s reconstruction—fundraising, oversight and allocation—a Clinton was now involved.”
Despite appearances, the Clinton-Bush fund was not focused on providing traditional relief. As they wrote , “[w]hile other organizations in Haiti are using their resources to deliver immediate humanitarian aid, we are using our resources to focus on long-term development.” While the fund would advertise that “100% of donations go directly to relief efforts,” Clinton and Bush adopted an expansive definition of “relief” efforts, treating luring foreign investment and jobs as a crucial part of earthquake recovery. On their website, they spoke proudly of what the New York Daily News characterized as a program of “supporting longterm programs to develop Haiti’s business class.”
“At every stage of Haiti’s reconstruction—fundraising, oversight and allocation—a Clinton was now involved.”
The strategy was an odd one. Port-au-Prince had been reduced to ruin, and Haitians were crowded into filthy tent cities, where many were dying of a cholera outbreak (which had itself been caused by the negligence of the United Nations). Whatever value building new garment factories may have had as a longterm economic plan, Haitians were faced with somewhat more pressing concerns like the basic provision of shelter and medicine, as well as the clearing of the thousands of tons of rubble that filled their streets.
The Clinton-led recovery was a disaster. A year after the earthquake, a stinging report from Oxfam singled out Clinton’s IHRC as creating a “quagmire of indecision and delay” that had made little progress toward successful earthquake recovery. Oxfam found that:
“…less than half of the reconstruction aid promised by international donors has been disbursed. And while some of that money has been put toward temporary housing, almost none of the funds have been used for rubble removal.”
Instead, the Clinton Foundation, IHRC, and State Department created what a Wall Street Journal writer called “a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.” Haitian IHRC members lamented that the commission had produced “a disparate bunch of approved projects. . . [that] do not address as a whole either the emergency situation or the recovery, let alone the development, of Haiti.” A 2013 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that most money for the recovery was not being dispersed, and that the projects that were being worked on were plagued by delays and cost overruns. Many Clinton projects were extravagant public relations affairs that quickly fizzled. For example, The Washington Post reported that :
“…[a] 2011 housing expo that cost more than $2 million, including $500,000 from the Clinton Foundation, was supposed to be a model for thousands of new units but instead has resulted in little more than a few dozen abandoned model homes occupied by squatters.”
“ A stinging report from Oxfam singled out Clinton’s IHRC as creating a ‘quagmire of indecision and delay.’”
Other Clinton ventures were seen as “disconnected from the realities of most people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Politico reported that many Clinton projects “have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and the island’s ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with.” For example, “the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested more than $2 million in the Royal Oasis Hotel, where a sleek suite with hardwood floors costs more than $200 a night and the shops sell $150 designer purses and $120 men’s dress shirts.”
Predictably, the Royal Oasis didn’t do an especially roaring trade; The Washington Post reported that “[o]ne recent afternoon, the hotel appeared largely empty, and with tourism hardly booming five years after the quake, locals fear it may be failing.” In a country with a 30-cent minimum wage, investing recovery dollars in a luxury hotel was not just offensive, but economically daft. Sometimes the recovery projects were accused not only of being pointless, but of being downright harmful. For instance, Bill Clinton had proudly announced that the Clinton Foundation would be funding the “construction of emergency storm shelters in Léogâne.” But an investigation of the shelters that the Foundation had actually built found that they were “shoddy and dangerous” and full of toxic mold. The Nation discovered , among other things, that the temperature in the shelters reached over 100 degrees, causing children to experience headaches and eye irritations (which may have been compounded by the mold), and that the trailers showed high levels of carcinogenic formaldehyde, linked to asthma and other lung diseases. The Clinton Foundation had subcontracted the building of the shelters to Clayton Homes, a firm that had already been sued in the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) for “having provided formaldehyde-laced trailers to Hurricane Katrina victims.” (Clayton Homes was owned by Warren Buffett ’s Berkshire Hathaway, and Buffett had been a longstanding major donor to the Clinton Foundation.) The Nation ’s investigation reported on children whose classes were being held in Clinton Foundation trailers. Their semester had just been cut short, and the students sent home, because the temperature in the classrooms had grown unbearable. The misery of the students in the Clinton trailers was described:
“Judith Seide, a student in Lubert’s sixth-grade class [explained that] she and her classmates regularly suffer from painful headaches in their new Clinton Foundation classroom. Every day, she said, her ‘head hurts and I feel it spinning and have to stop moving, otherwise I’d fall.’ Her vision goes dark, as is the case with her classmate Judel, who sometimes can’t open his eyes because, said Seide, ‘he’s allergic to the heat.’ Their teacher regularly relocates the class outside into the shade of the trailer because the swelter inside is insufferable. Sitting in the sixth-grade classroom, student Mondialie Cineas, who dreams of becoming a nurse, said that three times a week the teacher gives her and her classmates painkillers so that they can make it through the school day. ‘At noon, the class gets so hot, kids get headaches,’ the 12-year-old said, wiping beads of sweat from her brow. She is worried because ‘the kids feel sick, can’t work, can’t advance to succeed.’”
“Three times a week the teacher gives her and her classmates painkillers so that they can make it through the school day.”
The most notorious post-earthquake development project, however, was the Caracol industrial park . The park was pitched as a major job creator, part of the goal of helping Haiti “build back better” than it was before. The State Department touted the prospect of 100,000 new jobs for Haitians, with Hillary Clinton promising 65,000 jobs within five years. The industrial park followed the Clintons’ preexisting development model for Haiti: public/private partnerships with a heavy emphasis on the garment industry. Even though there were still hundreds of thousands of evacuees living in tents, the project was based on “the more expansive view that, in a desperately poor country where traditional foreign aid has chronically failed, fostering economic development is as important as replacing what fell down.” Much of the planning was focused on trying to lure a South Korean clothing manufacturer to set up shop there, by plying them with U.S. taxpayer funding. The Caracol project was “the centerpiece” of the U.S.’s recovery effort. A gala celebrating its opening featured the Clintons and Sean Penn, and it was treated as the emblem of the new, “better” Haiti, that would demonstrate the country’s commitment to being “open for business.” In order to build the park, hundreds of poor farmers were evicted from their land, so that millions of dollars could be spent transforming it.
But the project was a terrible disappointment. After four years, it was only operating at 10% capacity , and the jobs had failed to materialize :
Far from 100,000 jobs—or even the 60,000 promised within five years of the park’s opening— “Caracol currently employs just 5,479 people full time. That comes out to roughly $55,000 in investment per job created so far; or, to put it another way, about 30 times more per job than the average [Caracol] worker makes per year. The park, built on the site of a former U.S. Marine-run slave labor camp during the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation, has the best-paved roads and manicured sidewalks in the country, but most of the land remains vacant.”
Most of the seized farmland went unused, then, and even for the remaining farmers, “ surges of wastewater have caused floods and spoiled crops.” Huge queues of unemployed Haitians stood daily in front of the factory, awaiting jobs that did not exist. The Washington Post described the scene:
“Each morning, crowds line up outside the park’s big front gate, which is guarded by four men in crisp khaki uniforms carrying shotguns. They wait in a sliver of shade next to a cinder-block wall, many holding résumés in envelopes. Most said they have been coming every day for months, waiting for jobs that pay about $5 a day. From his envelope, Jean Mito Palvetus, 27, pulled out a diploma attesting that he had completed 200 hours of training with the U.S. Agency for International Development on an industrial sewing machine. ‘I have three kids and a wife, and I can’t support them,’ he said, sweating in the hot morning sun. ‘I have a diploma, but I still can’t get a job here. I still have nothing.’”
“ The interests of the market, the interest of foreigners are prioritized over the majority of people who are impoverished in Haiti.”
For some , the Caracol project perfectly symbolized the Clinton approach: big promises, an emphasis on sweatshops, incompetent management, and little concern for the actual impact on Haitians. “Caracol is a prime example of bad help,” as one Haiti scholar put it . “The interests of the market, the interest of foreigners are prioritized over the majority of people who are impoverished in Haiti.”
But, failure as it may have been, the Caracol factory was among the more successful of the projects, insofar as it actually came into existence. A large amount of the money raised by Bill Clinton after the earthquake, and pledged by the U.S. under Hillary Clinton, simply disappeared without a trace, its whereabouts unknown. As Politico explained :
“Even Bill’s U.N. Office of the Special Envoy couldn’t track where all of [it] went—and the truth is that still today no one really knows how much money was spent ‘rebuilding’ Haiti. Many initial pledges never materialized. A whopping $465 million of the relief money went through the Pentagon, which spent it on deployment of U.S. troops—20,000 at the high water mark, many of whom never set foot on Haitian soil. That money included fuel for ships and planes, helicopter repairs and inscrutables such as an $18,000 contract for a jungle gym… Huge contracts were doled out to the usual array of major contractors, including a $16.7 million logistics contract whose partners included Agility Public Warehousing KSC, a Kuwaiti firm that was supposed to have been blacklisted from doing business with Washington after a 2009 indictment alleging a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government during the Iraq War.”
The recovery under the Clintons became notorious for its mismanagement. Clinton staffers “ had no idea what Haiti was like and had no sensitivity to the Haitians.” They were reportedly rude and condescending toward Haitians, even refusing to admit Haitian government ministers to meetings about recovery plans. While the Clintons called in high-profile consulting firms like McKinsey to draw up plans, they had little interest in listening to Haitians themselves. The former Haitian prime minister spoke of a “weak” American staff who were “more interested in supporting Clinton than helping Haiti.”
“A large amount of the money raised by Bill Clinton after the earthquake, and pledged by the U.S. under Hillary Clinton, simply disappeared without a trace, its whereabouts unknown.”
One of those shocked by the failure of the recovery effort was Chelsea Clinton, who wrote a detailed email to her parents in which she said that while Haitians were trying to help themselves, every part of the international aid effort, both governmental and nongovernmental, was falling short. “The incompetence is mind numbing,” she wrote . Chelsea produced a detailed memorandum recommending drastic steps that needed to be taken in order to get the recovery on track. But the memo was kept within the Clinton family, released only later under a Freedom of Information Act disclosure of Hillary’s State Department correspondence. If it had come out at the time, as Haiti journalist Jonathan Katz writes , it “would have obliterated the public narrative of helpful outsiders saving grateful earthquake survivors that her mother’s State Department was working so hard to promote.”
The Clintons’ Haiti recovery ended with a whimper. The Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund distributed the last of its funds in 2012 and disbanded, without any attempt at further fundraising. The IHRC “ quietly closed their doors” in October of 2011, even though little progress had been made. As the Boston Review ’s Jake Johnston explained , though hundreds of thousands remained displaced, the IHRC wiped its hands of the housing situation:
“[L]ittle remained of the grand plans to build thousands of new homes. Instead, those left homeless would be given a small, one-time rental subsidy of about $500. These subsidies, funded by a number of different aid agencies, were meant to give private companies the incentive to invest in building houses. As efforts to rebuild whole neighborhoods faltered, the rental subsidies turned Haitians into consumers, and the housing problem was handed over to the private sector.”
The Clintons themselves simply stopped speaking about Haiti. After the first two years, they were “nowhere to be seen” there, despite Hillary’s having promised that her commitment to Haiti would long outlast her tenure as Secretary of State. Haiti has been given little attention during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, even though the Haiti project was ostensibly one of great pride for both Clintons.
“One of those shocked by the failure of the recovery effort was Chelsea Clinton.”
The widespread consensus among observers is that the Haiti recovery, which TIME called the U.S.’s “compassionate invasion,” was a catastrophically mismanaged disappointment. Jonathan Katz writes that “it’s hard to find anyone these days who looks back on the U.S.-led response to the January 12, 2010, Haiti earthquake as a success.” While plenty of money was channeled into the country, it largely went to what were “little more than small pilot projects—a new set of basketball hoops and a model elementary school here, a functioning factory there.”
The end result has been that little has changed for Haiti. “Haitians find themselves in a social and economic situation that is worse than before the earthquake,” reports a Belgian photojournalist who has spent 10 years in Haiti:
“Everyone says that they’re living in worse conditions than before… When you look at the history of humanitarian relief, there’s never been a situation when such a small country has been the target of such a massive influx of money and assistance in such a short span of time… On paper, with that much money in a territory the size of Haiti, we should have witnessed miracles; there should have been results.”
“If anything, they appear worse off,” says Foreign Policy of Haiti’s farmers. “I really cannot understand how you could raise so much money, put a former U.S. president in charge, and get this outcome,” said one Haitian official. Indeed, the money donated and invested was extraordinary. But nobody seems to know where it has gone.
Haitians direct much of the blame toward the Clintons. As a former Haitian government official who worked on the recovery said , “[t]here is a lot of resentment about Clinton here. People have not seen results. . .. They say that Clinton used Haiti.” Haitians “ increasingly complain that Clinton-backed projects have often helped the country’s elite and international business investors more than they have helped poor ‘Haitians.” There is a “suspicion that their motives are more to make a profit in Haiti than to help it.” And that while “striking a populist pose, in practice they were attracted to power in Haiti.”
But perhaps we should be more forgiving of the Clintons’ conduct during the Haitian recovery. After all, instead of doing true harm, the Clintons simply failed to do much good. And perhaps it’s better to have a luxury hotel than not to have one, better to have a few jobs than none at all. Thanks to Bill Clinton, there’s a gleaming new industrial park, albeit one operating at a fraction of its capacity.
Yet it’s a mistake to measure Clinton against what would have happened if the United States had done nothing at all for Haiti. The question is what would have happened if a capable, nonfamous administrator, rather than a globetrotting narcissist, had been placed in charge. Tens of millions of dollars were donated toward the Haiti recovery by people across the world; it was an incredible outpouring of generosity. The squandering of that money on half-baked development schemes (mainly led by cronies ), and the ignoring of Haitians’ own demands, mean that Clinton may have caused considerable harm through his failure. Plenty of people died in tent cities that would not have died if the world’s donations had been used effectively.
“Defending the Clintons’ Haiti record is an impossible endeavor.”
Democrats have bristled at recent attempts by Donald Trump to criticize Hillary Clinton over her record in Haiti. Jonathan Katz, whose in-depth reporting from Haiti was stingingly critical of the Clintons, has now changed his tune , insisting that we all bear the responsibility for the failed recovery effort. When Trump accused the Clintons of squandering millions building “a sweatshop” in Haiti in the form of the Caracol park, media fact-checkers quickly insisted he was spewing Pinocchios. The Washington Post said that while Clinton Foundation donors may have financially benefited from the factory-building project, they benefited “writ large” rather than “directly.” The Post cited the words of the factory’s spokesman as evidence that the factory was not a sweatshop, and pointed out that Caracol workers earned at least “minimum wage” (failing to mention that minimum wage in Haiti remains well under a dollar). PolitiFact also rated the sweatshop claim “mostly false,” even though Katz notes “long hours, tough conditions, and low pay” at the factory and PolitiFact acknowledges the “ongoing theft of legally-earned wages.”
Defending the Clintons’ Haiti record is an impossible endeavor, one Democrats should probably not bother attempting. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which has studied the recovery, noted , when it comes to the Clinton-led recovery mission, “it’s hard to say it’s been anything other than a failure.” Haitians are not delusional in their resentment of the Clintons; they have good reason to feel as if they were used for publicity, and discarded by the Clintons when they became inconvenient.
None of this means that one should vote for Donald Trump for president. His tears for Haiti are those of a highly opportunistic crocodile, and his interest in the country’s wellbeing began at the precise moment that it could be used a bludgeon with which to beat his political opponent. As we have previously noted in this publication , one does not need to be convinced that Hillary Clinton is an honorable person in order to be convinced that she is the preferable candidate. It is important, however, not to maintain any illusions, not to stifle or massage the truth in the service of short-term electoral concerns. It remains simultaneously true that a Clinton presidency is our present least-worst option and that what the Clintons did to Haiti was callous, selfish, and indefensible. | 1real |
Turkey issues warning over travel to U.S. after Trump protests | ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey warned its citizens about travel to the United States on Saturday in response to what the foreign ministry called increasingly violent protests against President-elect Donald Trump. “Within the context of risks caused by the incidents and of social tension, our citizens who live in the U.S., or who are considering traveling there, should be cautious,” the ministry said in a statement. Demonstrators planned to gather again on Saturday in U.S. cities nationwide to protest against Trump, whose election they say poses a threat to their civil and human rights, a day after a protester was shot in Portland, Oregon. Last month, the U.S. State Department updated its travel warning on Turkey, ordering family members of consulate employees in Istanbul to leave the country, citing threats against U.S. citizens. There has been growing tension between the two NATO allies after repeated calls from Turkey to extradite U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara blames for a failed coup in July. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Wednesday he hoped for an improvement in bilateral ties after Trump’s victory, and again called for Gulen’s extradition. | 0fake |
California Today: On the Ground in Oroville - The New York Times | Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the .) With thousands of people fleeing areas downstream from Lake Oroville amid warnings of catastrophic danger, my editor thought it would be a good idea for me to do the opposite. So early Monday, I drove from my home to Oroville, about 80 miles north in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Along Route 70, Northern California’s extreme wet winter was evident in every direction. It was reflected in the flooded orchards, the bursting Yuba River and the Sierra’s snowy peaks. Relentless runoff from the mountains had caused Lake Oroville to flow over its emergency spillway for the first time ever on Saturday. A day later, state officials noticed a hole forming in the spillway and prepared for the worst, ordering nearly 190, 000 people to seek safer ground. In Oroville on Monday, just a handful of businesses were open. Among them was Mike’s Grande Burger which gave out free meals to the truck drivers, emergency personnel and others working at the hobbled spillway. Some residents who had stayed behind gathered on a hill above Oroville Dam and watched the scene below. The reservoir, California’s second largest, was perfectly still and surrounded by hills. In the distance, the Feather River snaked along the valley floor. Locals recalled flooding events of the past — one in 1997, when thousands of people were forced to flee, and another in 2006. Some wondered whether state officials had done enough to shore up the Oroville reservoir before the latest round of trouble. Others talked about untamable nature. With more storms approaching, officials are effectively now in a race against time to lower the level of the lake and reinforce the hobbled spillway. Whether it will be enough is by no means certain. Read more in my article with Jess Bidgood here. More on the Oroville crisis from around the web: • People of good will stepped up to help those forced to flee. [Opinion | Sacramento Bee] • The crisis highlighted the need for repairs to other California dams. [East Bay Times] • The nightmare scenario that officials are fighting to prevent. [Los Angeles Times] • President Trump promised to fix infrastructure. He can start with crumbling dams. [Opinion | The New York Times] (Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.) • Inside the black bloc movement that is rising up against President Trump. [Los Angeles Times] • Los Angeles’s mayor wants to lower the city’s temperature. Scientists are figuring out how to do it. [Los Angeles Times] • That California teacher shortage? It’s already a crisis. [Opinion | San Diego ] • There is a growing worry that the quietude of the southern San Andreas fault is unlikely to last. [Washington Post] • If milk comes from an almond, can you still call it milk? [The New York Times] • Playboy, based in Beverly Hills, will resume showing naked women. [The New York Times] • Bobby Freeman died at 76 in Daly City. His 1950s hit “Do You Want to Dance” was covered by a range of artists including the Beach Boys and Bette Midler. [The New York Times] • It’s not just about Adele and Beyoncé, our critic writes. The Grammys consistently celebrate white acts. [The New York Times] • Photo: For a short time every February, Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall lights up like fire at sunset. [Twitter | U. S. Department of Interior] There are comic book stores, mystery book stores and even culinary book stores. But until last year, the United States had few, if any, romance novel stores. And this despite the genre’s enormous popularity. To the sisters Leah and Bea Koch, that sounded like an opportunity. They opened their shop, The Ripped Bodice, in Culver City last March. With Valentine’s Day upon us, it seemed a good moment to check in. We caught up with Leah Koch via telephone. Some excerpts: • Is it true that romance novels get short shrift? • What’s popular right now? • What advice would you give men as they’re thinking about Valentine’s Day with their partners? California Today goes live at 6 a. m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes. com. The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U. C. Berkeley. | 0fake |
What Is the Met Gala, and Who Gets to Go? - The New York Times | Officially, it’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit, a extravaganza held the first Monday in May to raise money for the Costume Institute (a. k. a. the fashion department) the only one of the Met’s curatorial departments that has to fund itself. Unofficially, Monday night’s festivities in New York have been called many things, including “the party of the year,” “the Oscars of the East Coast” (mostly because of the star quotient and the elaborate red carpet, in which guests pose on the grand entrance stairs to the museum) and, somewhat pointedly, “an A. T. M. for the Met,” by the publicist Paul Wilmot. Update: see the 2016 red carpet arrivals here. The party signals the opening of the Costume Institute’s annual blockbuster show, and it is known for its celebrity and fashion hosts. This year, the exhibit is “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” and the hosts are Anna Wintour, chairwoman of the gala Jonathan Ive, chief design officer of Apple Taylor Swift and the actor Idris Elba. The honorary chairs are the Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld Miuccia Prada and Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director. All will be in attendance except for Mr. Lagerfeld, who will be in Cuba because the Chanel Cruise show is in Havana the day after the gala. Ms. Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and the artistic director of Condé Nast, took over as chairwoman of the gala in 1999. Since then, she has been instrumental in transforming a local philanthropic event into the ultimate global cocktail: Take a jigger of famous names from fashion, add film, politics and business, and mix. It is among the hardest party tickets of the year to get — and thus intensely coveted. Tickets this year are $30, 000 apiece, and tables are $275, 000. The party and exhibit are sponsored (this year Apple is the main underwriter) so all the money raised from ticket sales goes to the Costume Institute. Last year, more than $12. 5 million was raised. Of course, not everyone pays for a ticket. Brands often invite celebrities to be their guests and sit at their table, and Ms. Wintour also often invites designers who might not be able to afford a ticket and scatters them around the event. Last year, there were about 600 attendees. Dream on. Unlike other cultural like the New York City Ballet gala or the Frick Collection’s Young Fellows Ball, the Met gala is and there is a waiting list to get on the invitation list. Qualifications for inclusion have to do with buzz and achievement (and beauty) more than money. Ms. Wintour has final say over every invitation and attendee, which means that even if a brand buys a table, it cannot choose everyone who sits at its table: The brand must clear it with her, and Vogue. It’s reality TV at its most glamorous. Watch Justin Bieber schmooze with Rihanna! See Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady greet Donatella Versace! Check out Chelsea Clinton kissing Diane von Furstenberg! Judge whether you approve of their outfits! You get the idea. (And where can you watch? On our Facebook live stream or on E! starting at 7pm ET.) It isn’t explicitly stated that attendees have to dress like the exhibition, but it is encouraged. This can sometimes backfire. In 2013, for example, the theme was “Punk,” and the red carpet, which featured Sarah Jessica Parker in a Philip Treacy fauxhawk hat and graffiti gown, and Madonna in fishnet shorts and a studded plaid jacket, was widely panned. Last year, the exhibit was “China: Through the Looking Glass,” and it created some politically incorrect moments when celebrities and the designers who dressed them got their Asian references muddled. (Lady Gaga, for example, wore a Balenciaga kimonolike look, which seemed to lean toward the Japanese ditto Georgia May Jagger in Gucci.) Generally, it is advisable to play it safe and just get really, really dressed up. That said, what is not negotiable is that if celebrities are invited to the gala by a brand, they have to wear clothes from that brand. This encourages brands to get the best celebrities because they can act as something of an advertisement for a house. It is also why, whenever designers are photographed on the red carpet, their “dates” are almost always famous people. Last year, for example, Marc Jacobs took Cher Christopher Kane, FKA Twigs Alexander Wang, Taraji P. Henson and Jeremy Scott, Katy Perry. This year, you can expect guests to be wearing a lot of Prada, Louis Vuitton and Chanel, given the honorary chairs, though the technology component could yield some interesting results. Beyoncé usually makes the final entrance, so it’s worth watching until the bitter end. The publicist Eleanor Lambert started the gala in 1948 as a typical philanthropic endeavor for the great and good of New York society. Pat Buckley, the wife of the conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. took over as chairwoman in 1979, but it has morphed into its current form only since the turn of the millennium. Ms. Wintour now oversees every detail, down to timed entrances for guests. It’s a secret! Since last year, posting on social media has been banned after the red carpet. What I can tell you is this: There is a receiving line inside with all the hosts, and guests have to file by and them then they tour the exhibit on their way to the cocktail party, so they are at least theoretically forced to see the culture. After cocktails, they are called in to dinner, and there is always some form of entertainment (last year, it was Rihanna the year before, Frank Ocean). This is good, because as the red carpet part of the evening has become a giant marketing event, the fact that the main part of the event is private allows guests to relax and have fun. Or so they tell me. | 0fake |
Tough-talking Trump defense lawyer says he's no 'snowflake' | NEW YORK (Reuters) - The latest lawyer hired to represent U.S. President Donald Trump in the federal investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election is an ex-Marine who likens some cases to war. “I fight hard,” John Dowd said in an interview. “I believe that’s what I’m supposed to do. I am not a snowflake, I can tell you that.” “Snowflake” is a disparaging term for people considered overly sensitive and fragile that has been adopted by some Trump supporters to mock liberals. Dowd, who spoke with Reuters on Wednesday, is a mirror of his client in many ways. He has a no-holds-barred, hyperbolic style and a history of attacking prosecutors, congressional Democrats and the media. The 76-year-old Washington lawyer, who retired from the firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in 2014, brings criminal defense and government investigation experience to Trump’s legal team. The team, led by New York lawyer Marc Kasowitz, is tasked with responding to Robert Mueller, the special counsel named by the Justice Department to probe whether anyone associated with Trump or his campaign had any illegal dealings with Russian officials or others with ties to the Kremlin. Russian officials have denied meddling in the U.S. election, and Trump denies any collusion by his campaign. In what Dowd said would be his last major trial, he defended billionaire hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam in one of the biggest insider trading cases of all time. Rajaratnam was convicted of all 14 insider trading counts and sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2011. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Reed Brodsky, who prosecuted the case, said Dowd put on a strong defense in the face of overwhelming evidence. “This is war, and I will defeat you,” Brodsky recalled Dowd declaring in one phone conversation. Dowd confirmed the sentiment on Wednesday. “It is a war,” he said of such cases. His tactics in the Rajaratnam case reflected that belief. Dowd aggressively challenged the prosecution’s stance on what constituted insider trading. He also fought the government’s wiretaps of his client’s cell phone, claiming investigators “gamed the system.” Brodsky said he believed the physically commanding 6-foot-4-inch-tall Dowd would be a “ferocious defender of the president.” In a manner similar to Trump, Dowd lashed out at what he perceived to be improper leaks by prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Rajaratnam case, singling out then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in particular. “He sat in the back of the courtroom with his press dogs,” Dowd said. “It was the most atrocious thing I’ve ever seen.” Dowd also went after reporters. Bharara, who declined to comment on Wednesday, last weekend retweeted an intemperate 2011 email the defense lawyer sent to a Wall Street Journal reporter he accused of “whoring” for the prosecution. In another encounter with the press caught on camera, Dowd swore at and gave the middle finger to a CNBC reporter. Like Trump, Dowd has a tendency to put his own spin on adverse news. After the Rajaratnam verdict, Dowd argued “the defense is winning” because the prosecution chose not to pursue 23 other allegations of insider trading. “The score is 23-14,” he told reporters. In a 2007 congressional probe of politically motivated firings of U.S. Attorneys, Dowd complained of McCarthyism when his client, former Justice Department official Monica Goodling, was criticized by Democrats for invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Dowd represented U.S. Senator John McCain on congressional ethics charges in the 1980s “Keating Five” banking scandal and conducted the Major League Baseball investigation that led to former Hall of Famer Pete Rose being banned from the sport for betting on games while he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds. Dowd would not discuss legal strategy for Trump but said the team the president had assembled was great. “We’re all fighters,” he said. Though his hiring was first reported Friday, a person familiar with the matter said Dowd has been working with the team for weeks. Dowd said he knew Kasowitz partner Michael Bowe, who is also representing Trump, and met with Kasowitz at the end of May. Jay Sekulow, another member of the team, has been appearing on television on Trump’s behalf. Dowd also said he talked with the president but declined to describe their conversation. He called Trump “a fighter for the people” and said the president had done nothing wrong. A onetime military lawyer with the U.S. Marine Corps, Dowd noted his shared service in declining to criticize Mueller, a Marine platoon leader during the Vietnam War. “Bobby is doing what he has to do and he’ll do a good job,” said Dowd. “He’s a fellow Marine and he’s a good man.” | 0fake |
Employers added a disappointing 126,000 jobs in March | Here's everything you need to know about how the labor market fared in March | 0fake |
Trump to order anti-hacking plan within 90 days of taking office: statement | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump said he had a “constructive” meeting with members of U.S. intelligence agencies on Friday and plans to appoint a team to give him a plan to combat cyber attacks within 90 days of taking office on Jan. 20. “While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines,” Trump said in a statement after the briefing from spy chiefs who have accused Russia of hacking to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Russia denies the allegations. | 0fake |
China's Xi meets military in first event since new leaders unveiled | BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping met senior military leaders on Thursday and pressed them on his goal of having world class armed forces by the middle of the century, his first publicly announced meeting with them since a new leadership was unveiled. Xi, who is also head of the military and the ruling Communist Party, has made military modernisation a key policy platform, with advanced new equipment like stealth jets and aircraft carriers either already in service or development. The armed forces have also been a focus of Xi s fight against deep-seated corruption, with dozens of senior officials investigated and jailed. In his first publicly reported meeting with top officers since Wednesday s unveiling of his new Standing Committee, a seven-man body that is the height of power in China, Xi pushed home his modernisation message. The military must ensure it is a world-class service by 2050, Xi said, in comments carried by state media, a goal he set last week at the opening of a key party congress. The armed forces must fully recognize the bright prospects for a strong military , Xi told them. Put into practice one hundred percent military construction. Though China has not fought a war in decades, it has been taking an increasingly assertive stance in the disputed East and South China Seas, as well as over self-ruled Taiwan, claimed by Beijing as its own, rattling nerves around the region. China says that it has only peaceful intentions, but that it needs a modern military to protect its interests and citizens around the world and that it will never compromise on China s sovereignty and territorial integrity. | 0fake |
Video – This Can’t Be Good: Russia and NATO Holding Emergency Military Drills Just Miles Apart | Sheeple News Shot: Joe Joseph discusses drills that are kicking off in the Balkans by NATO and Russia. These drills are happening at the same time and in the same region.
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CHURCHGOERS TRAPPED INSIDE CATHEDRAL After Man Hits Police Officer Guarding Church In Head With Hammer…Authorities Calling It Act Of Terror [VIDEO] | France s armed police officers were at least prepared to handle the terror attack after shooting the terrorist, thereby preventing any further acts of terror by what police believe to be a lone wolf incident. Many questioned the how the UK can effectively deal with terrorism when their law enforcement officers are unarmed, like in the most recent attack in London where unarmed police officers were seen running away from the scene of the crime, and citizens were forced to use chairs to protect themselves from terrorists with knives A man with a hammer bashed a police officer in the head outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris Tuesday, in an attack that investigators called an act of terror.The wounded officer fired twice at the hammer-wielding man in the square in front of the cathedral, French police told Fox News. The attacker was hospitalized; the specific conditions of both men were unclear.UPDATE:French Minister G rard Collomb: Notre Dame cathedral attacker said This is for Syria. pic.twitter.com/cDeOD3csEK Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) June 6, 2017 Police can be seen here rushing to terror scene:Police rush to Paris s Notre-Dame cathedral following reports man attempted to attack officer with a hammer. pic.twitter.com/VHJdRRMpdG Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) June 6, 2017Visitors to the famous Notre Dame Cathedral are trapped inside until police can clear the scene:Photo of visitors locked inside Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris following reports man attempted to attack officer with a hammer. pic.twitter.com/3GNPK2sN6k Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) June 6, 2017Police asking everyone to raise their hands in the church pic.twitter.com/y5KkyWqdWK Matthew CurrieHolmes (@mch2k) June 6, 2017The French interior minister said the suspect had been threatening several policemen and passersby at the time.Paris has been under high security after a string of Islamic extremist attacks in recent years. Security Message: ongoing security incident at Notre Dame Cathedral U.S. citizens should avoid the area & follow advice of authorities U.S. Embassy France (@USEmbassyFrance) June 6, 2017The French U.S. embassy alerted American citizens to avoid the area and follow advice of authorities following the incident.On social media, people reported that they were trapped in the cathedral for an incident outside. One person in the cathedral said officers instructed them to raise their hands. Later in the day, they said officers were starting to let them out. FOX News | 1real |
Arkansas Rushes to Execute 8 Men in the Space of 10 Days - The New York Times | The state of Arkansas plans to put to death eight inmates over a span of 10 days next month, a pace of executions unequaled in recent American history and brought about by a looming expiration date for a drug used by the state for lethal injections. The eight men facing execution — four black and four white — are among 34 death row inmates in Arkansas, where capital punishment has been suspended since 2005 over legal challenges and difficulty in acquiring the drugs for lethal injections. All eight men were convicted of murders that occurred between 1989 and 1999, and proponents of the death penalty and victims’ rights in the state have been frustrated that the cases have dragged on so long. At a news conference this week, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican and former federal prosecutor, seemed to regret that the executions were so closely stacked. “I would love to have those extended over a period of multiple months and years, but that’s not the circumstances that I find myself in,” said Mr. Hutchinson, who took office in 2015. “And, again, the families of the victims that have endured this for so many years deserve a conclusion to it. ” In a statement on Friday, Mr. Hutchinson said that it was necessary to schedule the executions close together because of doubts about the future availability of one of three drugs the state uses in its procedure. State officials have previously said that the expiration date would pass in April for Arkansas’s supply of midazolam, a drug that has been used in several botched and gruesome lethal injections in other states in recent years. Amid the controversy generated by such cases, a number of pharmaceutical companies have restricted their drugs from use for capital punishment. Some states have had difficultly finding midazolam. Arizona announced last year it would stop using it in part because of the logistical challenges. “It is uncertain as to whether another drug can be obtained,” Mr. Hutchinson said in the statement, “and the families of the victims do not need to live with continued uncertainty after decades of review. ” This week, the governor signed proclamations setting four execution dates for the eight inmates between April 17 and 27. Two men would be put to death on each of the four dates. If Arkansas follows that timetable, it will be at a rate unmatched by any state since the United States resumed the death penalty in 1977, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research group that opposes capital punishment. In 1997, Texas came close, putting eight inmates to death in May and again in June, but not over such a short number of days, the group said. Critics of midazolam’s use in executions say it is a sedative, not an anesthetic, and is thus misapplied as a first round of lethal injection shots, with inmates sometimes able to feel pain from the subsequent lethal drugs that are administered. In one case in Oklahoma, a convict named Clayton D. Lockett, who was administered midazolam, died 43 minutes after the injections were started and appeared to struggle and moan. The Arkansas Department of Correction has not refilled its stock of potassium chloride, the third and fatal drug administered in an execution, but a spokesman for Mr. Hutchinson said the governor had confidence the department would acquire it in time for the April executions. Brian Stull, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that something was more likely to go wrong with so many executions scheduled so close together. “Each of these prisoners is a person with rights that have to be honored, and each execution is a process that needs to be planned and handled with care and close attention to detail,” he said. “And that’s just impossible for Arkansas on this schedule. Because they’re trying to do too much, too quickly, with too little preparation. It’s likely to lead to botched executions. ” The lawyers for the condemned men say some legal avenues of appeal are still available. Their lengthy appeal process has included a petition asking the United States Supreme Court to review the matter. The court denied the petition on Feb. 21. But the men’s lawyers said that even a scenario would most likely only entail an alternative form of execution to the current injection method, which the lawyers argue is unconstitutionally cruel. “The state’s supply of midazolam runs out on April 30,” said John Williams, an assistant federal public defender based in Little Rock. “And so the schedule is quite obviously dictated by that, and we think it is inhumane that the state would schedule executions so as to get rid of a drug supply that the evidence shows is cruel and unusual. ” The executions come at an unsettled and complicated moment for capital punishment in the United States. Nationwide, the number of executions has been in steep decline, and though many Americans support the death penalty, some polling shows that support for capital punishment has been steadily waning since the . And while the Supreme Court has been less than clear on its collective stance toward capital punishment, President Trump is an ardent and longtime proponent. The president’s opinions may have little direct effect on state cases, but his blunt, speech is sure to influence the tone of the national conversation. In Arkansas, Mr. Hutchinson has earned a reputation as a relative moderate, serving in some cases as a break on the ambitions of the legislature. But he has also been determined to reactivate the death penalty. The year he took office, he scheduled the execution of eight inmates, including several of the same men set to die next month, saying that they had exhausted all appeals. But a state court halted the executions because of a lawsuit against the state over its provisions at the time that kept secret the sources of its lethal injection drugs. The state was then ordered to disclose information about its supply chain. Mr. Hutchinson’s latest effort to restart executions came after the state’s attorney general, Leslie Rutledge, told him that the eight men had no additional legal challenges to their executions. The eight men scheduled for execution are Kenneth Williams, Bruce Ward, Stacey Johnson, Don Williamson Davis, Ledell Lee, Jack Harold Jones, Jason McGehee and Marcel Williams. Some of the crimes were particularly heinous. Mr. Ward went into a Jackpot convenience store in Little Rock on a night in August 1989 and asked the clerk, Rebecca Lynn Doss, an who read the Bible during the overnight shift by herself, for help unlocking the men’s restroom. Inside the bathroom, he sexually assaulted and strangled her. A police officer spotted him leaving the restroom and about to get on his motorcycle to leave. Mr. Lee killed Debra Reese, 26, in her home in February 1993 in Jacksonville, Ark. outside Little Rock, after beating her 36 times with a tire tool that her husband had given her for protection while he was out of town. Kenneth Williams killed a cheerleader at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in December 1998 but escaped from a prison after a jury sentenced him to life the next year. A few miles from the prison, he fatally shot Cecil Boren, a farmer who was working in the yard while his wife was at church, and stole his truck. Mr. Williams led the police into Missouri in a chase before he crashed into a car, killing the driver. In 2005, he confessed to killing a man the same day he shot the cheerleader. At the news conference, Mr. Hutchinson said he had discussed concerns about stacking the executions, and its potential ill effects on prison employees, with Wendy Kelley, the state corrections director. “The answer is it’s not any easier to string it over four or five months than to do it in a measured and separated fashion, but in the sequence we have outlined,” he said. | 0fake |
Earth To Ammosexuals: NRA Admits No One Is Coming For Your Guns! (VIDEO) | Earth To Ammosexuals: NRA Admits No One Is Coming For Your Guns! (VIDEO) By Natalie Dailey
For decades, gun-toting, ammosexual Right Wing Nut Jobs have claimed that the government is going to take their guns away.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been preaching this kind of crap “news” for years, and blaming it on Democratic presidents. It turns out that the organization has finally admitted that this is a lie.
When asked about it, President Barack Obama said : “I’m about to leave office. There have been more guns sold since I’ve been president than just about any time in U.S. history. There are enough guns for every man, woman and child in this country. And at no point have I ever proposed confiscating guns from responsible gun owners. So it is just not true.”
The NRA responded with : “Congress writes the laws, not the president. He could then have listed the many attacks on the right to bear arms — from Operation Fast and Furious to Operation Choke Point to Obama’s attempted ban on common ammunition for AR-15-type rifles to his using a ‘pen and phone’ to push anti-gun executive actions. But Rhude respectfully stayed silent.”
Even if Congress and the president were able to pass such a law, the Supreme Court would rule it unconstitutional if challenged since they would be going against the Second Amendment.
Not only has the NRA lied about taking away guns, but Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is spreading that BS as well. He said this about it back in May: “Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment. She wants to abolish it. Hillary Clinton wants to take your guns away and she wants to abolish the Second Amendment. She wants to take the bullets away. She wants to take it.”
Americans really need to stop listening to these fear-mongering idiots. No one is coming after your guns. We need to keep guns out of the hands of people who abuse them and commit crimes with them.
Here is a clip from The Daily Show about Obama’s last batch of gun control executive orders :
Featured image via YouTube screenshot . About Natalie Dailey
Hi, I'm from Huntsville, AL. I'm a Liberal living in the Bible Belt, which can be quite challenging at times. I'm passionate about many issues including mental health, women's rights, gay rights, and many others. Check out my blog abravealabamaatheist.com. Check out my other blog weneedtotalkaboutmentalhealth.com Connect | 1real |
Spain issues arrest warrant for ousted Catalan leader | MADRID/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Spain on Friday issued an arrest warrant on sedition and other charges against Carles Puigdemont, tightening the judicial net around the former Catalan leader who went Brussels after his government was sacked over a declaration of independence. A Madrid High Court judge asked Belgium to arrest Puigdemont and four associates after they ignored a court order to return to Spain on Thursday to answer charges of rebellion, sedition, misuse of public funds, disobedience and breach of trust relating to their secessionist campaign. The judge rejected a request from Puigdemont to testify via video conference from Belgium. In Brussels, a federal prosecutor said Belgian authorities would study the warrant before handing it to a judge. We will give it to an investigative judge maybe tomorrow or the day after, Eric Van der Sypt told Reuters. Puigdemont, who is considering standing in a snap election in the region on Dec. 21, has said he did not trust Spanish justice but would cooperate with the Belgian courts. Embroiled in Spain s gravest political crisis since the return of democracy in the late 1970s, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called the election when he took control of Catalonia in response to last week s declaration of independence by its parliament. Belgium, where a European arrest warrant can be blocked for several mainly procedural reasons, will have a maximum of three months to decide whether to send Puigdemont back to Spain. On Thursday, nine members of his sacked cabinet were ordered by the High Court to be held in custody pending an investigation and potential trial. We consider ourselves a legitimate government, Puigdemont told Belgian state television RTBF on Friday. There must be a continuity to tell the world what s going on in Spain ... It s not with a government in jail that the elections will be neutral, independent, normal. ... I am ready to be a candidate ... it s possible to run a campaign from anywhere. The detention of the secessionist leaders and Puigdemont s journey to Belgium have given a new boost to the secessionist camp after cracks had appeared in its ranks. In protest at the jailings, Catalan civic groups Asamblea Nacional Catalana and Omnium Cultural whose leaders were imprisoned last month on sedition charges called for a general strike on Nov. 8 and a mass demonstration on Nov. 11. Another six Catalan leaders are due to testify on Nov. 9 on the same charges. One member of the dismissed cabinet, Santi Vila, was released after paying bail of 50,000 euros ($58,300) on Friday. The other eight could remain in custody for up to four years. Vila stepped down from the Catalan cabinet before the independence declaration. While he remains a supporter of an secession he has advocated a negotiated solution with the central government. He has said he wanted to stand as the leading candidate for Puigdemont s PdeCat (Catalan Democratic party) in the regional election. Thousands of people staged pro-independence protests on Thursday night in several Catalan towns, and parties forming the current coalition Junts Pel Si (Together For Yes) are pushing to run again on a joint ticket at the election. An opinion poll published on Tuesday showed Junts Pel Si would win in December with 35.2 percent if the vote was held immediately and would likely reach a parliamentary majority if it stuck with its current pact with far-left party CUP. The Spanish government said on Friday it would have no option but to open talks within the law with those who held a majority. We could offer a new dialogue so that we can fulfil Catalans aspirations for more autonomy and look into reforming the constitution, Foreign Affairs Minister Alfonso Dastis told French newspaper Le Figaro in an interview. Some even mention the idea of a federal model so that regions can have more autonomy, including financially. | 0fake |
France says Trump method not best way to tackle North Korea crisis | PARIS (Reuters) - France s foreign minister said on Wednesday that Donald Trump s verbal jousting with North Korea was perhaps not the best method to handle the nuclear crisis and urged the U.S. president to focus his attention on raising diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. Bellicose statements by Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in recent weeks have created fears that a miscalculation could lead to action with untold ramifications, particularly since Pyongyang conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on Sept. 3. Trump s method is perhaps not the best, but at the same time we shouldn t mix up the responsibilities, Jean-Yves Le Drian told BFM TV. The country that is breaking with nuclear international agreements is North Korea. President Trump is reacting forcefully to this, but without a doubt there is a way to act in a different way by putting pressure and sanctions. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho on Monday accused Trump of declaring war on North Korea and threatened that Pyongyang would shoot down U.S. warplanes flying near the Korean Peninsula after American bombers flew close to it last Saturday. The North Korean minister was reacting to Trump s Twitter comments that Kim and Ri won t be around much longer if they acted on their threats toward the United States. Le Drian repeated that a maximum amount of pressure needed to be placed on Pyongyang to get it back to the negotiating table, but warned there was a risk of an accidental military escalation. The world is living in a dangerous period, he said. At the moment we re at a verbal clash, but there could be an incident. We need to avoid incidents. | 0fake |
null | Another example of the public not holding our political machinery’s and it’s politicians feet to the fire but instead satisfied with saying we did. Kudo’s to the Sheriff for trying to insert some clarity into our delusion. | 1real |
Trump's son met Russian lawyer for damaging information on Clinton | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s eldest son told Senate investigators on Thursday that he had set up a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer because she might have had damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr., in a prepared statement to Senate Judiciary Committee investigators for a meeting behind closed doors, said it was important to learn about Clinton’s “fitness” to be president. “To the extent they had information concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate, I believed that I should at least hear them out,” said the statement, which was seen by Reuters. Trump also said the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others in Trump Tower in New York provided no meaningful information. The New York Times first reported the statement. Russia has loomed large over the Trump presidency. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded Moscow worked to tilt the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. Several congressional committees and a special counsel are also investigating allegations of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The younger Trump’s testimony is believed to be the first by a member of the president’s family to congressional investigators, much of whose work has been conducted behind closed doors. Moscow denies meddling and Trump denies collusion by his campaign, while regularly denouncing the investigations as political witchhunts. When news of the meeting with the lawyer broke earlier this year, the younger Trump at first said that the main topic at the encounter was child adoption from Russia but then he released emails that showed his reason for attending the meeting was to receive possibly damaging information about Clinton. His statement on Thursday is further acknowledgment that he was willing to receive potential help from a Russian citizen to help his father’s campaign, when it was still not certain he was going to be the Republican presidential nominee. “The fact that Trump Jr. acknowledges taking the meeting along with two other top campaign officials ... during a time in which the nomination was to be contested at the convention, also highlights how significant the campaign viewed the promise of dirt on their opponent from the Russian government,” Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a senior White House adviser, and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended the Trump Tower meeting. Congressional investigators have focused on the June 9, 2016, meeting, and what came of it, if anything, in terms of the relationship between Russians and the Trump campaign or Trump business interests. “As will become clear, I did not collude with any foreign government and do not know of anyone who did,” the statement said, promising to “set forth the sum and substance” of what happened at that meeting. Trump Jr. was questioned by Judiciary Committee staff for five hours. He left without speaking to reporters, and the meeting room entrance was shielded by a special partition that kept news cameras from recording his arrival and departure. A handful of mostly Democratic senators attended the meeting but said questioning was limited to staff. The session was not classified and Trump Jr. was not under oath. However, it is illegal to provide false information to Congress. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal described the atmosphere in the room as “cordial.” He said the testimony made it clear there was more to discover. “There certainly are a lot of areas that are opening for future witnesses, and questioning,” he told reporters. Blumenthal also said he expected Trump Jr. would testify under oath later at a public Judiciary Committee hearing. Schiff said his panel looked forward to having many questions answered when he appeared before them. | 0fake |
OOPS! CRYBABY HAMILTON STARS Who Lectured Pence Haven't Voted In Years [VIDEO] » 100percentfedUp.com | DONALD TRUMP SKIPS MEDIA: Delivers Transition Update Straight To The People [Video] Audience members booed Pence as he entered the theater and after the cast’s curtain call, the statement was read. Cast member Brandon Dixon stopped Pence on his way out of the performance to publicly shame him in front of the audience and cast members of Hamilton. Dixon’s message was written by show creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, director, Thomas Kail and lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, according to the New York Times. ‘We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us,’ Dixon said, reading the message aloud. But cast members were able to give input. RadarOnline investigated whether or not the actors had voted and revealed many leads hadn’t in years. Dixon’s records show he didn’t vote during president Obama’s reelection bid in 2012. Javier Munoz, playing the titular role of Hamilton, registered to vote in 2006 and voted in the mid-term elections, but hasn’t been on record as voting since.
Seth Stewart, who plays Thomas Jefferson, voted in 2008 when Obama ran for the first time. He did not vote in 2012. Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan, who players James Madison and Hercules Mulligan, registered to vote in 2005 but hasn’t been on record voting since. Since the clash with the Hamilton cast, Pence told Fox News he wasn’t offended by the message and said the booing ‘is what freedom sounds like’. – Daily Mail
| 1real |
Limbaugh: Democrats would 'destroy Jesus Christ' | Actor Jim Caviezel portraying Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ.”
Jesus Christ of Nazareth is not the Republican nominee for president in this election cycle.
But if He were, Democrats would try to “destroy” Him in the same manner they’re attacking the 2016 GOP candidate, Donald Trump.
That’s according to radio host Rush Limbaugh, who hypothesized what this year’s race would look like if the Son of God were at the top of the Republican ticket.
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“It doesn’t matter who the Republicans would have nominated, they were gonna get the treatment Trump’s getting. It wouldn’t have mattered,” Limbaugh said Wednesday.
“They would go out of their way to find ways to destroy Jesus Christ if he could be nominated as a Republican. The Democrats would do everything they could, include calling Him a liar, the Bible a fake book, whatever it took.” Rush Limbaugh
And despite the fact the Bible never indicates Jesus was married or had sex out of wedlock, Limbaugh suggested Democrats would do their best effort in trying to find any of His offspring:
“They would scour the historical record looking for children He had fathered, anything they could do to disapprove the gospel to discredit Jesus. That’s who they are. That’s what they would do.”
Limbaugh said the point he was stressing was that Republicans would never escape “this kind of media assault based on who we nominate.” Donald Trump’s RNC acceptance speech (Photo: Screenshot from RNC live feed)
“I say this because a lot of you Never Trumpers are out there claiming that this is exactly what you get when you nominate a guy like Trump. No, it’s exactly what you get when you nominate a Republican. Whenever there is any opposition to the Democrats, this is what they do. It doesn’t matter. They’re gonna do it. They did it to Romney …
“I’ve made this point ’til I blue in the face. They turned Romney, who is mild-mannered Mr. Gosh, Can’t Even Get Noticed into the biggest walking Satan, El Diablo politics had ever seen at that time, and they made it stick So this is why I think Trump has so many people supporting him. He’s fighting back against it when most Republicans haven’t and don’t.”
As an example of how media treatment of Republicans has not changed, Limbaugh played an excerpt of 1980 election-night coverage from CBS. Commentator Bill Moyers characterized the race before it was known that Republican Ronald Reagan would easily defeat Democrat Jimmy Carter. Moyers stated:
“Those of you who might speak Spanish, who might be black, who might be women, remember,” said Carter, “who’s been your friend.” And there under the California sun in San Diego at a shopping center, Ronald Reagan was delivering himself of one of those patriotic soliloquies at which he’s been a master since his days at Eureka College. Suddenly hecklers in the crowd started shouting and waving their ERA signs. Reagan took his cue and snapped back, “Aw, shut up!”
And thousands of supporters roared their approval. Those are the people for whom Ronald Reagan is the apostle of the rollback, the knight who promises finally to slay the dragon of liberal government. Jimmy Carter won four years ago as an outsider, and, if he wins at all tonight, it must be as an insider defending the status quo. Reagan has cast himself as a sheriff who comes riding into town at just in the nick of time shouting, “Enough’s enough.”
“Does it sound like anything has changed in the way these people see the world?” Limbaugh asked. “Not an iota!”
Follow Joe Kovacs on Twitter @JoeKovacsNews | 1real |
WikiLeaks: Look Who The Clinton Camp Most Wants to Please | Pinterest
Who does the Clinton camp want to make “happy”? Not the American people, of course, but none other than billionaire left-wing globalist George Soros.
Soros has donated around $25 million to the Clinton campaign as of July, according to Politico , and that clearly buys a great deal of influence. WikiLeaks has recently released emails from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that show the lengths the campaign went to keep Soros “happy” and the huge amount of influence he exerted.
In an Oct. 7, 2014 email from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin to now-campaign manager Robby Mook, Abedin discussed a dinner Clinton was going to have with Soros. Abedin said in the email that she expected that Soros would eventually ask Clinton to attend a fundraiser for one of the numerous groups Soros helps bankroll, the liberal America Votes organization.
Mook replied to the email: “I would only do this for political reasons (ie to make Soros happy).”
Fox News reported :
During her time as secretary of state, Clinton was forwarded from Soros’ aides on Jan. 23, 2011 a message he wrote specifically for her addressing “a serious situation” in Albania. Soros even included two actions that “need to be done urgently.” One of the suggestions was appointing “a mediator such as Carl Bildt, Martti Ahtisaari or Miroslav Lajcak…”
Clinton received the email the next day. On Jan. 27, Lajcak met Albanian leaders for a mediation effort.
In another instance, just hours after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia on Feb. 13, 2016, Chris Stone, president of the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations, emailed Podesta and asked: “Remember our discussion of Wallace Jefferson, [former] Chief Justice in Texas?” Podesta simply replied, “yup.”
An adviser and spokesman for Soros, Michael Vachon, did most of the corresponding with Podesta related to Soros. Vachon scheduled phone calls and meetings along with making sure that the campaign knew Soros’ position on a variety of policy issues.
Fox News reported:
On March 7, 2016, Vachon sent Podesta a memo regarding “TPP and Malaysia’s Corruption Crisis.” The document criticized President Obama for making “visible compromises” in his quest to get a deal for the Trans Pacific Partnership completed. Podesta was ostensibly set to discuss the memo with Soros and his son, Alexander, during a dinner later that month. Six days later, Vachon got even more specific.
“In general I think George is more interested in talking about policy than the campaign per se,” Vachon wrote. “In a separate email I will send you George’s latest thinking on the migration crisis, which he is spending a lot of time on. His other big preoccupation these days is Ukraine.”
Refugees/migration, the Supreme Court, global warming, Ukraine, etc., are surely just a sampling of policy issues on which the globalist Soros has and will continue to influence Clinton.
Clinton is dangerous enough as it is, but as the man who could be directing policy decisions if Clinton is elected president? That is a scary thought. | 1real |
Bernie Sanders Won't Rule Out Running In 2020 | On Thursday, socialist septuagenarian Bernie Sanders, 75, said he wouldn’t necessarily rule out running for president in 2020, when he will be nearly 80. | 1real |
Why Donald Trump must shut down The Federal Reserve and start issuing debt-free money | Why Donald Trump must shut down The Federal Reserve and start issuing debt-free money It would take someone very bold to make a move like this By Michael Snyder - Thursday, November 17, 2016 10:26 AM EST
If Donald Trump truly wants to fix the economy, he must shut down the Federal Reserve. If he just tries to patch up our current system, he will fail, because it has been fundamentally flawed from the very beginning. A little over a century ago, very powerful forces on Wall Street convinced Congress to completely restructure our financial system. An immensely powerful central bank known as the Federal Reserve was created, and the goal was to transform the U.S. dollar into a debt-based currency that would continuously be inflated and to create an endless debt spiral from which the federal government could never possibly escape. Sadly, they were successful on both counts. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by approximately 98 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger .
Americans tend to give most of the credit or most of the blame for the performance of the U.S. economy to our presidents, but the truth is that an unelected, unaccountable group of central bankers has far more power over our economy than anyone else does. The Federal Reserve has become known as “ the fourth branch of government “, but unlike the other branches of government we are told that the Fed’s decisions are “above politics” because they are “too important”. Fed officials fiercely guard their “independence”, and they fiercely resist any “interference” from Congress, the President, or the American people.
Donald Trump can try to lower taxes and reduce regulations, but what he will be able to do to influence the economy pales in comparison to the immensely powerful tools that the Fed wields. The Fed controls interest rates, the Fed controls the money supply, and the Fed regulates the banks.
To give you an idea of how enormously powerful the Fed is, I want you to pull out a dollar bill.
As you look at that dollar bill, I want you to notice that it says “Federal Reserve Note” right at the top.
In the financial world, a “note” is an instrument of debt, and the truth is that our system was designed to create as much debt as possible.
So why are we using debt-based “Federal Reserve Notes” in the first place? Shouldn’t Congress have control over our currency?
According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution , it is Congress that has the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.
So how did the Fed get involved?
Well, it is a very long and convoluted story, and if you are interested in the history behind it I would commend to you an excellent book by C. Edward Griffin entitled “ The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve “. Basically, big money interests on Wall Street got their hooks into the White House and Congress, and they rushed through legislation right before Christmas in 1913 that created this insidious central banking system that was designed to slowly but surely take wealth from the American people and put it into their hands.
Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize that we have a debt-based currency, nor do they understand where our money comes from. In a previous article , I discussed how money is normally created by the Federal Reserve under our current system…
When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.
Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.
The Federal Reserve takes the U.S. Treasury bonds that it receives in exchange for the “Federal Reserve Notes” that it gave to the government and it auctions off those bonds to the highest bidder . But of course this process always creates more debt than it does money… The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system. But wait. There is a problem. Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created. So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt? Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt. But that never actually happens, does it? And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well. They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt. They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.
So our debt just keeps going up and up and up. While Barack Obama has been in the White House our national debt has risen by more than 9 trillion dollars, and at this moment it is sitting just under the 20 trillion dollar mark .
But we shouldn’t be surprised by this, because this is precisely what the Federal Reserve system was designed to do to us.
But we shouldn’t be surprised by this, because this is precisely what the Federal Reserve system was designed to do to us.
Many conservatives still hold to the mistaken illusion that we could somehow pay all of this debt back someday, but as I have shown in a previous article, this is mathematically impossible to do .
If the government went out today and grabbed every single dollar in existence we could not pay back the national debt, and of course we have trillions of dollars of household debt, trillions of dollars of corporate debt and trillions of dollars of state and local government debt that we need to pay back as well.
Under the current system our only hope is to keep the wheel spinning by continuing to devalue the dollar and by continuing to go into even greater amounts of debt.
And of course it isn’t just the United States that is in this predicament. At this point, almost every single nation on the entire planet has a central bank.
Even though there are extremely sharp disagreements among nations on virtually everything else, somehow central banking has achieved nearly universal adoption.
As you read this article, well over 99.9% of the population of the globe lives in a country that has a central bank.
Do you think that is just a coincidence?
Of course there are still a few very small countries such as the Federated States of Micronesia that do not have a central bank, but the only big nation not to have one is North Korea.
And you would literally have to be insane to want to live in North Korea.
But now we have an opportunity to get free from this insidious system. The truth is that we don’t have to have a central bank. In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no central bank .
We don’t need central planners to set our interest rates and to manipulate our money supply. They will never admit this, but the reality of the matter is that their interference in the economy often creates tremendous economic busts.
Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions : 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.
Considering their track record, isn’t it time for a change?
And we don’t have to have a debt-based currency. In fact, not too long ago we had a president that decided to start issuing debt-free “United States Notes”.
Back in 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue debt-free “United States Notes” which were directly created by the U.S. government.
He was assassinated shortly thereafter.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but many of the debt-free United States Notes that were issued under President Kennedy are still in circulation today , and President Trump could do something similar.
But will he?
It has been said that the borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve system has turned all of us into debt slaves.
Debt is a form of social control, and the global elite use all of this debt to dominate the planet. The total amount of debt in the world just hit a brand new record high of 152 trillion dollars , and the longer we allow the central banks to control the system the bigger this debt bubble will become.
There is a way out, and here in the United States that starts with shutting down the Federal Reserve and issuing debt-free currency. It would take someone very bold to make a move like this, and so let us hope that the man that we just elected is up to the task. | 1real |
These Two FANTASTIC Tweets Perfectly Show The Main Difference Between Hillary And Trump | Last night, NBC hosted the Commander-in-Chief Forum in New York, where host Matt Lauer questioned Hillary and Trump for 30 minutes each (actually he put the screws to Hillary and lobbed puff balls at Trump, but that s beside the point). Hillary, as usual, was specific when answering questions, even those from veterans. Trump? Har de har har. His entire answer to every question boiled down to, I have a plan, and it will work. Obama and Hillary have screwed this up for you, but my plan will fix it. In fact, the following tweets actually show the difference between Hillary and Trump when it comes to anything to do with policy:One striking contrast: How will you improve vets mental health?Clinton: See my detailed plan, released last week Trump: The VA is corrupt Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) September 8, 2016 Clinton: Points to specific allies and her 4,700-word mental health planTrump: Says he ll create something great to fix corrupt system Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) September 8, 2016That s pretty much all Trump does. He makes grandiose but vague promises to take care of this, fix that, and more, and people believe him. He could say, The VA is corrupt. Trust me. I know corrupt enterprises. I can spot them a mile away. The VA is definitely a corrupt enterprise, but I will fix it. We ll have the best veterans system in the world. The best. It ll be great, and they ll just eat it up without question.That s why he s a demagogue.Meanwhile, we have Hillary Clinton in the other corner, who knows how to develop plans to handle things, and has actual, real ways to handle things, along with who will be enlisted to carry it out and/or help. She provides the specifics on her plans that Trump won t provide on his.That s the main difference between them now. Trump just says whatever he thinks people want to hear, and makes it vague enough that it ll be very easy for him to claim he never promised this, that or the other when, in fact, he did promise this, that or the other. Hillary actually tells people what they can expect.Photo of Hillary Clinton by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. Photo of Donald Trump by Alex Wong/Getty Images | 1real |
BUSTED: THE TRUTH COMES OUT, TWITTER FOUNDER INVOLVED IN HIDING AMERICAN CELEBRITY PEDOPHILE RING - Russia News Now | This post was originally published on this site
A screenshot from “An Open Secret,” a 2015 documentary about pedophilia in the entertainment industry .
I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
Let’s start with the bad news: this is one of those unpleasant, disturbing articles that I sometimes write here at CDP. It deals with a topic that I wish didn’t exist to be reported. But reality is what it is, so we might as well face it head-on.
Which brings me to the good news: “The truth shall set you free.”
That teaching is, of course, from Jesus, found in the Gospel of Sty. John, and it is the torch that we will carry to brave the dark tunnels ahead. As bad as it is, the good news is that dragging perversion and corruption into the light is the only way to destroy them, and the only way to set others free from the corrupt.
In any case, here is what we know so far about “Twittergate,” according to a recent post by NorthCrane.com :
Several Twitter users [earlier this week] were reporting child pornography accounts and sending them to 0hour, an active member of Anonymous. The Anonymous user, @0hour , was retweeting them and tagging Twitter, FBI and Disney. The YouTube user, notsafeforjerk, is providing up-to-date reports on #Twittergate .
Just some of the Twitter accounts exposed for posting child-sex content
[embedded content]
I can’t understand this man’s accent well at all, but your mileage may vary.
Not surprisingly, a few hours later, “0hour got his account suspended”–and it’s not the first time his account has been suspended–yet, very disturbingly, “many of the child pornography accounts remained active, despite the child pornography being publicly displayed on the Twitter accounts.”
No comment.
I know of one Twitter user whose account has been banned 11 times (and counting) in the last few weeks, and once three times in the same day, because he consistently tweets about the Podesta pedo ring, #pizzagate , spirit cooking, the Clinton Foundation’s human trafficking baggage, and so on. (He is able to restore his account almost immediately, however, because he uses Keybase, which, provides proof of his identity so Twitter readmits him under a different handle/name.)
At this point, the Twitter gods are either malicious for allowing such content to remain public, or too apathetic and incompetent to do anything about it, which, in terms of public harm, is just as bad.
The North Crane article ends on this note: “As more people become involved in the manhunt, the scope of horror increases.”
Sadly, this is truer than the author might have realized.
Hold fast to those torches, dear readers; we’re going farther down the tunnel.
+ + +
The reason Twitter may be “asleep at the wheel” during this #Twittergate storm is that Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, may very well be involved in the pedophilia underworld inhabited by the rich, the famous, and the powerful in Obama’s America.
The “blueprint” for the esoteric “spirit cooking” rituals that were exposed in the weeks before election day is Marina Abramovic’s 1996 cookbook of the same name. ****
Ten years later, Dorsey gave a nod to the ritual in this tweet :
Making “pasta” and “Satanic” allusions are key elements/codes in Spirit Cooking.
As the replies indicate, this tweet was unearthed within the last day, and has a disturbing significance in light of the larger Podesta ring.
At this point, a natural objection is to shrug this off as a weird possible aspect of one CEO’s life.
Unfortunately, Dorsey’s strange affinity for the pedo world belongs of a larger context. The 2015 documentary An Open Secret was directed by Amy Berg, and “exposes how pedophiles operate in Hollywood and cover up their crimes.” In addition, Berg’s 2006 documentary on the Catholic Church’s cover-up of pedophilia/pederasty, Deliver Us from Evil , was nominated for an Oscar.
The Hollywood Reporter has described the film as “A sober look at…the sexual exploitation of teenage boys in the entertainment industry by the older men who can make or break their careers…. [W]ith any luck it will encourage other victims to speak up, and enlighten the parents of showbiz aspirants about the industry’s dangers.”
Several journalists are included in the film. One journalist said his story documenting the sexual crimes committed by top Hollywood figures was censored.
Berg said she could not find any company willing to distribute her film until Rocky Mountain Pictures, the distributor behind such ground-breaking conservative-oriented documentaries as Obama 2016 , stepped up to release An Open Secret in various cities this summer.
The film identifies a pedophile ring led by a convicted sex offender named Marc Collins-Rector, who had ties to the rich and famous in Hollywood. Collins-Rector established an Internet-based TV company called Digital Entertainment Network (DEN).
Bad news: this is real.
Good news: they can’t hide anymore.
One blogger hit the nail on the head when he says that for years conservatives,
have tried to argue why their positions on a given issue were better than the liberal positions pushed by the entertainment industry. … But to be persuaded about the whole sweep of their criticisms, you’d have to evaluate every argument…..
A far more efficient use of time, money, and energy is not to attack all the myriad weirdnesses that Hollywood produces, but to attack the source from which they spring . If what produced them is rotten, polluted, and corrupted, the average person is willing to believe that the fruits themselves are rotten, polluted, and corrupted.
As such, he argues, the DoJ under President Trump ought to attack the Hollywood perverts and “blow the lid off of a similar culture of pedophilia among the DC Establishment insiders.” Because even if our culture is growing more and more tolerant of degradation and immorality, “there’s still one taboo left that everyone recoils in disgust at, and it’s pedophilia.”
More good news: The truth shall set you free–to fight the darkness.
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EPA CHIEF: ‘CLIMATE DENIERS’ AREN’T NORMAL PEOPLE | What s with the cultish attitude coming from our EPA chief? This is so creepy and Orwellian but the big push on climate change has even sucked in the Pope. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told an audience Tuesday gathered at a White House conference normal people, not climate deniers will win the debate on global warming.McCarthy s remarks came as she was talking about the reasons why the EPA put out a report on the negative health impacts global warming will have on public health. She said the agency puts out such reports to educate the public, not answer critiques from global warming skeptics. I am doing that not to push back on climate deniers, McCarthy told doctors, health professionals and others gathered at a White House summit. You can have fun doing that if you want, but I ve batted my head against the wall too many times and if the science already hasn t changed their mind it never will. McCarthy then remarked how normal people, and not skeptics would eventually win the global warming debate. Implicit in her remarks is the contention that skeptics are somehow not normal people. But in any democracy, it s not them that carries the day, McCarthy said. It is normal human beings that haven t put their stake into politics above science. It s normal human beings that want us to do the right thing, and we will if you help us. Read more: The Daily Caller | 1real |
AWESOME! SECRETARY OF STATE Rex Tillerson at Rolling Thunder 2017! [Video] | Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was a participant in Rolling Thunder 2017! What a great show of support! Candidate Donald Trump was at the event last year. His speech to the crowd was a heartfelt call for more concern for our veterans and a vow to rebuild the military.Secretaryof State Rex W. Tillerson at Rolling Thunder 2017!!!! @cnn @msnbc pic.twitter.com/gZ6EZWToRs Victor Martinez (@vjmar1) May 28, 2017 REX TILLERSON AT ROLLING THUNDER 2017!Secretaryof State Rex W. Tillerson at Rolling Thunder 2017!!!! @CNN pic.twitter.com/hEYrBid93x Victor Martinez (@vjmar1) May 28, 2017REX TILLERSON AT ROLLING THUNDER 2017!Secretaryof State Rex W. Tillerson at Rolling Thunder 2017!!!! @cnn pic.twitter.com/8mV7xe3bQ7 Victor Martinez (@vjmar1) May 28, 2017HERE S A PREVIOUS REPORT ON T REX WHEN HE WAS ANNOUNCED AS SOS: The 64-year-old veteran oil executive has no government or diplomatic experience. The pick would put to rest weeks-long speculation of who would earn the post as the U.S. s top diplomat, and would place Tillerson fourth in line to the presidency.Tillerson is a surprising choice, particularly for establishment political forces who urged Trump to select Mitt Romney for the job. It also shows that Trump will start fresh with his diplomatic team, rather than selecting a life-long politician. Tillerson has spent his life in the private sector, working with Exxon-Mobil and has business relationships around the world.OUR FIRST BIKER SECRETARY OF STATE!TILLERSON COMES RIDING THROUGH THE SHOT AT THE 1:53 POINT: | 1real |
Michigan governor expects no charges over Flint crisis: newspaper | (Reuters) - Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said he had “no reason to be concerned” he would be charged in connection with the Flint drinking water crisis that exposed city residents to high levels of lead, the Detroit Free Press reported on Thursday. Snyder made the comments to the newspaper on Wednesday, the day after two Flint emergency managers appointed by the governor were indicted on felony charges of conspiring to violate safety rules. “I have no reason to be concerned,” Snyder was quoted as saying, while acknowledging he could not speak on behalf of state Attorney General Bill Schuette. Both Snyder and Schuette are Republicans. Snyder told the paper much of the $3.5 million in taxes he is using for his criminal defense was being spent to find and prepare records requested by Schuette and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is also investigating the water scandal. Schuette has filed 43 criminal charges against 13 current and former state and local officials, including the emergency managers this week. Snyder’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the interview. Flint has been at the center of a public health crisis since last year, when tests found high amounts of lead in blood samples taken from children in the poor, predominantly black city of about 100,000 residents. Critics have called for charges to be brought against the governor, who has been in office since 2011, as well as other high-ranking state officials. Snyder has said he believes he did nothing criminally wrong. Asked at a news conference on Tuesday whether the investigation would lead to charges against senior state officials, Schuette said no one was excluded from the probe. Flint’s water contamination was linked to a switch of its source to the Flint River from Lake Huron in April 2014, a change made in an attempt to cut costs, while the city was under state-run emergency management. | 0fake |
George Michael Mattered Beyond the Music - The New York Times | If you were around in October of 1987 and had MTV then, you remember. You remember the camera climbing, in black and white, up a rotating pair of torn, Levis. You remember it seeming to take in the seat of the pants — or seeming to let you take that in. You remember the annoying cut to a jukebox, against which leaned two pairs of legs: some lady’s in blue heels, and another in blue denim and cowboy boots — a dude’s. You remember the fade from the jukebox back to the rotating body, and the camera’s revealing a man in a leather jacket and a white with perfectly trimmed stubble, aviator sunglasses and a cross dangling from his left ear. Today, we’d call that a lot of look. (The pompadour doesn’t even arrive for another couple of shots.) But if you were around in 1987, you just called your friends and said, “Oh, my God. ” If you missed Elvis or James Dean or the Beatles, if you were immune to what they did to other people’s hormones, maybe George Michael’s “Faith” registered strongly on your superstar Richter scale. Maybe he triggered your gaydar, too. Mr. Michael, who died unexpectedly on Christmas Day, never had to say he was gay for his gayness to seem apparent and unabashed. Three years earlier, this same person could be seen hugging himself while singing into the camera as the more freshly blond in a pop duo (Wham! with Andrew Ridgeley) whose sound was about as close as two white British boys could get to a black girl group from the 1960s. By 1987, Mr. Michael had become just fresh, switching personas from soft to hard, from exuberant cheerleader to butch troubadour. [ Read the obituary | Watch George Michael perform live ] Somehow, wagging his derrière and begging for sex — and sounding deeply soulful while he did it — didn’t make him a novelty act. It made him extremely famous. It was a pose he kept for about a year. By the time you saw him in 1988, swiveling through the video for “Monkey,” in suspenders and a bolero hat, he’d . Striking a pose is one thing. Holding it is something else. There weren’t many major male pop stars who were openly gay back then. (Scarcely any are now. Elton John said he was bisexual in 1976, and officially stayed there for more than a decade. He could hold a pose.) Lots of men hinted. Lots of men messed around with masculinity, and not just the megastars. For every David Bowie or even Boy George, there was a Jermaine Stewart or a Good Question, many rungs down the fame ladder. And for reasons that make no cosmic sense, a few of those men — Prince, David Bowie, Prince Be of P. M. Dawn, and now Mr. Michael — died in 2016, a year in which dismaying ambivalence about aggressive, invasive male behavior was matched by the reinstatement of duller performances of masculinity in both our pop music and our politics. The Princes and the George Michaels seem as radical as ever. Some of the shock of seeing “Faith” for the first (or 10th) time was that, just that summer, the man in it was getting all kinds of kids in trouble for singing “I Want Your Sex” not far into the AIDS era. After that, we should have been ready for “Faith. ” But “I Want Your Sex” kept to MTV’s gender norms, in which videos objectified sexy women (in that case, the stunning Kathy Jeung). “Faith” seemed exhilaratingly dirty by those standards: Mr. Michael was objectifying himself. “Faith” isn’t as great a video as it is a song or an album. But it’s important. Its hotness gave Mr. Michael this new, macho self to work with: somewhere between leather bar opening act and the boyfriend that girls in teen comedies think they want. He seemed both dangerous and “dangerous. ” But the pleading in his voice made you take him more seriously than you would a star whose new look was “sexy Village Person. ” Mr. Michael’s artistry ensured he would never be received only as camp. He was too good. He was too rueful and needy. Under the jacket and the shades and the stubble and the hair was a human who ached. Mr. Michael had a pretty, plainly textured voice that could quickly flare outward, into regret or shame, just for a few bars, the way it does in the bridge for 1984’s “Careless Whisper,” one of those apologetic slow jams with the evergreen wisdom of a psalm. It’s clarifying to tally up all those excellent songs and discover just how many were about emotional desperation and sexual frustration (“Everything She Wants,” “Last Christmas,” “Faith,” “Father Figure,” “Hard Day,” “Hand to Mouth,” “Something to Save,” “Too Funky,” “Outside,” to name just nine). The need for both liberty and intimacy also recur. So does the urge to let go or be released, to be truly seen and to give love. You don’t always notice because Mr. Michael’s singing smooths out any psychological cracks. He was ingenious with melody. There aren’t that many pop stars with as many parts of as many songs that are as exciting to sing as George Michael has — bridges, verses, the fillips he adds between the chorus during a . “Faith” isn’t just an album. It’s a complex city of modern sound: a collection of songs, yes, and a skyline, too. But the psychological always tended to be present. The church organ at the beginning of that “Faith” video is playing the chorus of Wham! ’s “Freedom. ” He sang about wanting to be free often enough to make you wonder whether he thought any freedom was ever attainable. He seemed to come to resent his fame. David Fincher’s video for another “Freedom” — “Freedom! ’90” — amounts to Mr. Michael’s changing his mind about 1987. The stars of the video are Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz and Linda Evangelista — supermodels — not Mr. Michael, who’s conspicuous by his absence yet represented by the demolition of that jukebox and the immolation of the leather jacket. He was rejecting “Faith,” and it was heretical. “Freedom! ’90” appears on “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” the album with Mr. Michael’s strongest singing. There are want, hurt, protest and artistic risk. Prince, Mr. Bowie and Michael Jackson were theatrical performers. This was the first time Mr. Michael allowed himself to sound theatrical, too. The lyrics are explicitly personal, if poetically implicit. The record rejects the perfect pop songwriting of “Faith” and replaces a lot of the danciness of that album with gospel. It holds up as a work of art as well as the previous record holds up as an achievement of commercial intelligence. Those other men who died this year — Mr. Bowie and Prince and Prince Be — also managed to do interesting stuff with race: to sing black music while white to be a black guitarist in any genre to be a fat, bohemian rapper who sang. For all Mr. Michael did to make gayness interesting and less threatening, he might have done more to help erase a barrier between who should and should not sing soul music. In his prime, he was a relatively frictionless ambassador among the races. He didn’t cross all the way over, as Teena Marie did. He didn’t “sound black. ” He sounded like himself — and that was enough to land him near the top of the black music charts. “I Knew You Were Waiting for Me,” from 1987, is still the best Aretha Franklin duet. Mr. Michael’s black support was never an exploitative exhortation. It was never “Go, white boy! Go, white boy! Go!” It was: “Oh, he gets it. ” And by 2016, he wasn’t done mattering. Last spring, Key Peele’s stoner, comedy, “Keanu,” came and went. But there’s a running gag that’s stayed with me. It’s just three Los Angeles thugs and one uptight bureaucrat named Clarence (Keegan Michael Key) pretending to be a thug (long story a good one, though) chilling in Clarence’s minivan. To pass the time, they turn to the fake thug’s iPhone for music, and up comes George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90. ” One dude says, “That sounds kinda white. ” And Clarence begins a quick defense of his taste, studded with the that also makes a flashy British pop star sound like a gangsta from Crenshaw. The sequence culminates with their being oblivious to the shootout in the house they’re parked in front of, belting “One More Try” like a pack of wolves baying at the moon. For about 25 minutes, “Keanu” is smarter than the bad action comedy it turns out to be. And one thing it’s brilliant about is the partial meaning of George Michael. Who knows if Mr. Michael found that annoying. Who knows if he was aware that “Keanu” existed. But the crush this movie has on him is the crush almost everybody did. At some point, Clarence takes a hit of some hot new street drug, and the first place his high takes him is dancing with Mr. Michael in the “Faith” video. He’s up where even Mr. Michael’s slowest, saddest music could take you. He’s in heaven. | 0fake |
Yemen’s Seventh Truce: Turning Tragedy Into Farce | New Eastern Outlook | Country: Yemen With six previous attempts to observe truce having already failed to mitigate the intensity of the crisis, the US brokered seventh truce has yet again —and unsurprisingly— failed to end the fighting in Yemen where the death toll has already risen to 7,000. Despite the fact that both rebels and the Yemeni government had agreed to observe the truce and the ceasefire announced by the Saudia led coalition, fighting has surged, with both sides accusing each other of violation, around the flashpoint southwestern city of Taez, where violence has killed dozens this week, despite clashes subsiding on several fronts. While the fighting itself is a clear reflection of the US’ inability to control the situation on the ground even in a limited sense, the irony of the matter is that—and what turns the tragedy into farce—the US, which is trying to broker peace, happens to be the biggest provider of weapons to Saudi Arabia which has been bombing Yemen for last 19 months. This is where the crux of the problem lies and this is where the original cause of the war must be traced back to. Yemen war continues to drag on not because the warring parties are unable to come to terms; it continues to defy a negotiated end due primarily to the US’ dual-game in the region—a policy that utilises the war-scenario to not only to deepen the Arab countries’ dependence upon the US for military assistance and aid but also to earn billions in terms of weapons sold to the same countries. Therefore, John Kerry’s involvement in many rounds of talks notwithstanding, it is also a fact that many strikes are actually carried out by Saudi pilots who have received their training by the US and who fly US-made jets that are refuelled in the air by American planes. And Yemenis often find the remains of American-made munitions, as they did in the ruins after a strike that killed more than 100 mourners at a funeral last month. Graffiti on walls across Sana reads: “America is killing the Yemeni people.” To the US’ disappointment, no graffiti reads “America is brokering peace in Yemen”, or that “America, is protecting the Yemenis from brutal bombing.” With the US thus playing a double game in Yemen and with the US-made missiles and jets pounding the Yemenis indiscriminately, the question of the US being a committer of war crimes becomes pertinent. The allegation has concrete material base. For instance, consider this: while the UN officials were expressing their concerns over the rising toll of civilian deaths in Yemen in September this year, the US Senate backed, on September 21, the Obama administration’s plan to sell more than $1 billion worth of American-made tanks and other weapons to Saudi Arabia, soundly defeating a bid to derail the deal pushed by lawmakers critical of the kingdom’s role in Yemen’s war. The deal involves more than 100 main battle tanks, machine guns, smoke grenade launchers, night-vision devices, vehicles to recover damaged tanks from the battlefield, and thousands of rounds of training ammunition. The primary contractor for the equipment is General Dynamics Land Systems of Sterling Heights, Michigan. With Saudi Arabia being such an important buyer of the US made weapons, which are being currently used in Yemen against the Houthis, and with the US being eager to fulfil its security commitments and equally facilitating the Saudi led coalitions’ bombing campaigns both logistically and militarily, peace cannot really be established, not unless the US forces Saudia to stop its bombing campaign—something that comes at a high-cost for the US weapon-makers: hence, unlikely to happen. What adds insult to injury is that the supporters of the deal say that the US cannot deny its Middle East allies the weapons they need to combat Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) extremists and check Iran’s aggression in the region. “Blocking this sale of tanks will be interpreted by our Gulf partners, not just Saudi Arabia, as another sign that the United States of America is abandoning our commitment to the region and is an unreliable security partner,” said John McCain. The support continues despite the fact that the Saudi-led coalition was responsible for 60 percent of the 2,067 civilians killed in the conflict over a yearlong span starting on July 1, 2015, according to a report released by U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein. Given the dual game the US is playing in Yemen, it cannot be gainsaid that truce and ceasefire cannot hold the fighting and pave the way for an end of the war, not unless Saudi Arabia’s source of military power, the US, decides to cut off the chain of supply and brings it to the negotiating table—something that is unlikely to happen under Obama administration and something that would be paid lip service only under the Trump administration. In this context, the off and on saga of truce and ceasefire means nothing except that it allows the US administration to feed the general public with the impression of maintaining a ‘neutral’ stance towards the war. Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook ”. Popular Articles | 1real |
EPA's Pruitt took flights costing taxpayers more than $58,000: Washington Post | (Reuters) - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt is said to have taken at least four noncommercial and military flights since mid-February, costing taxpayers more than $58,000, the Washington Post reported. In June, Pruitt took the most expensive of the four trips when he traveled from Andrews Air Force Base to Cincinnati to join President Trump, the paper reported, citing records obtained from a congressional oversight committee. wapo.st/2fsAyBo “When the administrator travels, he takes commercial flights,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman told Washington Post on Wednesday. The administrator and the cabinet secretary are the face of the agency, and have an obligation to get out throughout the country, the paper quoted Bowman as saying. Pruitt’s frequent travels to Oklahoma are already being investigated by EPA’s inspector general. The EPA and Pruitt’s office were not immediately available for comment outside regular business hours. | 0fake |
Management sees woman’s untapped potential to work weekends | Management sees woman's untapped potential to work weekends 02-11-16 A MANAGER has identified one of his employees as having what it takes to work most weekends. Nikki Hollis, a junior marketing executive, has been working at her current job for just three weeks, but her manager has already singled her out as being what he calls ‘a weekender’. Manager Denys Finch Hatton said: “Nikki has the lack of social life and deep fear of losing her job that will drive her to slog her guts out on more Saturdays and Sundays than she can count. “She is a great fit for the company and has already responded to subtle manipulations to stay late, even on a Friday. “With the right continued guilt-tripping from me, combined with a gradual build-up of workload and stress, I’m confident she has a very bright future working here at weekends.” The company currently runs a rewards scheme for weekend-working employees called ‘Go Hard But Don’t Go Home’, which offers vouchers at an office cafe with the same name.
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EP #7: Patrick Henningsen LIVE with guest Shawn Helton – ‘Top Conspiracies of 2016’ | Join Patrick every Wednesday at Independent Talk 1100 KFNX and Alternate Current Radio for the very best in news, views and analysis on all top stories domestically and abroad THIS WEEK: Episode 7 Top Conspiracies of 2016 Another year and another slew of incredible stories globally. The Orlando Nightclub Mass Shooting, the Dallas Cop Shooting, the Turkish Coup, the White Helmets, the Podesta Emails and the fake news crisis, and so many more. Which ones will be remembered as the biggest conspiracies of 2016?All this and more, as host Patrick Henningsen in joined by special guest Shawn Helton, investigative journalist and Associate Editor at 21stCenturyWire.com. Listen END 1158 Download Link Download this podcast END 1364 Download Link This program broadcasts LIVE every Wednesday night from 8pm to 9pm MST, right after the Savage Nation, on Independent Talk 1100 KFNX over the terrestrial AM band across the greater Phoenix and central Arizona region, and live over global satellite and online via www.1100kfnx.com.LISTEN TO MORE INTERVIEWS AT PATRICK HENNINGSEN LIVE SHOW ARCHIVESREAD MORE CONSPIRACY NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Conspiracy FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @ 21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Schumer: If Trump Changes, We Could Work Together - Breitbart | On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ( ) said if President Donald Trump were to change, Democrats could work with him. Schumer said, “The bottom line is very simple: the president, if he works with us, particularly on issues like trade and infrastructure, we can work. But on the issues so far, taxes and healthcare, he doesn’t consult us at all. ” He added, “He’s not governing from the middle, he’s governing from the hard right. That’s why his regime has had hardly any major successes, with the exception of Gorsuch. If he changes, we can work together. But he can’t just dictate what he wants. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0fake |
U.S. Navy carrier drills with Japanese navy amid North Korean tension | TOKYO (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy carrier Ronald Reagan is conducting drills with Japanese warships in seas south of the Korean peninsula, Japan s military said on Friday, in a show of naval power as Pyongyang threatens further nuclear and missile tests. The Reagan strike group will conduct a separate drill with the South Korean Navy in October, the defense ministry said in a statement distributed to South Korean lawmakers on Monday. The 100,000-ton Reagan, which is based in Japan, and its escort ships have been holding drills with Japanese navy vessels since Sept 11 in waters south and west of Japan s main islands, the Japan Maritime Self Defence Force said in a statement. That exercise with the three Japanese warships, including two destroyers and one of the country s two biggest helicopter carriers, the Ise, will run until Sept 28, it added. The U.S. and regional allies are responding with military drills, including bomber and jet fighter flights near the Korean peninsula, as Pyongyang pursues its nuclear and missile programs, with an apparent hydrogen bomb test and two ballistic missile firings over Japan in recent weeks. North Korea on Friday said it might test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean after U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to destroy the country. | 0fake |
Clinton, Trump vie for world leaders' attention in New York | NEW YORK (Reuters) - With national security again a major U.S. election issue after bombings in New York and New Jersey, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump sought to burnish their foreign-policy credentials on Monday by meeting world leaders at the United Nations. For Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, it was a return to a role she knows well after she served as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state for four years. Trump, the Republican nominee, is a newcomer to the global stage who is hurriedly trying to play catch-up. In rapid succession, Clinton met briefly with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Trump also met Sisi minutes after the Egyptian leader spoke with Clinton in the same Manhattan hotel. The meetings came on a day that started with Clinton suggesting Trump’s harsh rhetoric toward Muslims aids the Islamic State militant group’s recruiting efforts. Trump pushed back, arguing the United States was less safe as a result of Obama and Clinton’s policies. Security questions arose in each of Monday’s bilateral sessions, which took place as world leaders gathered for the U.N. General Assembly, with Clinton and Abe discussing concerns over North Korea and maritime issues involving China. Clinton and Trump both spoke with Sisi about working more closely with Egypt to combat the Islamic State threat. Trump’s campaign released a statement saying that Trump “highlighted how Egypt and the U.S. share a common enemy and the importance of working together in defeating radical Islamic terrorism.” With Clinton, Sisi also discussed his goal of moving Egypt toward “a new civil society, a new modern country that upholds the rule of law and respects human rights and liberties.” Clinton and Poroshenko addressed Russian incursions into Ukrainian territory. Clinton started the session by saying Ukraine faces “very real problems and threats from Russian aggression” and that she was “anxious to know how we can be supportive.” The session also resonated because of Trump’s praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. Trump called Putin a stronger leader than Obama, rattling both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. The evening was not without drama, starting with Clinton’s motorcade zooming through packed New York streets at rush hour and then quickly rushing from hotel to hotel. Trump also tried to bolster his foreign policy credentials last month when he went to Mexico to meet President Enrique Pena Nieto, but both sides ended up disagreeing about whether who would pay to build a border wall had been discussed. Clinton called that episode an “embarrassing international incident.” | 0fake |
BLACK LIVES MATTER TERRORISTS Take To Social Media: ANGRY Over Attention Given to FRANCE TERROR VICTIMS | There are no words for these selfish sub-humans Here are a couple of profiles from Twitter of the people tweeting about BLM being ignored because of Nice terror tragedy. They have both made their Twitter accounts private:We found this sweet self-described Georgia Peach listed as a Fashion Contributor at company called xoNecole.com Feel free to send a message to her boss on their Facebook page. Click HERE for link.Here s another pathetic Twitter user: @_nehoda_ who whined about the attention victims of the Nice terror attack were taking from the BLM movement. She s lists herself as living in London, but calls Egypt the motherland ?? Hmmm How does a Muslim woman living in London get hooked up with BLM terrorists in US?And then there s the other Muslim living in London who s a bit more brash with his tweets: Don't #PrayForNice we are fighting a civil war against whites. #BLM Andre Johnson (@LarryKingfisher) July 15, 2016Here are a few replies to Omar s tweet:Here are a few of this Muslim punk s remarks threatening a caliphate and boasting about how the Muslims have already won the war against the West:Here s real bright guy who s got nothing better to do than take to Twitter complaining about the plight of black people on the day after a major terror attack that killed over 80 people. Never mind that people just lost their husbands, wives, children, kids, friends, relatives or co-workers.Some white people die in Europe and now the media can ignore the plight of black people being exterminated #blacklivesmatter #NiceAttack Bob Schmidt (@bobschmidt857) July 15, 2016We tryna rise up for equality n somehow a 'muslim' attacks people? #BlackLivesMatter #FakeShit #NiceAttack Daye Hazit (@YurBoyDW) July 15, 2016The real tragedy about the #NiceAttack is that it takes the spotlight away from #BlackLivesMatter TheAltRightProfessor (@NationalistProf) July 14, 2016And finally this guy nails it:Nice job with PR #BlackLivesMatter Nothing makes people want to support you like whining about "getting the limelight stolen" by #NiceAttack Pink Snow kitty (@HugoThePinkCat) July 15, 2016 | 1real |
Greek top court to decide Dec. 13 on Russia cyber suspect extradition | ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece s Supreme Court will decide on Dec. 13 whether to extradite a Russian to the United States where authorities want to put him on trial for laundering $4 billion via a bitcoin platform. Alexander Vinnik, who says he is a bitcoin consultant, is accused by U.S. authorities of running the BTC-e exchange, which they allege was a conduit for laundering proceeds from illicit activities. Vinnik denies the charges and is fighting his extradition to the United States. I don t think there is independent justice in the United States for a Russian citizen, Vinnik told the court in session in Athens. He also said conditions in American prisons were terrible . Addressing the court, a Greek public prosecutor recommended Vinnik s extradition. The 38-year-old was arrested in northern Greece on the basis of a U.S. warrant in July, one of seven Russians arrested or indicted worldwide this year on U.S. cybercrime charges. Since his arrest, Russia has also sought Vinnik s extradition there on lesser charges of fraud. Vinnik has agreed to be extradited to Russia. In competing requests of this nature, the final decision of where Vinnik will be extradited rests with Greece s justice minister. | 0fake |
Trump leaning toward Georgia ex-governor for agriculture head: official | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue is U.S. Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s leading candidate to run the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a senior Trump transition team official said on Monday. Perdue, a Democrat-turned-Republican who founded a grain and fertilizer business, served on Trump’s agricultural advisory committee during his presidential campaign. The official gave no other details about Trump’s choice for agriculture secretary, one of the few remaining posts Trump has to fill as he assumes the White House on Jan. 20. The appointment must be approved by the Republican-led U.S. Senate. Perdue, 70, led the southern U.S. state for two terms as governor from 2003 to 2011 after previously representing a rural swath of central Georgia about 100 miles south of Atlanta in the state Senate. Elected in 2002, he became the state’s first Republican since 1871, according to the National Governors Association. After finishing his second term as governor, Perdue founded Perdue Partners, a global trading firm that consults and provides services for companies looking to export products. Trump had been meeting with a number of other possible candidates for U.S. agriculture secretary, including Elsa Murano, undersecretary of agriculture for food safety under President George W. Bush, and Chuck Conner, head of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. He has also met with Abel Maldonado, former lieutenant governor of California and co-owner of Runway Vineyards; Tim Huelskamp, Republican U.S. representative from Kansas; and Sid Miller, Texas agriculture commissioner. | 0fake |
Donald Trump’s Racist Plan Is About To Start IMMEDIATELY | While Donald Trump is back peddling on several of his campaign promises, like the wall, repealing Obamacare, prosecuting Hillary Clinton and his Muslim ban, in an interview on 60 Minutes, Trump vowed that he would immediately institute one of his worst promises. He claimed he ll start deporting undocumented residents right away, but it s okay because it s only the criminals. What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate, Trump told 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, according to a preview of the interview released by CBS. But we re getting them out of our country. They re here illegally. As for the rest of the undocumented immigrants: After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we re going to make a determination on the people that they re talking about who are terrific people. They re terrific people, but we are gonna make a determination at that, Trump said. But before we make that determination it s very important, we are going to secure our border. The Washington Post notes that the Department of Homeland Security, in 2013, said there were about 1.9 million removable criminal aliens. That number is not just about people who are here illegally. Many are here lawfully, but have broken the law.Regardless, there are some major civil rights and logistical problems, including how do we figure out exactly who has committed crimes? It s not like they re just sitting in jail.Robert Reich asks this:Out of an estimated population of 11 million undocumented immigrants, how exactly will the government identify these people? Will there be wholesale roundups and interrogations? Anyone who looks Latino stopped and identity checked? Anonymous accusations to government agents of gang membership or drug dealing? And what is the responsibility of the rest of us including those of us living in sanctuary cities to stop such abuses?Despite Trump s assertions that immigrants are criminals and rapists, they, by and large, aren t. Undocumented immigrants, for pretty obvious reasons (they don t want to attract the attention of the law) stay out of trouble. In several studies quoted by the conservative Wall Street Journal, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and less likely to be locked up for crimes. It s not just well-educated immigrants working in Silicon Valley who stay out of trouble. It s immigrants from Latin American countries as well.Despite the fact that immigrants as criminals is just a red herring, and the real immigration problem is the fact that employers hire undocumented workers, this will put a lot of people s lives in danger. Trump has given his tacit permission for his voters to become vigilante warriors. Hate crimes are already up and Trump has done nothing to denounce them, let alone quell them.Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | 1real |
CORRUPTION: Ivanka Trump Gets Trademarks From China After Meeting With Chinese President At Mar-a-Lago | This is a major ethics violation. Period.In March, Donald Trump made his daughter Ivanka an official part of his administration by giving her an office in the White House. My biggest concern is that this is yet another erosion of government ethics standards in this White House, said government ethics expert and law professor Kathleen Clark at the time.And now those concerns are being raised again.Supposedly, Ivanka won t be paid a salary. But it appears that Ivanka is being compensated in other ways.Not long after getting her own White House position, Ivanka joined her father at Mar-a-Lago to dine with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife.Ivanka even posted a picture of herself with Jinping at Mar-a-Lago on Twitter thanking him for visiting the United States.Thank you President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan for your visit to the United States ?? pic.twitter.com/VLvzyDMiiY Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) April 9, 2017But what Ivanka was apparently really thanking Jinping for was the trademarks China awarded to her company on the same day they had dinner together.According to The Boston Globe,On April 6, Ivanka Trump s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world s second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago.Clearly, Ivanka Trump and her dad are still using the White House to get lucrative business deals and now that Ivanka works directly in the White House, she ll have even more access to foreign leaders to benefit her business and fill her family s pockets.Ivanka previously joined her father in a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the same time that a licensing agreement between her company and Sanei International was at stake.So Ivanka Trump can t pretend that she s involved in her dad s administration because she gives a damn about helping people and serving her country. She only cares about herself and has demonstrated repeatedly that she doesn t care about ethics as long as she s making money. This entire administration is corrupt to the core and it s time for Trump and his family to be kicked out of the White House before they sell America to the highest bidder to enrich themselves.Featured Image: Twitter | 1real |
In the Age of ISIS, Who’s a Terrorist, and Who’s Simply Deranged? - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — In December 2014, a man driving a car in Dijon, France, mowed down more than a dozen pedestrians within 30 minutes, occasionally shouting Islamic slogans from his window. The chief prosecutor in Dijon described the attacks, which left 13 injured but no one dead, as the work of a mentally unbalanced man whose motivations were vague and “hardly coherent. ” A year and a half later, after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel slaughtered dozens of people when he drove a refrigerated truck through a Bastille Day celebration on Thursday in Nice, France, the authorities did not hesitate to call it an act of Islamic terrorism. The attacker had a record of petty crime but no obvious ties to a terrorist group, yet the French prime minister swiftly said Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel was “a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another. ” The age of the Islamic State, in which the tools of terrorism appear increasingly crude and haphazard, has led to a reimagining of the common notion of who is and who is not a terrorist. Instances of wanton violence by deranged attackers — whether in Nice or in Orlando, Fla. — are swiftly judged to be the work of terrorists. These judgments occur even when there is little immediate evidence that the attackers had direct ties to terrorist groups and when they do not fit a classic definition of terrorists as those who use violence to advance a political agenda. “A lot of this stuff is at the fringes of what we would historically think of as terrorism,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a professor at Dartmouth College. But, he said, “the Islamic State and jihadism has become a kind of refuge for some unstable people who are at the end of their rope and decide they can redeem their lives” by dying in the name of a cause. Mr. Benjamin said this also led the news media and government officials to treat violence like the Nice attack differently from other mass attacks, like shootings at schools and churches that have been carried out by . “If there is a mass killing and there is a Muslim involved, all of a sudden it is by definition terrorism,” he said. The spectrum of terrorism is widening and now includes attacks loosely inspired by the Islamic State, those carried out by its affiliate groups and attacks directed by the group’s leadership. All have drawn public condemnation and concern, but the plots organized and executed by the Islamic State usually prompt greater concern from the authorities. On Saturday, a bulletin on the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency channel described Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel as a “soldier of the Islamic State” who answered a call to attack nations involved in the military campaign against the group. But the bulletin gave no specifics about the extent of the attacker’s ties to the terrorist network. On one hand, there is now good reason for government officials to make immediate assumptions after some mass killings that the Islamic State has played a role, however indirect. The group’s ideology, spread widely through social media and slick propaganda videos, appears to have inspired a scourge of violence for more than a year: including the shooting in December in San Bernardino, Calif. the mass killings last month at a gay nightclub in Orlando and the deadly attack early this month at a cafe in Bangladesh. These were in addition to attacks that top Islamic State operatives apparently planned directly, like the Paris assaults in November and the Brussels bombings in March. In September 2014, the spokesman for the Islamic State put out a call for the group’s followers to attack Westerners by any means possible, and to do so without awaiting further instructions from the group’s leaders. “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him,” the spokesman, Abu Muhammad said during a recorded statement. At the same time, governments also see a benefit in linking the Islamic State to what are sometimes random and unconnected acts of violence. It is a way to project order amid chaos, and to try to assure jittery citizens that there is a strategy to end the violence. For example, in the days since the Nice attack, French officials have pledged to increase the resources that the country is devoting to the bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. “Even if Daesh doesn’t do the organizing, Daesh inspires this terrorist spirit against which we are fighting,” the French defense minister, Le Drian, said Saturday, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL. Similarly, American officials have cited progress in the military campaign as a measure of success in draining the Islamic State’s power, resources and influence. Brett H. McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State, recently told Congress that the group had lost 47 percent of its territory in Iraq and 20 percent in Syria: territory used to extract oil from the ground and taxes from residents, as well as to plot attacks against the West. Top representatives of nations participating in the bombing campaign will meet this week in Washington to assess the progress in the fight. But terrorism experts caution that because the Islamic State seems to have broad appeal to the mentally unbalanced, the displaced and others on the fringes of society, there are limits to how much any military campaign in Syria and Iraq can reduce violence carried out in other countries on the group’s behalf. William McCants, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The ISIS Apocalypse,” said there was a large cadre of “men and women who have no organizational ties to ISIS but murder in its name. ” These irreligious criminals and social misfits, whom he described as “” are “rebels looking for a cause,” he said. During congressional testimony last week, Nicholas J. Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, gave a sober assessment of the broad campaign against the Islamic State. “It is our judgment that ISIL’s ability to carry out terrorist attacks in Syria, Iraq and abroad has not to date been significantly diminished,” he said. “Either lone actors or small, insular groups continue to gravitate toward simple tactics that do not require advance skills or outside training,” he said. The murderous rampage by Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a Tunisian living in France, is the embodiment of this phenomenon. The authorities in France are still trying to piece together what direct ties, if any, Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had to the Islamic State. On Saturday, the Islamic State’s Bayan radio station said Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had used “a new tactic” to wreak havoc. “The crusader countries know that no matter how much they enforce their security measures and procedures, it will not stop the mujahedeen from striking,” the station said. Such ominous warnings about indiscriminate violence create formidable challenges for world leaders, who must strike a balance of raising awareness about the terrorist threat without gratuitously stoking fears. “As for how governments can calm their citizens, I’m at a loss,” Mr. McCants said. “Every attack is discussed endlessly on television and social media, which heightens fear of future attacks, makes citizens scared of one another” and puts pressure on governments to look tough, he said. And, he added, it “gives politicians a cudgel to club their governing opponents when they don’t react strongly enough. ” | 0fake |
LEFTISTS USE TRUMP To Teach Kids How To Use Violence Against Someone You Disagree With: “I Want To Kill Him” [VIDEO] | Just when you thought only Muslim terrorists teach their kids to use violence against anyone who doesn t agree with them Along comes the hateful American Left. What these poor misguided parents have clearly missed is how many Latino s don t support amnesty for people who ve illegally crossed our borders It seems like plenty of people have wanted to take a bat to Donald Trump s head this year, and last night in Oregon, some kids finally had the chance with a pi ata shaped like the Republican presidential candidate.At the grand opening for El Diablito, a food cart in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, a group of predominately of children and Latinos took turns hitting a candy-filled Trump pi ata with a baseball bat.The group had some choice words as they took swings at the life-size presidential candidate figure, which had Trump posing with his mouth open and his middle fingers raised. I want to kill him, one child said as he watched someone hit the pi ata.One woman eagerly smashed the pi ata as she hit it several times. Because f*** Trump, she said when asked why she wanted a turn. I m sorry I know there are kids here, but he really sucks that hard. Another man took several swings at the pi ata as he spoke about why he didn t believe that Trump should be elected. You re bringing hate and we don t want you as a president, the man said as he hit the figure.The owner of El Diablito said, however, that the Donald Trump pi ata had nothing to do with politics, and was instead a way of bringing people to his food truck s grad opening. It has nothing to do about politics, actually, he said. It s about having a good time. I figured that would be the best character for everybody to be excited to take a hit at, he added. It s all about popularity and he s at the top of it right now A video of the event concludes with a little girl smashing the body off of the pi ata and a man holding the Trump figure s head by the hair as its body likes broken on the ground.Via: UK Daily Mail | 1real |
Brexit negotiations not ready for next stage yet, EU's Tusk says | LONDON (Reuters) - Sufficient progress has not yet been made in Brexit talks to allow negotiations to move to the next phase of discussing the future relationship including trade, European Council President Donald Tusk said on Tuesday. After a meeting in Downing Street with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Tusk said he welcomed a new constructive and realistic tone from the government, adding that this shows that the philosophy of having a cake and eating it is finally coming at an end - at least I hope so. He added: We will discuss our future relations with the UK once there is so-called sufficient progress. The sides are working and we work hard at it. But if you ask me... I would say there s no sufficient progress yet, but we will work on it. Britain wants to move divorce talks on from settling budget commitments with the bloc and issues such as the future status of EU citizens living in the UK to discussions about future trade relations. May, who hoped to give the negotiations a shot in the arm with a speech in Florence last week, earlier told Tusk that Britain and EU could make Brexit a success if the two sides were creative. By being creative in the ways we approach these issues, we can find solutions that work both for the remaining (EU) 27 but also for the UK and maintain that cooperation and partnership between the UK and the EU, May said. | 0fake |
U.S., Japan agree China should play larger role on North Korea | TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed on Tuesday that the two countries need to persuade China to play a larger role in dealing with North Korea, a Japanese government spokesman said. The two confirmed during a working lunch that China’s role was important in dealing with North Korea, and they needed to work on China to take on a bigger role, Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda told reporters. North Korea has conducted a series of ballistic missile launches in recent months in defiance of U.N. sanctions and concerns have been growing that the reclusive state could soon conduct a sixth nuclear test. With a U.S. aircraft carrier group steaming to the area in a show of force, fears of a confrontation have been rising. | 0fake |
Conservative Christian Leader Admits Liberals Were Right About Evangelicals All Along | For years, liberals have maintained that evangelicals have only been using religion as a means to achieve absolute power, and now one of their leaders has confirmed it.On Monday, Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention president Russell Moore wrote a column for the Washington Post blasting evangelical Christians for proving liberals right.Donald Trump, despite his more than fleeting flirtation with fascism and his campaign of hate and intolerance, has gained massive support from evangelical Christians who are willing to overlook the Republican front-runner s lack of Christian morals as long it means they get a president who will give them more power. The problem is the behavior of some evangelical leaders, Moore wrote. I have watched as some of these who gave stem-winding speeches about character in office during the Clinton administration now minimize the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice through the casino and pornography industries. Moore wasn t finished though. He also slammed evangelicals, a term he is too embarrassed to use to describe himself any longer, because they are flocking to candidates who pretend to be Christians. I watched one evangelical leader pronounce a candidate a Christian, though he explicitly states that he has never repented of sin, because he displays the fruit of the Spirit in job creation. That s not a political problem; it s a gospel problem.Why are many evangelical leaders, including some who pontificate on nearly everything else, scared silent as evangelicalism is associated with everything from authoritarianism and bigotry to violations of religious freedom? How can they look the other way in silence when politicians praise Planned Parenthood and demur about white supremacists and neo-Nazis? And then he admitted that liberals have been right about evangelicals for years and they have been vindicated by evangelicals who have flocked to Trump s campaign. For years, secular progressives have said that evangelical social action in America is not about religious conviction but all about power. They have implied that the goal of the Religious Right is to cynically use the moral to get to the majority, not the other way around.This year, a group of high-profile old-guard evangelicals has proven these critics right. Indeed, evangelical Christians have only sought power and they ve had no problem rewriting or flat-out ignoring parts of the Bible that do not fit with their agenda in order to achieve it.It s been all about money and power, and evangelical leaders have fleeced their congregations so they can keep trying to topple the government and establish religious tyranny. But evangelicals have grown more and more desperate over the years as Americans continually reject them and their radical agenda that would confine women to the home and sentence gay people to death as well as declare America a Christian state governed by the Bible instead of the constitutional principles we hold dear.And Donald Trump may not be an evangelical Christian, but evangelicals are increasingly supporting his campaign because he is saying exactly what they want to hear and they see him as their last chance to take power. It s never been about the gospel or morality to evangelicals. It has always been about gaining power and using it to persecute and indoctrinate those they disagree with. And by supporting Trump, evangelicals are telling the world that they are precisely the fake Christians that liberals have been fighting against for decades.Featured image via screen capture | 1real |
Trump acknowledges thanks from UCLA players released from China | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday acknowledged the thanks he received from three UCLA basketball players who had been detained in China for shoplifting and were released after he raised the case with his Chinese counterpart. The players - LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill - have admitted to stealing items from three stores during a team trip to China. Before they thanked Trump on Wednesday for intervening with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Republican president had wondered whether they would express gratitude. “To the three UCLA basketball players I say: You’re welcome, go out and give a big Thank You to President Xi Jinping of China who made your release possible and, HAVE A GREAT LIFE!” Trump said in a tweet. “Be careful, there are many pitfalls on the long and winding road of life!” After the players returned from China on Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “Do you think the three UCLA Basketball Players will say thank you President Trump? They were headed for 10 years in jail!” The trio, all freshmen, have been suspended indefinitely from the University of California, Los Angeles, basketball team. They had faced charges after police took them in for questioning in the Chinese city of Hangzhou on Nov. 7 over allegations of shoplifting at a Louis Vuitton store. Their team had been in China for a game against Georgia Tech in Shanghai on Saturday, which UCLA won 63-60. The teams had traveled to Hangzhou earlier in the week. | 0fake |
PHOTO: Game Camera Catches Glimpse Of Possible 3-Antlered Buck | Hillary Camp Caught on Camera Telling Tiny Crowd What to Cheer for
The archer’s opportunity finally arrived on Oct. 8, when he went out to the field to hunt for prey .
“When the deer came out, there were about 10 deer in the field,” he said. “I was sitting there and a 4-point came out and walked right underneath me and went in the bean field. About a minute later, (the 12-point buck) came out and walked right underneath my stand.
Without a moment to lose, Stubblefield fired a shot.
“He ran about 80 yards and just dropped,” Stubblefield said. “It was so dry, when he took off it looked like a smoke trail. He ran right out in the bean field and crashed. It looked like a bomb went off it was so dusty.”
R.I.P. to the unnamed buck, though clearly he will not be forgotten anytime soon.
Please share this story on Facebook and Twitter and let us know what you think about these odd but amazing bucks. What do you think about this? Scroll down to comment below! Advertisement Popular Right Now | 1real |
Bombshell Reveals Nazi Connection To the Koch Brothers | The infamous conservative Republican financiers Charles and David Koch had a family connection to the Nazis, a new book reveals.Jane Mayer, the New Yorker journalist who was among the first mainstream writers to document the Kochs multi-million dollar campaign to effectively take over the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement, uncovers the connection in her new book, Dark Money.The book, Dark Money, by Jane Mayer, traces the rise of the modern conservative movement through the activism and money of a handful of rich donors: among them Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, and Harry and Lynde Bradley, brothers who became wealthy in part from military contracts but poured millions into anti-government philanthropy.But the book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of their father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler s war machine.The Kochs, who are among two of the wealthiest individuals in America, stand atop an industrial giant Koch Industries that has previously been fined for being one of the worst polluters in America. The brothers use their fortune to finance a political machine that often pursues goals that would enrich the brothers by pursuing a hardline right wing agenda that favors big business and opposes government oversight and regulation.The brothers bankroll a network of groups that often hide their spending on political goals under tax laws. That is the dark money that Mayer s book title refers to. The Kochs run groups like Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners, the Center to Protect Patients Rights and then they are also able to flow money towards groups like the NRA, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Club for Growth.What those groups all have in common is their opposition to progressive ideals and their targeting of progressive and Democratic politicians.These groups also work at the state level to prop up governors and state legislators. One particularly potent success the Kochs had was helping Wisconsin s Scott Walker in his campaign to restrict union rights in his state. And the Kochs have cells working towards similar results in all 50 states.After spending about $400 million on the 2012 election, unsuccessfully trying to dislodge President Obama, the brothers announced plans to spend at least $900 million pushing for conservatives in 2016.Featured image via Flickr | 1real |
GOP Voters Declare #NeverTrump & #RepublicansForHillary As Donald Is Named The Nominee (TWEETS) | On Tuesday night, Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican race for the White House and Donald Trump was named the presumptive nominee by the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. However, while the RNC may be ready to embrace Trump as their chosen one GOP voters are not and they took to Twitter to express their disgust.Fox News contributor Stephen Hayes said Trump isn t going to happen for him:Under no circumstances.https://t.co/6yS3fxGsMT Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) May 3, 2016Conservative Ben Howe, an editor for RedState went as far as to say he s voting for Hillary: #ImWithHer Ben Howe (@BenHowe) May 3, 2016I am no longer a Republican. Ben Howe (@BenHowe) May 4, 2016Managing Editor at the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein declared that he is no longer a Republican: I have officially de-registered as a Republican. pic.twitter.com/DjRI21Oyvx Philip Klein (@philipaklein) May 4, 2016Another Fox News contributor, Guy Benson, said he isn t going to support Trump either:Much to my deep chagrin (& astonishment ~8 months ago), for the 1st time in my life, I will not support the GOP nominee for president. Guy Benson (@guypbenson) May 3, 2016Conservative radio host and founder of RedState Erick Erickson is echoing the sentiments of other Republicans, saying, If Trump is the Republican Party nominee, I won t be a Republican. :This is going to be a huge problem for the Republican Party in November. These people are not just random GOP voters who don t like Donald Trump, they are very prominent, high profile voices of the party and they are so disgusted with the nominee that they are LEAVING the party. But regular GOP voters are leaving too.I will not be a member of a party that supports sexism, racism, and hatred. My party left me, so I m leaving it. #NeverTrump #GoodbyeGOPA photo posted by Cassy Chesser (@casachesser) on May 4, 2016 at 8:31am PDT#votehillary #disgruntledrepublican #republicansforhillary ? ? #drudgereportA photo posted by Shauna Varvel (@varvels) on May 3, 2016 at 6:11pm PDTI said #NeverTrump folks were #RepublicansForHillary back in March, as a joke. Now some of them are really doing it. pic.twitter.com/iyPSJcRlXA Audit The Media (@AuditTheMedia) May 4, 2016 Still and always #NeverTrump. That means tonight sees the birth of #RepublicansForHillary Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) May 4, 2016That means not only is the RNC going to have to try to figure out how to woo minority voters, women voters and Independent voters, they are going to have to try to woo their OWN voters and minimize the damage their anti-Trump pundits are doing.If the GOP thought they were stomped in 2012 when they picked Mr. Binders Full of Women as their nominee, they have no clue how painful November is going to be. Grab your popcorn, Democrats. It s about to be quite a show.Featured image via Instagram | 1real |
Attorney General Jeff Sessions to face House judiciary panel November 14 | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will testify before the House Judiciary Committee about issues facing the Justice Department on Nov. 14, the committee confirmed on Tuesday. The hearing will take place at 10 a.m. (1500 GMT), it said in a statement. Reuters reported on Monday that the committee would hold a hearing with Sessions next week. It will offer Democrats their first opportunity to question him about his past statements regarding contacts between President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russian intermediaries. In a letter to Sessions on Tuesday, all 17 Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee told the attorney general they would question him about his past denials of communications between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Court filings made by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s role in the election, indicate that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos made Sessions aware of his contacts with Russian representatives. “When you appear before our Committee, we intend to ask you about these inconsistencies. We are providing you with notice in advance because we expect you to respond,” ranking committee Democrat Rep. John Conyers and his colleagues wrote Sessions. Separately, although some congressional aides had expected Sessions to also appear in a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 14, a Justice Department spokesman said there are no plans for him to do so. | 0fake |
China’s Internet Controls Will Get Stricter, to Dismay of Foreign Business - The New York Times | HONG KONG — In August, business groups around the world petitioned China to rethink a proposed cybersecurity law that they said would hurt foreign companies and further separate the country from the internet. On Monday, China passed that law — a sign that when it comes to the internet, China will go its own way. The new rules, which were approved by the country’s Parliament and will go into effect next summer, are part of a broader effort to better define how the internet is managed inside China’s borders. Officials say the rules will help stop cyberattacks and help prevent acts of terrorism, while critics say they will further erode internet freedom. Business groups worry that parts of the law — such as required security checks on companies in industries like finance and communications, and mandatory data storage — will make foreign operations more expensive or lock them out altogether. Individual users will have to register their real names to use messaging services in China. Restrictions on the flow of data across borders “provide no security benefits but will create barriers to Chinese as well as foreign companies operating in industries where data needs to be shared internationally,” James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, wrote in an emailed statement. He added that by creating such restrictions, China risked isolating itself technologically from the rest of the world. But in many ways, the regulations are not likely to have a major impact on much about how business is done. Most of the rules are already in effect, but not codified. Other parts are vague enough that the government will determine their meaning on the fly. The law, however, is an important statement from Beijing on how the internet should be run: with tighter controls over companies and better tracking of individual citizens. Calling it a “basic law,” Chen Jihong, a partner at the Zhong Lun law firm in Beijing, said the rules were set up to deal with the growing number of legal issues regarding the Chinese internet and to seek to strike a balance between privacy and security. “The law only stipulates principles it would take laws or interpretations to specify the standards,” he said. Human Rights Watch said on Monday that it was concerned about several aspects of the law, including that it calls for registration for users of Chinese instant messaging services. “The already heavily censored internet in China needs more freedom, not less,” the group’s China director, Sophie Richardson, wrote in a statement. “Despite widespread international concern from corporations and rights advocates for more than a year, Chinese authorities pressed ahead with this restrictive law without making meaningful changes. ” The final law did soften a few elements. In particular, a second draft of the law said foreign businesses did not need to keep all of their data inside China — just important business data collected within China or about Chinese consumers. For years the government has been working to ensure that people’s real names are linked to their online activities. Beijing has also long restricted many types of online content, from pornography to political discussion. Foreign companies have at times dealt with the controls detailed in the new law. For example, during the past two years, American tech companies have had products subjected to government security reviews that target encryption and data storage. Beijing also distributed a pledge to American companies last year asking them to vow to respect Chinese national security and to store data within the country. The law is also part of a broader set of policy steps to streamline regulation of the internet. Analysts say the regulations seem to indicate that the Cyberspace Administration of China, a relatively new regulatory body created during President Xi Jinping’s tenure, ultimately is in charge of setting the agenda. Last year China passed a national security law that called for technology that supports crucial sectors of the economy and government to be “secure and controllable. ” Industry groups say that language means companies can be forced to allow access to their networks, provide encryption keys or hand over source code. After the state news media announced the law’s passage, comments on Chinese news and social media sites were largely censored. On one news app run by the internet company Tencent, some users applauded the law as a way for China to crack down on internet fraudsters and the less savory parts of the web. Others wondered what the cost of that security would be. “I hope this won’t be a law that does more to limit freedom of speech,” wrote one user under the screen name Leisa Wenzhou. | 0fake |
SICK: KKK Holding Trump Victory Parade | The racist Ku Klux Klan is very pleased that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States in the 2016 election and one chapter of the terrorist group is holding a parade to celebrate his victory.The website for Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan located in North Carolina announced that they will hold a klavalkade Klan parade on December 3rd in order to hail the occasion of the Republican nominee winning.They write:Our goal is to help restore America to a White Christian nation, founded on God s word. This does not mean that we want to see anything bad happen to the darker races we simply want to live separate from them As GOD intended. (Lev.20:24-25) It is a simple fact that whenever these races try to integrate themselves into White society, that society is damaged immensely perhaps even destroyed altogether. Everything that we do as Klan members is in furtherance of our ultimate goal. We are not evil; hateful people as our enemies would have you believe. We are common white people from all walks of life who have recognized the problems that our race is facing. We have chose to stand and fight for those things that we hold dear to our people. Won t you stand with us, while there is still time! It is the duty of all white Christian men and women to fight against the Communist who have stolen our Nation The Trump campaign spent a lot of time courting and promoting white supremacists. They invited white supremacists radio shows to broadcast from campaign stops and on the floor of the Republican Convention, while members of the Trump family also appeared on those programs. Trump himself has promoted tweets from white supremacists, and received an endorsement from former klansman and Republican candidate David Duke.Featured image via screen capture | 1real |
“DIRTY JOBS” HOST MIKE ROWE Absolutely Destroys Guy Who Called Him A White Nationalist | Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe went off on a guy who claimed Rowe is a white nationalist . The usual happy-go-lucky Rowe was clearly ticked when he wrote back to Chuck Adkins.Chuck Adkins asked Rowe: One of the tenants of white nationalism is that college educated people are academic elitists. Comment? No? I m not surprised. You never take a political stand because you don t want to alienate anybody. Its bad for business. I get it. But there is a current of anti intellectualism in this country promoted by Republicans. Those people love you, and they think your initiative is their initiative. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is kickin our ass academically. Rowe responded with a blistering rebuke of Adkins and the liberal media: Since we re being candid, allow me to say how much I dislike your post. Everything about it annoys me your smug and snarky tone, your appalling grammar, your complete lack of evidence to support your claims, and of course, the overarching logical fallacy that informs your entire position, Rowe wrote. What really bugs me though, is the fact that you re not entirely wrong. It s true; I haven t shared any political opinions this week, in part anyway, because doing so might very well be bad for business. What can I say? I work for half-a-dozen different companies, none of whom pay me to share my political opinions. I run a non-partisan foundation, I m about to launch a new show on Facebook, and I m very aware that celebrities pay a price for opening their big fat gobs. Gilbert Gottfried, Kathy Griffin, Colin Kaepernick, Milo Yiannopoulos even that guy from Google who just got himself fired for mouthing off. There s no getting around it the first amendment does not guarantee the freedom to speak without consequences. And really, that s fine by me, he continued. So no I m not going to share my personal feelings about Charlottesville, President Trump, or the current effort to remove thousands of statues of long dead soldiers from the public square. Not just because it s bad for business, but because it s annoying. I can t think of a single celebrity whose political opinion I value, and I m not going to assume the country feels any differently about mine, Rowe wrote. So, rather than blow myself up, or chime in with all the obvious observations about the cowardly scum in the pointy hats, I m going to talk instead about my belief that comments like yours pose a far greater threat to the future of our country than the existence of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson, or a monument to George Washington. Ready? Then Rowe started in on Adkins insinuations. You say that White Nationalists believe that everyone who goes to college is an academic elite. You then say that Republicans promote anti-intellectualism. You offer no proof to support either claim, but it really doesn t matter your statements successfully connect two radically different organizations by alleging a shared belief, Rowe said. Thus, White Nationalists and The Republican Party suddenly have something in common a contempt for higher education. Then, you make it personal. You say that Republicans love me because they believe that my initiative and their initiative are one and the same. But of course, their initiative is now the same initiative as White Nationalists. He continued Very clever. Without offering a shred of evidence, you ve implied that Republicans who support mikeroweWORKS do so because they believe I share their disdain for all things intellectual. And poof just like that, Republicans, White Nationalists, and mikeroweWORKS are suddenly conflated, and the next thing you know, I m off on a press tour to disavow rumors of my troubling association with the Nazis! Far-fetched? Far from it, Rowe continued. That s how logical fallacies work. A flaw in reasoning or a mistaken belief undermines the logic of a conclusion, often leading to real-world consequences. And right now, logical fallacies are not limited to the warped beliefs of morons with tiki torches, and other morons calling for more dead cops. Logical fallacies are everywhere. Not near done, Rowe wrote, As I type this, a Democrat on CNN is making an argument that says, because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, those Republicans now opposed to tearing down his memorial are pro-slavery, and therefore aligned with the modern day KKK. That s a logical fallacy. Over on Fox, a Republican is arguing that any Democrat who has not yet condemned the Senator from Missouri for publicly wishing that Donald Trump be assassinated, is guilty of wishing for the exact same thing. That s a logical fallacy. Yesterday, on The Science Channel, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a noted astronomer, tweeted that the ability of scientists to accurately predict the solar eclipse, was proof that predictions of global warming were also accurate. That s a logical fallacy. Then Rowe turned the tables on his accuser, continuing, Want to hear another one? Imagine something like this, unfolding over on MSNBC. Good Evening, America, our top story tonight Chuck Atkins is a racist! Why? Because he can t spell. Just look at his grammar! In a recent post on Mike Rowe s Facebook page, Mr. Atkins, while bemoaning America s global academic standing, not only misspelled elitist, he used tenants when he meant tenets. He neglected to use a hyphen in anti-intellectual, and he misplaced several commas and apostrophes! But why is he a racist, you ask? Simple. Because everyone knows racists are ignorant. Chuck Atkins is clearly a poor speller. Poor spelling and grammar are signs of ignorance. Ergo Chuck Atkins is a racist! Boom! The matter is settled! There s not much we can do about the news, but here on Facebook, I think we can do better. This isn t Twitter, Rowe said. We re not limited to a few inflammatory sentences and a flurry of emojis. Take a moment, Chuck. Think. Make a rational argument. Otherwise, just link us to a cat video. People love those, and they re almost never bad for business. (Unless of course, the cat gets hurt. People hate that.) Just don t assume that people will care about your beliefs, if you re not willing to back them up with some relevant facts and a rational conclusion. Here, for instance, are a few facts that matter to me, with respect to my foundation and the recurring charge of fostering anti-intellectualism. Rowe then defended his charitable work, writing, mikeroweWORKS is a PR campaign for the skilled trades. For the last nine years, we ve partnered with numerous trade schools, raised millions of dollars for work-ethic scholarships, and called attention to millions of jobs that don t require a four-year degree. But that doesn t mean we re anti-intellectual. We re not even anti-college. We simply reject the popular notion that a four-year degree is the best path for the most people. And we re hardly alone. Millions of reasonable people Republicans and Democrats alike are worried that our universities are doing a poor job of preparing students for the real world. They re worried about activist professors, safe spaces, the rising cost of tuition, a growing contempt for history, and a simmering disregard of the first amendment. These people are concerned that our universities once beacons of free speech now pander to a relatively small percentage of students who can t tolerate any political opinion that challenges their own. And they re concerned deeply concerned that millions of good jobs are currently vacant that don t require a four-year degree, or any of the catastrophic debt that comes with it. Returning to the original attack, Rowe concluded, Again these are not the concerns of anti-intellectuals. They are the concerns of people who care about the future of the country. I don t know how many of these people are Republicans, but I can assure you that no one who actually supports my initiative is remotely confused about my feelings on education, because I ve been crystal clear on that topic from the very beginning. To quote Thomas Jefferson, (while I still can,) If a nation expects to be ignorant and free and live in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. On this point, my foundation does not equivocate. In other words, Chuck, I have no idea what The White Nationalists think about my efforts, or the Republicans, the Democrats, the elitists, the Italians, the Presbyterians, the unions, or the self-proclaimed anti-intellectuals. And really, I couldn t care less. My question is, why do you? Mike PS. Ok, I ve just re-read this, (in a desperate search for typos,) and I want to apologize for pointing out that you re a lousy speller. This is probably not the time to trot out The Grammar Nazi, but your tenor and tone pissed me off, and I responded in my own snarky way. Sorry, he wrote. PPS Maybe this is how political correctness begins? Maybe we start by correcting each other s grammar, and then move on to the business of correcting everything else? Today a missing hyphen, tomorrow a missing monument. Or, maybe not, he concluded. | 1real |
BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD blows whistle on new Hillary emails: Money Laundering, Pay to Play, Perjury, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation | BNI Store Nov 2 2016 BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD blows whistle on new Hillary emails: Money Laundering, Pay to Play, Perjury, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation New York Police Department (NYPD) detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life,” NYPD sources said. TruePundit NYPD sources said Clinton’s “crew” also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders. The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday. But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: Money laundering Sex crimes with minors (children) Perjury Pay to play through Clinton Foundation Obstruction of justice Other felony crimes NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.” The NYPD Chief said once Comey saw the alarming contents of the emails he was forced to reopen a criminal probe against Clinton. “People are going to prison,” he said. Meanwhile, FBI sources said Abedin and Weiner were cooperating with federal agents, who have taken over the non-sexting portions the case from NYPD. The husband-and-wife Clinton insiders are both shopping for separate immunity deals, sources said. “If they don’t cooperate they are going to see long sentences,” a federal law enforcement source said. The new emails contain travel documents and itineraries indicating Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, Weiner and multiple members of Congress and other government officials accompanied convicted pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein on his Boeing 727 on multiple occasions to his private island in the U.S Virgin Islands, sources said. Epstein’s island has also been dubbed Orgy Island or Sex Slave Island where Epstein allegedly pimps out underage girls and boys to international dignitaries. Both NYPD and FBI sources confirm based on the new emails they now believe Hillary Clinton traveled as Epstein’s guest on at least six occasions, probably more when all the evidence is combed, sources said. Bill Clinton, it has been confirmed in media reports spanning recent years, that he too traveled with Epstein over 20 times to the island. READ MORE (Apparently the link has been scrubbed from the internet already. Don’t know if that means it’s something they don’t want to get out?) | 1real |
Brazil top prosecutor requests billionaire Batista's arrest -source | BRASILIA/SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil s top prosecutor asked the country s Supreme Court late on Friday to approve the arrest of billionaire Joesley Batista, one of the owners of the world s largest meatpacker JBS SA, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Brazil s Prosecutor-General Rodrigo Janot had told a news conference on Monday that he was considering revoking a plea bargain deal struck by Batista and a fellow state s witness after they appeared to have inadvertently recorded themselves discussing crimes not covered in the deal. The source, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said that Janot had requested the arrest of Batista and Ricardo Saud, a former executive at the Batista family holding company J&F Investimentos, based on the four-hour recording. Janot s office did not respond to calls and email requests for comment. Joesley Batista and his brother Wesley confessed to bribing scores of politicians in plea bargain testimony that allowed them to avoid prosecution. Amongst the evidence they provided to prosecutors was a recording of President Michel Temer apparently endorsing hush payments to a possible witness in a graft probe. The source said that Janot had revoked the benefits granted under the plea bargain deal to Joesley and Ricardo Saud, a former executive of holding company J&F Investimentos, through which the Batista family controls JBS. He also asked Supreme Court Justice Edson Facchin to authorize the arrest of a former prosecutor, Marcelo Miller, the source said. The taped conversation, which was made public by the Supreme Court this week, was inadvertently submitted to prosecutors with unrelated material last week. In it, Batista and Saud say Miller helped the Batista brothers strike their plea bargain before leaving the Prosecutors Office in April to work in a private law firm. In a statement this week, J&F said Batista and Saud were simply discussing hypotheses in the conversation, not facts. Batista s lawyer, Pierpaolo Bottini, filed a request on Saturday for the Supreme Court to hear defense arguments before authorizing the arrest of his client and Saud. The lawyer also said Batista and Ricardo Saud are willing to surrender their passports. A lawyer for Miller, Andr Perecmanis, said on Saturday his client did not help the Batistas in their plea deal while working as a prosecutor. Another source with knowledge of the matter said the leniency agreement of J&F Investimentos SA, which the company signed in May agreeing to pay a record leniency fine of 10.3 billion reais ($3.3 billion) for its role in the political bribery scheme, had been validated on Friday by a federal court. The source, asking for anonymity to discuss the matter freely, said that if a plea bargain by J&F Investimentos is canceled, the leniency agreement may also lose effect. A string of asset sales depend on the validity of the leniency agreement. In three months, the holding company has signed agreements to sell Havaianas flip-flops maker Alpargatas SA ALPA4.SA, dairy company Vigor Alimentos SA and pulpmaker Eldorado Brasil Celulose SA, but the sales may only be finalized if the leniency agreement is still valid. | 0fake |
In first visit, Trump urges reform so U.N. can meet full potential | UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the United Nations for bloated bureaucracy and mismanagement on his first visit on Monday to U.N. headquarters, calling for truly bold reforms so it could be a greater force for world peace. Ahead of his maiden speech to the annual U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump hosted a short event to boost support for changes to the United Nations. In recent years the United Nations has not reached its full potential because of bureaucracy and mismanagement, while the United Nations on a regular budget has increased by 140 percent and its staff has more than doubled since 2000, Trump said. The United Nations must hold every level of management accountable, protect whistleblowers and focus on results rather than on process, Trump said. I am confident that if we work together and champion truly bold reforms the United Nations will emerge as a stronger, more effective, more just and greater force for peace and harmony in the world, Trump said in his first remarks at the U.N. in New York since his inauguration as president in January. In a building where long statements are commonplace, Trump spoke for just four minutes. Some 128 countries were invited to attend Monday s reform meeting after signing on to a U.S.-drafted 10-point political declaration backing efforts by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to initiate effective, meaningful reform. U.N. Security Council veto powers Russia and China did not sign the declaration. Businessman Trump, who complained during his 2016 election campaign about the United States paying a disproportionate amount of money to the United Nations, made the point again on Monday. We must ensure that no one and no member state shoulders a disproportionate share of the burden and that s militarily or financially. The United States is the biggest U.N. contributor, providing 22 percent of its $5.4 billion biennial core budget and 28.5 percent of its $7.3 billion peacekeeping budget. The contributions are agreed on by the 193-member General Assembly. Guterres, who also took office in January, told the meeting: To serve the people we support and the people who support us, we must be nimble and effective, flexible and efficient. He agreed that U.N bureaucracy was a problem that kept him up at night. Our shared objective is a 21st century U.N. focused more on people and less on process, Guterres said. Value for money while advancing shared values that is our common goal. Trump also said that all peacekeeping missions should have clearly defined goals and metrics for evaluating success. The United States is reviewing each of the U.N. peacekeeping missions as annual mandates come up for Security Council renewal in a bid to cut costs. The United States is a veto-wielding council member, along with Britain, France, Russia and China. On Sunday night, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. When asked if the U.N. refugee agency could perform its current missions if the United States cut its voluntary contributions to the budget, according to a pool report Grandi answered: I would say no. U.S. aid is vital to what we do to support refugees around the world and to find solutions to their situations, Grandi said. | 0fake |
Año 1975: Fallece Francisco Franco con 82 años de retraso | Año 63: Cupido logra que le validen la aptitud “arquero” en Linkedin EFEMÉRIDES DE LA SEMANA | 1real |
MUST WATCH: Barack Obama After January 20th…This Will Make Your Day! | January 20th can't come soon enough. We need this anti-American, terrorist sympathizer out of our White House. #WorstPresidentEver pic.twitter.com/D20c8phH18 Steve Hirsch (@Stevenwhirsch99) December 21, 2016 | 1real |
UnReal Report: PM Modi trolls one and all with his surgical strike on black money | Tweet
It seems to be PM Modi’s signature style. He will often stay silent for a prolonged period of time, absorbing criticism, ridicule and even abuse from opponents and sympathisers, and then suddenly, seemingly like a bolt from the blue, he will do something that trolls the pants off his critics. Yesterday was one such day when PM Modi once again proved to media houses that his is the prime time show with the highest TRPs when he announced via an address to the nation that his government is abolishing Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes, effective midnight. Some initial reactions to Modi’s decision to abolish Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes pic.twitter.com/YwBN3e5rCJ
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
Even as black money hoarders writhed and squirmed, PM Modi rubbed it in with his version of English. As if his decision wasn’t enough, PM Modi purposely dragged out his English address to add insult to injury to black money holders #Legend
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
For a while after the address, there were no reactions from PM Modi’s political opponents, mostly because many of them were scrambling to get rid of their cash by midnight. The means they adopted followed from their respective intellectual abilities. Some did this… JUST IN: Suresh Kalmadi spotted trying to buy 100 kilos of onion using 500 rupee notes
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
…while others decided to take advantage of the fact that government hospitals will continue to accept 500/1000 rupee notes for another three days One way for black money holders to spend some of their money is to get a heart attack and get treated in a govt hospital in the next 3 days
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
We thought we’d give people an option, but it remains to be seen how many fell for it… Attention folks. We are ready to accept 500 rupee notes from anyone who buys “Unreal Aliens” and posts snapshot :P https://t.co/gE186TXsd4
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
Some unfortunate souls, however, were short on options. The worst affected are media anchors who desperately want to go out & spend their 500 / 1000 notes but are forced to do debates on the move
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
While Arnab Goswami predictably raved about the move, veteran journalist Rajdeep Sardesai equally predictably was busy looking for a contrarian voice… Rajdeep Sardesai moving from panelist to panelist hoping to get someone to agree with his “..or is it a foolhardy move?”
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
…and eventually found one in Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha who inexplicably brought up Panama papers like he inexplicably brings up 2002 in every debate concerning Modi. Back on Times Now, Saba Naqvi tried to evoke pathos by talking about the poor housewife or domestic help who will be inconvenienced, only to be promptly trounced by the nation’s noise.
NDTV would normally have featured an interview with finance minister Arun Jaitley, and he was willing too, but… Arun Jaitley to NDTV: “Aa jaun kya interview ke liye?” NDTV: “Er, no Jaitley ji, we’re busy until midnight”
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
Meanwhile, down in Mumbai, residents heard a string of loud FMLs and curses from a posh residence near Mafatlal Park. When the man inside was done cursing, he picked up the phone to talk to PM Modi: How this surgical strike may help PM Modi fulfill another poll promise… pic.twitter.com/rWwrQIZt4f
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
At least for those in India this was just one blow. For some across the border, this was PM Modi’s second surgical strike. Somewhere in Pakistan… pic.twitter.com/vtUHaLVXML
— Karthik Laxman (@karthlax) November 8, 2016
While Modi was trolling others, a beggar decided to troll a specific politician…
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
When he was done trolling everyone in the real world, PM Modi trolled some in the unreal world too… Just got payment from BJP for unreal services rendered – a bag of Rs. 500 / 1000 rupee notes and a post-it saying “LOL”
— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016
When all the tamasha was done and dusted, a satisfied PM Modi caught up with BJP President Amit Shah to get a cup of tea. An awestruck Amit Shah who probably hadn’t been told about the move in advance either, asked PM Modi what his plans were… PM Modi’s next Surgical Strike pic.twitter.com/CDQ73jLTsE Tweet About UnReal Mama
Ek chatur naar badee hoshiyaar, apane hee jaal me phasat jaat ham hasat jaat are ho ho ho ho ho! | 1real |
The Daily 202: Trump really is in danger of losing Utah | SALT LAKE CITY—The revelations of recent days about Donald Trump’s lascivious and predatory attitudes toward women have hurt him in Utah perhaps more than any other state.
Julie de Azevedo Hanks, a psychotherapist with a blog that is widely read in the Mormon community, is an independent who voted for Mitt Romney four years ago. She planned to keep her preference for Hillary Clinton quiet until she saw the 2005 video of the Republican nominee boasting to Billy Bush about pursuing married women and using his celebrity to make unwanted advances.
“That tape put the final nail in the coffin,” Hanks said. “A year ago, I never would have thought I’d be voting for her. I know she’s not flawless. I don’t idolize her. I don’t have rose-colored glasses. … We may not get everything we value with Hillary, but she aligns more closely with what we do value than Trump.”
Hanks posted on her blog about how dangerous she thinks Trump would be as president. She said her husband, a rock-ribbed Republican, may just not vote at all now. Last night, she was one of nearly 70 volunteers who showed up to phone bank at Clinton’s Utah headquarters, on the outskirts of the capital of one of the country’s reddest states.
The parking lot overflowed. Volunteers – many who identify as independent or even Republican – parked down nearby residential streets and walked. They ate Little Caesar’s Pizza as they made the case on cell phones to their Utah neighbors to back a Democrat for president for the first time since 1964.
The Clinton team has a full-time staffer on the ground to organize the phone banks and canvassing. They’ve even launched a Mormons for Hillary effort.
The influential Deseret News, which is owned by the Mormon Church, has stayed out of presidential politics for 80 years. But the editorial board urged all of its readers over the weekend not to vote for Trump. (For context, more than six in 10 voters in next month’s election will be members of the flock.)
“What oozes from this audio is evil,” the editorial said. “Trump’s banter belies a willingness to use and discard other human beings at will. That characteristic is the essence of a despot.”
Republican Gov. Gary Herbert and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, both Mormons, withdrew their support last Friday just hours after The Post published the video. Sen. Mike Lee, who is up for reelection, also called for the reality TV star to drop out, prompting an avalanche of colleagues to follow.
A former Miss Teen Utah is one of the women who has come forward to accuse Trump of boorish behavior in the days since. (Trump denies any wrongdoing.)
-- Romney, who is Mormon, got 73 percent of the vote here four years ago. Trump got just 34 percent of the vote in a Monmouth University poll published yesterday. He leads Clinton by only 6 points (she pulled 28 percent). Another 20 percent back independent Evan McMullin, who joined the race at the urging of Never Trump conservatives, and 9 percent support Libertarian Gary Johnson. The survey was in the field after the emergence of the 2005 tape but before numerous additional women came forward to accuse Trump of misconduct.
Just 19 percent of likely voters view Trump favorably. Seven in 10 do not believe he has the temperament to be president. Six in 10 Republicans and three in four Mormons say he does not share their values.
-- I interviewed more than 30 voters on the ground over the past two days, and it feels like he has not yet hit bottom.
-- The alternatives to Trump are racing to capitalize on his collapse in the Beehive State. Both McMullin and Johnson are running their national campaigns out of Salt Lake City, trying to become the first non-major-party candidate since 1968 to win any state’s electoral votes.
McMullin, who is focusing more on Utah than any other state, is a 40-year-old Mormon who spent a decade at the CIA and later became the policy director for the House Republican Conference. “People are finally realizing the truth about Trump,” he said during an interview at his campaign headquarters yesterday afternoon. “I imagine there are dozens more of these women out there, sadly.”
The first-time candidate presents himself as the antithesis of Trump. He talked about “the positives of immigration.” He said he really wants to win over Muslims. He decried stop-and-frisk policing as “based on racism.” And he heavily criticized both major-party nominees.
“Both of these candidates, under other circumstances, might find themselves in jail,” McMullin said, taking a sip of a Diet Coke. “Either Donald Trump for sexual assault or Hillary Clinton for violating our laws on protecting classified information. So the debate is about who has abused women more and who is more corrupt. It is horrible that we find ourselves in this position.”
McMullin last week tapped Mindy Finn, a D.C.-based digital media strategist, to be his running mate. “We hear from a lot of our supporters that we are an answer to their prayers,” she said. “They can walk out of the polling booth with their head held high. … The Republican Party has lost its way. It’s eating itself alive by normalizing the behavior of Trump. … What exists here is a lifeboat.”
-- Utah was always a bad fit for Trump. Most Mormons spend two years overseas as missionaries, which gives them a more internationalist outlook. Because the early church faced so much persecution, Trump’s support for religious tests cause visceral disgust. The state welcomes refugees with open arms. In contrast to the Rust Belt, there are vastly more opportunities for upward mobility and the unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the country.
Boyd Matheson, who runs a local conservative think tank called the Sutherland Institute, believes McMullin can win. “Utahns are not an angry people,” he said. “The hunker-down protectionism that Trump is offering just doesn’t ring true here. … For a lot of people who were never excited about Trump, the video locked it in.”
-- But McMullin’s immediate problem is that two-thirds of Utahns have still not heard of him. “We want to prevail in Utah, but we have a lot of work to do,” he said at a sparsely-decorated campaign office that is next door to a Thai restaurant and across from a credit union. Without much fundraising, he’s focusing on free media coverage and digital efforts. He said there has been a 1,600 percent increase in online engagement over the past four days. “We saw a marked shift with the tape,” he said.
-- The other big issue is that if the anti-Trump vote is divided, like it was throughout the GOP nominating contest, the reality TV star could eke out a narrow win. Johnson has campaigned hard in Utah. He was back in the state Wednesday night and has come at least once every few weeks since the start of the year. During the interview, McMullin sought to dismiss Johnson as a spoiler of sorts: “He has some impact, but this is a three-way race.”
Johnson’s communications director Joe Hunter responded that the former New Mexico governor will appear on the ballot in all 50 states while McMullin has only qualified to appear in 11 states. “He’s kind of running for president of Utah, and that’s legit,” Hunter, who lives up the road in Park City, said of McMullin. “There’s nothing wrong with that strategy. But we’re more confident in ours. … We’re ultimately the best option for the Never Trump Republicans in Utah.”
Everyone says a late endorsement from someone like Romney might help voters coalesce behind either McMullin or Johnson and put them over the top. “All the people you would wonder about, I’m talking to most of them,” McMullin said when asked if he’s in touch with the 2012 GOP nominee (who is legendary here because he turned around Salt Lake City’s failing 2002 Olympics).
-- To be sure, Clinton has a very narrow path to victory in such a conservative state. She’s viewed unfavorably by almost the same percentage of voters as Trump. Only 25 percent said they like her in the Monmouth poll. And she lost the caucuses here this spring to Bernie Sanders.
But Peter Corroon, the chairman of the Utah Democratic Party, said his team is mobilizing a bigger get-out-the-vote operation than ever before, knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors and making hundreds of thousands of phone calls. “It probably won’t be over 30 percent of the vote, but I think she’ll get the plurality,” said Corroon, the former mayor of Salt Lake City. “Every time Trump opens his mouth, it gets worse for him here. … Some will move to Hillary, and McMullin and Johnson are splitting the third-party votes.”
Republicans like to point out that, in 1992, Bill Clinton finished in third place (with 25 percent of the vote) behind George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot. Mike Lee says he still has not made up his mind about who to vote for, but it will not be Trump or Clinton. When I asked him if there’s any way she could prevail, he did not hesitate. “No,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”
But it’s also true that third-party candidates typically underperform how they do in pre-election polling because they do not have the same kind of organization to get out the vote.
The Clinton outreach also extends to Utah's growing Hispanic population, especially those living in the state's 4th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Mia Love (R). Statewide, Hispanics comprise about 8 percent of eligible voters, but in Love's district they account for about 25 percent. That was enough to prompt Lorella Praeli, the campaign's Latino voter outreach director, to travel here last month to meet with local volunteers and activists. As in other states with smaller, but growing, Hispanic populations like North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the Clinton campaign thinks running up the score with this constituency could wind up being decisive.
-- Clinton campaign strategists freely acknowledge that Utah is a reach, and that it is easier to pick off states like Arizona or Georgia first. Both sides agree that, if Trump loses here, the election nationally will probably be a blowout. But if for some reason it is close, and the divided third-party votes allow her to win in a squeaker, Utah’s six electoral votes (the same number as Iowa has) could cut off several other paths Trump has to get to 270.
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
-- The Nationals season is over after they fell to the Dodgers 4-3 in Game 5. Los Angeles scored all four runs in the seventh inning. “We just came up short,” manager Dusty Baker said. “I’m proud of my guys, of how they played this year.” (Jorge Castillo)
-- A Fox News poll shows Clinton up 7 points (45-38) over Trump, up from just 2 points last week. More than half of Americans now say Trump is unqualified to be president. "If the Republicans are not at rock-bottom, they can certainly see the bottom from where they are," says GOP pollster Daron Shaw. "If Trump got 90 percent of self-identified Republicans and nothing else -- no Democrats and no independents -- he'd be at 32 percent.”
-- Clinton is up 4 points in North Carolina and Ohio is virtually tied in NBC/WSJ/Marist polling. Sen. Richard Burr is tied with Democratic challenger Deborah Ross at 46 percent in the Tar Heel State. Rob Portman continues to dominate in the Buckeye State, leading Democratic challenger Ted Strickland by 18 (55-37).
-- A SurveyUSA poll in Texas found that Trump’s lead has receded to just 4 points in the Lone Star State, which is within the margin of error. For perspective, Romney won the state by 16 points in 2012, McCain by 13, and George W. Bush by 23. Ted Cruz is not popular back home: Only 45 percent approve, compared to 45 percent who disapprove. "It suggests that he may be looking at a significant primary challenge,” said SMU professor Matthew Wilson. Separately, Texas has a record-breaking 15 million people registered to vote ahead of the election, the Texas Tribune reports – more than 777,000 more than were registered for the March primaries.
-- Trump is pulling out of Virginia. NBC News reports that the news was announced to staff on a Wednesday night conference call and left many operatives on the ground blindsided. The decision came from Trump’s headquarters in New York and means that he is running essentially a four state campaign in the final three weeks, focusing on Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.
“Several factors appear to have pushed Virginia into the Clinton column,” Laura Vozzella explains from Richmond: “Changing demographics that favor Democrats in statewide elections; divisions within the state Republican Party over Trump; Clinton’s selection of Sen. Tim Kaine, a well-liked former Virginia governor as her running mate; and vigorous support from Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a close Clinton friend. ‘We got so far ahead here that we are no longer considered a swing state in Clinton World,’ McAuliffe told The Post in an interview last week — before the release of a tape of Trump bragging about groping women.”
-- Paul Ryan is attempting to move past his week-long battle with Trump today by delivering a fresh policy speech and announcing that he helped raise an additional $15.4 million to defend the House GOP majority. Kelsey Snell has early excerpts: “Ryan will argue for the value of conservative leadership in Congress in a mid-day address to college Republicans in his home state of Wisconsin. The speech aims to refocus the political discussion on the same traditional Republican themes like small government and freedom that Ryan has seen as key to maintaining a GOP majority as support [for] Trump has been sinking. ‘It is important that we take a step back and reflect on what this election is ultimately about,’ Ryan will say. ‘Beneath all the ugliness lies a long running debate between two governing philosophies: one that is in keeping with our nation’s founding principles—like freedom and equality—and another that seeks to replace them.’"
-- The RNC raised $39.4 million in September and has transferred $6.35 million of that to fund down-ballot races. From Bloomberg’s Kevin Cirilli: “The reallocation of $6.35 million—$4.5 million of which went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and $1.85 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee—was made ‘with the encouragement of the Trump campaign,’ the RNC's press release stated.”
-- Elsewhere, a group of the Republican Party’s most generous donors are calling on the RNC to disavow Trump, saying the latest allegations about his sexual misconduct are grounds for the committee to cut ties, finally and fully. From The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns, and Maggie Haberman: “The Republican financial apparatus under Mr. Priebus, sputtering since Mr. Trump claimed the presidential nomination, is wheezing painfully in the final weeks of the race. The committee’s fund-raising officials now quietly acknowledge that Mr. Trump is a thoroughly compromised candidate, party donors said, but implore potential contributors to give anyway, stressing graver concerns like control of the Supreme Court. Many donors have stopped giving, though, and some have deserted the party, including two major donors who confirmed on Thursday that they were supporting Gary Johnson … Even some of Mr. Priebus’s allies believe that Mr. Trump is certain to be defeated and that it is time for the party to protect its image by disavowing him.”
-- Those who know him best are not giving him money --> “Trump's missing donors: the people who work for him,” by Michelle Conlin and Grant Smith at Reuters: “Kerry Woolard, the 37-year-old manager of Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, went online in June and made her first political contribution: A $250 donation to the campaign of her boss, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Woolard's donation was unusual. Only a dozen of an estimated 22,450 people employed at Trump's companies have donated more than $200 to the celebrity businessman's bid for the U.S. presidency, [according to a Reuters review] …” The contributors have given a total amount of $5,298 to Trump's campaign, a fraction of the $112 million Trump's political operation has received this year. This stands in stark contrast to the 2012 election, when employees at the private equity firm Mitt Romney led until 1999, Bain Capital, and a separate company for which he worked, Bain & Company, donated nearly $375,000. Bain Capital employees gave an additional $1.125 million to Romney's Super PAC.”
-- How toxic is Trump? Florida GOP Rep. David Jolly, who represents an area around Tampa, is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee over a campaign ad that uses multiple photo-shopped pictures of him and Trump, portraying a close relationship between the two -- though they have never met in person. "I have never met Donald Trump. I have never had a conversation with Donald Trump. I have never been in a room with Donald Trump," said Jolly, who has refused to endorse Trump but is nevertheless expected to lose to Charlie Crist. (Miami Herald)
-- Trump spent Thursday afternoon issuing a stunning call to arms, emphatically denying a wave of new groping allegations while charging that his accusers were instead conspiring against him. From Philip Rucker and Sean Sullivan: “Scrambling to turn around his floundering campaign, Trump declared war on the media and multinational corporations, alleging they are colluding with [Clinton] to orchestrate ‘the single greatest pile-on in history.'" “The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure,” he said at a Palm Beach rally. “Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed."
-- This is part of a pattern: When he gets desperate, Trump spins conspiracy theories. From Sean Sullivan: “This time, there was a bigger, badder villain — ‘a global power structure’ of corporate interests, the media and Clinton engaging in subterfuge. This time, it was about him. Trump said Thursday that the world had reached ‘a moment of reckoning.’ He told his backers that his campaign is ‘not about me; it’s about all of you, and it’s about our country.’ He portrayed the powers he says have banded together to rally against him and his advocates as ruthless and cunning. ‘They will attack you; they will slander you; they will seek to destroy your career and your family; they will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation,’ Trump said. ‘They will lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that; they will do whatever is necessary.’”
-- His speech came just minutes after Michelle Obama delivered a scathing, impassioned repudiation of Trump’s behavior, saying the groping allegations have “shaken her to her core.” The dueling speeches made for a remarkable moment in a roiling presidential campaign and signaled that the final 25 days would focus "not on policy or ideology, but on character. “Two speeches. Two Americas. A pair of apocalyptic arguments and one call to burn down the house. That’s the summation from just two remarkable hours Thursday that crystallized the final month of Campaign 2016,” Dan Balz writes. “In back-to-back appearances, in what might be the two most compelling hours of the entire election, Michelle Obama in New Hampshire and Donald Trump in Florida delivered the fiercest, most provocative and hardest-hitting speeches of an election cycle that has been without precedent in hot rhetoric. The presidential campaign has been building toward all this. Day after day after day, the rhetoric has intensified, the charges and countercharges have escalated, the issues have been reduced to asterisks, and the gulf between the Trump and Clinton coalitions has widened. Sunday’s debate in St. Louis foreshadowed what was to come. Now there will be no turning back.”
-- Trump today will broaden his attack against the media to hit globalism and the Clinton Foundation by charging that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is part of the biased coalition working in collusion with the Clinton campaign, the Wall Street Journal’s Monica Langley reports. “As early as Friday, Mr. Trump is planning to claim that Mr. Slim, as a shareholder of New York Times Co. and donor to the Clinton Foundation, has an interest in helping Clinton’s campaign … The Slim family held about 17% of the New York Times Class A shares as of March, making them the largest individual shareholder. Mr. Slim and his foundation have given between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation since its founding. Attacking the Mexican billionaire would allow Mr. Trump to hit several targets. He could slam the ‘failing’ New York Times, which he says had to be ‘rescued’ by a ‘foreigner’—Mr. Slim, a [Trump adviser] said.”
Slim and the Times pushed back quickly: “This is totally false,” said Arturo Elias, Slim’s spokesman. “Of course we aren’t interfering in the U.S. election. We aren’t even active in Mexican politics.” He said the contributions by Slim to the Clinton Foundation were a matter of public record. “Carlos Slim is an excellent shareholder who fully respects boundaries regarding the independence of our journalism,” said Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. “He has never sought to influence what we report.”
-- Die-hard Trump supporters have become angrier than ever. “Crowds that once booed and shouted at the press mainly at Trump’s prompting … have now begun spontaneously targeting the press on their own, at a scale not yet seen in this campaign, or any in memory on American soil,” says Politico’s Ben Schreckinger, who has covered the campaign for more than a year. “Chants of ‘CNN sucks’ have become commonplace at Trump's rallies this week and members of the traveling press were called ‘whores’ and ‘press-titutes’ as they filed out of a Thursday afternoon rally in West Palm Beach. This week, Trump has begun claiming that mainstream media outlets no longer conduct journalism. ‘Reporters who work for these outlets like Washington Post or The New York Times may think of themselves as journalists, but they’re actually just cogs in a corporate, political machine,’ he said in Panama City."
-- One woman told HuffPost that she witnessed Trump looking up model’s skirts and commenting on their underwear at a 1996 dinner with mutual friends. Their group was seated at a semi-circular table, Lisa Boyne recounted, and the women couldn’t get up without Trump and his friend getting up – which they refused to do. “Instead, Boyne said, Trump insisted that the women walk across the table, allowing him to peer up their skirts while they did so. Trump “stuck his head right underneath their skirts,” Boyne said, and commented on whether they were wearing underwear and what their genitalia looked like.
-- Three longtime “Apprentice” staffers told The Daily Beast that Trump repeatedly called deaf actress Marlee Matlin “retarded,” saying he regularly disrespected her and treated her as if she was mentally disabled. “He would make fun of her voice. It actually sounded a lot like what he did [to] the New York Times guy,” said a former Apprentice employee. In another incident, Trump scribbled in the margins of a note on set: “Marlee, is she retarded?”
-- Creepy: In 1992, Trump spotted a pair of girls singing Christmas carols at the Plaza hotel and asked them how old they were. When they said 14, Trump, then 46, replied, “Wow! Just think — in a couple of years, I'll be dating you!" (LA Times)
-- Trump canceled a Sean Hannity interview that was scheduled for Fox News last night, perhaps to avoid having to answer for the latest allegations. A spokesman said it would be “rescheduled.” (Politico)
-- “These women plan to vote for Trump, despite his lewd comments,” by Mary Jordan in North Carolina: “If Clinton becomes the first female president of the United States, a lot of women at Granny’s Country Kitchen will be upset. They know Trump has said crude things about women. He may even have behaved like a lout. But when forced to weigh Trump’s behavior against their disdain for Clinton, the women at Granny’s say it’s not even close. A growing gender gap is marking the 2016 campaign. Not since CBS News exit polls were first taken in 1972 has there been such a divide in how men and women view candidates.” But perhaps more unexpected than women abandoning Trump are those who still enthusiastically support him. … ‘Is it offensive? Yes. Can we forgive it? Yes!’ Debbie Meadows, wife of Rep. Mark Meadows (N.C.), said of Trump’s remarks. Rep. Ted Yoho’s wife agreed: ‘When I found out, I had a few moments of righteous indignation,’ she said. ‘Then I got some perspective.’”
-- The Times responded to a letter from Trump’s lawyers that called their sexual assault story "libelous" and threatened a lawsuit: "The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation," Times’ lawyer David McCraw wrote. “Mr. Trump has bragged about his non-consensual sexual touching of women. He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio hosts’ request to discuss Mr. Trump’s own daughter as a ‘piece of ass.’ Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr. Trump’s unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.”
-- Melania Trump's lawyers also threatened to sue People magazine over the first-person account written by Trump accuser Natasha Stoynoff, demanding a retraction and saying that portions of the story are "completely fictionalized."
-- People editor-in-chief Jess Cagle posted a lengthy defense of Stoynoff and the story: “Ms. Stoynoff is a remarkable, ethical, honest and patriotic woman. We stand steadfastly by her, and are proud to publish her clear, credible account of what happened."
-- Clinton allies David Brock and Gloria Allred both offered to help cover legal fees for and otherwise represent Trump’s accusers: "We would pay for the legal defense of Trump accusers,” said Brock, a Democratic operative. And Allred, a civil rights lawyer, also signaled openness: “If any women who are making allegations of inappropriate [conduct] contact me, I would be happy to speak to them and then decide if I would be able to represent them,” she said. (Politico)
-- Donald Trump Jr. defended his father. Asked about the two women who talked with the Times, he said during a radio interview: "Come on guys, it's so ridiculous, I've never heard anything dumber in my life. ... I think it makes him a human. I think it makes him a normal person, not a political robot.” (CNN)
-- In another radio interview, from 2013, Don Jr. actually suggested that women who cannot tolerate harassment “don’t belong in the workforce”: “If you can’t handle some of the basic stuff that’s become a problem in the workforce today, then you don’t belong in the workforce,” the younger Trump said. “Like, you should go maybe teach kindergarten. I think it’s a respectable position.” The hosts then joked about hypothetically pulling up pictures of naked women on their computer screens. “I’d feel harassed!” Trump, Jr. joked. “This is my get rich quick scheme. I’m now suing you guys because I feel uncomfortable. And by the way, that’s what happens in the world. I can play along, I can be fine, and then I can decide randomly — ‘uh oh, you now have crossed the line, even though I’ve been going with it.’” (Buzzfeed)
-- Ivanka Trump, stumping for her father in the Philadelphia suburbs, avoided any talk of the groping allegations. “Ivanka, perpetually on point, stayed on message,” NBC’s Leigh Ann Caldwell reports. “So much so that some of the same questions were repeated in each of the events, including what it was like to work with her dad and brothers, what she likes about Pennsylvania and why she thinks her dad would be a good president.”
-- Why didn’t Trump’s people see any of this coming? Because the candidate rebuffed political aides’ requests to provide standard-fare opposition research that is traditional for any public figure -- and the decision ultimately contributed to his campaign being caught off guard this week. Both Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort made these requests when they took the reins of Trump’s campaign, and it became a point of contention among his top political advisers. (Bloomberg’s Kevin Cirilli)
-- A review of previously-sealed New York records shows that neither Trump nor the Trump Foundation actually gave the $10,000 that they pledged to a 9/11 charity organization in the months following the attack. From the New York Daily News: The review, conducted by city comptroller Scott Stringer, “appears to contradict Trump's prior boasts of spontaneous generosity, made as his hometown reeled from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history … The records show that through mid-2002 there is no evidence that Trump personally or through the Trump Foundation gave to either group. The only recorded major donation to 9/11 causes that Trump has made was $100,000 from his foundation — which has been bankrolled by others without any money from Trump for years — to the 9/11 Museum in April 2016, as he sought to generate headlines after Cruz attacked him for his ‘New York values’ during the primary election.”
-- Ten former nuclear launch control officers signed an open letter saying that Trump “should not have his finger on the button.” The letter says the decision to use nuclear weapons requires “composure, judgment, restraint and diplomatic skill” — all qualities that the former Air Force officers who signed it said Trump lacks. (Carol Morello)
-- A group of former Reagan administration alumni have formed a group called “Reaganites Opposing Trump.” In a post on Medium, former George W. Bush National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte writes: “Ronald Reagan was a man of wisdom, humor, unfailing courtesy and measured temperament. I personally observed these traits … during daily meetings in the Oval Office, meetings with foreign leaders and in the Situation Room. He would have been appalled by Donald Trump’s utterances and behavior. Mr. Trump has no claim whatsoever to the mantle of Ronald Reagan.”
-- “What happened to ‘America’s Mayor’? How Rudy Giuliani became Trump’s attack dog,” by Paul Schwartzman and Ben Terris: “A year ago, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani read an editorial in his hometown newspaper mocking him as a ‘shill’ for endorsing a little-known Republican [district attorney candidate]. Angry, Giuliani phoned the editorial page editor, Arthur Browne, to defend his endorsement. But the point that appeared to wound Giuliani the most, Browne recalled, was the editorial’s assertion that the former mayor ‘resides today beyond political relevance.’ “’I am relevant,’ [he insisted], ‘because all these people want my endorsement.’ The former mayor has no such worries these days. Eight years after his own presidential bid failed, Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s unflinching chief apologist, cheerleader and rhetorical Rottweiler … It’s a role that confounds allies and admirers who remember Giuliani’s rise as a law-and-order Republican twice elected in the country’s largest bastion of liberalism. ‘From his days as U.S. attorney, he was at the top of the organizational chart,’ [a] former adviser said. “Now he’s staff. He carries bags. He walks behind Trump. It’s just amazing to see.’”
-- Clinton submitted formal answers under penalty of perjury over her use of a private email server at the State Department, declaring 20 times that she did not recall requested information and discussions, and asserting she was never warned that the practice could run afoul of laws on preserving federal records. From Politico’s Josh Gerstein: "Clinton also said she could not recall ever being warned about any hacking or attempted hacking of her private account or server. Clinton's answers generally track with her public statements on the issue and with FBI reports about what she said during an interview conducted in July. Clinton "decided to use a clintonemail.com account for the purpose of convenience," her lawyers said. Asked what other reasons she may have had for doing so, she gave no ground.
-- Clinton advisers pressed her to apologize more explicitly for her use of a private email server while at the State Department, according to emails obtained in the WikiLeaks hacking. From the Wall Street Journal: After Clinton addressed the issue in a September 2015 TV interview, top aides discussed what they deemed a positive showing. But longtime Clinton confidante Neera Tanden wrote, “Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should.” “Apologies are like her Achilles' heel,” Tanden added. “But she didn’t seem like a [b*tch] in the interview. And she said the word sorry.”
-- President Obama launched a two day campaign swing for Clinton in Ohio, seeking to boost turnout for the Democratic nominee among African American and millennial voters that helped him win the state in 2008 and 2012. (David Nakamura and Krissah Thompson)
-- The Idaho Statesman endorses Clinton today: “We recognize a lot of you are not going to like our choice of a Democrat in this Republican state," the editorial board writes. “But our hope is that you will consider our reasoning before critiquing our conclusion. At this critical time in our nation’s history, we need, more than ever, to listen to each other with respect.”
-- This week’s Economist cover is on “The debasing of American politics”: “In a more fragile democracy, [Trump’s rhetoric] would foreshadow post-election violence. Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that when many bad things happen at once, societies define deviancy down, until the list of what is unacceptable is short enough to be manageable. When parents wonder if a presidential debate is suitable for their children to watch, Mr Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border no longer seems quite so shocking. Healthy politics is not gang warfare. It involves compromise, because to yield in some areas is to move forward in others. It requires the insight that your opponent can be honourable and principled, however strongly you disagree. The 2016 election campaign has poured scorn on such ideas. All Americans are worse off as a result.”
-- Conservative commentator Erick Erickson writes on the path forward for the post-Trump GOP: “In November, when Mr. Trump’s meteor enters the atmosphere of the voting booth, Americans will be treated to a spectacular flameout as late-night comedians and professional Twitter warriors rush to tweet, ‘You’re fired!’ But when the Russians go home, the pastors repent and riot police disperse white nationalist protests, the Republicans will need fresh ideas. [And most importantly] … the Republican Party must recommit to a basic principle — character counts. The party that once impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair has defended a man who bragged about sexual assault. Character cannot be wedded to party politics, and the Republicans will have to make amends for defining deviancy down to defend the indefensible Donald Trump.”
-- Wall Street Journal, “Voters’ Education Level a Driving Force This Election,” by Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni: “The clearest dividing line in this year’s presidential election now falls along educational lines: Whites without a college degree have consolidated behind Trump and those with a four-year degree are tending to back Clinton. The divide helps explain why Mr. Trump pulled his field staff Wednesday from Virginia—essentially ceding a state where polling shows he has been largely abandoned by suburban voters with higher education levels—and why he remains competitive in the swing states of Iowa and Ohio, which have large shares of noncollege whites. Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, is ahead in New Hampshire and Colorado, home to larger shares of whites with college degrees … The widening education gap, if it holds, would stand as a landmark in the repositioning of the nation’s two main political parties.”
-- Former Boston Globe D.C. bureau chief David Shribman grapples with the idea that Democrats are becoming the new “professional party”: “American political parties are always in transition. This year, Trump has revealed deep cracks in the traditional Republican coalition and gone to war with party leaders. Yet while the Democrats are more united behind their 2016 nominee, they’re arguably more divided over their party’s vision and future. … For politicians and campaign operatives who for a generation or more have been working for the Democrats — or against them — the party’s growing dependence on the prosperous and well-educated is disorienting. Are the Democrats the party of working people anymore or is their future with college-educated professionals? Does a party that draws its strength from the richest and the poorest places in America have any logical rationale? Hence this question, perhaps the most devastating one of all: Have the Democrats replaced the Republicans as the party of the social, cultural, and economic elite?”
-- “A wounded bear is a dangerous thing. Detested and defeated, Trump is now in a tear-the-country-down rage,” The New York Times’ Timothy Egan writes. “Day after day, he rips at the last remaining threads of decency holding this nation together. His opponent is the devil, he says — hate her with all your heart. Forget about the rule of law. Lock her up! Here’s his lesson for young minds: If you’re rich and boorish enough, you can get away with anything. Get away with sexual assault. Get away with not paying taxes. Get away with never telling the truth. You know this by now — all the sordid details. For much of the last year, the Republican presidential nominee has been a freak show, an oh-my-God spectacle. He opens his mouth, our cellphones blow up. But now, in the final days of a horrid campaign, an unshackled Trump is more national threat than punch line. He’s determined to cause lasting damage.”
Russia's foreign minister gave quite a quote on the presidential campaign -- this tweet was posted on their U.S. embassy's official Twitter account:
Hell keeps freezing over -- a senior correspondent at National Review praised Michelle Obama for her speech going after Trump on groping:
Here's what she said:
So did Biden and others:
On the campaign trail: Trump campaigns in Greensboro and Charlotte, N.C.; Pence is in Pensacola and Miami, Fla. Bill Clinton campaigns for Hillary in Delaware and Cincinnati, Ohio.
At the White House: Obama speaks at a Clinton event in Cleveland. Later, he and Biden attend the convening of the National Security Council for a periodic review of the Counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria.
On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.
NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
-- The weather is officially starting to cool down! The Capital Weather Gang gives today’s fall forecast an official “nice day” rating: “Similar to, say, this past Monday, it may feel pleasantly cool under mostly sunny skies. Perhaps a periodic, thin veil of high clouds, but don’t worry. Temperatures should get from morning 50s to afternoon readings near 60 to the mid-60s. You may not need that morning light jacket on the way home! Arguably a great, beautiful day despite slightly below-average high temperatures. Some folks may fall below official Nice Day criteria (65-85 degrees) but it’s close enough for a Friday.”
-- The Capitals fell to the Penguins 3-2.
In case you missed Michelle Obama's speech, check out this clip:
At a rally, Obama determined he was not a demon:
Watch this old, bizarre interview with Trump. At the end, he talks about pursuing women: "Move forward -- even if you get smacked, move forward."
Seth Meyers took a closer look at Clinton's leaked Wall Street speeches:
Joss Whedon's super-PAC created this video poking fun at generalized touting of "business experience" in politics: | 0fake |
Indian counter-terror experience useful for Russia | terrorism , india , russia Opinion Indian Army soldiers leave the site of a gun battle in Pampore, on the outskirts of Srinagar, Kashmir. Source:AP
The Indian experience in fighting against terrorism can be useful for Russia, while the Western experience is narrowly focused. Cooperation with New Delhi on this issue, therefore, is more important than such a dialogue with the West, said Yuri Nagernyak, General Director of “Humanism, Progress and the Rule of Law” Fund, an international foundation for the promotion of culture, science and education.
“I think that the Indian direction, in terms of fighting against terrorism in Russia, is extremely important, and I dare say, more important than trying to organize such cooperation with Western countries,” he said during a Moscow-Delhi video bridge, organized by the MIA Russia Today.
Nagernyak said Russia and India were connected by “deep interests”, and a common vision of the future, which make them “close partners”.
Kadakin: Russia with India. Terrorism is greatest human rights violation
Thus, “relations between the two countries, regardless of how the political situation develops, always remain at the highest level,” he explained.
“In this sense, in cooperating with India, in terms of the fight against terrorism, we can, firstly, be sure that this cooperation will be real, and not merely declarative. Secondly, we can be confident in the stability of this cooperation. Third, and much more important, it seems to me, exchanges between our two countries will give us much more than cooperation in this sphere between Russia and the West,” believes Nagernyak.
The reason for this, he said, is particularly because India is faced with different directions of terrorism.
“The Indian experience in counter-terrorism , and terrorism in many of its different forms, is really beneficial to Russia, while the experience of the West – is actually a very narrow experience,” said Nagernyak.
Andrey Kazantsev, Director of the Analytical Centre of the Institute of International Studies, MGIMO (University) MFA Russia, also noted that, “for Russia and India there exists a common interest in stabilizing the situation in such a wide region that includes Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia”. He believes “different formats of Russian-Indian dialogue need to be developed on this aspect of cooperation.”
First published in Russian by RIA Novosti . | 1real |
BREAKING: HOUSE Votes “Yes” On American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act…But What Does That Really Mean For Our Nation’s Security? | As the House moves closer to actually representing the will of We The People with this vote, what does it really mean in terms of stopping the bleed of Muslim men (Syrian refugees) into our country?The American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act that was approved by the US House this afternoon will not prohibit Syrian Refugees (Muslim males) from entering our country. It just ensures they are being more carefully screened. Congress needs to act NOW to stop the flow of potential terrorists and mostly military age Muslim men who have been conditioned to hating America for their entire lives into our country.The House of Representatives has approved legislation that would make it even more difficult for refugees from Syria and Iraq to enter the United States.Our Imperial President, Barack Hussein Obama has already said he ll veto the bill With almost unanimous support from Republicans and 47 Democrats supporting, the House approved by 289 votes to 137 the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, which would require the secretary of homeland security, the FBI director and the director of national intelligence to each certify that a refugee was not a threat to national security before they were admitted to the United States.This certification would come on top of the preexisting extensive screening process for refugees seeking admittance to the United States, which currently takes over 18 months.The White House has already said the president will veto the legislation and both chief of staff Denis McDonough and secretary of homeland security Jeh Johnson were on Capitol Hill lobbying against the bill on Thursday. However, those efforts did not sway some Democratic skeptics.New York Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney told reporters that he thought the bill represented a simple improvement to the process. The administration is required to certify many things under federal law, and I don t understand why the president couldn t direct the heads of these agencies within 24 hours of the completion of existing process to make this certification or not. It adds no new time. The New York congressman said it is offensive to me that we would stigmatize refugees and make victims of people who have suffered so much already and said he did not think the bill did that, unlike the reactions of many governors and Republican president candidates to the refugee issue. Instead, he insisted it represented a simple step to provide certification to the preexisting screening process.Democratic opponents of the bill such as representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri dismissed the legislation something simply designed to make people feel better. However, he noted that there had been a failure among politicians of both parties to acknowledge the very legitimate and very real fear that s out there . In doing so, Cleaver echoed remarks made to reporters yesterday by Democratic senator Tim Kaine who complained that the Obama administration had not properly explained [the vetting system for refugees] to the American public .Republicans were realistic about the bill s dim prospects of becoming law but saw it as an important step in raising public awareness of the refugee issue. Iowa congressman Steve King told the Guardian said that, while there was very little that Congress could pass that would avoid a veto, the bill brings the public s attention to this .King said he thought the increased public attention would make it harder for Obama to veto the bill, which would also need to pass the Senate to become law, and might even make it possible for an Obama veto to be overridden by Congress. However, King thought that the focus on the refugee issue missed the point and there instead we need to destroy the caliphates and defeat the ideology of Islamic jihad .King said: It s the equivalent of going into emergency room with patients bleeding off of gurneys and going and getting a bucket and mop to mop it up instead of stopping the bleeding. His thoughts were echoed in part by Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who noted that many of his constituents had been worried about whether Syrian refugees had been properly vetted since before the Paris attacks.The Kansas Republican saw this bill as prelude to a fight in December over the budget, seeing the possibility of attaching a rider on refugee policy to an appropriations (spending) bill. I don t think the president is gonna shut government down to bring Syrian refugees into this country and that s the only way to get attention, he said. Via: The Guardian | 1real |
NYPD Catches Itself Selling Stolen Goods, Blames Business Owner |
by Carey Wedler
A business owner in Manhattan is suing the city after being forced to waive his Fourth Amendment rights and potentially forfeit his business because an NYPD officer sold illegal goods at his store.
You read that right.
According to a lawsuit filed this month by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal advocacy group, an undercover NYPD detective attempted to sell stolen electronics to customers at Sung Cho’s laundromat in Inwood, which located near the northern tip of Manhattan, in 2013. After the officer successfully sold stolen goods to two people — one inside the store and one outside — the city threatened Cho with eviction “merely because a ‘stolen property’ offense had happened at his business,” the legal organization’s website explained .
Institute for Justice (IJ), which takes on cases involving the suppression of free speech, eminent domain, and civil asset forfeiture, among other government encroachments, detailed Cho’s case:
“The city presented Sung with a choice: See his business shut down or sign an agreement giving up constitutional rights—including his Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches of his business. Faced with the imminent closure of his laundromat, Sung had no real choice but to sign.”
Under the city’s decades-old “nuisance eviction ordinance,” residents and business owners can be evicted simply because an illegal act occurred on or near their property. Though the law was passed in the 1970s to target businesses that encourage illegal activity, like many laws, it has been abused.
“Under the ordinance, the identity of the criminal offender is irrelevant,” IJ explains. “You can be evicted because a total stranger (or a friend or family member) decided your home or business was a good place to commit a crime.”
According to IJ, “in many cases, the ‘proof’ of the alleged criminal offense is an affidavit from an NYPD officer relaying vague allegations from unnamed confidential informants.”
A joint investigation by ProPublica and the New York Daily News reported that in Cho’s case, “the police claimed in court filings that [his] business was facilitating an illegal fencing operation” because the undercover detective sold illegal goods there in 2013.
None of Cho’s employees were ever accused of or charged with a crime.
Nevertheless, in cases like Cho’s, the city often offers to drop the charges — but only if the defendant agrees to relinquish their constitutional rights. Some “are forced to sign agreements waiving their Fourth Amendment rights,” IJ explains.
According to ProPublica and the Daily News :
“Cho agreed to give up his right to a hearing before being fined and agreeing to be shut down if police accuse anybody at his shop of breaking the law in the future. He also must allow the police to search his business and access his security footage at any time. The terms continue in perpetuity, and pass on to any new buyer or partner in Cho’s business, which he said makes it essentially worthless.”
“I couldn’t really defend myself, that’s why we had to settle prior to going to the judge,” Cho said. “Just because it happened nearby, under the law I am guilty, and that is not right.“
The ordinance is being abused in other ways, as well. As IJ explains:
“Others are forced to sign agreements barring family members from the home—including family members who have not been accused of any crime”
This was the case of Jameelah El-Shabazz, also represented in IJ’s suit, who was forced to ban her son from her home. She was required to do so after he was falsely accused of possessing 45 cups of cocaine during a police search of a bedroom at her residence in 2011. Laboratory tests proved her son did not have cocaine or any other narcotic; she says the powder the NYPD found was crushed eggshells he uses for spiritual rituals.
Though no charges were ever pressed, “four months later, she was served with the nuisance case and an order forcing her from her apartment while the case was being decided,” ProPublica and the New York Daily News reported.
She says that when she signed the agreement, she had no idea it meant she had to permanently ban her son from her home.
“I’m not going to make my son homeless because of the false accusations,” she said.
The ProPublica/Daily News investigation reports that of over 1,100 cases in which these notices were issued during 2013 and the first half of 2014, fewer than half of the individuals targeted had actually committed a crime. They reported the cases occurred “almost exclusively” in black and Latino communities.
IJ’s suit follows another similar lawsuit concerning a woman who was evicted from her home for four days after police claimed drugs were illegally sold there. As it turned out, those engaging in illegal activity had moved out eight months prior. Though Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to the lawsuit, saying he believes everyone is entitled to a fair trial, city attorney Nicholas Ciapetta claimed in a recent motion that the woman “was not entitled to any additional process.” The city’s law department said it has not yet seen IJ’s new case filing.
Though the NYPD has amended its use of the ordinance to restrict full closures on homes while nuisance cases are still being decided, they continue to endorse the law. “This is one of many important tools we use as part of precision policing to continue to drive down crime and protect the public,” Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill said .
But Cho disagrees. “It’s unfair,” he asserted . “Unfair to me, unfair to all the investment that I made here, unfair to the employees that work here and support their families…it’s New York City versus a little guy like me.”
Robert Johnson, the lead attorney on the case representing Cho, El-Shabazz, and one other individual, strongly objected to the practice. “The mere fact that someone’s been arrested is just not a reason why they should be kicked out of an apartment,” he said. The case was filed in the United States Court for the Southern District of New York.
Johnson said IJ is prepared to take the case against the “coercively obtained” settlements all the way to the Supreme Court. If they win, “past waivers of constitutional rights will be declared unenforceable and, going forward, this practice will be put to an end once and for all.” Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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Contributed by The Anti-Media of theantimedia.org .
The “Anti” in our name does not mean we are against the media, we are simply against the current mainstream paradigm. The current media, influenced by the industrial complex, is a top-down authoritarian system of distribution—the opposite of what Anti-Media aims to be. At Anti-Media, we want to offer a new paradigm—a bottom-up approach for real and diverse reporting. We seek to establish a space where the people are the journalists and a venue where independent journalism moves forward on a larger and more truthful scale. | 1real |
GOP seeking Plan B on immigration | During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States. | 0fake |
Homeless Woman Protects Trump’s Walk of Fame Star From Violent Leftists | Homeless Woman Protects Trump’s Walk of Fame Star From Violent Leftists "I'm gonna stay here and watch this, and make sure nobody touches it." Chris Menahan | Information Liberation - October 28, 2016 Comments
Powerful video shows a homeless woman protecting Donald Trump’s Walk of Fame Star after it was smashed by a criminal leftist.
As The Gateway Pundit reports , the woman was seen holding up a sign reading: “20 Million Illegals and Americans Sleep on the Streets in Tents. Vote Trump.”
It was repaired on the same day.
The day after, this homeless Trump supporter went to protect it.
“I’m gonna stay here and watch this, and make sure nobody touches it,” she was heard saying. Homeless Trump supporter guards @realDonaldTrump 's star on Hollywood Blvd. against all SJWs #BasedSentinel #MAGA3X https://t.co/BjGcFO0du5 ? pic.twitter.com/nrMqnbW5UK
— PeterDuke MAGA3X🇺🇸 (@peterdukephoto) October 27, 2016
Video shared on Periscope shows hordes of disgusting leftists insult and attack the woman for supporting Trump.
In this short video posted to YouTube, one angry black man is seen screaming in her face and asking her: “Do you know your federal government is not even party of the f***ing government?”
“Do you know that?” he asks. “No, I didn’t think so,” he says.
“Hello,” another woman in the crowd shouts in agreement. “Open your eyes,” she says.
In case anyone is not aware, the federal government is part of the government.
While Hillary Clinton wants to bring in millions of foreigners to take jobs and welfare from the poorest of Americans, Donald Trump wants to help our own and put the needs of Americans first. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles | 1real |
DEMOCRAT CHAIRMAN YELLS “All Together Now…F*ck Donald Trump!” [Video] | The classless Democrats are at it again. The over-the-top potty talk by the Chairman Tom Perez was bad enough but now the California Dem Chairman has raised the bar on nastiness. He prompts the crowd to yell out F@ck Donald Trump! The kicker is that Nancy Pelosi was caught laughing with the crowd. How unbelievably childish are these people?AP reported:California s elected Democrats had tough words for President Donald Trump and the GOP Congress on Saturday, urging their party s fired-up activists to work against the 14 Republicans in the state s congressional delegation.The party s leaders blasted Trump s alleged ties to Russia and presented California as the epicenter of liberal resistance to the president. The world, literally the world, is counting on all of you, counting on California to reject Trump s deception and destructiveness, said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is among a crowded field of Democrats running for governor next year.U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, often mentioned as a potential candidate for president in 2020, accused Trump of putting Russia first, America second. In a sign of the vigor of the party s distaste for the president, outgoing party Chair John Burton, a longtime Democratic lawmaker and powerbroker known for his blunt and profane manner, extended two middle fingers in the air as the crowd cheered and joined him. F Donald Trump, he said:Outgoing @ca_dem chair @Johnburton gets standing O w final words to his party, finger upraised: F@ck Donald Trump! pic.twitter.com/VIqNQlhDJc Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci) May 20, 2017And we though Tom Perez was bad! | 1real |
Russia-WikiLeaks Conspiracy Theory: “Clinton claim ridiculous, based on lazy US Twitter culture” | 21st Century Wire says As 21WIRE reported previously, since this past summer Washington and its media surrogates have been seeding the news cycle with the talking point that Russia was responsible for the DC Leaks and WikiLeaks document dumps, and that Russia is somehow trying to hack the US elections. Here s what the Clinton campaign claimed:Once again, Russian propaganda network RT shows collusion w/ @wikileaks by promoting new email dump before even WL does. Glen Caplin (@GlenCaplin1) October 17, 2016Of course, they were completely wrong.21WIRE s Patrick Henningsen spoke to RT International about the Hillary Clinton campaign s ridiculous accusation that somehow RT News had the latest batch of emails before WikiLeaks did, and how the US media and political establishment can t comprehend a reality beyond their transient Twitter feeds. Watch: SUPPORT OUT WORK SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 1real |
All Governments Lie, The Movie | Posted on October 30, 2016 by DavidSwanson
Picture, if you will, video footage of vintage (early 2016) Donald Trump buffoonery with the CEO of CBS Leslie Moonves commenting on major media’s choice to give Trump vastly more air time than other candidates: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
That’s the introduction to a powerful critique of the U.S. media. A new film screens in New York and Los Angeles this week called All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone .
The website AllGovernmentsLie.com has screening dates , a list of lies , and a list of good journalists who expose lies . The lists on the website are not identical to the content of the film, but there’s a good deal of overlap — enough to give you a sense of what this project is about.
I’d have made various changes and additions to the film. In particular, I’m tired of all the focus on Iraq 2003. This film touches on war lies since then, but still gives that one particular set of war lies prominence.
Still, this is a film that should be shown in cities, homes, and classrooms across the United States. It includes and is driven by Noam Chomsky’s analysis of how the media system is “rigged” without those doing the rigging believing they’ve done anything at all. It’s a survey of skullduggery by corporate media. It’s an introduction to numerous journalists far superior to the norm. And it’s an introduction to I.F. Stone. It includes footage of a presentation of the annual Izzy Award which goes to journalists acting in Stone’s tradition.
One of the lies listed in the film and on the website is that of the Gulf of Tonkin (non-)Incident. Anyone paying attention knows of it now as a war lie. And it was a transparent war lie at the time in a particular sense. That is: had the North Vietnamese really shot back at a U.S. ship off their coast, that would not have been any sort of legal, much less moral, justification for escalating a war. I’d love it if people could grasp that logic and apply it to the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and every other part of the earth today.
But the Gulf of Tonkin lies about Vietnamese aggression against the U.S. ships innocently patrolling and firing off the coast of Vietnam were not transparent to people with faith in the U.S. role of Global Policeman. Someone had to make the lies transparent. Someone had to document that in fact the Secretary of So-Called Defense and the President were lying. Sadly, nobody did that in the first 24 hours after the Congressional committee hearings, and that was all it took for Congress to hand the president a war.
And it was decades before White House transcripts came out and before the National Security Agency confessed, and additional years before former Secretary Robert McNamara did. Yet, those revelations simply confirmed what people paying attention knew. And they knew it because of I.F. Stone who just weeks after the (non-)incident published a four-page edition of his weekly newsletter exclusively about Tonkin.
Stone’s analysis is useful in looking at the incident or lack thereof this past month in the Red Sea off Yemen. And in fact it is to Yemen that Stone immediately turned on page 1 in 1964. The United Nations, including its U.S. ambassador, had recently condemned British attacks on Yemen that Britain defended as retaliatory. President Dwight Eisenhower had also warned the French against retaliatory attacks on Tunisia. And President Lyndon Johnson, even at the time of Tonkin, Stone notes, was warning Greece and Turkey not to engage in retaliatory attacks on each other.
Stone, who tended to look even at written laws that nobody else paid any heed to, pointed out that three of them banned these sorts of attacks: the League of Nations Covenant, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the U.N. Charter. The latter two are still theoretically in place for the U.S. government.
The United States in Vietnam, Stone goes on to show, could not have been innocently attacked but itself admitted to having already sunk a number of Vietnamese boats. And indeed the U.S. ships, Stone reports, were in North Vietnamese waters and were there to assist South Vietnamese ships that were shelling two North Vietnamese islands. And in fact those ships had been supplied to South Vietnam by the U.S. military and the good old American tax payers.
Stone did not have access to closed committee hearings, but he hardly needed it. He considered the assertions made in speeches by the only two senators who voted against the war. And then he looked for any rejoinders by the chairmen of the committees. He found their denials to be non-denials and nonsensical. It made no sense that the U.S. ships simply happened to be randomly hanging around in the vicinity of the South Vietnamese ships. Stone didn’t believe it.
Stone also filled in the background information. The United States had been supporting guerrilla attacks on North Vietnam for years prior to the non-incident. And Stone raised numerous suspicions, including the question of why the U.S. ships had supposedly made sure they were out in international waters for the (non-)incident to (not) occur, and the question of why in the world Vietnam would take on the United States military (something nobody could explain, though Eugene McCarthy proposed that perhaps they had been bored).
Missing from the film and website of All Governments Lie is I.F. Stone’s work on lies about the outbreak of the Korean War. We’ve learned more since he wrote it, but seen little more insightful, relevant, or timely for our understanding of Korea and the world today. This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink . | 1real |
Job Loss due to Immigrants | Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs: ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The "Live Preview" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name: | 1real |
Michael Bloomberg: 55 Percent Chance Trump Gets Re-Elected in 2020 | Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the New York Times Wednesday that he estimates President Donald Trump has a 55 percent chance at . [Bloomberg, who has been harshly critical of President Trump, thought Democratic would make Trump the odds on favorite in 2020. “They’ll step on each other and Donald Trump,” he told the Times‘s Frank Bruni, adding that there is a “55 percent chance he gets . ” Bruni, for his part, was horrified by the estimate. “ percent? Whether good for my longevity or not, I need a cookie,” he wrote, comparing the campaign to unseat Trump to Bloomberg’s crusades against smoking and junk food. Bloomberg was brutal in his critique of Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the White House. ‘Hillary said, ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman and the other guy’s bad,’” he said. The former mayor has a long and tumultuous history with the president. Despite Trump’s occasional praise of his fellow NYC billionaire’s time as leader of the Big Apple, things turned ugly after Trump’s presidential campaign kicked off. Bloomberg, nominally an independent, spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, telling the packed arena, “The bottom line is: [Trump] is a risky, reckless, and radical choice, and we can’t afford to make that choice. ” Trump was quick to hit back, telling ABC News, “Michael Bloomberg couldn’t get elected as a dog catcher in New York. ” Bloomberg, best known outside New York for his steadfast opposition to gun rights, support for taxes on soda, and the news outlet that bears his name, has not let up on the president since Trump took office. In March, he appeared to defy the president and Congress, saying America will meet the requirements of the Paris climate agreement regardless of what the democratically elected government tries to do. | 0fake |
(VIDEO) AWESOME! TRUMP SHOWS UNIVISION REPORTER HOW TO DEPORT ILLEGALS: “WE START WITH THE GANGS.” | If you watched this press conference live, you ll know you want to see it again and again. I ve never seen anyone toy with the press like Trump. It s priceless! | 1real |
Obama to meet Philippines' Duterte, broach human rights | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to meet with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Sept. 6, and plans to touch on human rights as well as security concerns, the White House said on Monday. “We absolutely expect that the president will raise concerns about some of the recent statements from the president of the Philippines,” White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told a media briefing when asked whether inflammatory remarks by Duterte about women, journalists and others would be a topic of discussion. Rhodes said, however, that there were important security issues to cover as well, particularly tensions over navigation in the South China Sea. China has been incensed by a ruling against its claims in the South China Sea by an international court, a case initiated by Manila. The expected meeting between Obama and Duterte would take place in Laos, where the two leaders will be attending a summit of leaders from Pacific Rim nations. | 0fake |
HIGH SCHOOL V.P. Warns Students: “Only terrorists we need to fear are “domestic white ‘Christian’ men with easy access to guns.” | It s a wonder we have any sane children coming out of our Leftist indoctrination think tanks that are being passed off as schools. The Vote Bernie is an especially nice touch The vice principal of Camden Hills Regional High School has America s enemy all figured out: domestic white Christian men with easy access to guns. After a lone gunman killed two civilians and a police officer in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the vice principal, Piet Lammert, took to Facebook to post his thoughts the next day:It s Small Business Saturday. Buy localThere s a show in the Strom tonight. Buy ticketsThe only terrorists we need to fear are domestic white Christian men with easy access to guns. Vote BernieThat is all. Enjoy your dayFive Town CSD Superintendent Maria Libby criticized the post, but defended the administrator. I know Piet and he s someone who genuinely accepts all people, Libby tells WGME. The post does not reflect who he is as a person. She didn t stop there. It was a mistake, Libby says. It was a poor choice in words and it should never have been posted. The superintendent didn t specific what words would have been better to say.After it was posted, Libby said the situation has been handled, without giving any specifics. I have investigated it and I have taken appropriate action, Libby would only say.Lammert took to Facebook to apologize to those I offended, but also to attempt to explain his comments.I am writing to take responsibility and apologize for a post that I made on my private Facebook account yesterday. I mistakenly left my setting open to Public and in doing so made a post that offended some members of our community and beyond. I deeply regret doing so, take full responsibility, and hope that those I offended will accept my apology.Apparently still feeling the public blow back from his remarks, the school administrator posted another apology, saying it was an exaggeration. With true humility, I write to apologize for the offensive statement that I recently posted on Facebook. I did not intend this statement literally when I wrote it it was an exaggeration but soon after realized that it was unintentionally hurtful, offensive, and divisive at a time when more than ever we need compassion and understanding.In short, I did not mean what I said and wish with all my heart that I could take it back. But I need to take responsibility for it nonetheless, because I wrote it. It does not represent who I am or what I believe, but I wrote it. This post is an effort to at least begin to make amends.Had I simply written what I meant, the post would have reflected my urgent distress at the epidemic of mass violence in our country, which more recent events have proven to span all social groups. Ironically, in my effort to point out that we run the risk of simplifying the problem by singling out a particular ethnic group, I did exactly that to the group to which I belong. It was careless and rash.Lambert appears to have removed the offensive post from his Facebook page. He did however, leave this post up on his page, just in case anyone wonders where he stands on the evil NRA. Note the cute little nickname he appears to have given them:// <![CDATA[ (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); // ]]>NRA: Not Really ApplicablePosted by Piet Lammert on Monday, December 17, 2012WGME attempted to contact the public employee, but Lammert reportedly ignored their requests. Via: EAG News | 1real |
LIBERAL “The View” HOSTS MOCK HILLARY’S RESPONSE To Brussels Terror Attack…Admit Trump Was Right [VIDEO] | Hell begins freeze over Did We Ever Think That Donald Trump Would Be The Voice Of Reason? So which candidate makes you feel more safe Hillary or Trump? | 1real |
GOP to Trump: You crossed the line | (CNN) The Republican establishment is making the most of the chance it had long sought to finally say this to Donald Trump: You crossed the line.
Ever since announcing his presidential run last month, the brash, unfiltered billionaire businessman has created headaches for the party. Particularly, his comments equating some Mexican immigrants to rapists and criminals left GOP leaders struggling to appease those Trump had offended without alienating conservative voters attracted to his views on combating illegal immigration.
But on Saturday, Trump seemed to hand party bosses and the pack of 2016 Republican presidential candidates a golden chance to take him down at almost no political cost -- while making themselves look magnanimous. The spark for the latest political firestorm came when the New York real estate billionaire questioned on Saturday whether Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran who languished in a prisoner of war camp for more than five years, was a genuine "war hero because he was captured."
"I like people that weren't captured, OK?" Trump said, drawing gasps and "boos" from a conservative crowd in Iowa.
What transpired within minutes of those inflammatory comments was telling. The GOP pile-on was swift and outspoken. McCain might be a controversial figure with plenty of enemies in Washington but he's universally regarded as a rare example of pure heroism.
The Republican National Committee, which stays neutral in the GOP primary and rarely weighs in on political debates, made the unusual move of publicly condemning Trump's remarks.
'No place in our party'
"There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably," RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said on Twitter.
While the GOP was shy in responding to Trump's tirade against Mexico, it became clear on Monday that the party's hierachy was not going to be bitten by the Donald again.
"Right now what you are seeing is the party taking a dramatic shift this weekend -- taking Donald Trump head on," Mitt Romney's former senior political advisor and CNN contributor Kevin Madden told Wolf Blitzer. "This is their chance to really draw some stark contrasts about the direction of the party. This is an opportunity for a lot of these candidates."
One after another, Trump's fellow GOP presidential candidates were quick to go after the former host of the reality TV show, "The Apprentice."
"Enough with the slanderous attacks," former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tweeted. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain's, said Trump had "crossed a line today that will offend most every one that I know," and predicted that American voters would only have this message to Trump: "You're fired."
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that Trump's shot against a man who refused to take early release from the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison because his comrades could not come too disqualifed the billionaire as a potential commander in chief.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, an Air Force veteran -- who is languishing in the polls and needs every headline he can get -- upped the ante -- calling on Trump to "immediately withdraw" from the 2016 race altogether.
Trump, by alienating sectors of the GOP electorate, is already breaking all the normal political rules, so it's not surprising he didn't choose to return to the high ground. True to form, he decided to intensify the row rather than walk away, or simply apologize, penning an opinion piece in USA Today, that was scathing of the media, the "establishment" and McCain.
"The reality is that John McCain the politician has made America less safe, sent our brave soldiers into wrong-headed foreign adventures, covered up for President Obama with the VA scandal and has spent most of his time in the Senate pushing amnesty. He would rather protect the Iraqi border than Arizona's," Trump wrote.
One Republican candidate chose not to join the torrent of criticism of Trump. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was effusive in praise of McCain, who once called him a "wacko bird" but trod carefully on Trump, possibly hoping to appeal to the billionaire's supporters should he eventually exit the race.
"I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican-on-Republican violence, and so you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump, or bad about John McCain or bad about anyone else," he said. "I'm not going to do it."
Hillary Clinton, enjoying a rare moment out of the political spotlight, also took a chance to have a shot at the "hate (Trump) is spewing" towards Mexicans and stood up for her old Senate buddy McCain.
Even the Obama White House, no friend of McCain, pounced on the opportunity to fan the flames of a controversy that Democrats hope will damage the Republican political brand. Spokesman Josh Earnest praised McCain's "remarkable" service.
The GOP's swift and nearly unanimous criticism of Trump's remarks about McCain was particularly striking in light of how the party dealt with an earlier political row set off by his highly controversial comments -- even if it marked an easy political choice.
In his presidential announcement speech last month, Trump said that some people entering the United States from Mexico were "rapists," "criminals" and "drug dealers." The comments flew in the face of the GOP's desperate need to improve its standing with the increasingly influential demographic of Hispanic voters which are vital in general election swing states like Florida, Nevada and Colorado.
The episode suggests that though candidates like Bush and Rubio know very well the perils of estrangement from the community, they are not yet at ease with the base of their own party, which remains vociferously opposed to any immigration reform that would bring millions of illegal immigrants -- eventually -- into the U.S. fold.
More immediately, there is increasing speculation on whether Trump's broadside against McCain would turn out to be the moment when the billionaire's political bubble bursts -- in a way that would offer some relief to the GOP leadership.
A new ABC/Washington Post National poll on Monday had Trump leading the Republican field on 24% but his number dropped into the single digits in samples taken on Sunday following his McCain comments, albeit in a small sample size.
Madden predicted that Trump's bombast would indeed sooner or later begin to take a toll on his poll numbers.
"It's the beginning of the end -- part of the process. This information is going to start to get to voters," he said. "They are going to see a revelation in his character right now as well as his temperament that is going to lead them to look at other candidates."
While it could be the case that Trump's remarks could narrow what many analysts already think is a virtually non-existent path towards the GOP nomination, that doesn't necessarily equate to an early exit for the reality show star.
For now, the McCain clash seems to leave Trump where he most likes to be -- in the middle of a raging storm of publicity generated by himself about himself, while taking shots at the media and the Republican political establishment. It's the kind of behavior that gave his presidential run a fast start among a certain sector of the Republican electorate in the first place. | 0fake |
Second Avenue Subway’s Arrival Brings Fear That Rents Will Soar - The New York Times | Few cities in the world are as closely linked to their subways as New York City — the vast network helped shape the city and now carries nearly six million people a day. So when the most ambitious expansion of the subway system in half a century opens on Sunday, it will be a transformative moment, promising to alter the future of a large slice of Manhattan. The new Second Avenue subway will provide badly needed relief to one of New York’s most congested transit corridors and is expected to be a boon to the local economy, making restaurants and stores suddenly easier to reach. But even as the city celebrates a line many doubted would ever open, its arrival has prompted fears that rising rents could force out longtime residents and shops — the kind of displacement that has swept through many other parts of an increasingly affluent New York and deepened its inequality. People living near three new stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th Streets could face rent increases as high as $462 per month, according to a report by StreetEasy, a real estate website. Sleek are already popping up above the apartment buildings that have served as first homes for many New Yorkers. One of those is Dina Zingaro, who gravitated to the neighborhood when she moved from New Jersey. She and a roommate pay $2, 400 a month for a apartment on the fifth floor of a building. While the new line will shorten her trip to work, she worries that it could also bring a major rent increase and ultimately push her out of Manhattan. “If it was over $200, that would be tough,” she said. “We’d have to consider moving. ” Once a German enclave where elevated trains ran above Second and Third Avenues, the Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side is now home to millennials looking for a deal, families drawn by good schools and older people with limited budgets. Rowdy bars with beer pong games exist alongside hordes of strollers. On its eastern border sits the verdant but way Carl Schurz Park and Gracie Mansion, the mayoral estate, whose current resident, Bill de Blasio, prefers to use chauffeured cars over the subway. The elevated lines were razed in the 1940s and 1950s, to the delight of many residents who viewed them as noisy eyesores and expected a new subway line to open soon. Instead, the area became a desert, one of the few neighborhoods in Manhattan that the subway did not reach. But this has also made the neighborhood relatively affordable by Manhattan standards. Yorkville’s median rent is about $2, 700 per month, lower than Manhattan’s rate of about $3, 300, according to StreetEasy, and there are clusters of and apartments. A real estate wave seemed forever around the corner as plans for the subway line were delayed again and again. Until now, residents have been forced to trek blocks to the nearest packed subway stops to board No. 4, 5 and 6 trains on Lexington Avenue, the nation’s subway line. The first phase of the new line, which cost about $4. 4 billion, is opening at a critical moment, with subway ridership reaching its highest level since 1948. The flood of riders has led to uncomfortable crowding and increasing train delays, while people who choose to drive or take the bus face intensifying gridlock. Since the subway first opened in Manhattan in 1904 and expanded farther into the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, it has paved the way for development, and it propelled the city’s soaring population in the first half of the 20th century. But in recent decades, the system has largely remained the same size, even as the city’s population of 8. 5 million is the highest ever and continues to climb. The city’s first new subway station in a opened at Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan in 2015, but that was only one stop and the formerly industrial neighborhood was largely a blank slate for developers. The Second Avenue line is a different story, traversing an already dense neighborhood, and the full economic impact is not yet clear. Local businesses are bracing for steep rent increases. Peter Psirakis, the owner of a shoe repair shop on Second Avenue near 70th Street, worries that his rent each month, now more than $6, 000, could rise by thousands of dollars. He would likely have to shut his store when his lease ended in a couple of years. “I’m here 23 years,” he said. “I can’t go to another neighborhood and start a business from the beginning. ” At the same time, though, many restaurants and shops are also eagerly anticipating the return of foot traffic many people avoided the area when construction of the subway line began in 2007. Tunnel blasting rattled buildings, broke windows and produced noise and dust. Local business leaders held a news conference recently on Second Avenue with Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat who represents the area and is a longtime supporter of the project, to praise the anticipated economic stimulus. Even before the first train rolls, the area’s housing market has been heating up. New condos have risen on First and Second Avenues, with sales topping $2 million for a apartment. In the last five years, median rents near Second Avenue have grown by 27 percent to about $2, 520 per month, according to StreetEasy. Many of the same concerns over gentrification could arise as the line is ultimately extended uptown to 125th Street in East Harlem. “Displacement is a real concern,” said Thomas K. Wright, the president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban policy group. “When you increase the values in areas like this, you need to do things to protect affordable housing and retail. ” He said officials should consider a host of policies to keep the neighborhood within reach, including securing affordable housing as part of any zoning changes. A lifelong resident of the neighborhood, Carol McCabe moved to Knickerbocker Plaza on Second Avenue in 1975. Ms. McCabe, 67, who runs a senior center in the complex, is struggling to pay her rising rent of about $3, 000 per month after her husband died, and might eventually have to leave New York. “I’m not so certain about the future,” she said. “I’m worried about my apartment. ” Even Yorkville’s city councilman, Ben Kallos, 35, who grew up in the neighborhood, is weighing how he and his wife can afford to stay in the district. He said there was little he could do to slow rising rents. “Where I have to place much of my focus is on helping tenants stay in their apartment and exercise their rights,” said Mr. Kallos, a Democrat who has also pushed to set a height limit on superscrapers in the neighborhoods he represents. Austin Finan, a spokesman for Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said the administration’s top priority remained protecting affordable housing and building new units. “We pursue that goal in every neighborhood in the city, including on the Upper East Side,” Mr. Finan said. Across the United States, good transit access often leads to higher real estate prices, with home values near rapid transit in Boston, Chicago, . Paul, Phoenix and San Francisco far outpacing other properties during the last recession, according to a report by the American Public Transportation Association. But New York City is a special case, where proximity to the subway is perhaps the most important factor for renters and buyers. Just look at the recent panic in trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn, over the impending shutdown of the L line for more than a year. Still, the Upper East Side is unlikely to become suddenly hip, said Mitchell L. Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University. “The neighborhood is intrinsically boring,” Mr. Moss said. “People don’t live there for excitement. They live there for stability. ” Some predict an influx of shops and more chain stores, even as shuttered storefronts along Second Avenue highlight the places that closed rather than wait out the disruptive construction. Dave Goodside kept the Beach Cafe restaurant open, borrowing money, laying off employees and sometimes working nonstop to remain afloat. A sign in the dining room is a reminder of the tumultuous construction era: “One long whistle: Preparing to blast. ” Mr. Goodside expects his rent will soon rise sharply. “What we talk about all the time,” he said, “is how we can increase business and be ready for that day. ” | 0fake |
null | Put the women in charge. Maybe PEACE will break out.*
*Hillary not included, she’s not really a woman. | 1real |
HOW COLLEGES ARE DESTROYING Free Speech: “Emergency counseling sessions” Offered After “TRUMP” Word Was Written On Sidewalk In Chalk | Terrorism has gripped Europe, America has two Socialist candidates running for President, people who want to kill us are freely flowing into our country, and college students are hyperventilating over chalk drawings with the name of one of the name of one of the most successful business men in America. As if today s college students didn t already face enough horrors, now the poor kids have to deal with the most gruesome microaggression of all: the T-word.Trump.Yes, hatemongers use the name of the Republican presidential front-runner on campus. Emory University students have even seen Trump chalked on sidewalks!The injured kids promptly did the only rational thing: marched on the Georgia school s administrative center, chanting Stop Hate, and You are not listening. Come speak to us, we are in pain. So are we, kids, so are we.The college leaped into action, offering emergency counseling sessions as President James Wagner vowed to track down the heartless graffiti-scrawler.Academia has come to this children who can t bear to share the same ZIP code with anyone who sees the world differently.Via:NYPJim Wagner, the president of the university in Atlanta, met with the protesters and later sent an email to the campus community, explaining, in part, During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.Wagner added that the Freedom of Expression Committee is meeting to address whether the person or people responsible for the chalking were in compliance with Emory s policy. He said that they would debate technical issues, such as whether or not the chalkings were done on appropriate surfaces. However, he believes that the broader concern motivating the protests had to do more with the ideas the chalkings stood for than how they were done. Was it really just a message about a political preference, a candidate preference, or was it a harsher message? he asked. And I will tell you, those who met with me were genuine in their concerns that it was the latter. Ultimately, Wagner said he thinks that Emory s Respect for Open Expression Policy, which states that Emory is committed to an environment where the open expression of ideas and open, vigorous debate and speech are valued, promoted and encouraged, permits people to feel as though they have safety in speaking up and allows administrators to feel comfortable responding to incidents and concerns like this. However, College senior Alex Reibman believes that the proposed administrative response will prove to be counterproductive. I think the best step forward would be for administrators to engage in discussions with the students, he said. They could actually capitalize on this and allow for a better way of freedom of expression. He suggested that administrators consider the possibility of implementing free speech zones at Emory, which would allow people to voice their personal opinions and for others to counter those opinions. Hate speech, whether we like it or not, is a crucial part of free speech, he said.College freshman Amanda Obando disagreed with Reibman s view, saying that it dismissed the personal experiences of many who felt offended by the chalking. My reaction to the chalking was one of fear, she said. I told myself that it was a prank, and that the responsible individual was probably laughing in their room. I told myself that Emory would do something about it. Via: Emory Wheel | 1real |
The judge immigration foes wanted | One thing that is certain about Monday’s ruling by a federal judge in Texas blocking implementation of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration reform — it won’t be the last word.
Nonetheless, the opinion is worth noting for three reasons: first, what it says about the depressing politicization of the federal judiciary; second, and related, what it suggests about the conservative face of judicial activism; third, what its implications may be for the coming showdown on funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
The New York Times report on the ruling contained a jarring phrase, describing its author, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, as “an outspoken critic of the administration on immigration policy.” My instinct was that the reporter had gone too far in that characterization; surely, a federal judge — even a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush — could not fairly be described that way.
Turns out, he can. Hanen sits in Brownsville, Tex., on the border with Mexico, and it can fairly be assumed it was no accident that the 26 states challenging the executive actions sued in that court, where they had a 50/50 chance of having the case heard by Hanen. (The other judge in Brownsville is a Bill Clinton appointee.)
Hanen has a remarkable history of blasting the Department of Homeland Security for what he views as its lax approach to immigration enforcement. In his court, where you stand depends, literally, on where he sits — Hanen’s rulings bristle with frustration over the influx of illegal immigrants at the border and what he views as the feckless governmental policies in dealing with them.
In a 2013 case involving the smuggling of a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador, Hanen went after DHS for reuniting the girl with her undocumented mother, rather than prosecuting the mother for having hired the trafficker. “This court is quite concerned with the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security . . . of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States,” Hanen wrote.
The plaintiffs challenging Obama’s plan “got the judge they wanted and they got the ruling they wanted,” Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration reform group, told me.
As to that ruling, its weakest link is its strained conclusion that Texas, at least, had legal standing to challenge Obama’s actions. Time was, conservatives, and conservative judges, were most reluctant to grant standing, an approach in keeping with their conception of the modest judicial role.
So how did Hanen deal with the federal government’s argument that the states had failed to show the individual injury required to allow them to challenge the executive actions?
It came down — this is not a joke — to driver’s licenses. Texas argued that the expanded class of individuals eligible to remain in the country would be entitled to apply for licenses, and that the $24 fee for obtaining a license did not cover the state’s actual cost. Thus, Hanen found, the states have shown the the program “will directly injure the proprietary interest of their driver’s license programs and cost the states badly needed funds.”
Hanen’s conclusion that he should prevent the immigration actions from going into effect rests on a similarly slender reed. He concluded that an injunction was justified because the states could suffer “irreparable harm” in the form of having to issue driver’s licenses and other benefits.
Seriously, the irreparable harm to Texas is that it spends some money on driver’s licenses? Please, you conservatives who applaud this outcome — not another word about judicial activism.
Finally, because the clock is ticking on funding for the Department of Homeland Security, Hanen’s ruling raises the question of whether it offers a face-saving exit to Republicans seeking to avoid a shutdown or instead will further inflame conservatives.
My answer is: both. Those who rail against presidential usurpation of authority will seize on Hanen’s opinion to assert that they cannot appropriate a dime for the Department of Homeland Security. (No matter that Hanen’s opinion only reached the not-so-sexy topic of whether the administration’s actions complied with the, yawn, Administrative Procedure Act, not whether they overstepped constitutional boundaries.)
The cannier move would be for Senate Republicans to seize on the case as an escape from their untenable corner: The executive actions are under court review, now we can move on with funding essential government services. Smarter? Yes. More likely? Not in the current poisonously partisan environment.
Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook. | 0fake |
Fox News Attacks Obama’s National Cancer Initiative By Claiming Obamacare Won’t Cover It | President Obama gave America a bit of the spirit of the 60 s back when he announced, during his final State of the Union address, his support for a new American moon shot to develop a cure for cancer. It harkened back to the days of John F. Kennedy s We choose to go to the Moon speech he delivered at Rice University in 1962, and Richard Nixon s signing of the National Cancer Act of 1971 where he dedicated federal funds towards working on a cure for the disease.A national goal to cure one of the worst and widespread diseases known to humanity is an incredible undertaking. If it were successful, it would save countless lives, ease untold amounts of suffering, and reduce the colossal expenses we incur by managing the disease every year. But, because Obama suggested it someone had to have a problem with it.For years now, there has been a running joke of If Obama is for it, Fox News hates it. This included such silly notions as drinking enough water every day, to breathing oxygen, and other common-interest items like these. Reality has overwritten satire yet again when Fox News insisted that Obama s national cancer cure initiative was a waste of time because Obamacare won t allow it to happen.One of the objectors was Dr. Marc Siegel, who appeared on Fox and Friends to declare that Obama was the wrong president to cure cancer. It was a strange way to start his argument, but the implication was clear. Some conservatives like Siegel just don t want to see Obama with a win even if it meant we could cure cancer starting tomorrow.Jumping immediately onto the anti-Obamacare bandwagon, Fox hosts started suggesting that the Affordable Care Act inhibits cancer research. This is something that is not proven true. Some trade groups have made the disingenuous leap connecting cost-saving measures to a reduction in research. However, there are other aspects of the ACA that promote more research across the board.Seigel continued on, implying that Barack Obama had not committed substantial funds to cancer research, by citing Richard Nixon directing $100 million towards cancer research during his presidency. Barack Obama has actually directed $264 million towards cancer research as part of a $2 billion raise to the National Institutes of Health.Seigel also claimed that the ACA wouldn t provide enough coverage for treatments developed during a national cancer initiative:Obamacare is narrow networks of doctors, he continued. It doesn t include most of these major medical centers, the cancer institutes. It won t include these treatments that are $100,000 per year. And not only that, as you just said, it stifles innovation.Source: Raw Story Seigel is trying to conflate the coverage of current treatments with cures that have not been invented. It s a bit disingenuous to suggest that a cure that has not actually been developed yet will not be covered by the ACA. Data on which insurance policies cover treatments that have yet to be invented simply do not exist.Seigel s argument about existing treatments does not have merit either. Media Matters had previously pointed out that conservative media had misrepresented the facts in an AP report about narrow health care networks to falsely claim enrollees in ACA exchanges cannot get coverage for treatments at advanced cancer centers. The narrow networks that were used as the basis for the right-wing misinformation was a marketing tactic to provide lower premium options to customers and had virtually nothing to do with the ACA forcing them into that position.Watch the full clip below:It s ridiculous that Fox News is actually fighting back against a national cancer cure initiative, simply because they can t let it go on Obamacare, but that is exactly what is happening. He already won on jobs, national security, ending wars, ensuring marriage equality, providing health insurance to tens of millions and bringing America back into the hearts and minds of the rest of the world. They can t stand the thought of him also being the president that cured cancer as well.featured image: screengrab | 1real |
LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: Chelsea Proves She’s Unelectable With One Simple Tweet | If what we say reflects on how our parents raised us, Bill and Hillary Clinton must be beaming with pride over Chelsea taking shots at the new administration.Sadly, the privileged, former first daughter might have also inherited her parent s lack of knowledge of basic economics.What's #MAGA abt eliminating national service, legal services for poor people, support for the arts & public television? What am I missing? https://t.co/aJgNKgno5V Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) February 18, 2017She seems to be missing quite a lot, and some American s felt the need to point that out.serious question.. who ties your shoes for you ? Honky Tonk Jew (@HonkyTonkJew) February 19, 2017hopefully, they are gone. Americorp is a complete waste of money. FallingDebris (@VolatileAmine) February 18, 2017Chelsea has fallen prey to the idea many liberals embrace, assuming the government s job is to, entertain, educate, train and even employ Americans and this is just not the case. As the saying goes, you[the goverment] have one job; PROTECT!(Source: Twitchy) | 1real |
Janice Crouch, ‘Gospel of Prosperity’ Disciple, Dies at 78 - The New York Times | Janice Crouch, who founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network with her husband, Paul, and preached a “gospel of prosperity” with him on TBN programs, reaching millions of viewers around the world, died on Tuesday. She was 78. Her death was confirmed in a family statement on TBN’s website. The network said she had been hospitalized on May 25 after a stroke, but gave no other details. At her death, the network and members of her family were fighting in court over multiple lawsuits, including one involving an accusation of rape and a and another claiming financial improprieties. Mrs. Crouch was a convivial and colorful presence on the air, typically appearing in a bouffant frosted pink or champagne. Speaking with a singsong lilt, she referred to herself as Mama as she delivered an uplifting version of Scripture that included personal encounters with the divine and linked spirituality to material success. A donation to their church, the Crouches said, would be repaid with divinely ordained riches. Mrs. Crouch and her husband were the longtime hosts of TBN’s talk show “Praise the Lord. ” She was also TBN’s vice president and director of network programming, helping to develop many of its popular shows. The Crouches started their network as a single station, now called 40, in Santa Ana, Calif. in 1973 with the help of the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who went on to found their own hugely popular televised ministry in South Carolina. In time, Mr. Crouch said, a vision inspired him to invest in satellite distribution, which became the foundation of TBN’s global broadcasting empire. TBN, which calls itself the world’s most watched religious broadcaster, now has programming 24 hours a day, providing Bible study, religious movies and soap operas, and Christian rock videos. Evangelists like Pat Robertson, Billy Graham and Robert H. Schuller have appeared on the network. The network says its shows are translated into many languages and appear on more than 80 satellite channels and more than 5, 000 television stations. TBN’s parent company listed $799, 244, 556 in total assets and received $52, 905, 172 in contributions and grants in its tax filings for 2014, the most recent year available. Twice a year, the Crouches held “ ” drives in which they appealed for donations to keep programs like “Praise the Lord” on the air. The Crouches were criticized for using those donations to finance a luxurious lifestyle, including the use of private jets. The family was reported to have multiple homes, among them mansions in Newport Beach, Calif. In 2007, TBN purchased Holy Land Experience, a religious theme park in Orlando, Fla. for $37 million. Mrs. Crouch became Holy Land’s president and creative director and began a major remodeling of the park, renting adjacent rooms in a luxury hotel for nearly two years. One was used to house clothing and her two Maltese dogs, which otherwise occupied a motor home. The family controversies made headlines in 2004, when The Los Angeles Times reported that Mr. Crouch had paid a former employee, Enoch Lonnie Ford, $425, 000 in 1998 after Mr. Ford threatened to sue TBN for unjustly firing him. As part of the settlement, the newspaper said, Mr. Ford agreed not to publicize his claim that he had had a sexual encounter with Mr. Crouch. But Mr. Ford later threatened to publish a manuscript that discussed the matter. Mr. Crouch denied Mr. Ford’s claims, and the case was settled by a private arbitrator. In 2012, The Orange County Register reported that a granddaughter, Carra Crouch, had sued the network that year, alleging that she was raped by a TBN employee in 2006, when she was 13, and that the Crouch family had covered up the assault. The suit contended that when Carra Crouch told her grandmother about the assault, Mrs. Crouch “became furious” and screamed at her granddaughter, saying, “It is your fault. ” That suit has not yet been resolved, according to documents in Orange County Superior Court. In another lawsuit filed around the same time, another granddaughter, Brittany Koper, who was TBN’s finance director, accused the network of misusing donated money. Ms. Koper and her husband, Michael, were fired and accused by the network of stealing $1. 3 million. TBN has since filed multiple suits against the Kopers. Paul Crouch Jr. Mrs. Crouch’s son and Ms. Koper’s father, was forced off TBN’s staff and quit its board because of the acrimony. Janice Wendell Bethany was born in New Brockton, Ala. on March 14, 1938. She grew up in Columbus, Ga. as a pastor’s daughter raised in the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. She graduated from high school and attended Evangel College (now Evangel University) in Springfield, Mo. before she met Paul Crouch in 1956. They married a year later and began to preach. Mr. Crouch also worked in radio and television, and in 1965, they moved to California to pursue their career in religious television. Mr. Crouch died in 2013. Mrs. Crouch is survived by Paul Jr. and another son, Matthew, who is TBN’s chairman a sister, Dorothy Casoria several grandchildren and a . | 0fake |
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