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Gov. Cuomo Defends Not Endorsing Mayor de Blasio…Speaks Up On ‘Offensive Statues’ Of Christopher Columbus | NY Governor Andrew Cuomo made two shocking announcements regarding the Christopher Columbus Statues and about his decision not to endorse NY Mayor de Blasio.During an appearance at the West Indian Day Parade on Monday, Gov. Cuomo said statues of the famous Italian explorer should remain in the public square: The Christopher Columbus statue is really about honoring Italian Americans. I for one for obvious reasons happen to believe in the Italian-American heritage. I believe in the contribution Italian-Americans have made, just as I believe in celebrating the Caribbean and the Israel day parade. NO ENDORSEMENT? A BATTLE ROYAL BETWEEN TWO DEM HEAVYWEIGHTSGov. Andrew Cuomo said he isn t endorsing Mayor Bill de Blasio for re-election because he lives in Westchester. I don t vote in the primary election. I m a Westchester resident, he said. I m not voting in this election, so I don t have any primary endorsements at this time. The Democratic primary is Sept. 12, and de Blasio is heavily favored to win. The mayor endorsed Cuomo months before the Democratic primary in 2014.Cuomo s non-endorsement of de Blasio is just the latest example of sniping between the two Democratic Party power brokers. We didn t ask for his support, said de Blasio campaign spokeswoman Monica Klein. A FIRESTORM OF CRITICISM If this doesn t sink the mayor s reelection efforts, we don t know what will! When de Blasio announced he would form a committee of people who would decide which statues are offensive then take them down, we knew it was going to be a rough go for de Blasio. You don t tell the Italian community to take down Christopher Columbus statues! Cuomo said it best when he finally came out with a statement in support of keeping the statues: The Italian American contribution and the Italian American culture is a big part if what makes New York, New York, Cuomo said.There have been several protests regarding this move by de Blasio so he s now backtracking on his decision:Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito have come under a firestorm of criticism for mulling the removal of a Christopher Columbus statues including the 76-foot structure in Columbus Square as part of a review of offensive monuments. The mayor has backtracked following the outcry. There s no plan to remove the Columbus statue, said de Blasio spokesman Eric Phillips.While the Italian explorer is revered for discovering the New World, Columbus detractors said he mistreated and enslaved native Caribbean populations and doesn t deserve to be extolled.CUOMO NEEDED TO FIRST PUT HIS WET FINGER INTO THE WIND TO SEE HOW OPINION WAS GOINGIt s the first time Cuomo has waded in on the controversy after declining comment last week. The sniping has happened before between the aides of both camps:De Blasio, Cuomo aides engage in nasty Twitter feudREAD MORE: NYP | 1real |
State Supreme Court Rules Mississippi Judge Can Call Herself ’JudgeCutie’ - Breitbart | The Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled that a county court judge can call herself by the nickname “JudgeCutie” in one of the fastest decisions the court has made in years. [After justices had heard arguments for two days, the court ruled to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the state Commission on Judicial Performance against Gay that stated she was using her profession as a judge with her online presence as a means of promoting herself as a musical performer and motivational speaker, the Associated Press reported. The complaint stated that ’s online profile contained her opinions about what she thought of her profession as a Forrest County justice court judge, such as wearing her judge’s robe in a photo that graced the cover of a book about all her social media posts. ’s attorney, Oliver Diaz, argued before the Mississippi State Supreme Court that other judges used names that others might not consider as dignified, such as Judge Noah “Soggy” Sweat. Sweat served as a circuit court judge from 1966 to 1974. Diaz said the commission unfairly targeted her client because she was a woman. “It was a frivolous filing,” Diaz said of the complaint. Court documents say “JudgeCutie” was inspired by the TV judge “Judge Judy. ” Justices said did not violate the Mississippi Code of Judicial Conduct, the Daily Mail reported. Justice court judges in the state of Mississippi are elected to their positions and work on a basis. These judges preside over cases in small claims court of $3, 500 or less, misdemeanor criminal cases, and traffic violations that take place outside city boundaries. | 0fake |
ANYONE WHO Still Supports Hillary After They See This Video Should Forfeit Their Right To Vote | Hillary is without a doubt, the worst and most despicable liar to ever run for the office of President Of The United States Hillary is a sociopathic liar: A sociopath is typically defined as someone who lies incessantly to get their way and does so with little concern for others. A sociopath is often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused it is done to get one s way). Sociopaths have little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others.https://twitter.com/HlLLARYCLINT0N/status/777660956088406017 | 1real |
U.S. pledges 'strong response' in event of another North Korean nuclear test | TOKYO (Reuters) - The United States will respond strongly in the case of a further North Korean nuclear test, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, days after the North’s failure to launch what the United States believes was an intermediate-range ballistic missile. North Korea conducted a fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the next month, both in contravention of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Expanded U.N. sanctions aimed at starving North Korea of funds for its nuclear weapons program were approved in a unanimous Security Council vote in early March on a resolution drafted by the United States and China. Blinken, who is meeting senior Japanese government officials in Tokyo, told reporters North Korea would be digging itself deeper into a hole if it pursued further provocations. “There will be additional strong response in case of another (North Korean) nuclear test,” Blinken said, adding that such actions by North Korea were “unacceptable”. Blinken said the United States would consider “a number of possibilities” while adding that it was “premature” to be specific. Some experts expect North Korea to conduct its fifth nuclear test in the near future, possibly before its party congress in early May, following the embarrassing missile failure on Friday. | 0fake |
A Gut Makeover for the New Year - The New York Times | If you’re making resolutions for a healthier new year, consider a gut makeover. Refashioning the community of bacteria and other microbes living in your intestinal tract, collectively known as the gut microbiome, could be a good investment in your health. Trillions of microbial cells inhabit the human body, outnumbering human cells by 10 to one according to some estimates, and growing evidence suggests that the rich array of intestinal microbiota helps us process nutrients in the foods we eat, bolsters the immune system and does all sorts of odd jobs that promote sound health. A diminished microbial ecosystem, on the other hand, is believed to have consequences that extend far beyond the intestinal tract, affecting everything from allergies and inflammation, metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity, even mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Much of the composition of the microbiome is established early in life, shaped by forces like your genetics and whether you were or . Microbial diversity may be further undermined by the typical American diet, rich in sugar, meats and processed foods. But a new study in mice and people adds to evidence that suggests you can take steps to enrich your gut microbiota. Changing your diet to one containing a variety of foods, the new research suggests, may be crucial to achieving a healthier microbiome. Altering your microbiome, however, may not be easy, and nobody knows how long it might take. That’s because the ecosystem already established in your gut determines how it absorbs and processes nutrients. So if the microbial community in your gut has been shaped by a daily diet of cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizza, for example, it won’t respond as quickly to a healthy diet as a gut shaped by vegetables and fruits that has more varied microbiota to begin with. “The nutritional value of food is influenced in part by the microbial community that encounters that food,” said Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, the senior author of the new paper and director of the Center for Genome Science and Systems Biology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Nutritional components of a healthy diet have to be viewed from “the inside out,” he said, “not just the outside in. ” One of the questions the study set out to answer was how individuals with different diets respond when they try to improve their eating habits. The scientists harvested gut bacteria from humans, transplanted them into mice bred under sterile conditions, and then fed the mice either or diets. The scientists then analyzed changes in the mice’s microbial communities. Of interest, the scientists harvested the gut bacteria from people who followed sharply different diets. One group ate a fairly typical American diet, consuming about 3, 000 calories a day, high in animal proteins with few fruits and vegetables. Some of their favorite foods were processed cheese, pepperoni and lunch meats. The other group consisted of people who were devotees of calorie restriction. They ate less than 1, 800 calories a day and had meticulously tracked what they ate for at least two years, sticking to a mostly diet and consuming far less animal protein than the other group, a third fewer carbohydrates and only half the fat. This group, the researchers found, had a far richer and more diverse microbial community in the gut than those eating a typical American diet. They also carried several strains of “good” bacteria, known to promote health, that are unique to their diet. “Their choices as adults dramatically influenced their gut community,” said Nicholas W. Griffin of Washington University, the paper’s lead author. The study, published in Cell Host Microbe, is not the first to report findings suggesting dietary shifts can induce persistent changes in a gut microbial community, said Dr. David A. Relman, a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, who was not involved in the current research. He noted that other studies had found even more profound effects. After the human microbiota was transplanted into the mice, the mice got to eat either like typical Americans or like the calorie restrictors. Mice that had a microbiota conditioned by the typical American diet had a weaker response to the diet. Their microbial communities didn’t increase and diversify as much. “They all responded in a predictable direction, but with not as great a magnitude,” said Dr. Griffin. Another aspect of the study suggests the company you keep may also enrich your gut microbiota — at least in mice. At first the animals were kept in separate cages. Then, when they were housed together, the microbes from the communities conditioned by plant diets made their way into the microbiome. It’s not clear how that translates to humans: Mice eat one another’s droppings when they live together, so they easily share the bacterial wealth. Still, it’s possible humans have other ways of sharing bacteria, Dr. Griffin said. “We know from previous work and other studies that spouses who live together will develop microbial communities that are similar to each other,” he said. Perhaps the best way to cultivate a healthier microbiome is to eat more fiber by consuming more fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and nuts or seeds, said Meghan Jardine, a registered dietitian who was not involved in the current study but has published articles on promoting a healthy microbiota. (She is also affiliated with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which recommends a diet.) She urges people to aim for 40 to 50 grams of fiber daily, well above levels recommended by most dietary guidelines. “When you look at populations that eat real food that’s high in fiber, and more foods, you’re going to see they have a more robust microbiota, with more genetic diversity, healthier species and fewer pathogenic bacteria living in the gut,” she said. | 0fake |
Trump seen replacing Yellen at Fed with NEC's Cohn: Politico | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is increasingly unlikely to nominate Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen next year for a second term, and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn is the leading candidate to succeed her, Politico reported on Tuesday, citing four people close to the process. Politico said sources in the White House, the Treasury Department and on Capitol Hill said that if Cohn decides he wants the job, he is likely to get it. “It’s Gary’s if he wants it, and I think he wants it,” Politico quoted one Republican whom it said was close to the selection process as saying. A few Senate Republicans may express reservations about Cohn but he would probably receive widespread support, a senior congressional Republican aide said, according to Politico. In response to a query from Reuters, White House spokeswoman Natalie Strom said: “Gary is focused on his responsibilities at the NEC.” Cohn, a Democrat and former Goldman Sachs president, did not work on Trump’s campaign and only got to know him after the November election. Yellen took over from Ben Bernanke as Fed chair in February 2014 with the U.S. economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis still on shaky ground. She has made no secret she puts a priority on growth in jobs and wages and a broad recovery in U.S. household wealth. Yellen begins two days of congressional testimony on Wednesday on the Fed’s semi-annual report on the state of the U.S. economy. Under her leadership the Fed has pared the massive stimulus it put in place to counteract the 2007-2009 financial crisis and begun raising interest rates. Later this year Yellen expects to begin trimming the Fed’s $4.5 trillion balance sheet in a gradual and predictable manner. “I do think the Fed’s trying to set a course toward normalization that won’t be knocked out by a new Fed chair,” said Eric Stein, co-director of global income at Eaton Vance. Still, Cohn would be a very different kind of leader than Yellen or her immediate predecessor, Ben Bernanke, both of whom hold doctorates in economics. Cohn began his career at Goldman as a commodities trader in 1990. “He has more knowledge of financial markets than almost any Fed chair would have and less of a monetary policy background,” Stein said. During last year’s election campaign, Trump accused Yellen of accepting orders from then-President Barack Obama to keep interest rates low for political reasons, and he said he would replace her as Fed chair because she is not a Republican Party member. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in April, Trump said Yellen was “not toast” and that he respected her. A Fed spokeswoman had no comment on the Politico story. Yellen has said she plans to serve out her full four-year term as chair, which runs through Feb. 3. Cohn would join several other Goldman alumni around the Fed policymaking table, including New York Fed President William Dudley, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari and Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan. | 0fake |
California Has 6 of Top 10 Worst Cities for Smog in America - Breitbart | The American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” report named 6 California cities among the top 10 worst for smog in the United States. [The Lung Association report card highlighted continued improvement in air quality during 2016. But about 166 million, or 52. 1 percent, of Americans are still at risk from the health effects of air pollution, including higher levels of lung cancer, asthma attacks, cardiovascular damage, and developmental and reproductive harm. The Lung Association has utilized data averages from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency to calculate its “State of the Air. ” This year’s 17th annual report used 2012, 2013 and 2014 ozone data from America’s 228 major cities in the United States to calculate the top ten “Most Cities:: The good news from the “State of the Air” report is that most U. S. cities improved their ozone levels. Although Los Angeles dropped its average number of unhealthy days to its lowest level ever recorded, the still suffers the most ozone pollution in the nation. Another five U. S. cities with historically high ozone levels experienced their lowest number of unhealthy ozone days on average since the report began in 2000, including: Visalia — Porterfield — Hanford, CA Sacramento, CA Dallas — Fort Worth, TX El Centro, CA and Houston, TX. Four other California cities also experienced their lowest number of unhealthy ozone days, including: Bakersfield, CA Fresno — Madera, CA and Modesto — Merced, CA. San Diego had more days on average in this report compared to the 2015 report. Harold P. Wimmer, President and CEO of the American Lung Association commented: Thanks to cleaner power plants and cleaner vehicles, we see a continued reduction of ozone and particle pollution in the 2016 ‘State of the Air’ report. However, climate change has increased the challenges to protecting public health. … There are still nearly 20 million people in the United States that live with unhealthful levels of all three measures of air pollution the report tracks: ozone, and particle pollution. | 0fake |
The Worst Takes Of 2016 Election: An Unforgiving Retrospective | At Shadowproof, we believe part of what made the 2016 Presidential Election so agonizing was the endless stream of punditry we were inundated with on a daily basis. Sometimes it masqueraded as valuable analysis and critical journalism. Most often, these pieces were clearly, as author Aldous Huxley might say, excruciating orgasms of self-assertion.
Shadowproof’s staff collaborated on this collection of the worst punditry written during the campaign. Many of these individuals deserve the label of hack. They should be forever remembered for compounding the trauma of this election.
Additionally, we know we probably missed some gems that deserve recognition. We would like our readers to submit what they consider to be the worst of the worst, and on Thursday, November 10, we will publish a collection nominated by our readers. Share your picks in the comment section below or send us an email .
DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY Jonathan Chait —”Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, And Marxism Has Always Failed” We won’t see a red tide sweep the United States any time soon, but that hasn’t kept liberal writers from trying, and failing, to malign leftists. The most energized pundit was Jonathan Chait, writer for New York Magazine. In this piece championing liberalism , Chait took part in what’s become a formulaic liberal undertaking: warning of the specter of Marxism or any leftist ideology imbued with even the faintest hint of red.
Arguing liberalism “works” not only means ignoring its past and present failures, but it also speaks to a deep-seated fear among the liberal commentariat. They are afraid a genuine leftist ideology is enticing to the young and disillusioned. Even Bernie Sanders, as benign and unthreatening as he was, faced a torrent of diatribes for advocating some of the most genial socialist policies, including the right to a “living wage.” Someday, there will be an independent socialist movement, and it will be truly vindicating. (Roqayah Chamseddine)
Further Reading: “ Oh, Good, It’s 2016 And We’re Arguing Whether Marxism Works “
Courtney Enlow —”An All-Caps Explosion of Feelings Regarding the Liberal Backlash Against Hillary Clinton” Bourgeois feminists invested in the Clinton brand inundated readers with banal fan-fiction dressed up as politics. One of the most superficial justifications for a Hillary Clinton presidency came from one Courtney Enlow who penned an “all-caps explosion of feelings” for the former Secretary of State. Enlow spends the entire body of her article yelling because “Hillary cannot yell”, so on her behalf she etches out a stream of incoherent complaints in all caps.
“Fuck everything, I’m with her,” Enlow concluded. It might as well be the mantra of every liberal supporter of Clinton. Her article not only neglects to address a single policy issue but it also—intentionally or otherwise—paints all detractors as misogynists, unwilling to pass the torch to a woman, and white, thereby erasing countless people of color who condemned Clinton for actions she’s taken, and the policies she’s supported throughout her political career. This shallow examination of Clinton as a beer buddy instead of a politician with a direct hand in the material consequences, which impacted innumerable communities, is now normal. This is the way so many dissect political candidates and a preview of what is in store for Americans after Clinton’s inauguration. (Roqayah Chamseddine)
Further Reading: “ Hillary Clinton vs. Herself ” by Rebecca Traister
Max Fisher — “Is Hillary Clinton really the foreign policy super-hawk she is portrayed to be?” Clinton has a reputation as a hawk. It won her praise during the 2016 election from neoconservatives, who ardently supported President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. She supports a no-fly zone in Syria. She was a fierce advocate for regime change against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya after meeting with Westernized Libyan exiles and played a key role in pushing the U.S. government to war. She is a big believer in targeted assassinations with drones. She voted for the Iraq War when she was a senator. Nevertheless, Fisher wrote a piece during the primary intended to undermine all the scrutiny of her foreign policy record.
It was a response to the New York Times profile by Mark Landler on how she became a hawk. Fisher made several distinctions without a difference, suggesting she is “hawkish on failed states, civil wars, and humanitarian crises; dovish toward adversarial or hostile states.” He penned this marvelous sentence after summarizing her record supporting interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria: “That is just a large number of wars or military interventions, and it’s easy to see why Clinton has been judged as hawkish as a result,” as if the wars just happened to Clinton like bad bouts of the flu and there’s nothing much she could do about it. Then, Fisher reasoned it is hard to know what a president will do in terms of foreign policy because it is beyond American control. Except, what Fisher does not get is that America is a massive empire, and the U.S. most certainly has the ability to determine whether pouring gasoline on the fire is the right thing to do. (Kevin Gosztola)
Paul Krugman – “Plutocrats and Prejudice” Casting Sanders as myopic and money-obsessed was a convenient way for pundits to water down his actual platform, which included demands for universal healthcare and an end to mass incarceration. However, Krugman’s argument went beyond that. It joined the trend of weaponizing identity politics and cast Clinton as the candidate, who understood minority communities better even though she once called black people “super predators.”
Krugman claimed Sanders believes “money is the root of all evil,” while Clinton believes “money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn’t the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right.“ It helped to deflect conversation about Clinton’s relationships with Wall Street elites or her support for welfare reform that ravaged communities of color. It also enabled Clinton to respond to critiques of President Barack Obama with suggestions that an angry old white man was trying to hijack the Democratic Party. (Brian Sonenstein)
Further Reading: “ The Pastrami Principle “
Amanda Marcotte – “Let’s storm the Sander’s he-man women-haters club: Hillary plays the gender card, while Bernie fans rage” It is possible no one put in as much effort to simplify the Democratic Primary contest as a battle of the sexes as Salon’s Marcotte . In the early months of the primary, she painted Sanders supporters as an all white and male obstacle to history, and Sanders himself as their belligerent leader intent on denying American women their dream of a potent symbol in the White House.
Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record relished the kind of work Marcotte did because it effectively erased the thousands of young women who had legitimate policy disagreements with Clinton. In this particular piece, she put forth “evidence” of the gender dynamic by publishing two photos she took of a rally in Iowa. One showed a crowd full of hopeful women of all ages she said were united by their love of Katy Perry and adorned with “Glitter, unicorns, and Disney princess memorabilia.” Another showed the scraggly crowd of “cantankerous young men” Sanders attracted. Again, identity politics cleverly distracted from a necessary conversation on the issues and records of the two presidential candidates. (Brian Sonenstein)
Further Reading: “ Why I’m supporting Clinton over Sanders: Liberals don’t need a savior but someone who can actually get things done in Washington “
Joy Reid – “Come on, Bernie, Time to Level With Your Dreamers” Like many careerist grifters, Reid supported Hillary Clinton in the primary and tried to undermine any populist progressive movement in the Democratic Party. This particular column was so trollish it needed to be read by gaslight.
Claiming Sanders supporters were part of an “angry movement” and out of their senses, Reid told Sanders in May, before many primaries occurred, he needed to concede the race and tell his supporters to stop living in an “alternate reality.” And she further distinguished herself by trying to manipulate Sanders voters into believing their concerns were products of racism and sexism, even though Sanders typically won all younger voters, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender. (Dan Wright)
Michael Tomasky – “Get Of My Lawn, Bernie Kids! Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton” In the film, “Gran Torino,” Clint Eastwood shouts at kids to get off his lawn because he struggles with diversity and America as a more inclusive society. For Tomasky, the “threat” to his “lawn” was different. It is millennials, who possess an ambitious vision for a better and just world that goes beyond the confines of establishment politics; you know, young people who seek to unravel the messes created and amplified by the failures of Tomasky’s generation.
For this column, Tomasky, a 56 year-old white man with a very nice home in suburban Washington, D.C., that could be found on Zillow, haplessly wielded the politics of privilege. It was written in first person and teemed with the kind of self-absorbed narcissism, which was a hallmark of the vote scolding genre of writing so many of us were subjected to during the election. After he was challenged by Sanders supporters, Tomasky copped out and declared, “I haven’t the slightest idea. But none of you Sanders supporters has the slightest idea of what the future holds either.” He went on to mock supporters for being assertive, even though it was his performance that provoked thousands of supporters into understandable outrage. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ An Ode To My Berniebro Trolls “
GENERAL ELECTION Jonathan Chait — “Jill Stein Explains Her Plan To Stop Trump By Electing Him President” A small percentage of U.S. citizens, who voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, had their votes counted as, can you guess? Votes for Jill Stein. However, there is a genre of liberal punditry that goes back more than a decade. It lectures and berates every citizen, who would dare to vote for a third-party candidate. It says they help Republicans and seeks to blame them for wars, poverty, famine, armageddon—just about anything bad that occurred after voters dared to support another choice than one of the two candidates the capitalist system foisted upon them.
Chait is magnificent at writing these types of asinine columns. Through spectacular misdirection, he maintained Stein believed Clinton will lead to fascism. He ignored the kernel of Stein’s remarks that sparked this spittle; in particular, how failure to improve the material conditions of lower and working class Americans fuels right-wing extremism. If anyone needs to demonstrate why our choices get progressively worse each election, they can point to columnists like Chait, who foster this kind of half-baked discourse. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ Ralph Nader Still Refuses To Admit He Elected Bush ”
Jamie Kirchick – “Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left” Few screeds backfired on their authors as marvelously as this piece. None of the individuals smeared in the piece actually ever expressed support for Trump. In fact, each of them had records, where they denounced him before Kirchick accused them of being Trump Lovers. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent reacted , “Area man willfully confuses refusal to unthinkingly parrot all criticism of Trump with ‘admiration’ of him.” On top of that, it brought further controversy to The Daily Beast after it published a story by a straight writer who was outing Olympians as gay. (That egregious piece was removed.)
Kirchick’s piece was one of the earlier articulations of the argument that the Kremlin wants Trump to be U.S. president, which now saturates media. He reasoned leftists critical of Clinton “validated” Trump and so, therefore, they were feeding into the agenda of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. It seems rather boring and uninspired at this point. He and other neoconservatives had it rough during the election because they were no longer relevant, and in order to be relevant, they had to openly identify with the Clinton campaign. Maybe, there’s a role for Kirchick in the pundit class under a Clinton presidency. He regularly contributed to the Los Angeles Times over the past months. Or maybe this cretinous drool monger now carries too much of a risk of damaging a media organization’s reputation that editors will steer clear of him. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ If Trump wins, a coup isn’t impossible here in the U.S. “
Eli Lake – “Now Clinton Knows How Scooter Libby Felt” The failed presidency of George W. Bush left many neoconservatives scrambling to hold onto power and relevance, but neocons like Lake believe they have found the sunny-side up around the Clinton campaign. With Clinton and friends celebrating the support of Iraq war cheerleaders Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and David Frum, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to beat the yoke of the old regime off former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and convicted felon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
In his piece, Lake celebrated Libby’s reinstatement to the D.C. Bar and feebly tries to compare Clinton’s alleged mistreatment by the FBI with Libby’s, noting a tangential connection to FBI Director James Comey. Lake claimed Libby was “tried and convicted in the press before the trial” (and also convicted after the trial). It amounted to a preview of how we can expect neocon pundits to behave under a Clinton presidency. (Dan Wright)
Matt Yglesias — “Against Transparency” There are hundreds of journalists against transparency, some who are in the closet and some who are very public about their views. Concerned about how the Clinton campaign struggled with coverage of the former secretary of state’s emails, Yglesias fully outed himself and advocated for increased restriction on the types of government records that can be released to journalists and the public. He argued emails and other electronic records produced with “conversational” communication tools should not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Yglesias displayed a severe misunderstanding of FOIA and neglected to mention the existence of key privacy exemptions and “deliberative process privilege.” These are supposed to protect officials so they can have frank conversations that will most likely remain secret. Beyond that, Yglesias’s column represented the growing disdain against information that exists among liberal pundits, who seem to believe if these things are secret the right-wing echo chamber will not be able to make Clinton’s life miserable. Yet, of course, organizations in this echo chamber will always find something to spin against Clinton. Yglesias knows this, and that made his call to restrict a major tool for government accountability even more dumb. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ The lesson of Hillary’s secret speeches is she’s exactly who we already knew she was ”
The post The Worst Takes Of 2016 Election: An Unforgiving Retrospective appeared first on Shadowproof .
| 1real |
How Clinton's Email Controversy Is Affecting Her Campaign | With just 59 days remaining until Election Day, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is still facing questions - and attacks - over her email controversy.
Her Republican opponent Donald Trump took shots at her over the issue Thursday while speaking in Cleveland.
"Remember, Hillary Clinton was emailing about the drone program among many other extremely sensitive matters. This is yet more evidence that Clinton is unfit to be your commander in chief," the business mogul charged.
Clinton has claimed that she didn't send or receive any email with classified marking, but a new report from Fox News says that a Clinton email had classified markings on virtually every paragraph.
Meanwhile, Clinton talked freely about her faith to the National Baptist Convention, the oldest African-American Baptist denomination.
"Sometimes people ask me, are you a praying person? And I tell them, 'If I wasn't one before, one week living in the White House or on the campaign trail would've turned me into a praying person," she said in Kansas City, Missouri, Thursday,
Clinton's lead over Trump has been dropping in the polls in recent days. But the race will, as always, come down to the Electoral College, especially in the swing states -- and the polls show the race getting tighter in four of the key states.
In a new Quinnipiac poll that also includes the two independent candidates, Trump has a slight lead in Ohio, but is tied with Clinton in Florida. The former secretary of state, however, holds slim leads in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
While Clinton still appears to be ahead in the Electoral College, the campaign is far from over.
Both candidates are likely to focus the last two months of the campaign on the battleground states, where the race will almost certainly be decided. | 0fake |
Prosecutors Say Baltimore Police Mishandled Freddie Gray Case - The New York Times | BALTIMORE — After a string of defeats, the prosecutors who were unable to win convictions of police officers in the death of Freddie Gray defended themselves on Thursday and sharply accused the city’s Police Department of undermining them. At a news conference the day after their boss, Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, announced she was dropping charges against the three officers who still awaited trial, the lead prosecutors — both seasoned lawyers — said the police had failed to serve search warrants for the officers’ personal cellphones. The lawyers also echoed a charge made in court that a detective assigned to the case was sabotaging it. They disputed a contention by critics that they rushed to bring charges, and said they never doubted their theory of the case — or whether they had the evidence to win. “There was sufficient evidence for a rational juror to convict,” Michael Schatzow, deputy chief state’s attorney, told reporters crowded into a conference room in Ms. Mosby’s downtown suite. “We believed in these cases, and we were prepared to fight very hard for these cases. ” The appearance by Mr. Schatzow and Janice Bledsoe, a deputy state’s attorney, was the first time the prosecutors — who like all the lawyers, defendants and witnesses had been subject to a strict rule of silence imposed by the judge — spoke publicly, outside the courtroom, about a case that has torn apart this city and drawn national attention. The two appeared worn out and at times exasperated — “When it comes to frustration, I plead guilty,” Mr. Schatzow said — but offered a remarkable look into their thinking, and the potential conflicts between the police and prosecutors who usually work together. It is “extraordinarily unusual” for prosecutors to publicly criticize the police, said David Jaros, a law professor at the University of Baltimore. He said the trials highlighted the need — as Ms. Mosby suggested at her news conference on Wednesday — for independent investigators and prosecutors to handle police misconduct cases. “There is something problematic,” Mr. Jaros said, “when police officers are asked to investigate themselves and when local prosecutors are involved in these highly politicized, prosecutions. ” The Police Department has stood by its investigation. In a statement released Wednesday, Commissioner Kevin Davis said “over 30 ethical, experienced and talented detectives worked tirelessly to uncover facts” in the case. A department spokesman said Thursday that the police would “not engage in public banter with our criminal justice partners. ” Mr. Gray, a black man, was arrested on April 12, 2015, in the blighted West Baltimore neighborhood where he grew up. He sustained a fatal spinal cord injury and died a week later — one of a string of deaths around the country of black men at the hands of the police that prompted national outcry, and riots here. On May 1, with National Guard troops on patrol, Ms. Mosby announced that she was bringing criminal charges against six officers. Prosecutors argued that Mr. Gray was improperly arrested, and that he sustained the fatal injury during a ride in a police van, in part because officers failed to put a seatbelt on him and drove the van dangerously. But the first trial ended in a hung jury, and three more ended in acquittals issued by Judge Barry G. Williams of the Baltimore City Circuit Court, prompting the prosecution team to conclude they could not win convictions before him. In Maryland, defendants may choose whether to have a trial by judge or jury. Mr. Schatzow said prosecutors began investigating the circumstances around Mr. Gray’s injury in the days after it happened, and said it was not scattershot or rushed, adding, “I don’t think we felt that there was material that we overlooked. ” Legal experts have noted that timeline fell short of what is typical for federal inquiries, which last months if not years. But the prosecutors laid blame on the police, not themselves. Mr. Schatzow said the lead police detective involved in the inquiry, Dawnyell Taylor, “was doing things without notifying us, and doing things that were counter to what a primary detective should be doing,” and was removed from the case as a result of his complaints. But in court, she denied that she had been removed from the case. And Ms. Bledsoe said that while the police tried to get personal cellphones of the six officers, which might have shown their communications during and after the episode, the department “did not execute those warrants in the correct amount of time, and they expired. ” One of the biggest outstanding questions is what, precisely, happened to Mr. Gray. Some residents here, as well as neurologists who have watched the case from afar, have questioned whether he was injured not in the van, but during the initial arrest, when he was pinned to a sidewalk — a scene captured on video that was widely replayed. “Everybody who saw that acknowledged that he couldn’t use his legs properly,” said Mary Anne Whelan, a retired neurologist in Cooperstown, N. Y. who was one of several doctors who in interviews have questioned the narrative about Mr. Gray’s injury. “Somehow or other it’s gotten to be accepted that it happened in the van, but that’s wrong. ” But prosecutors said that video recordings of the arrest, which they said showed Mr. Gray raising his chin off the pavement and later standing on the back bumper of the police van, at least partly supporting his own weight, indicated that he had not yet sustained a paralyzing injury. In the end, Mr. Schatzow said, Ms. Mosby “correctly determined” that while there may have been enough evidence to persuade jurors, they would never convince Judge Williams that the officers had committed a crime — despite the judge’s history as a lawyer who once prosecuted police misconduct for the Justice Department. “We had to face the reality,” he said, “that defendants would select judge trials, and that this judge would try the cases. ” | 0fake |
WATCH: Sean Spicer Spits On Coretta Scott King’s Grave In Defense Of Jeff Sessions | Donald Trump s White House mouthpiece just desecrated an American civil rights icon to defend a racist.Back in 1986, Coretta Scott King wrote a letter in opposition to Ronald Reagan s nomination of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. The widow of Martin Luther King Jr. condemned Sessions for his track record on voting rights and implored Republicans to reject him. They did.Mrs. King died in 2006 but her words against Sessions continue to haunt him to this day as he has been nominated by Trump to be Attorney General, which would give him the power to cripple civil rights and voting rights across this country.King wrote that Sessions lacks the temperament, fairness, and judgement to be a federal judge and has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens. His attempt to prosecute three civil right activists who were helping black people vote in Alabama raises serious questions about his commitment to the protections of the voting rights of all American citizens and consequently his fair and unbiased judgement regarding this fundamental right. Based on his record, I believe his confirmation would have a devastating effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also on the progress we have made everywhere toward fulfilling my husband s dream that he envisioned over twenty years ago. Sean Spicer, however, seems to think that if King were alive today, she would just come around to supporting Sessions and would change her mind about him.During the daily press briefing, Spicer said I would respectfully disagree with her assessment of Senator Sessions then and now. His record on civil voting rights, I think, is outstanding. I can only hope that if she were still with us today that after getting to know him that she would share the same view. Spicer went on to lie his ass off about Sessions, painting him as a civil rights hero when the fact is that Sessions is the man who didn t mind the KKK until he found out that they smoked pot. He didn t seem to give a damn about the history of lynching and racism the KKK is responsible for.Here s the video via Twitter.Ugh. Spicer desecrates Coretta Scott King, tells string of lies about Sessions pic.twitter.com/65nqBjIcFY Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) February 8, 2017There has been fierce opposition to Sessions ever since Trump nominated him. The KKK endorsed Trump and cheered his decision when he announced Sessions as his pick to head the Justice Department. Clearly, racists see Sessions as their chance to roll back critical civil and voting rights protections for minorities.If Coretta Scott King were alive today, it is unlikely she would join the KKK by endorsing Sessions. She would still oppose Jeff Sessions and so should every American who believes in liberty and justice for ALL. Because if Jeff Sessions is confirmed, he will take the justice out of the Justice Department and all the progress made by real civil rights heroes will be erased.Read more:Featured Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images | 1real |
MOCKINGBIRD MIRROR: Declassified Docs Depict Deeper Link Between the CIA and American Media | 21st Century Wire says Over the past month, more than 12 million declassified documents from the CIA have been reportedly published online. While the intelligence docu-dump supposedly sheds additional light on covert war programs, psychic research and the Cold War era, it also contains more evidence confirming the symbiotic relationship between the CIA and American media. In late January the UK s Guardian reported that the CIA themselves released millions of documents online: The CIA has published more than 12 million pages of declassified documents online, making decades of US intelligence files more easily accessible and searchable.The agency published the roughly 930,000 documents that make up the CIA Records Search Tool (Crest) on Tuesday. The online publication of the files was first reported by BuzzFeed News. Although all of the documents in Crest were part of the public record before Tuesday, they could only be inspected by visiting the National Archives in Maryland in person. Once at the archives, just four computers available only during business hours provided access to Crest. A lawsuit from the open-government nonprofit MuckRock prompted the CIA to make the documents available online. Further pressure to publish the documents came from the transparency advocate and journalist Michael Best, who began steadily scanning and uploading the documents one by one. Continuing, the Guardian reported that the CIA also kept files and documents on media organizations and individual reporters. In 2014, Best from MuckRock, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in order to get the CIA to post all of its documents online. Along the way, Best reportedly crowd-funded more than $15000 to print out and then publicly upload the records, one by one, to apply pressure to the CIA. Although some mainstream outlets have been somewhat congratulatory of the CIA, many of the files released remain heavily redacted.In the early 1950 s, the CIA ran a wide-scale program called Operation Mockingbird that was said to have infiltrated the American news media in particular, which propagandized the public through various front organizations, magazines and cultural groups. THE COMPANY The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. (Image Source: zerohedge.com)In recent years, there has been a series of surreal and unreal news stories since the Smith-Mundt Act was effectively rendered obsolete by US lawmakers on July 2nd 2013, as published by RT below: Until earlier this month, a longstanding federal law made it illegal for the US Department of State to share domestically the internally-authored news stories sent to American-operated outlets broadcasting around the globe. All of that changed effective July 2, when the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) was given permission to let US households tune-in to hear the type of programming that has previously only been allowed in outside nations. The Smith-Mundt Act has ensured for decades that government-made media intended for foreign audiences doesn t end up on radio networks broadcast within the US. An amendment tagged onto the National Defense Authorization Act removed that prohibition this year. More from Washington s Blog below (Photo Illustration 21WIRE s Shawn Helton)Washington s BlogNewly-declassified documents show that a senior CIA agent and Deputy Director of the Directorate of Intelligence worked closely with the owners and journalists of many of the largest media outlets:The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities found in 1975 that the CIA submitted stories to the American press:Wikipedia adds details:After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the CIA. By this time, Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services.The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning off funds intended for the Marshall Plan [i.e. the rebuilding of Europe by the U.S. after WWII]. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers.In 2008, the New York Times wrote:During the early years of the cold war, [prominent writers and artists, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Jackson Pollock] were supported, sometimes lavishly, always secretly, by the C.I.A. as part of its propaganda war against the Soviet Union. It was perhaps the most successful use of soft power in American history.A CIA operative told Washington Post owner Philip Graham in a conversation about the willingness of journalists to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories:You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote in 1977:More than 400 American journalists in the past twenty five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.***In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America s leading news organizations.***Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were [the heads of CBS, Time, the New York Times, the Louisville Courier Journal, and Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include [ABC, NBC, AP, UPI, Reuters], Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune.***There is ample evidence that America s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services. Let s not pick on some poor reporters, for God s sake, William Colby exclaimed at one point to the Church committee s investigators. Let s go to the managements.***The CIA even ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were taught to make noises like reporters, explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management.***Once a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, CBS correspondents joined the CIA hierarchy for private dinners and briefings.***Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.***In the 1950s and early 1960s, Time magazine s foreign correspondents attended CIA briefing dinners similar to those the CIA held for CBS.***When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from, said a former deputy director of the Agency. Frank Wisner dealt with him. Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency s premier orchestrator of black operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his mighty Wurlitzer, a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press.)***In November 1973, after [the CIA claimed to have ended the program], Colby told reporters and editors from the New York Times and the Washington Star that the Agency had some three dozen American newsmen on the CIA payroll, including five who worked for general circulation news organizations. Yet even while the Senate Intelligence Committee was holding its hearings in 1976, according to high level CIA sources, the CIA continued to maintain ties with seventy five to ninety journalists of every description executives, reporters, stringers, photographers, columnists, bureau clerks and members of broadcast technical crews. More than half of these had been moved off CIA contracts and payrolls but they were still bound by other secret agreements with the Agency. According to an unpublished report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Representative Otis Pike, at least fifteen news organizations were still providing cover for CIA operatives as of 1976.***Those officials most knowledgeable about the subject say that a figure of 400 American journalists is on the low side . There were a lot of representations that if this stuff got out some of the biggest names in journalism would get smeared .An expert on propaganda testified under oath during trial that the CIA now employs THOUSANDS of reporters and OWNS its own media organizations. Whether or not his estimate is accurate, it is clear that many prominent reporters still report to the CIA.A 4-part BBC documentary called the Century of the Self shows that an American Freud s nephew, Edward Bernays created the modern field of manipulation of public perceptions, and the U.S. government has extensively used his techniques.More from Washington s Blog here READ MORE PROPAGANDA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Propaganda FilesREAD MORE PENTAGON NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Pentagon FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE by subscribing and becoming a MEMBER @ 21WIRE.TV | 1real |
Morocco's king fires ministers over slow progress in restive tribal area | RABAT (Reuters) - Morocco s king dismissed several ministers and top officials on Tuesday for failing to improve the economic situation in a region shaken by protests, a statement said. Protests erupted in the Rif region around the northern city of Al-Hoceima last October, triggered by the death of a fishmonger whose produce was confiscated by police. The man s crushing to death in a garbage truck during a confrontation with police became a symbol of corruption and official abuse. Protests, also fueled by economic underdevelopment, continued there this year. Morocco s King Mohammed dismissed the ministers of education, planning and housing and health, as well as other officials, after an economic agency found imbalances in implementing a development plan, state news agency MAP reported, citing a palace statement. Political protests are rare in Morocco, where the palace remains the ultimate power. The protests, the largest in Morocco since the days of the 2011 Arab Spring , were directed at the government and the king s entourage rather than the monarch himself. The king s move came as protest leader Nasser Zefzafi and 29 others accused of organizing demonstrations in the northern region went on trial in Casablanca. They face charges ranging from conspiring against the state to protesting without authorization. Zefzaki s lawyer told Reuters he could be sentenced to death in a worst-case scenario. The judge adjourned the session until Oct 31. Zefzaki s supporters protested in front of the court while some 70 lawyers attended the trial. The protest movement was born after Fikri s death. Police confiscated fish they said he had bought illegally and dumped it in a garbage truck. Desperate to recover his stock, Fikri jumped inside and was killed by a rubbish crusher. In July the king pardoned dozens of people arrested in the protests and blamed the failure of local officials to quickly implement development projects for stoking public anger. | 0fake |
Hillary and Trump Could Both Be Criminally Charged After The Election | Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have made headlines recently for their alleged problems with the law . Trump, who in April of 2016 was named as the defendant in a lawsuit filed by Katie Johnson, is scheduled to appear before a court on December 16, 2016. The lawsuit alleges Trump, along with former banker billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, raped Johnson when she was thirteen. The incident allegedly happened in the 1990s. Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution in 2008, has also been associated with former President Bill Clinton, whose name appears in “ flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the ‘Lolita Express, ’” a term used in association with Epstein’s Boeing 727 jet. The jet was allegedly set up with beds where Epstein and guests “ had group sex with young girls .” The lawsuit was first filed in April , but U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Stevenson threw the suit out in May because Johnson then failed “ to state a civil rights claim .” The plaintiff was representing herself at the time, claiming to be unemployed and having only $276 to her name. In June, Johnson went on to refile the suit in the Manhattan federal court. This time around, Johnson filed the suit under the name “Jane Doe,” asking $75,000 plus attorney fees. But in September, Johnson dropped her lawsuit, only to have it refiled weeks later with three affidavits instead of two. While Trump is scheduled to appear in court for a status conference in December in reference to this case, it still requires more information before it leads to a trial or settlement. In contrast to Trump’s case, Clinton’s brush with the law is taking place at a different, more advanced level — but is still not close enough to conviction to ruin her chances of being elected. Just over a week before Americans head to the polls to cast their ballots, the FBI announced it would be reopening its the probe into presidential nominee and former secretary of state Clinton’s use of a private email server. The announcement followed the discovery of an email stash found on a laptop that belonged to former congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a longtime Clinton aide. She claims to have been unaware that her emails were on Weiner’s device. Though the FBI has announced it obtained a warrant to review the 650,000 emails, it is unlikely the agency’s investigation will achieve any results before election day. The FBI is seeking to determine whether the messages found on Weiner’s computer include any classified information or evidence that may indicate Clinton undermined U.S. national security. In an article for Law Newz , Ronn Blitzer attempts to answer some of the questions the public might raise now that the FBI has announced the probe, attempting to determine how Clinton’s legal future will look if she’s elected president. While the law “ is hazy, ” Blitzer writes , he goes over several scenarios. First, he explains “ it’s highly unlikely that an indictment would come before November 8 .” If it happened, however, “ the indictment itself wouldn’t mean that Clinton could no longer run, as an indictment is only an accusation, not a convictio n.” Theoretically, he continues , “ the Electoral College could … go rogue and not vote for Clinton, even if their states tell them to .” Another possibility is that Clinton would be pressured, either by the DNC or the public, to “ give up her candidacy. ” In the case Clinton wins but is indicted before her inauguration, “ she could try to play beat-the-clock and hope to take office before her case concludes .” But if she’s both indicted and convicted before the inauguration and then sentenced, “ she may be deemed incapacitated, in which case Section 3 of the 20th Amendment kicks in and the Vice President-Elect, in this case Tim Kaine, would become President .” But if Clinton wins the election and is inaugurated as the investigation is carried on, “ Clinton would luck out ,” Blitzer explains , “ due to the philosophy that Presidents — and only Presidents — [sic] are immune from prosecution while in office .” Since the House of Representatives determined in 1873 that a president may only be impeached over offenses committed after their inauguration, Blitzer writes , impeachment over the email scandal isn’t likely to take place. And even if she’s convicted after moving to the White House, “ President Hillary Clinton could pardon herself .” These scenarios could all play out fairly similarly in Trump’s case, assuming the rape lawsuit filed against him leads to a conviction. But whether Clinton or Trump is elected, their federal or FBI probes may result in nothing more than footnotes in the grand scheme of things — especially once we’re faced with the realization that elected officials are required to meet lower standards of conduct than the rest of us . Only after the FBI probe is finalized will we know if Congress is willing to tackle the presidential immunity rules. source: | 1real |
South Sudan commander defects to rebels amid showdown with ex-army chief | MOYO, Uganda (Reuters) - A South Sudanese military commander said he had defected with more than 200 soldiers to the country s largest rebel group, amid a showdown between President Salva Kiir and his former military chief. Lieutenant Colonel Chan Garang, an ally of former army chief Paul Malong, defected to join the largest rebel group fighting Kiir, he said. All three men are ethnic Dinkas and any split within the powerful group could represent a threat to Kiir. The four-year civil war has split the country into a patchwork of fiefdoms, created Africa s biggest refugee crisis in two decades and led to ethnic cleansing. A third of the 12 million-strong population has fled their homes and half are dependent on food aid. In May, Kiir fired Malong, whom U.N. investigators accused of directing ethnic militias responsible for the rape, torture and murder of civilians. Malong, who is also on a U.S. sanctions list, briefly fled north but returned to the capital, where he has been under house arrest ever since. Over the weekend, Kiir s troops surrounded Malong s house in Juba and unsuccessfully attempted to disarm his bodyguards. An armed standoff continues outside his house. Garang is the first Malong loyalist to join the rebels. Garang said he defected because allies of Malong s were being badly treated, troops had not been paid for seven months and other tribes were being discriminated against. I left Juba because when are you are a supporter of Paul Malong, you will be arrested, Garang told Reuters via satellite phone. We are preparing our army so that we can launch an attack on Juba. Salva Kiir divided the tribes so we need him to go. Garang told Reuters he took more than 200 soldiers with him, although a rebel press release put the number at 150. A photo provided by the rebels showed more than 30 armed men but their identities were unclear. Army spokesman Lul Ruai Koang said they were not aware of any defection from their ranks. Malong was unreachable by phone, but his wife Lucy Ayak distanced her husband from the defected commander. [Garang] is not happy with the government and he has deserted. Why is he saying it is the issue of General Malong? she asked Reuters. South Sudan s war began in December 2013 between troops loyal to Kiir and rebels of former vice president Riek Machar, a Nuer. Oyet Nathaniel, a senior rebel official, told Reuters that Garang had brought 150 men with him and that anyone deciding to join them against Kiir is a welcome development, regardless of their background. There are several rebel groups, but none of them is well-funded or well-armed. (This version of the story was refiled to remove repetition in second to last paragraph) | 0fake |
Four big takeaways from Trump's 'Acela Primary' triumph | Whoever dubbed Tuesday, April 26 the “Acela Primary” (because the five states that held primaries on that day coincide with the route of Amtrak’s fastest carrier) needs a refresher in how trains and Republican presidential hopefuls run.
The Washington-to-Boston Acela service is known for the three things: speed, “quiet cars” and higher fares.
You won’t find those first two traits – swiftness and silence – in this boisterous, time-consuming GOP affair. Expensive, yes, but not a joy ride.
Here are four takeaways, now that the Republican local has completed its northeastern course.
Trump Towered. I’ve kept struggling with a way to best characterize Donald Trump’s roll – New York last week; Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island all this week.
One thought: Trump 2016 looks a lot like the American map circa the mid-1700’s. He’s conquered 12 of the 13 original colonies (New Jersey votes on June 7), plus most of the southeast. Except for a few states here and there, Trump controls the American continent east of the Mississippi River.
But now the race moves west. First up: Indiana, on May 3 (more on that in a moment). A week later: West Virginia and Nebraska.
After that, the GOP field spends quality time on the West Coast – two weeks in Oregon and Washington – before a final push in California, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota and the aforementioned New Jersey.
The question: Trump has momentum as he steps off the Acela. Then again, so too did Texas Sen. Ted Cruz after he rolled Trump in Wisconsin’s April 5 primary.
From this point forward to California, will it be “nomemtum” or “big mo” for The Donald?
Isn’t It Bromantic? You’ve heard of Rudolph Valentino, but maybe not Jean Acker. She was Valentino’s first wife – best known for supposedly locking him out of the bedroom on their wedding night, never consummating the marriage, yet suing for the legal right to “Mrs. Rudolph Valentino”.
The political marriage between Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (quicker even than Valentino and Acker’s two-month courtship) may not turn out to be as cinematic.
But there is the matter of consummation.
Cruz thinks Kasich intends to cede Indiana to the more conservative Texan; Kasich has told reporters he’s not instructing his followers to switch to Cruz.
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether Cruz and Kasich much care for each other. What I don’t understand: why they felt the need to go public with their hasty nuptials. Other than the obvious reason: they both realize the urgency of the moment – far behind in delegates, needing to defeat Trump soon before he salts away the GOP nomination.
It’s funny how fast things can change in politics: we entered April with Trump looking wobbly; we’ll exit the month with Cruz and Kasich resorting to a bromance that reeks of desperation.
Hoosier Daddy. A word about campaigning in Indiana, home to a pivotal presidential contest and a contentious GOP Senate primary both of which are playing out along “establishment/outsider” lines: if I were working the basketball-crazy state, I’d want one of three individuals by my side – basketball legend Larry Bird, former Indiana University Coach Bobby Knight, or the kid who drained the jumper at the end of “Hoosiers”.
OK, Jimmy Chitwood doesn’t exist in real life and “Larry Legend” isn’t all that political (though he once snubbed Ronald Reagan). That leaves us with Coach Knight, who’s appearing with Trump at a Wednesday evening rally in Indianapolis.
It’s not the first sports endorsement to come Trump’s way – Buffalo Bills Coach Rex Ryan warmed up the crowd for him at a rally the day before New York’s primary. And it begs the question of pro-Trump star power other than the “Apprentice” and Gary Busey, Wayne Newton and Jon Voight.
With polls showing Trump holding a narrow lead among Hoosiers, Cruz could use some star-power of his own – better yet, maybe a Gene Hackman pep talk.
California. The Chicago Cubs have waited 71 years for a World Series appearance; 108 years for a title. California’s absence from the national political picture seems just as pronounced.
Post-Acela Primary, Trump’s delegate count has risen well into the 900’s. That puts him three-fourths of the way to 1,237, which is now officially out of reach for Cruz (until after a first ballot in Cleveland, when pledged delegates can begin switching their votes).
Here’s why California matters more with each passing week: Trump can’t win without taking a gluttonous portion of the Golden State’s 172 GOP delegates (to get to 1,237 on June 7, I’m guessing he’ll have to score 140 delegates); as such, it’s the #nevertrump movement’s last chance to derail him.
In California Amtrak parlance, that primary would be a ticket on the Coast Starlight – a three-day ride along the West Coast that isn’t fast and isn’t cheap.
And unlike Tuesday’s Acela experience: maybe the only real hope of throwing Trump from the train.
Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen. | 0fake |
Cuba and United States draw up roadmap for talks to deepen detente | HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba and the United States aim to reach new agreements on cooperation in law enforcement, health and agriculture over the coming months, a senior Cuban official said on Monday, as part of the former Cold War foes’ drive to normalize ties. The Communist-ruled island and its northern neighbor reestablished diplomatic relations a year ago after decades of hostility and have since signed deals on the environment, postal services and direct flights. A bilateral commission met on Monday in Havana to establish a roadmap for talks over the rest of this year, which would include more high-ranking official visits, said Josefina Vidal, head of the Cuban delegation. In March, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president in 88 years to visit Cuba. “The agenda is quite ambitious,” Vidal told a news conference, adding that talks about intellectual property rights were also in the cards. The two sides had discussed holding dialogues on human rights and claims, the U.S. embassy in Cuba said in a statement. They already outlined their respective claims late last year, with the U.S. seeking upwards of $10 billion in compensation for nationalized properties and Cuba demanding at least $121 billion in reparations for the U.S. trade embargo and other acts it described as aggression. “The United States looks forward to holding these meetings in the near future,” the embassy said. “Tomorrow (we) will discuss specific steps related to bilateral security during the law enforcement dialogue.” Vidal, who is the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s chief of U.S. affairs, said the island was hopeful that whomever became next the U.S. president would continue to deepen the detente. The United States will hold a general election on Nov.8. “When you look at the polls, the majority of the American population and the Cuban American community are in favor of the normalization of relations,” she said. “So I expect their opinion will be taken into account.” | 0fake |
Kremlin: law on media 'foreign agents' is our response to U.S. measures | MOSCOW (Reuters) - A draft law allowing Moscow to designate foreign media as foreign agents gives Russia a tool to reciprocate to restrictions Washington has imposed on Russian media operating in the United States, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. He said it was too early to say how tough the law would be as the draft, approved on second reading by the lower house of parliament on Wednesday, did not spell out how it would be applied in practice. | 0fake |
A Debate: Should the Justice Department Police the Police? - The New York Times | Blue lives matter. That is, in essence, what Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been saying since he took office, promising to protect the lives of police officers, stop undermining them as (he implied) the Obama administration had, and let them get back to enforcing law and order. For some in law enforcement, the message has done what it intended to do: mollify, soothe, inspire. With vilification on the street, who needed vilification from the top? But to others, it is as shrill and jarring as a traffic whistle, threatening to undo years of work toward dismantling policies that led to mass incarceration and the erosion of trust in the police. We asked two experts to weigh in. In the first camp is Sheriff Michael Bouchard of Oakland County, outside Detroit, who explains the perspective of officers facing hostility and scrutiny by cellphone cameras as they perform a dangerous job. On the other side is Ronal W. Serpas, former chief in Nashville and New Orleans, who counters that not just civilians, but officers themselves, are safer when policing is done more fairly — sometimes at the insistence of the federal government. Sheriff Bouchard answered questions by phone, and Dr. Serpas by email. Their responses were edited for clarity and length. Michael Bouchard: I think that police agencies are expecting and capable of handling scrutiny. But I think that the tone and the rhetoric did in fact diminish it. It almost — in many situations — came from a “You’re broken,” adversarial position rather than “You’re a professional, occasionally you’re going to have situations that need rectifying and we want to work together to make sure that happens. ” It’s a very different kind of vantage. I think every police executive that’s worth their salt — and I believe that’s 99. 9 percent — believe that if police do something wrong they ought to be held accountable. Ronal Serpas: To the contrary, the Department of Justice must ensure that the federal Constitution is followed so that all citizens experience constitutional policing as a right. There are about 18, 000 police departments in America. Few police agencies have been part of a D. O. J. review since 1994, and even fewer have been party to a consent decree. In those departments, the data suggested it was indeed necessary. What really makes the job of American policing more difficult is when we fail to realize the police are just one part of an interconnected system of criminal justice (police, prosecution, judiciary, corrections, mental health, drug addiction, etc. Sheriff Bouchard: I think there’s a great deal of officers on the front line that are much more cautious about doing the job in a proactive way, for fear of negative exposure. I mean, what you want is proactive policing to question situations, to stop cars, to look for something that is on the precipice of being a crime and interrupt it before it happens. When you put a chilling effect on that kind of patrol, you basically become report takers. It’s the job of the chief to tell their folks, “Look, if you do your job as you’re trained and as I expect, I will stand behind you. ” And that’s a difficult thing for a lot of people to feel and understand in this environment — that they would be stood behind. Because use of force captured on a cellphone is not pretty. A street fight is not pretty. That does not make it inappropriate or illegal. Dr. Serpas: Yes and no. In the case of the Baltimore Police Department it’s been my personal experience, from interviewing nearly 100 officers, that the department has not “pulled back. ” In fact, to a person, every officer was clear — they see their job to save lives and make the community safe. “We did not take a knee” was a constant refrain. In Chicago, the data appears to be the opposite, in that officers have been far less proactive — and that has been a recent development. What the data in Chicago suggests is that there was a sudden and dramatic change in officer activity immediately following the public release of information regarding the tragic death of Laquan McDonald. We will likely need more time and information to understand the factors driving this . Sheriff Bouchard: One of our concerns about the dialogue from the past administration about we need to be more involved with the community is the presumption that we weren’t already or didn’t care about it. I have a list of community engagement programs that are as long as my arm. But some of the engagement also goes back to funding. So for example, in one of the communities where we are policing, at one time they had 200 officers. Now we police that community with about 77. And so at the same time the past administration said, “You need to do more of that,” pointing their finger, they didn’t give me any grants when I applied for that community to do that. Dr. Serpas: There is no such thing as too much emphasis on community relations and partnerships. Crime reduction necessarily comes from the relationships the police have with the community. Despite the great advances in technology like DNA or ballistics evidence, our criminal justice system must have willing community members who will participate in criminal investigations and prosecutions. Every officer and prosecutor knows this. Sheriff Bouchard: Civil rights investigations are routinely undertaken by the Department of Justice, and we’re not suggesting that they stop, but the approach that “virtually every department is broken” has been a frustrating dialogue. Clearly there’s some videos that we’ve all seen that are obviously out of bounds. But there are some videos that don’t lend themselves to context or totality of circumstance. So rushing to a decision based on that often incites problems, and not calms tensions. So the first thing ought to be a calming moment, saying: “Look, we don’t know all the facts and circumstances. We’re going to find out. And if there was wrongdoing, people will be held accountable. ” Dr. Serpas: Each of us demands that if a friend or family member encounters a police officer they will be treated fairly and with dignity. If not, then we expect the local police or political leaders to rectify the situation. But we all know this may not be the case in every local government. It is our federal Constitution that establishes what the requirements of policing are in this nation. | 0fake |
EU leaders seek greater reductions in Africa immigration | BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders agreed on Thursday to provide stronger support to Italy for its work in Libya and replenish their Africa fund to further curb immigration to Europe. We have a real chance of closing the Central Mediterranean route, chairman Donald Tusk said after 28 EU leaders meeting in Brussels discussed migration, stressing the need to lower the number of arrivals from Africa going through the Mediterranean to Italy. EU executive European Commission told the group they needed to immediately chip in an extra 225 million euros for migration-related projects in Africa due to run this year and early next. If we do want to be as present as possible in Africa - mainly in the Northern part of Africa - we have to increase financial means, Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker said. Brussels has so far committed 2.9 billion euros to the so-called Africa Trust Fund, with another 234 million euros from EU states, according to the Commission. Brussels said 1.6 billion euros would be spent by the end of 2017 on Turkey. In 2016 the bloc promised 3 billion euros for Syrian refugees in exchange for Ankara shutting down the route traffickers and smugglers were using to get people to Greece. Despite sour EU-Turkey relations on several issues, German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised Ankara for hosting refugees from Syria and said the bloc should pull together another 3 billion euros to that end. We have promised 3 billion euros for the coming years in addition to the 3 billion that we have already committed. We need to deliver on this promise, Merkel told reporters on arriving for the two-day EU leaders summit in Brussels. This money helps the refugees who are living under very difficult conditions. Once again, Turkey is doing a great job here, she said. Since 2015, the bloc has helped Greece, Italy and Bulgaria with nearly 2 billion euros to manage immigration flows. It spent another 100 million euros on controlling migratory routes in the Western Balkans, according to figures provided by the bloc. It has been spending on more deportations and financing United Nations projects for refugees and migrants in Africa, and mulling a center in Libya to assess asylum requests there. Despite criticism from rights groups that the EU is violating international humanitarian law by striving to curb immigration, the bloc has applauded itself for reducing arrivals by more than 70 percent in 2016 from the peak in 2015 when more than a million people entered in an uncontrolled flow. The influx of immigrants in 2015 caught the bloc by surprise, alarmed the EU s 500 million people and fueled support for anti-immigration, populist and nationalist groups. The bloc s asylum system broke down under the sheer numbers and the cherished Schengen zone of control-free travel was strained as member states introduced emergency border checks. EU states have since sought to agree on how to change their asylum laws, with bitter disputes deepening east-west divides. Tusk said on Thursday the 28 EU leaders would discuss the issue again in December and were aiming for an agreement by mid-2018. Earlier this week, the European Parliament agreed its own stance on asylum reform, including an option to cut EU funds to states that refuse to host asylum-seekers reaching the bloc. It proposed moving away from the current rule mandating that the first country through which a person enters the EU must handle his or her asylum request, saying it puts too much burden on frontline states like Italy, Greece, Malta or Spain. Southern frontline states want a scheme that would automatically lift people off their soil during periods of exceptionally high immigration and take them elsewhere in the EU. Westerners like Germany and Sweden, which eventually receive most of the refugees, have said more of the burden must be shared and that solidarity was needed. Eastern EU countries like Poland and Hungary have refused to admit anyone, saying doing so could compromise national security and affect the traditional composition of their populations. | 0fake |
OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE NANCY PELOSI Gives Gibberish Laden Reason For Opposing Border Wall: “You have to understand this part of the country” [Video] | House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was on Meet the Press and let out another gibberish laden response to a question. Does anyone out there understand what she meant by her comments about the wall. How does it mean Trump is weak if he wants a wall? Twisted reasoning is all that comes from Pelosi these days especially when in 2006 most prominent Democrats voted to build a barrier at the border. Immoral and unwise ? How is it immoral and unwise to want to protect your people? You have to understand this part of the country. There s a community going through it. WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO THE 2006 BORDER WALL FENCE?Remember the promise of a fence on our southern border? Yes, it was the plan but the $1.2 billion dollar plan was never executed as proposed. You can thank our Liar in Chief and a popular Republican for that WE RECENTLY POSTED THIS VIDEO OF AN IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL SAYING BUILDING A BORDER FENCE ISN T POSSIBLE EVEN THOUGH $1.2 BILLION WAS GIVEN IN 2006 FOR A FENCE: In his speech in El Paso on immigration reform on May 10, 2011, Obama declared that the fence along the border with Mexico is now basically complete. Like much of what comes out of the Obama administration, that was a lie. What was supposed to be built was a double layered fence with barbed-wire on top, and room for a security vehicle to patrol between the layers. Except for 36 of the seven-hundred mile fence, what was built looks like the picture above or the one below.But that doesn t stop your liar in chief. He claims. We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement, Obama said. All the stuff they asked for, we ve done. But even though we ve answered these concerns, I ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time. Maybe he s right the goal posts were moved, but to make the job easier.The Secure Fence Act was introduced on Sept. 13, 2006 by Rep Peter King (R-NY) and passed Congress on a bi-partisan basis. In the House of Representatives, the Fence Act passed 283 -138 on September 14, 2006. On September 29, 2006, the Fence Act passed in the Senate 80 -19. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 s goal was to help secure America s borders to decrease illegal entry, drug trafficking, and security threats by building 700 miles (1,100 km) of physical barriers along the Mexico-United States border. Additionally, the law authorized more vehicle barriers, checkpoints, and lighting as well as authorizing the Department of Homeland Security to increase the use of advanced technology such as cameras, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles to reinforce infrastructure at the border. So far less than 40 miles of a real fence have been built most of it during the Bush Administration.Of the almost 700 miles of fencing, DHS reports there are currently 36.3 miles of double-layered fencing, as the bill required, the kind with enough gap that you can drive a vehicle between the layers. But the majority of the fencing erected has been made from vehicle barriers with single-layer pedestrian fencing, the kind of barriers that are designed to stop vehicles rather than people. The design specifications vary, depending on geography and climate characteristics, but according to the Customs and Border Patrol website, those include post on rail steel set in concrete; steel picket-style fence set in concrete; vehicle bollards similar to those found around federal buildings; Normandy; vehicle fence consisting of steel beams; and concrete jersey walls with steel mesh. The first blow against the promised fence was made by Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican Senator from Texas, at the urging of DHS she proposed an amendment to give the Department discretion to decide what type of fence was appropriate in different areas. The law was amended to read, Nothing in this paragraph shall require the Secretary of Homeland Security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the Secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location. Hutchison s amendment was included in a federal budget bill in late 2007 despite the fact that Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., had a cow he argued the amendment effectively killed the border fence promised in the 2006 bill, he was right. Hutchison s intentions may have been honorable, but she didn t foresee Barack Obama being the next president.When Janet Napolitano became Obama s first DHS she took advantage of Ms. Hutchison s 2007 amendment, instead of building a fence which look something like the below, she built a fence that was mostly a combination of the two pictures above.When She was still Governor of Arizona Janet Napolitano said, You show me a 50-foot wall, and I ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. And she may be right The fence will never STOP all illegal crossings. The purpose of the fence is two-fold, slowing the intruders and making them visible to members of the border patrol. The rest of the work is done by human beings.Very little of the Israeli separation barrier erected to keep out terrorists is a wall, most of the 400 miles of the barrier which has received so much international scorn is a two layered fence like section of their barrier below. The fence has served its purpose, in 2002, the year before construction started, 457 Israelis were murdered; in 2009, 8 Israelis were killed.The reason it has been effective is not simply the fence itself but how the fence is guarded and patrolled. And that s what will make our fence along the Mexican border work.Here s the bottom line. Back in 2006 the people of the U.S. were promised a border fence. Since then thanks to Kay Bailey Hutchison and Barack Obama 95% of the fence wasn t built. The arguments against the fence are bogus especially if you look at Israel s history. It s time for America to demand that its leaders build the fence they promised. No one can honestly say it wont work, after all it hasn t been tried. Via: The Lid | 1real |
US Middle Class Still Suffering from Rockefeller-Kissinger Industrial Transfer Scheme to China | Dick Eastman The Truth HoundWhen Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller met with Zhou Enlai in China in 1973 just after President Richard Nixon had visited China establishing official relations an understanding was reached whereby the U.S. would supply industrial capital and know-how to China.In return Kissinger-connected corporations would gain the monopolistic advantage of low-cost labor production which could outcompete all U.S. domestic industry.The comparative advantage gained was being able to hire Chinese laborers who were ready to work hard at exceedingly low cost with no drugs, no alcohol, a strong work ethic, no unions, no paid benefits and weak environmental standards. And with such a large labor pool, burned out workers could simply be replaced. This gave the Rockefeller/Kissinger corporations a major edge over their domestic U.S. competitors who had to pay relatively high wages, high regulation costs, deal with union strikes and collective bargaining etc.Of course, the American consumer did not see greatly lowered prices commensurate with such greatly lowered labor costs. The $19.99 plastic action-figure toy marketed with a Hollywood movie still cost $19.99 even though it cost $12 to $15 to produce in the U.S. but less than $2.00 per copy to produce in China and transport to America s West Coast container ports for distribution throughout America.The consumer paid pretty much the old prices but the corporations split the monopoly profit with China s Princelings since it did not take much of a lowering of prices to drive high-wage, high-benefit, contracted-labor domestic corporations out of business (not to mention the environmental and workplace safety regulations with which domestic companies were saddled). Then, Wal-Mart became a near-monopoly retailer that increased and reinforced the widespread selling of these off-shore manufactures.Thus, America s domestic producers were not simply being bested on one or another area of production; they were being bested across the entire spectrum of manufactured goods that American buy. It was anticipated that these domestic firms would fail, and their failure was hastened by the banks maintaining a deflationary domestic economy in the U.S. throughout the post Rockefeller-Kissinger-Zhou buildup of China and the degrading of American domestic manufacturing.Remember, the entire money supply of the U.S. is borrowed that is, the money co-created with a debt of an even bigger amount (principal plus compound interest) that must in due course be returned to the lender. But money in the domestic economy was going to multinational corporations and to China, while also going to taxes to pay on the national debt that resulted [NOTE: Due to U.S. industrial depletion, federal revenue receipts as well as the tax-take of state and local governments, shrunk, resulting in greater government borrowing and therefore greater public debts TRUTH HOUND note]. And of course, compound interest was attached to that debt.Rockefeller and Kissinger were (and to some extent still are) at war with middle-class America with intelligent, self-supporting, self-respecting, ambitious, industrious citizens who always pose the greatest threat in the form of populist politics to the bankers and their Bank-of-England/East-India-Company/Rothschild monetary and trade system, the very system that Rockefeller and Kissinger were representing and expanding when they visited Zhou Enlai.So here we are in 2016 and newly elected President Donald J. Trump says he intends to place a tariff on goods imported from China, while the media decries the tariff proposal as a violation of long-standing liberal free-trade policies. One more thing in defense of who I believe was a great president and a warning for the new one.Richard Nixon opened China believing in peaceful co-existence and the fact that if given time for a fair comparison of how free-enterprise and representative government functions in contrast to the communist planned economy, that the U.S. model would win out over a system where each receives what the state deems he needs and where work is ordered by the state.But of course Kissinger and Rockefeller instigated the Watergate coup against Nixon a frame-up with John Dean and Kissinger as the real Deep Throats by my deductions from public information so that the Rockefeller/Kissinger plans for China s industrialization and America s deindustrialization could proceed unopposed, as it certainly did after Nixon resigned to avoid a constitutional crisis that would hinder the proper working of government.Nixon should have fought them because they were about to take a financial axe to this country as soon as Nixon was gone. When Nixon was gone, they first robbed the middle-class of their savings with banker Paul Volcker s QE (quantitative easing) bond purchases at the New York Federal Reserve branch. Then, when that was accomplished, America s savings-and-loans were cast into crisis (because they had been taking in money short-term at 3% and lending long-term at 6%). This helped force the deregulation of banking to Rockefeller advantage after which Volcker moved to become Federal Reserve Chairman in control of the discount rate. With that lever of power that sets the interest-rate framework of the nation, Volcker inaugurated the tight-money (deflation) policy that has persisted to this day, making it very hard for firms to invest in automation to combat the cost advantage of Chinese subsistence labor.Japan was hit with deflation too they were going to provide us with the robots. THE WHOLE THING WAS A GREAT PLAN AGAINST US, COORDINATED AT EVERY LEVEL, WITH EVERY INSTITUTION, FROM THE NEWS TALKING ABOUT HOW THE LEVERAGED BUY-OUTS OCCURING IN THE DEFLATION WERE MAKING US LEAN AND MEAN, WHEN IN FACT THEY WERE TEARING OUT THE GUTS OF AMERICAN PRODUCTION. And the news media and the economics and business administration courses in colleges sung the praises of international free trade and the efficiency of markets nonstop.I watched it all from a pretty good seat on the sidelines, but of course I was marginalized as just another excess white person who needed to stand aside so that blacks and women could have their fair chance. And who could argue with that? So I took to the internet to see what effect I could have simply speaking as a citizen, where I ve met encountered considerable abuse and ridicule, which certainly makes it unpleasant to try and be the Paul Revere awakening the good citizens.I do wish President Donald Trump the best. But let us make sure that none of the neo-conservatives he is taking into his administration are really Kissingers beholden to Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Beware of new Watergates.Washington writer Dick Eastman taught economics at Texas A & M University and also studied the behavorial sciences.READ MORE CHINA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire China Files | 1real |
Brexit drives Belgium to set up English-language commerce court | BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgium will set up an English-language commercial court to deal with disputes between international companies to make the most of Britain s plan to leave the European Union. The Brussels International Business Court (BIBC) will seek to take on cases that are so far handled by British courts or international arbitration tribunals, the Belgian government said on Friday. Cases in Belgium s regular courts are heard in French or Dutch. The government said the demand for arbitration was likely to grow because of Brexit. The same Brexit means moreover that going to a court in London might not be an appropriate option, it said, without giving a date for the start of the English-language hearings. BIBC will be presided over by sector specialists and parties will have to agree in advance to let the court settle their differences. They will not be able to appeal against the decisions. The development of the European Union cannot be slowed down by Brexit. Our country uses this opportunity to offer a new judicial instrument, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said in a statement. Some companies, such as Lloyd s of London, the world s largest specialty insurance market, have already picked Brussels as their European base in order to retain access to the EU market after Britain leaves the bloc in 2019. | 0fake |
INSANE VIDEO: IT’S GRADUATION TIME…AND THAT MEANS IT’S TIME FOR OUR RACIST FIRST LADY To Spew Hateful Lies And Rhetoric About Racist White America And The Mistreatment Of Blacks | GET OVER YOURSELF! MOOCH PLAYS THE RACE CARD AGAIN This woman loves to stir it up and fabricate things because it does exactly what she wants. It further divides us as a nation. Why else would she (a lawyer) not know that in both highly charged police abuse cases in Ferguson and Baltimore, racism was not the cause of death for either of the criminals who died.https://youtu.be/4w3eFiVUHQQSooo .instead of standing up to Mooch s claims that all Whites are racists and that clearly we, as a nation have made no progress in race relations since the 1950 s, the CBS hosts choose to applaud her courage and ability to speak the truth. Perhaps they missed the memo, but our so-called First Black President (who could have just as easily called himself white) and his racist wife have spent the last 6 years living in our White House and occupying the most important job in our nation.But you know, it s not about reality for these people, it s about stirring the pot and dividing the nation, and the mainstream media is more than happy to help them accomplish that goal. They don t even have the common sense to know they re being called racists right along with the rest of the majority of Americans who seem to be okay with Barack and Mooch s ignorant labels.CBS host Norah O Donnell closes her segment by saying: That is a speech worth reading from beginning to end. Everyone should take a look at that. | 1real |
Report: Obama Intel Officials Used ‘Russia Blackmail’ Claims to Warn Israel About Trusting Trump | TEL AVIV — U. S. intelligence officials warned their Israeli counterparts not to trust Donald Trump with intelligence secrets, citing alleged fears that Russia held blackmail information over Trump, according to a report today in Israel’s respected Yediot Ahronot daily newspaper. [The alleged blackmail information that U. S. officials reportedly warned Israel about seems to be in part referencing details contained in a debunked document of mysterious origin purporting to be an intelligence report alleging that Russia collected compromising videos and information on Trump. In the report, investigative journalist Ronen Bergman writes of a meeting that took place “recently between Israeli and American intelligence officials (the date of the meeting is not mentioned to protect the sources of the report). ” Continued Bergman: During the meeting, according to the Israelis who participated in it, their American colleagues voiced despair over Trump’s election, as he often lashes out at the American intelligence community. The American officials also told the Israelis that the National Security Agency (NSA) had “highly credible information” that Russia’s intelligence agencies, the FSB and GRU, were responsible for hacking the Democratic Party (DNC) servers during the elections and leaking sensitive information to WikiLeaks, which hurt Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The American officials further added that they believed Russian President Vladimir Putin had “leverages of pressure” over Trump — but did not elaborate. They were apparently referring to what was published Wednesday about embarrassing information collected by the Russian intelligence in a bid to blackmail the . The Americans implied that their Israeli colleagues should “be careful” as of January 20, Trump’s inauguration date, when transferring intelligence information to the White House and to the National Security Council (NSC) which is subject to the president. According to the Israelis who were present in the meeting, the Americans recommended that until it is made clear that Trump is not inappropriately connected to Russia and is not being extorted — Israel should avoid revealing sensitive sources to administration officials for fear the information would reach the Iranians. BuzzFeed on Tuesday published the document claiming Russia had collected blackmail information on Trump, including videos of the in compromising positions. “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors,” a BuzzFeed cautioned. Contacted by Breitbart Jerusalem, Bergman said that according to his sources, the meeting between U. S. and Israeli officials took place before the publication of the dossier on Tuesday and that the dossier wasn’t specifically mentioned to the Israelis, only the charge that Russian President Vladimir Putin has some sort of unspecified “leverage” over Trump. Bergman said that after the dossier was published, he contacted his sources again and they told him that they themselves were speculating that the “leverage” claim could have in part referred to the dossier. Bergman is the author of a forthcoming book on the history of the Mossad set to be published later this year by Random House. US intel sources warn Israel against sharing secrets with Trump #WhiteHouse staff. Fear leak to #Russia#Iran https: . #Mossad pic. twitter. — Ronen Bergman (@ronenbergman) January 12, 2017, BuzzFeed’s publication of the document prompted a flurry of news media reports drawing attention to the salacious and unproven details. CNN fanned the flames by reporting that “classified documents” presented to President Obama and Trump included “allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information” on Trump, the news network claimed, citing “multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings. ” The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported the author of the dossier was Christopher Steele, who serves as a director at the Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. which has refused to comment on the reports of the document’s origin. In October, Mother Jones reported on the contents of the dossier, writing the information was produced by a former Western intelligence officer who was assigned to the task for the purpose of an “opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. ” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement yesterday that he had called Trump that day to tell him that the intelligence community “has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable. ” Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. | 0fake |
Ex-CIA boss Petraeus indicates would serve Trump if asked | LONDON (Reuters) - Retired U.S. general David Petraeus indicated on Wednesday that he would serve in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration if he was offered a job, according to an interview on Britain’s BBC radio. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Petraeus, who resigned as CIA chief in 2012 after an extra-marital affair was revealed, was under consideration for the post of defense secretary. Asked if he would agree to serve in the Trump administration, Petraeus said: “I’ve been in a position before where a president has turned to me in the Oval Office in a difficult moment and .... said ‘I’m asking you as your president and commander-in-chief to take command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan’. “The only response can be ‘yes, Mr President’.” Petraeus was a four-star general in the U.S. Army and oversaw international forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was later appointed as CIA director by President Barack Obama. Asked during his BBC interview if he thought Trump had the right temperament to be president, Petraeus said: “We’re going to have to see. “I’m not someone who’s had contact with him in the past. I don’t know how he operates. It’s interesting that those who have been talking to him have said he’s a very personable, very hospitable, very gracious guy, full of questions and dialogue. “This is a guy who’s done pretty well in life.” Pressed further on the pressures of the office of U.S. president and whether he had confidence that Trump was capable of doing the job, Petraeus said: “I think so, yes. It’s up to Americans not only to hope that that is the case, but if they can, endeavor to help him.” | 0fake |
PRESIDENT TRUMP Hits Back At Activist Judge On Sanctuary City Decision: “Egregious Overreach” | Judge Orrick in California ruled against President Trump s effort to strip cities of federal funding if they identify themselves as Sanctuary cities that harbor illegals. President Trump went on a Tweet storm to reply to this egregious overreach :Here we go again! Another activist judge has shut down an effort by President Trump to protect Americans A President s #1 job!How do we know Judge Orrick of California is an activist? Well, he raised 200K for Obama: That should tell you all you need to know about this guy except one more HUGE thing:He s the judge who blocked the Planned Parenthood videos:A federal judge late Friday granted a temporary restraining order against the release of recordings made at an annual meeting of abortion providers. The injunction is against the Center for Medical Progress, the group that has unveiled Planned Parenthood s participation in the sale of organs harvested from aborted children.Judge William H. Orrick, III, granted the injunction just hours after the order was requested by the National Abortion Federation.Orrick was nominated to his position by hardline abortion supporter President Barack Obama. He was also a major donor to and bundler for President Obama s presidential campaign. He raised at least $200,000 for Obama and donated $30,800 to committees supporting him. Read more: The FederalistBRILLIANT LEGAL SCHOLAR AND DEMOCRAT JONATHAN TURLEY HAD THIS TO SAY ON TWITTER:The fact is that sanctuary cities violate our Constitution: CORNELL LAWCALIFORNIA JUDGE BLOCKS TRUMP:A federal judge in San Francisco has blocked a Trump administration order to withhold funding from communities that limit cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities.U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued the temporary ruling Tuesday in a lawsuit over the executive order targeting so-called sanctuary cities. The decision will stay in place while the lawsuit moves through court.The Republican president s administration and two California governments that sued over the order disagreed about its scope.San Francisco and Santa Clara County argued that it threatened billions of dollars in federal funding.But an attorney for the Justice Department, Chad Readler, said at a recent court hearing that it applied to a limited set of grants.Some of Judge Orrick s comments are shocking:Judge Orrick said Trump s order by its plain language, attempts to reach all federal grants, not merely the three mentioned at the hearing. The rest of the order is broader still, addressing all federal funding. And if there was doubt about the scope of the order, the president and attorney general have erased it with their public comments. Federal funding that bears no meaningful relationship to immigration enforcement cannot be threatened merely because a jurisdiction chooses an immigration enforcement strategy of which the president disapproves. Note that once again activist judges use public comments just like they did in the prior block to an executive order.READ MORE: ABC7 | 1real |
Russia says close to Syria deal with Turkey, Iran | ASTANA (Reuters) - Russia, Turkey and Iran are close to finalizing an agreement on creating four de-escalation zones in Syria, a senior Russian negotiator said on Thursday. The three sides are discussing details of the agreement at meetings in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, Alexander Lavrentyev, who leads the Russian delegation, told reporters. Our main task at this international meeting on Syria is to finalize and establish four de-escalation zones, Lavrentyev said. We are very close to reaching an agreement on creating these four zones. The meetings, which also involve representatives of the Damascus government and some rebel factions, will continue on Friday. Lavrentyev said the agreement was likely to include provisions on the deployment of monitors - such as military police servicemen - in the four zones and, more specifically, on their borders. The previous round of Syrian peace talks in Astana in July ended with no agreement after Turkey raised objections. Russia and Iran, which back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad s government, and Turkey, which supports some of the rebels, have been holding talks in Kazakhstan since January and the meeting this week is their sixth. | 0fake |
Trump stands by wiretapping allegation: White House | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump stands by his allegation that former President Barack Obama ordered Trump Tower to be wiretapped during the 2016 campaign, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Thursday. “He stands by it,” Spicer said at a daily briefing. Spicer’s comments came after the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said they saw no evidence to support Trump’s claim. | 0fake |
TIME TO GO? 84-Yr Old Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg Tells College Audience 3-Term Male U.S. Senator Is A Female [VIDEO] | Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg erroneously labeled South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham as one of the women of the Senate on Monday.Ginsburg s misstatement came in her remarks upon accepting an Allegheny College award given to her and the late Justice Antonin Scalia for civility in public life. Hours after Justice Neil Gorsuch was sworn in to replace Scalia, Ginsburg took to the podium in calling on lawmakers to work together, but mistakenly identified South Carolina s senior senator as a woman. I thought back to the 1993 confirmation of my nomination to the court the hearing was altogether civil, the vote was 96 to 3. For Justice Scalia, the vote was unanimous, Ginsburg said. Let s hope members of Congress, the members that Allegheny College has already honored Vice President Joe Biden and Senator John McCain, the women of the Senate, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Lindsey Graham let s hope that they and others of goodwill will lead in restoring harmonious work ways. Via: FOX News | 1real |
British PM's social mobility board quits over failing the poor | LONDON (Reuters) - All four members of the British government s Social Mobility Commission have quit accusing Prime Minister Theresa May of being too fixated on Brexit to improve the prospects of those from poor backgrounds. May has said she would create an economy which works for all Britons, but the commission s chairman Alan Milburn, a former minister in Tony Blair s Labour government, said she was failing to deliver on her promises. I have reached the conclusion sadly that the current government bears little, if any, hope of progress being made toward the fairer Britain the prime minister has talked about, Milburn told the BBC on Sunday. The government for understandable reasons is focused on Brexit and seems to lack the bandwith to be able to translate the rhetoric of healing social division and promoting social justice into reality. May talked about tackling the burning injustices in society on her first day as prime minister last year. She talked about tackling racism, gender inequality, the underperformance of government schools and the difficulties young people face buying a home. A government spokesman said it was making good progress on social mobility. We accept there is more to do and that is why we are focusing our efforts in disadvantaged areas where we can make the biggest difference, the spokesman said. May, who presides over a warring cabinet and has faced an open rebellion by some of her own lawmakers, is being buffeted by crises. Two ministers have quit May s cabinet in the last month, placing a strain on the government ahead of the Dec. 14-15 summit on Britain s exit from the European Union, when Britain wants EU leaders to give a green light to talks about future trade relations. An opinion poll published for the Mail On Sunday newspaper put Labour on 45 percent with the ruling Conservatives on 37 percent, the biggest lead for opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn s party in a survey by pollster Survation since late 2013. An 8 point lead would put the Labour party into overall majority territory if such vote share totals were reflected at the ballot box, Survation said. Corbyn has promised sweeping renationalisation, tax rises for the rich and increased welfare spending, including an end to healthcare cuts and scrapping university tuition fees. | 0fake |
Rieder: Why Stephanopoulos flap matters | The revolving door between politics and journalism and sometimes right back again has been spinning for a very long time.
Journalism depends so much on credibility. The recent Brian Williams scandal reminds us that this is not simply an academic issue.
Politicians and political operatives are all about the spin. Their mission isn't to get as close as they can to the truth. It's to win elections. Which means casting everything in a light most favorable to their prospects.
Not the finest or most appropriate credential for truth-seeker.
"One day they are calling journalists to spin them to write favorably about their prominent political patrons and the next minute they are sitting at the table with journalists and indistinguishable from the journalists," the late David Broder, an outstanding Washington Post political reporter who loathed that spinning door, once told American Journalism Review.
Yet there are people who have overcome their substantial political baggage and made that transition in a most impressive way. None more than the late Tim Russert, a onetime aide to the late New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Russert became a sterling host of NBC's Meet the Press.
Another political player who seemed to have successfully navigated those treacherous waters was George Stephanopoulos. I thought it was a truly bad idea when the former top aide to President Clinton, a hugely partisan figure, became a news analyst for ABC back in 1996. But Stephanopoulos, now ABC's chief anchor, host of its Sunday morning political talk show This Week with George Stephanopoulos and co-anchor of Good Morning America, turned out to be a pleasant surprise, shedding his political warrior past and showing journalism chops.
The recent revelation that Stephanopoulos had donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation between 2012 and 2014 not only raises serious questions about his judgment. It also disqualifies him from having anything to do with covering the 2016 presidential race. He has already said he won't moderate ABC News' Republican primary debate in February, which is a start.
So far ABC is standing firmly behind its embattled anchor. But it's early in the saga, and that could change quickly. Regardless, there is no way he should allow himself — or be allowed — to deal in any way with a contest in which Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to become the Democratic candidate for president.
Exhibit A of why that is the case came on April 26, when Stephanopoulos aggressively grilled Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which is critical of the Clinton Foundation. Stephanopoulos failed to disclose that he was a benefactor of said foundation. But even if he had, that would hardly have eliminated the problem. The issue is the donations themselves.
Making them would be inappropriate for any political journalist. But it's particularly crucial for a former Clinton consigliere. Even though he had had a public break with the Clintons, Stephanopoulos of all people should not be giving money to anything having to do with them. What was he thinking?
Sure, the foundation is a charitable enterprise. But all things Clinton tend to be closely intertwined. And there has been no shortage of suggestions that people have been ponying up to the foundation to curry favor with the Clintons, one of whom is a potential next president. There are lots of worthy causes out there with no links to Hillaryland.
One key point: Stephanopoulos' role — and that of his network, for that matter — are very different from the jobs and the forum of the ex-candidates who have made Fox News a full employment act for failed GOP presidential aspirants. Fox is a political force. ABC News is not.
Stephanopoulos' apologies have not been reassuring, certainly not the initial one. He first said he should have told his employer and his viewers about the donations, which are a matter of public record, not that he shouldn't have made them. He later conceded that the donations were problematic.
For someone so politically and journalistically astute, this was a boneheaded — and totally tone deaf — error indeed. | 0fake |
Ron Paul to Trump: Don't Listen to Neocons! | Written by Adam Dick Friday November 11, 2016 Ron Paul, known for his promotion of the United States following a noninterventionist foreign policy, presented Thursday his take on the prospects of Donald Trump’s foreign policy as president. Paul set out his analysis in an extensive interview with host Peter Lavelle at RT. Paul started off the interview saying that he is keeping his “fingers crossed” regarding Trump’s potential foreign policy actions. Paul says he views favorably Trump’s comments in the presidential election about “being less confrontational with Russia” and criticizing some of the US wars in the Middle East. Paul, though, notes that Trump has presented “vague” foreign policy positions overall. Paul also comments that a good indication of how Trump will act on foreign policy issues will be provided by looking at who Trump appoints to positions in the executive branch and from whom Trump receives advice. Regarding Trump’s foreign policy advisors and potential appointees, Paul expresses in the interview reason for concern. Paul states: “Unfortunately, there have been several neoconservatives that are getting closer to Trump, and, if he gets his advice from them, then I don’t think that is a good sign.” Even if Trump wants to pursue a significantly more noninterventionist course than his recent predecessors in the presidency, Paul warns that the entrenched “deep state” that favors foreign intervention and war, special interests that have “sinister motivation for these wars,” and media propaganda that “builds up the war fever” can provide significant headwinds against Trump pursuing such an objective. Watch Paul’s interview here: Related | 1real |
Vatican Ends Scrutiny Of U.S. Nuns | Updated at 10:04 a.m. ET
The Vatican has announced an end to an overhaul of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — an abrupt conclusion to a five-year doctrinal overhaul of the main umbrella group for nuns in the U.S. that began in 2012.
The Vatican said Thursday that it has accepted a report on the overhaul of the LCWR "marking the conclusion of the Doctrinal Assessment" of the umbrella group.
NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast unit the unexpected announcement is seen as a sign of Pope Francis' focus on a more merciful church.
LCWR leaders met with Pope Francis later Thursday, during their annual visit to Rome. David Gibson of Religion News Service described the meeting as "another indicator of the thaw in relations." He added:
The Rev. James Martin, SJ., editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America, said in a Facebook post that the LCWR agreed to implement some changes, "mainly regarding speakers and liturgies at its annual conventions. But overall, the operations of the LCWR remains intact."
Joshua J. McElwee, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, said the "news seems to bring to an end what had been an especially contentious period between the women religious and the Vatican."
At issue was an investigation of the LCWR that began in 2012 under Cardinal William Levada, the previous head of the Vatican's theological watchdog. As NPR's Scott Neuman reported at the time, "the Vatican issued a report declaring that the umbrella group representing most American nuns had strayed from church doctrine and adopted 'radical feminist' views. Rome ordered Seattle's archbishop to begin monitoring all operations of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious." The investigation called for a five-year doctrinal overhaul of the group.
Sister Simone Campbell, head of the Catholic social justice lobby Network, told NPR at the time that the investigation came "like a sock in the stomach."
A separate Vatican investigation into U.S. nuns ended last December with the Vatican expressing what NPR's Sylvia Poggioli called "appreciation for the dedicated work of nuns in education, health and among the poor." | 0fake |
‘Family Values’ Republican Busted For Having A Sex Video Of Himself On Government Computer | He s a Republican. He s anti-gay. He s all about family values. So of course he just got busted for having a sex video of himself on his work computer.Nebraska GOP state Senator Bill Kintner is being urged to resign by Republican Governor Pete Ricketts after the Nebraska State Patrol discovered a sexually explicit video of Kintner on the government computer he uses for work.According to the Lincoln Journal Star,A source familiar with the situation said Kintner told investigators about the video when he asked the Nebraska State Patrol for help with computer problems in July 2015.The patrol confirmed Friday that Kintner had sought help for what he believed to be a potential internet scam that occurred while the senator was in Massachusetts using his state computer. Having such a video on his work computer is a violation of Nebraska law, but it appears that Governor Ricketts and Kintner both ignored the law and hid the investigation from the public since last November when the discovery of the video was made.Only on Friday did Ricketts actually publicly call for Kintner to resign. Due to the ongoing investigation of this issue, I have been unable to say anything publicly. If the allegations are true, Senator Kintner needs to resign. The violation and the cover-up has Democrats calling for more than just Kintner s resignation. It is not enough for Sen. Kintner to resign in shame. Anyone that knew this information and continued to let him sit in office must also resign, Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb said in a statement. Did Gov. Ricketts or his staff look the other way so they had (Kintner s) vote in the Unicameral? This is so serious, in fact, that the State Patrol has turned out their findings to the Accountability and Disclosure Commission and and ethics investigation is underway.This is also incredibly hypocritical considering Kintner constantly brags about being a conservative Christian who has urged Christian-owned businesses to provide gay customers bad service on purpose and once told the Journal Star that his parents taught me the moral absolutes of Christianity, and I just applied those to everything. Except himself, apparently.Featured Image: YouTube | 1real |
Trump revealed intelligence secrets to Russians in Oval Office: officials | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russia’s foreign minister about a planned Islamic State operation, two U.S. officials said on Monday, plunging the White House into another controversy just months into Trump’s short tenure in office. The intelligence, shared at a meeting last week with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, was supplied by a U.S. ally in the fight against the militant group, both officials with knowledge of the situation said. The White House declared the allegations, first reported by the Washington Post, incorrect. “The story that came out tonight as reported is false,” H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, told reporters at the White House, adding that the leaders reviewed a range of common threats including to civil aviation. “At no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed. The president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known...I was in the room. It didn’t happen,” he said. Russia’s foreign ministry said reports that Trump had revealed highly classified information were “fake”, according to the Interfax news agency. The White House also released a statement from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who said the Oval Office meeting focused on counterterrorism, and from Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell, who called the Washington Post story false. Still, the news triggered concern in Congress. The Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, called Trump’s conduct “dangerous” and “reckless”. Bob Corker, the Republican head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the allegations “very, very troubling” if true. “Obviously, they’re in a downward spiral right now and they’ve got to come to grips with all that’s happening,” he said of the White House. The latest controversy came as Trump’s administration reels from the fallout over his abrupt dismissal of former FBI Director James Comey and amid congressional calls for an independent investigation into allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. One of the officials said the intelligence discussed by Trump in his meeting with Lavrov was classified “Top Secret” and held in a secure “compartment” to which only a handful of intelligence officials have access. After Trump’s disclosure of the information, which one of the officials described as spontaneous, officials immediately called the CIA and the National Security Agency, both of which have agreements with a number of allied intelligence services around the world, and informed them what had happened. While the president has the authority to disclose even the most highly classified information at will, in this case he did so without consulting the ally that provided it, which threatens to jeopardize a long-standing intelligence-sharing agreement, the U.S. officials said. Since taking office in January, Trump has careened from controversy to controversy, complaining on the first day about news coverage of his inauguration crowds; charging his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, with wiretapping; and just last week firing the FBI director who was overseeing an investigation into potential ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government. Trump, a Republican who has called allegations of links between his campaign team and Russia a “total scam,” sharply criticized his 2016 election rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, for her handling of classified information as secretary of state, when she used a private email server. The FBI concluded that no criminal charges against Clinton were warranted, but Comey said she and her colleagues had been “careless” with classified information. In his conversations with the Russian officials, Trump appeared to be boasting about his knowledge of the looming threats, telling them he was briefed on “great intel every day,” an official with knowledge of the exchange said, according to the Post. Some U.S. officials have told Reuters they have been concerned about disclosing highly classified intelligence to Trump. One official, who requested anonymity to discuss dealing with the president, said last month: “He has no filter; it’s in one ear and out the mouth.” One of the officials with knowledge of Trump’s meeting with the Russian called the timing of the disclosure “particularly unfortunate,” as the President prepares for a White House meeting on Tuesday with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, an ally in the fight against Islamic State. Trump’s first foreign trip also begins later this week and includes a stop in Saudi Arabia, another Islamic State foe, and a May 25 NATO meeting in Brussels attended by other important U.S. allies. He also has stops planned in Israel and the Vatican. The president’s trip and latest uproar over his meeting with Russian officials come amid rumors that he might shake-up his senior staff in a bid to refocus his administration. | 0fake |
TRUMP ARRIVES IN MOBILE, ALABAMA TO SAY THANKS…Obama Vacations For 17 Days In Hawaii [Video] | 1real | |
OBAMA’S ARROGANCE: WATCH As He Admonishes Reporter For Asking If He Was “Content” With 4 Americans Held In Iran Jail [VIDEO] | Being called out for his utter incompetence as a leader by the press is not something Obama is used to CBS News s Major Garrett asked President Obama at a press conference Wednesday if he was content with four Americans held in Iranian jails while his administration celebrated the nuclear deal. Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content with all the fanfare around this deal to leave the conscious of this nation, the strength of this nation unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans? Garrett asked. That s nonsense and you should know better, Obama bit back. Nobody s content and our diplomats and our teams are working diligently to try to get them out. Garrett later brushed off the scolding on CBS s news streaming network, saying, Clearly, it struck a nerve. That was my intention Was it provocative? Yes. Was it intended to be as such? Absolutely. The Daily Beast s Shane Harris reported yesterday that the Americans came up during negotiations over Iran s nuclear program. We believe very strongly that this is an opportunity for Iran to let the Americans come home, an administration official said.Via: The Daily Beast | 1real |
China foreign minister denounces efforts to damage 'one China' | BEIJING (Reuters) - Those who seek to damage the “one China” principle and harm China’s core interests are “lifting a rock only to drop it on their feet”, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Monday, in comments carried on the Foreign Ministry’s website. The ministry said he make the remark in Switzerland when asked by a reporter about a telephone call between U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. | 0fake |
Fake News: NYT, NYDN, HuffPo Report GOP Helping Mentally Ill Get Guns | The New York Times (NYT) the New York Daily News (NYDN) and The Huffington Post (HuffPo) are responding to the Senate vote to repeal the Social Security gun ban by accusing GOP lawmakers of helping the mentally ill get guns. [The House of Representatives voted to repeal the Social Security gun ban on February 2, and the Senate followed suit on February 15. NYT reacted with an editorial titled “Congress Says, Let the Mentally Ill Buy Guns. ” The NYDN ran an editorial titled “Gun Crazy: Making It Easier for the Mentally Troubled to Get Guns. ” HuffPo ran a column titled “Congress Just Repealed Rules to Keep Guns from the Mentally Ill. ” The NYDN’s story features a large photo of Sandy Hook Elementary School attacker Adam Lanza. This gives the impression that a Social Security ban would have stopped like Lanza from buying a gun at retail. However, Lanza was not a Social Security recipient, and he did not buy his guns at retail. Rather, he stole them. The Social Security gun ban would have done nothing to stop Lanza’s attack, but it would have denied Second Amendment rights to millions of elderly Social Security beneficiaries. This is why Jeffrey Swanson, Duke University’s psychiatry professor, said former President Barack Obama’s Social Security gun ban targets the “vulnerable” rather than the dangerous. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 0fake |
Was the airstrike in Syria Killing 22 schoolchildren another US false flag? Russian defense says so | Was the airstrike in Syria Killing 22 schoolchildren another US false flag? Russian defense says so By Joachim Hagopian Posted on October 31, 2016 by Joachim Hagopian
The Western media seizes every chance to twist the truth in favor of another round of Putin bashing as its worn out flimsy excuse to escalate further hostilities against Moscow in order to trigger World War III.
The pathological liars of the West never fail to deceitfully add fuel to their propaganda war machine fire. The latest hype is blaming a Russian airstrike for destroying a school in the rebel held Idlib Province in northern Syria, killing 22 children and six teachers.
Immediately the UN, as the Washington vassal it is, through the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), for added sensational effect no less, began opportunistically milking the tragedy for all it‘s worth, denouncing the killing as “an outrage” and probable war crime, adding that it’s the deadliest attack on a school in the near six-year Syrian conflict. What’s being left out of this heavily biased narrative is that the war in Syria was maliciously started by the United States, specifically the CIA funding protests in 2011 (actually as far back as 2005 ) targeting Assad as part of its infamous Arab Spring uprising in accordance with Empire’s illegal regime change policy. As an independent, secular leader unwilling to succumb to Empire’s pressure to allow a 2009 proposed Qatar gas pipeline to Europe be built through his country, the fixated neocons have been gunning for Assad’s removal ever since.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov explained that after closer examination and careful analysis, the video released to Western media allegedly depicting the airstrike in Idlib Province consists of more than ten separate pieces of footage fragmented together. Thus, it appears to be a hoax designed to incriminate the Russian aerospace group for killing innocent kids.
He added, “As one can see on a photo from the Russian drone, the roof of the school is not damaged and there are no bomb craters in the area adjacent to the school . . . All this means that the UNICEF leadership fell a victim to a new deception of swindlers in White Helmets. That is why, before making loud statements, UNICEF officials should check sources of their information in order not to undermine reputation of a respected organization.”
Of course, this latest false flag isn’t the first time Russia’s been falsely blamed for attacks in Syria. Through CIA and military intelligence, the West has an elaborate network of anti-Russian and anti-Assad provocateurs waging staged events to implicate and vilify Putin and Assad as the enemy. General Konashenkov mentioned the White Helmets as part of the organized setup of US false flag operations in Syria.
A former UK military intelligence officer owns the private security company responsible for training and handling the so-called White Helmets, discredited Syrian provocateurs pretending to be Syria’s Civil Defense corps regularly staging fake photo-ops after US backed terrorist groups kill innocent civilians making it appear that Assad and Putin are willfully and inhumanely murdering them. This latest school tragedy appears no different as incident after incident has been exposed in recent months.
Like last month’s attack on that UN humanitarian aid convoy north of Aleppo, engineered by Western intelligence working with the terrorists to accuse Russia of yet another airstrike that didn’t happen, covering up the a rocket attack perpetrated by the US backed al Nusra Front (forget their recent name change designed to distance themselves from being US proxy war terrorists no different from al Qaeda or ISIS/Daesh/Islamic State). Bottom line, Terrorists-R-US, Inc .
In this latest propaganda ploy, on-the-ground eyewitness reports vis-à-vis White helmets state that 10 airstrikes around midday on Wednesday were responsible for striking the residential compound containing two schools in session at the time resulting in the bloodbath. Of course the go-to propagandist organization out of London that the Western media never fails to quote, the already outed fraudulent Syrian Observatory of Human Rights consisting of one anti-Assad expatriated Syrian, began immediately pointing the finger at Russia, like Clinton, Obama and all the Western axis-of-evil liars determined to demonize Putin and Russia as false justification for starting their next world war .
In response to the tragedy, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Thursday called for an urgent international investigation without delay. She had this reaction to the Western pressitutes blaming her nation: “This is not surprising, but at the same time it deserves the strongest criticism. Al-Jazeera, The Independent, and other mass media sharing the same attitude to the journalistic profession at once blamed the tragedy on Russia, on the Russian aerospace group and on the Syrian armed forces. They claimed outright that it was a bombardment carried out by Russia and Syria. This is a lie. Russia has nothing to with that terrible tragedy, with that attack.”
Zakharova also mentioned concern that the UN humanitarian relief in Syria has not nearly been enough to evacuate the wounded and sick from East Aleppo after Russia and Syria agreed to a humanitarian pause there several days ago. However, US backed rebels and snipers fired on civilians attempting to leave the city. Moreover, the US took full advantage of the lull in the Russian-Syrian fighting by opportunistically resupplying their terrorists on the ground with 50 ton airdrops of fresh ammo and weapons. Again, clearly it’s the US that’s the war crime culprit, needlessly causing only more war and more deaths in the war ravaged nation reeling from nearly a half million lives lost.
Another reality check for the Washington neocon war maniacs determined to blame Russia for all the ills of the world (including the corrupt US political system responsible for the rigged election ) as their deceptive sleight of hand brainwash to feebly cover up their own slaughterhouse carnage raping our planet, just one day prior to the Idlib school violence, the Beirut branch of Amnesty International (AI) chastised the US led coalition pretending to fight the terrorists for its wanton killing of civilians in Syria as “collateral war damage.” The inhumanities that Empire commits is never admitted or acknowledged but instead constant lies claiming that Russian and Syrian forces are cold-bloodedly mowing down innocents continue nonstop. The hubris and hypocrisy stemming from Washington’s rotten core is American exceptionalism at its diabolical worse.
Deputy Director for research at the Beirut Amnesty International office Lynn Maalouf , stated, “It’s high time the US authorities came clean about the full extent of the civilian damage caused by coalition attacks in Syria. We fear the US-led coalition is significantly underestimating the harm caused to civilians in its operations in Syria.”
AI estimates that in 11 US coalition airstrikes since September 2014 killed more than 300 civilians in Syria. Maalouf maintains that in each case, “the coalition forces failed to take adequate precautions to minimize harm to civilians and damage to civilian objects.” So who’s really the inhumane kid-killing bad guy in Syria? Definitely not Russia nor the Syrian government but once again the enemy of the world, the US Empire.
Ultimately to silence this never-ending US blame game against Moscow, the Russian ambassador to the UN on Thursday began circulating the original September 9 US-Russian peace treaty to the UN Security Council as well as to the UN Geneva branch. This document clearly shows that Russia has exhausted every sincere effort to bring an end to the war in Syria and stop global terrorism but the United States and its Western lackeys have willfully and deceitfully sabotaged that process at every turn in order to save their precious terrorists and endless war on terror. The evildoers behind the lifted curtain are exposed and guilty as charged.
Or how can we forget that Obama staged false flag attack in August 2013 when the liar-in-chief falsely blamed Assad for sarin gassing his own Syrian children in the nearby Damascus suburb of Ghouta . Despite the real child murderers being Obama and his backed rebels, he and Hillary created soon to be named ISIS, the Manchurian president given the mission to destroy America and his then recently resigned secretary of state designated to be his successor to finish the job were trying to launch airstrikes on Syria to start World War III over three years ago. Putin outsmarted the US traitors in charge by brokering the last minute deal for Assad to turn in his chemical weapons arsenal. But with White House approval, US backed terrorists guilty of the Ghouta massacre are still using their Saudi and Turkish supplied chemical weapons to kill Syrian civilians even to this very day. Where are the humanitarian cries about those war crime atrocities?
Or what about all the civilians dying in Syria from mortar shelling of residential neighborhoods in West Aleppo? A mere one day after the Idlib school bombing, the US backed al Nusra fired rockets in two locations in West Aleppo, one a school killing six children under the age of 16 and injuring more than a dozen others. In response to the Thursday school bombing in West Aleppo by US backed terrorists, the Aleppo police chief Zuher Said Aldin commented, “There are no military units there, only schools. Nevertheless, militants carried out a strike on this area, moreover, when classes were underway. Innocent children were killed, they just wanted to study.”
But where are all the humanitarian cries against US financed and supported terrorists constantly murdering innocents throughout the Middle East and North Africa? Conveniently absent, because the US plotters of wars around the world couldn’t care less about any dead children anywhere on this planet.
Or the 10,000 civilians in Yemen slaughtered by the US backed Saudi coalition consisting of US Special Force boots on the ground and more al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists, deployed there as well, in addition to Israeli and Gulf State airstrikes and now US destroyers pounding the Yemen coast killing more civilians with cruise missiles after yet more US false flag claims that the Houthis fired missiles at the US Navy without any evidence to prove it. Where are the sanctimonious humanitarian cries over dead Yemeni children?
This historic, incessant use of false flags designed to bri
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/ This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink | 1real |
Factbox: EU launches action against Poland over courts reform | WARSAW (Reuters) - Below are details of the European Commission s decision to launch the Article 7 procedure against Poland on Wednesday over judicial reforms that Brussels says undermine Polish courts independence. The procedure could lead to a suspension of Poland s voting rights in the EU if approved by all over EU members except Poland. Hungary has said it would veto any sanctions on Poland. First Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, said at a news conference on Wednesday that thirteen laws passed in Poland over the last two years put at serious risk the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers in Poland . The common pattern of all these legislative changes is that the executive or legislative powers are now set up in such a way that the ruling majority can systematically, politically interfere with the composition, the powers, the administration and the functioning of these authorities, thereby rendering the independence of the judiciary completely moot, Timmermans said. He said that laws passed by Poland s parliament mean that: Almost 40 percent of current Supreme Court judges will be forced into compulsory retirement Poland s president will have discretionary power to decide if and for how long to prolong their mandates New Supreme Court judges will be appointed by the president on the recommendation of the newly composed National Council for the Judiciary (NCJ), which is dominated by political appointees of the ruling party. This politicized Supreme Court will decide directly about the validity of election results A number of judges in ordinary courts are forced to retire following a decrease of the retirement age of judges. Their mandates can be prolonged at the discretion of the Minister of the justice minister who is also the chief prosecutor Justice minister has discretionary power to appoint and dismiss all presidents of courts without concrete criteria, no obligation to state reasons and no judicial review Mandates of members of NCJ will be prematurely terminated and members will be reappointed by Polish parliament instead of by other judges as required by European standards NCJ plays key role throughout the career of judges when it comes to their appointments, their promotions, to where they are assigned to in the country and the courts, to disciplinary proceedings Timmermans said on Wednesday the European Commission asks Poland to: Restore the independence and legitimacy of the Constitutional Tribunal by ensuring that its judges, its President and its Vice-President are lawfully elected and appointed Publish and implement fully the three 2016 verdicts of the Constitutional Tribunal Amend the law on the Supreme Court so as to not apply a lowered retirement age to the current Supreme Court judges, and remove the discretionary powers of the President of Poland and remove the extraordinary appeal procedure Amend the law on the ordinary courts so as to remove the new retirement regime for judges of ordinary courts Amend the law on the National Council for the Judiciary so as to ensure that the mandate of members of the Council is not terminated and the members are elected by other judges The Commission said that should the Polish authorities implement the recommended actions in the coming three months the Commission stands ready to reconsider its decision to move forward with the Article 7 procedure. | 0fake |
Dem Sen Manchin: No Evidence ’Whatsoever’ of Collusion - Breitbart | Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Senate Intelligence Committee member Sen. Joe Manchin ( ) said that he had seen no evidence of collusion “whatsoever” between the Trump campaign and Russian during their investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election. When asked about “collusion” by host George Stephanopoulos, Manchin said, “You know, we haven’t seen any of that whatsoever, George, we’ve been looking and showing everything that they possibly have. That has not led to that. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0fake |
U.S. attorney general Sessions evasive on Russia probe: congressmen | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to answer questions on Thursday during a closed congressional hearing about whether President Donald Trump ever instructed him to hinder the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Democratic lawmakers who attended. Sessions testified behind closed doors for several hours before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. Representative Adam Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat, told reporters he was troubled by Sessions’ refusal to answer what he believes are essential questions. “I asked the attorney general whether he was ever instructed by the president to take any action that he believed would hinder the Russia investigation and he declined to answer the question,” Schiff told reporters after the hearing. “There is no privileged basis to decline to answer a question like that. If the president did not instruct him to take an action that would hinder the investigation, he should say so. If the president did instruct him to hinder the investigation in any way, in my view that would be a potential criminal act,” Schiff said. Representative Mike Quigley, another Democratic committee member, said on MSNBC that Sessions “is one of the most forgetful persons who works out of Washington, D.C., or he’s being less than candid with the American public.” Sessions declined to comment to reporters as he left the secure hearing room. The panel is among several congressional committees, along with the Justice Department’s special counsel Robert Mueller, investigating allegations that Russia sought to influence the U.S. election and potential collusion by Trump’s campaign. Moscow has denied any meddling and Trump has said there was no collusion. Another source familiar with his testimony said that Sessions said he could not remember the answers to many important questions, and the answers he did provide concerning meetings with Russians tracked statements he had previously made in other congressional hearings. A spokeswoman for Sessions said he has consistently declined to discuss his communications with Trump in the past, and that he has also previously said he was never instructed to do anything illegal or improper. When he was a Republican U.S. senator, Sessions was an early supporter and close adviser to Trump during his run for the White House. Democrats have accused Sessions of repeatedly changing his sworn testimony throughout several prior congressional hearings about meetings and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Schiff said committee members asked Sessions questions during the closed hearing about his prior testimony and about “interactions the campaign had with Russia.” The intelligence committee also met for more than three hours on Thursday with Erik Prince, who founded the private military contractor Blackwater and was a supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign. One focus of Thursday’s interview was expected to be a meeting Prince had in the Seychelles Islands in January, which some news reports later described as an effort to connect the incoming Trump administration with Moscow. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is Trump’s Secretary of Education, and he has said the Seychelles meeting had nothing to do with Trump. Schiff told reporters there were some “unresolved issues” after Prince’s testimony. Prince complained that the hearing had wasted time and taxpayer dollars on a “meaningless fishing expedition.” A spokesman for Prince later issued a statement saying Prince had volunteered to answer questions. “As we have said throughout, Mr. Prince has never acted on behalf of President Trump, the transition team or his administration regarding Russia.” The Republican-led committee is planning to publicly release the transcript of Prince’s closed hearing, described as “public in a closed setting” within about three days. There is no plan to release a transcript from Sessions’ testimony. | 0fake |
OBAMA AND UNION LEADERS SELL OUT AMERICAN WORKERS By Turning Illegal Alien Into Union Members | This story just proves what we ve been saying all along. When it comes to unions, it s not about the members, it s about the union leadership and how they can increase their membership numbers (dues). Aiding union leadership in their quest to add members to flailing union membership numbers is just a way for Obama to keep the skids greased and ensure future contributions from one of the largest Democrat party donors (unions) in America. Congressional investigators say they ve uncovered another attempt by the Obama administration to aid illegal immigrants in the U.S. this time, by teaching foreign workers lessons on union organizing.The National Labor Relations Board has entered into agreements with Mexico, Ecuador and the Philippines to teach workers from those countries in the United States their rights when it comes to union activity.The agreements reportedly don t distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants. But lawmakers are worried it s part of an effort to shield illegal immigrants specifically, by encouraging them to join a union and get protection.NLRB spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek explained to Fox News that under the National Labor Relations Act, employees, whether documented or undocumented, are protected from retaliation due to union or other protected concerted activity. That means employers could be charged for dismissing an illegal immigrant worker if the firing is determined to be tied to the worker s union activityHouse Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, argued illegal immigrant workers could soon learn to exploit the system, creating a catch-22 for businesses. They could instead be charged with violating the National Labor Relations Act because someone will claim that they re doing it because the individual is engaged in unionization activities, Goodlatte said.He also claimed the Obama administration was trying to keep the NLRB union education agreements, which were originally signed in 2013 and 2014, quiet. This is the first we ve learned of this and it s the first that news organizations have learned of this and they didn t learn it because the administration came out and told them, Goodlatte told Fox News. They learned about it because of leaked materials, and again, that is not the kind of transparency the American people expect of their government. An NLRB official, though, disputed the notion that the agreement was a new development or something that was intentionally being kept out of the news. Yet it isn t just the NLRB that could view union activity as a shield for illegal immigrants.In June 2011, then-Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton issued a memo saying: ICE officers, special agents and attorneys are reminded to exercise all appropriate discretion on a case-by-case basis when making detention and enforcement decisions in the cases . . . [of] individuals engaging in a protected activity related to civil or other rights (for example, union organizing). While this may serve as a way to boost union membership at a time when their numbers are trending downward, one activist said it will likely hurt U.S. citizen union members in the end. It seems that the union is almost selling out the interests of American workers and legal immigrant workers in order to boost its membership by appealing to illegal workers and getting the assistance of other countries in doing that, Jessica Vaughan, of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Fox News.Via: FOX News | 1real |
PINKERTON: How Republicans Should Address the Hostile Obamacare Town Halls | Second of Four Parts … The Republicans Face Flak, The fate of Obamacare dominates the news — again. Eight years ago, Republicans and Tea Partiers were on the offensive. Today, it’s Democrats, perhaps joined by “astroturf” activists, on the offense. In the first installment of this series, we looked at the hot political issue of pharma drug prices. Now we’ll look at an even hotter political issue, the fate of Obamacare — and we’ll also see how it ties into the question of pharma drugs. As Republicans grapple with Obamacare, the Main Stream Media headlines are, well, daunting. For example: My worry now is that many people are talking about a partial repeal of Obamacare. If you only repeal part of it and you leave some sort of Obamacare light, which some are talking about, my fear is the situation actually gets worse. The problem is that if you get it done, you own the entire system of American medicine. . . . If you replace, you are going to have to redo all of American medicine all over again, and then you become responsible. . . . So if something goes wrong in anybody’s life — denied coverage, lousy coverage, no available doctor, premiums increasing, whatever it is — whether or not it is caused by the replacement bill, you will be responsible for it and blamed. In the meantime, the Democrats and the left are, indeed, turning up the heat. So should Republicans be worried? Some observers say yes. On February 14, Jim VandeHei and David Nather, writing for the buzzy Beltway publication Axios, observed that some 147 million Americans benefit from health programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and VA benefits. The Democratic strategy, they added, is to scare all these beneficiaries about Obamacare repeal. That is, lump them all together and message them so that they all feel threatened. Will it work? We’ll have to wait to find out, of course, but here’s how the Axios scribblers see it in the meantime: This year’s version of “government takeover” is “throwing 20 million people off of health insurance. ” Democrats have been throwing that line around, even though Republicans are trying to find a replacement plan that covers people in other ways. (Their problem: They can’t guarantee it will cover all 20 million.) Continuing, the two write: Democrats in Congress are under direct orders from party leaders to crank up their own protests, to build on the loud and angry demonstrations at Republican town halls. And there is every reason to believe they will be highly effective. How do we know? Because Republicans exploited the same fears, energy and trends to do unto Democrats as Democrats are about to do unto them. [emphasis added] Again, no one is an oracle, but just on February 21, in the early days of Resistance Recess, came some indicators. One was this New York Times headline, surveying the activist activity surrounding Republican lawmakers’ meetings in Iowa and around the country: “Republicans Return to Town Halls, and Protesters Follow. ” And this, from Politico: “This time, [Sen. Chuck] Grassley hears voices: The Iowa senator’s 2009 town halls helped kill bipartisanship for the health law. Now, the crowds worry about repeal. ” Once again we might ask: Is all this noise simply journalistic hype? We’ll have a better handle on that question this spring, when Georgians go to the polls to fill the vacancy in the 6th Congressional district left by the departure of Tom Price, now Secretary of Health and Human Services. Price himself handily won to the House last year, but Trump won the district by just a single percentage point. And so, of course, the Democrats will seek to make the voting a referendum on Trump, not Price. The balloting takes place on April 18, and, if needed, a runoff will be held on June 20. In the meantime, we can observe that special elections are typically affairs, with the advantage going to the side that can bring out the most “mad as hell” voters. So Peach State Republicans will have to get themselves energized to keep the seat. Moreover, looking beyond that special election, we can see that the precise details of the Republicans’ legislation will be vital to their fortunes in the 2018 midterms. So if we recall Rep. Sensenbrenner’s jigsaw puzzle analogy, we know that each tiny detail of the GOP plan will be critical. We might further observe that it’s the American middle class that finds itself right smack in the middle of the Obamacare fight. And why is that? It’s because the rich and the have all the insurance, and the money, that they need. And the poor already have Medicaid and charity. So that leaves the middle class at the mercy of the tides. Veteran health observer Robert Laszewski, a frequent critic of Obamacare, offers these words of warning to the GOP and, in particular, to the Trump coalition: If you take Obamacare as it looks right now, [about half of enrollees] don’t get a subsidy because their incomes are too high. They make $90, 000 or $100, 000 a year but are in the individual market. These tend to be Trump supporters. So if [the administration’s forthcoming legislation] further destabilizes this thing and there are rate increases, he’ll be screwing his own people. | 0fake |
The World Is Full of Dogs Without Collars - The New York Times | MONTAGUE, Mass. — Think of all the dogs out there: labradors and poodles and labradoodles huskies and westies and dogues de Bordeaux pit bulls and spaniels and lovable mutts that go to doggy day care. Add them up, all the pet dogs on the planet, and you get about 250 million. But there are about a billion dogs on Earth, according to some estimates. The other 750 million don’t have flea collars. And they certainly don’t have humans who take them for walks and pick up their feces. They are called village dogs, street dogs and dogs, among other things, and they haunt the garbage dumps and neighborhoods of most of the world. In their new book, “What Is a Dog? ,” Raymond and Lorna Coppinger argue that if you really want to understand the nature of dogs, you need to know these other animals. The vast majority are not strays or lost pets, the Coppingers say, but rather superbly adapted scavengers — the closest living things to the dogs that first emerged thousands of years ago. Other scientists disagree about the genetics of the dogs, but acknowledge that of a billion dogs are well worth studying. The Coppingers have been major figures in canine science for decades. Raymond Coppinger was one of the founding professors at Hampshire College in Amherst, and he and Lorna, a biologist and science writer, have done groundbreaking work on sled dogs, herding dogs, dogs, and the origin and evolution of dogs. “We’ve done everything together,” he said recently as they sat on the porch of the house they built, set on about 100 acres of land, and talked at length about dogs, village and otherwise, and the roots of their deep interest in the animals. Both had dogs as children. Lorna had several kinds. An uncle brought Ray his first dog, a pup from a female that hung around a loading ramp at a chemical plant in Cambridge, Mass. “He lived to be 17 — he looked like any other village dog in the world,” he said. After they graduated from Boston University, where they were both undergraduates in the late 1950s, they continued to keep them. “I gave her a dog for a graduation present,” he said. It was reputedly a mix. After they both graduated, they moved to the Amherst area, where Lorna taught Russian and received a master’s degree in wildlife biology and Ray pursued a Ph. D. in zoology, both at the University of Massachusetts. They did field studies together, but on different subjects, and then dove deeply into the canine world. A neighbor raced sled dogs, and one thing led to another until Dr. Coppinger started racing them himself and they had a hundred dogs housed in cement dens on a hill behind his house. In 1969, he joined Hampshire College as part of the founding faculty, and continued researching energy expenditure in the dogs. He also developed a winning strain by hybridizing Alaskan village dogs with Border collies. For the first time in their lives together, the Coppingers are now without any dogs at home, and they talk with some nostalgia, more about the bad dogs than the good. Like Jane. “Worst dog I ever had,” Dr. Coppinger said. “I could tell you a thousand bad stories about Jane. ” “But,” he said, “put her on a mountain pass behind 3, 000 sheep, and she’d worry them all the way up the mountain and pick up the strays and everything. ” They don’t miss having dogs by the score, but Ms. Coppinger said, “I miss the pet dogs. ” The last, who died in 2013, was Poppyseed Shackleton, a Jack Russell terrier who belonged to their grandchildren, but lived with them. One benefit, however, is that they are enjoying observing a flood of wildlife that avoided their land when so many dogs were around — vultures, foxes, deer and other animals. In the early 1970s, they began studying dogs and traveled around the world finding dogs that sheep herders used. They brought some home and helped develop the Anatolian shepherd breed in the United States, and started a livestock project at Hampshire to study how effective dogs were in protecting sheep and other livestock. In 2001, their book “Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior Evolution” challenged the way scientists thought about the beginnings of dogs. They argued against the widely held view that one day a grabbed a wolf pup from a den and started a breeding program. Instead, they argued, dogs domesticated themselves. Some wild canines started hanging around humans for their leftovers and gradually evolved into scavengers dependent on humans. Not everyone in canine science shares that view today, but many researchers think it is the most plausible route to domestication. During their travels over the years — to look for sheepdogs, to introduce them to sheep farmers who hadn’t used dogs, to attend conferences — they noticed dogs in the street wherever they went, and after a while they began to think about the dogs’ lives. “They were so much more interesting than what we’d ever done before,” Dr. Coppinger said. “Here were animals that had their own unique kind of social behaviors. So we started to study them. ” That was in the early 1990s. He worked with Luigi Boitani of La Sapienza University of Rome, who was studying urban dogs that lived off garbage. “I taught classes in the Mexico City dump,” Dr. Coppinger said. And the Coppingers continued to observe village dogs around the world. They argue in their new book that these dogs “are not mongrels or strays,” as is often assumed. Some lost pets do wander into groups of village dogs. But by and large, these dogs are much the same around the world, whether in Africa, Mongolia, China or the Americas. Dr. Coppinger said he was once told by a Navajo sheep herder that a good herding dog was “not too big and not too small,” which perfectly describes village dogs, too. They are larger in colder climates, but in the tropics, he said, a dog is the norm. They are completely polygamous. “There can be as many fathers to a litter of puppies as there are puppies to a litter,” Dr. Coppinger said. And after about 10 weeks, the puppies fend for themselves. Most of the pups don’t survive, as is the case with many wild animals. They have remarkably varied connections to human beings. Some live completely on their own at dumps. Some are neighborhood dogs, recognized and perhaps given handouts by people who live in a certain area. Others may feed and breed on their own, but spend nights at the homes of people. Sometimes they are adopted by people. But really, Dr. Coppinger says, it is the dogs who adopt humans. The number of dogs that can survive in a city or a neighborhood or at a dump is determined by the available garbage. The Coppingers calculated that in the tropics it takes about 100 people to produce enough garbage to support seven dogs. There is precious little funding for studying these dogs, except in the context of preventing rabies, which is an enormous problem, with close to 60, 000 human deaths a year, mostly from dog bites. But some scientists have tracked their behavior. Sunil K. Pal in India has studied them and written a number of papers on their social lives and behavior. The Coppingers were joined for the recent conversation at their home by Kathryn Lord, a former student of Dr. Coppinger and now a researcher at Hampshire College, who studies the development and reproductive behavior of dogs, including village dogs. She shared her insights on what makes a dog a dog, and not a wolf, for example. Wolf puppies depend on their parents and other adults regurgitating partly digested food. “This is all but lost in dogs,” she said. It does happen, but reports suggest that in village dogs it may occur several times a week. Among wolves in the wild, she said, “it’s seven times a day,” and it is an uncontrollable reflex. In one experiment, she tried testing adult wolves by putting them into a pen with unrelated pups after a big steak meal. “They’d actually run around with their heads in the air to avoid the puppies,” she said. “Eventually they’d lose their lunch. ” At which point they would run off and let the youngsters have at it. The point the Coppingers and Dr. Lord make about these behaviors is not that dogs are somehow less caring or noble than wolves, but how perfectly adapted they are to the lives they lead. They don’t need to be big and strong to bring down prey. They don’t need the kind of parental care and hunting instruction that wolf pups get. As Dr. Lord said, dog pups don’t need to catch and kill anything. “They need to walk up to a rotten melon and eat it, which they can do at 10 weeks. ” Puppies, after they are weaned, cannot compete with adults, so unless disease or dogcatchers have put a dent in the adult population, most of them starve. They have a true superpower in reserve, however, that can help them escape their fate. They can convince a human to feed them. Dr. Coppinger recalled a woman in South Africa who had many dogs in and around her house. He asked her how it happened that she had so many dogs. “I don’t know,” he recalled the woman saying. “They just keep coming. ” But what are village dogs? Are they a breed, or a superbreed apart? Or are they just a mixture of many breeds with origins too messy to trace? Adam Boyko, a biologist at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, who was inspired to pursue canine science by the Coppingers’ 2001 book, has also compiled DNA from village dogs around the world. One of his research papers concluded that village dogs in Mongolia are at the center of dog diversity. That suggests that they are geographically nearest to the place where dogs first evolved. Other evidence has suggested that dogs originated in Europe or China, however, and Dr. Boyko is one of a number of participants in a major study being led by Greger Larson at Oxford to use ancient DNA and fossils to clear up some of the confusion about the origins of dogs. And other village dogs seem to have different genetic makeup. For example, Dr. Boyko and his colleagues analyzed DNA samples from village dogs on remote islands in Fiji and French Polynesia that he hoped would show a historical pattern of migration as people and their dogs moved from place to place. “Almost without exception the dogs were 99 percent European,” he said, meaning their ancestors were dogs on European ships that came to Pacific islands ages ago. Dogs in other places, like Borneo, he said, show almost no trace of European breeds. In a study published last fall, Wieslaw Bogdanowicz at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw led an international team of scientists in analyzing the DNA of dogs in Eurasia. He concluded that these dogs were different from purebreds and mixed breeds. “I would like to call them a superbreed,” he said. He also found that modern European street dogs trace their ancestry to East Asian dogs that migrated with humans to Europe. Earlier studies place that migration sometime between 4, 000 and 11, 000 years ago. Beyond that, however, lies the ultimate origin of dogs, which is still clouded in mystery. The consensus among scientists is that dogs evolved from ancient wolves, perhaps ones not found in the fossil record, 15, 000 or more years ago. Dr. Coppinger has suggested that dogs evolved after the invention of agriculture, perhaps around 8, 000 years ago, and that today’s village dogs are the closest to these first dogs. But this idea has little support from other scientists. The Coppingers’ main goal is to draw attention to the world’s vast majority of dogs that are hidden in plain sight. They represent a treasure trove of scientific information. Although the Coppingers recognize the social cost of animals that are unvaccinated and running free, they argue that killing the dogs, as some countries do during rabies epidemics, does not help. It’s impossible to kill them all, and because they breed rapidly, the population quickly rebounds. Nor do the Coppingers have any sympathy for rescue groups that, as Dr. Coppinger puts it, “kidnap and mutilate” street dogs from the Caribbean and elsewhere to bring them to American shelters to live as pets, “where they are made totally dependent and entirely restricted. ” This is supposed to benefit the dogs, but Dr. Coppinger argues that they are taken from a rich social environment, with many dogs, to lives of relative isolation. What to do? The Coppingers suggest a simple answer. One way or another village dogs depend on garbage. If society wants fewer dogs in the street, there’s a surefire solution. Less garbage. | 0fake |
U.S. military aircraft crashes in Syria, injuring two: officials | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two U.S. service member suffered non-life threatening injuries when a military aircraft crashed in Syria, U.S. officials said on Friday. In a statement, the military said the two service members were moved to a medical facility and released after it was determined that their injuries were not serious after the hard landing. The other passengers and crew on the aircraft were uninjured, and no other casualties were reported on the ground, the statement said. A U.S. official, speaking on condition on anonymity, said the incident took place in Syria and involved an Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. | 0fake |
Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014 | You are here: Home / US / Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014 Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014 October 27, 2016
According to the Pew Research Center’s latest numbers, in 2014, 275,000 anchor babies were born in the United States — enough to fill Orlando, Florida.
The Washington Examiner reported :
Moms in the United States illegally gave birth to 275,000 babies in 2014, enough birthright U.S. citizens to fill a city the size of Orlando, Florida, according to an analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
The data showed that newborns to illegals accounted for 7 percent of all births in 2014, according to the analysis from the Pew Research Center.
The report reviews births to unmarried foreign-born and American born women. Those who are foreign born, including illegals, are seeing their birthrate drop, though it is still making up for the decline in births by American women.
Pew’s recently-released report read: “In 2014, about 275,000 babies were born to unauthorized-immigrant parents in the U.S., accounting for about 7 percent of all U.S. births, and 32 percent of all U.S. births to foreign-born mothers.” The share of new mothers who are teenagers is higher among the U.S. born (6%) than among the foreign born (2%) https://t.co/d6f9C9ALoR pic.twitter.com/ydJpV2NgXh
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 26, 2016
“A third of all births to foreign-born mothers were to unmarried women – down from a peak of 37 percent in 2008. At the same time, the rate has held steady for U.S.-born women and now stands at 42 percent,” the study continued.
According to Pew, the birthrate among U.S.-born women has declined, so the rise in the birthrate is solely because of immigrant mothers. The growth in annual U.S. births since 1970 has been driven entirely by immigrant moms https://t.co/bhzGRzgimg pic.twitter.com/dozNVXXVgT
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 26, 2016
While the annual number of babies born in the U.S. has fluctuated in recent years – most markedly during the Great Recession when there was a significant drop in births nationwide – the trajectory over the past four decades or so has been upward. In 2014, there were 4 million births in the U.S., compared with 3.74 million in 1970.
This growth has been driven entirely by the increasing numbers of babies born to immigrant women. In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11 percent during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014.
So, do you think that all these people coming here, in many cases illegally, have assimilated to our culture and/or are planning on doing so? Take a look around and it’s easy to see that the answer is no.
If Hillary Clinton is elected, she plans to greatly increase refugee flows and give amnesty to illegal immigrants who broke our laws. In contrast, Donald Trump has pledged to restore law and order, build a wall, enforce immigration laws, and put the safety and interests of American citizens first.
Which one sounds better to you at this critical point in our country’s history? | 1real |
For Blacks Facing Parole in New York State, Signs of a Broken System - The New York Times | Jaimie Davenport and Billy Cassell had their first hearings before the New York State Board of Parole earlier this year. Both were serving a maximum of six years on a burglary conviction, Mr. Cassell for breaking into storage units, Mr. Davenport for stealing cellphones. The men are in their 30s and told the board that they had struggled for years with substance abuse — Mr. Cassell with drugs, Mr. Davenport with alcohol. Each had served a prior sentence for theft, and each had done a stretch in solitary confinement for breaking prison rules. Mr. Cassell was set free. But not Mr. Davenport. The board turned him down, extending his prison term for at least another two years. For all their similarities, there was a telling difference: Mr. Cassell is white Mr. Davenport is black. And in New York, black men going before the parole board are at a marked disadvantage. An analysis by The New York Times of thousands of parole decisions from the past several years found that fewer than one in six black or Hispanic men was released at his first hearing, compared with one in four white men. It is a disparity that is particularly striking not for the most violent criminals, like rapists and murderers, but for offenders who commit property crimes like stealing a television from a house or shoplifting from Duane Reade — precisely the people many states are now working to keep out of prison in the first place. Since 2006, white inmates serving two to four years for a single count of burglary have been released after an average of 803 days, while black inmates served an average of 883 days for the same crime. The racial disparity in parole decisions in the state is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of a broken system. Intended as a progressive tool to promote good behavior, parole has devolved into a hurried, often chaotic procedure. Inmates typically get less than 10 minutes to plead their cases before they are sent back to their cells. The parole board has not been fully staffed for years and rarely sees a prisoner in person. Inmates are usually glimpsed from the shoulders up on a video screen. Commissioners — as board members are called — often read through files to prepare for the next interview as the inmate speaks. The whole process is run like an assembly line. They hear cases just two days a week and see as many as 80 inmates in that time. Board members are mainly from upstate, earn more than $100, 000 annually and hold their positions for years. They tend to have backgrounds in law enforcement rather than rehabilitation. Most are white there is currently only one black man, and there are no Latino men. In short, they have little in common with the black and Latino inmates who make up nearly of the state prison population. At a September board meeting, one commissioner, Marc Coppola, complained that he had trouble keeping track of which inmate he was interviewing. “We were a mess,” Mr. Coppola said, according to video of the meeting. “We didn’t even know who was in the chair. ” Tina Stanford, the board’s chairwoman, agreed. “There are others among us who’ve had similar concerns, just for what their experience in terms of the caseload has been,” she said. While it is not possible to know whether race is a factor in any particular parole decision, a pattern of racial inequity is clear when the data are examined on a large scale. The Times analyzed 13, 876 parole decisions for male inmates over a period ending in May. The analysis included only appearances before the board, which take place after inmates complete their minimum sentence. The Times took into account such factors as an inmate’s crime, age, race and previous stints in state prison. The board rarely released violent offenders of any race, denying nearly 90 percent of them at their initial interview. But among offenders imprisoned for more minor felonies, the racial disparity is glaring. For burglars who had no earlier prison sentences, the board released 41 percent of white inmates compared with 30 percent of blacks and Latinos. The imbalance is especially stark for younger inmates. Among male prisoners under 25 who had no prior state prison sentences, the parole board released 30 percent of whites but only 14 percent of blacks and Latinos. The Times did not have access to the full range of information the board took into account. This includes inmates’ time in county jail, full arrest histories, complete prison disciplinary records and whether required prison programs were completed. Still, even before a black inmate takes a seat in the hearing room and utters a word, the odds are stacked against him. Guards punish black men in some prisons at twice the rate of whites, send them to solitary confinement more often and keep them there longer, a Times analysis of nearly 60, 000 disciplinary cases from last year found. And bad prison records make it that much harder to be granted parole. In parole hearings that are hurried and often disorganized, the board members’ first impressions of an inmate — whether he is well spoken or inarticulate, neat or disheveled, black or white — can have an outsize impact on his future. The Times reviewed transcripts of 109 parole hearings from the first quarter of this year, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request. They all involved inmates guilty of burglary in the third degree, like Samuel McQuilkin, a black inmate with a long history of minor crimes who was convicted of stealing chicken nuggets from a school cafeteria. It is often hard to pinpoint what the deciding factor is for commissioners. Some focus on an inmate’s criminal record or problems with drug abuse. Others are more interested in family ties. In an interview process that is impersonal — 95 of the 109 hearings examined by the Times were conducted by video — any rapport an inmate can establish with board members is likely to help. This can work in a white inmate’s favor. A majority of commissioners are white, and like most of the white inmates in the New York system, they come from upstate. Matthew Conley, a white college graduate from Eagle Bay, in the Adirondacks, was doing time for stealing golf carts from Mohawk Valley Country Club, in Little Falls, N. Y. While hearings usually go quickly and focus on criminal and prison disciplinary history, W. William Smith, a commissioner who is also white, spent time reminiscing with Mr. Conley about summers spent rafting in the Adirondacks. “Were you employed by Tickner’s kayak and canoe rental in Old Forge?” Mr. Smith asked. “I was,” Mr. Conley said. Mr. Smith said he had done similar work. “That was the best job I ever had,” he said. “Long time ago. ” Mr. Conley was released. The tone was different at the hearing for Mr. Davenport, the black inmate convicted of stealing cellphones. When it comes to an inmate’s criminal history, commissioners are supposed to consider convictions only, but G. Kevin Ludlow, a white board member from Utica, pressed him to confess any additional crimes he might have committed. “How many burgs have you done that you haven’t been nailed for?” Mr. Ludlow asked. “There are others out there. What do you figure, five, six? How many?” “No, sir, this is the only one,” Mr. Davenport said. “Not that it matters — it was a crime. But this is the only one. ” Though being a parole commissioner is considered a job, only two days a week are devoted to hearing cases. Monday and Thursday are set aside for travel, and Friday is reserved for interviewing crime victims’ families. Every week, four teams of two or three commissioners are dispatched around the state to administrative offices for video conferences or one of the few facilities where interviews are still conducted in person. The condensed schedule leaves commissioners with little time to prepare. They typically see their cases on the morning of the hearings, when they arrive to find a cardboard box with a stack of folders placed beside their chair. According to data from the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the board holds about 12, 000 hearings a year and may conduct as many as 40 interviews a day. In practice, only one commissioner presides over a hearing, while the other two try to pay attention as they read files for upcoming cases, according to four former commissioners whose service on the board spanned from 2000 to 2014. To save time, parole rulings are sometimes drafted beforehand. There are commissioners who come prepared with four or five decisions that they modify slightly to fit particular cases, said Robert Dennison, who was a commissioner from 2000 to 2007 and the board’s chairman for part of that time. “Some of the commissioners’ minds are made up before the guy comes into the room,” he said. Inmates complained that it often seemed as if what they had to say did not matter. At his hearing in January, James McArdelle sounded surprised that the commissioners appeared to be paying attention. “The most I would like to say is thank you for actually listening,” he said at the time. “I have been through parole before. A lot of people don’t listen and have a prejudgment. ” The board has long been understaffed, and it now has 13 commissioners, though as many as 19 may be appointed. Video conferences save time and may cut costs, but the former commissioners interviewed by The Times said they believed the inmates were being shortchanged. “There are things you may not catch if it’s done by video,” said Henry Lemons, who was a commissioner from 2009 to 2012. “A person could have turned his whole life around and walks in holding a Bible. At the interview, I’m just seeing his shoulder, neck and face on the video screen. ” Former commissioners said it was common knowledge on the board that corrections officers sometimes trumped up disciplinary “tickets,” intentionally undermining an inmate’s chances of parole. “The commissioners in some instances are savvy enough to know that somebody who hasn’t had a ticket in years that all of a sudden has a ticket right before a hearing, there might be something going on there,” said Milton Johnson, a former board member who was a Secret Service agent and served for a year ending in 2014. While commissioners are allowed to take time to look into such cases, they almost always weigh inmates’ claims on the spot, Mr. Johnson said. “It’s a very imperfect situation,” he said. Inmates have little recourse to challenge parole decisions. They can appeal to the State Supreme Court, but judges in New York can only order a new parole hearing, not overturn the original decision. Even if the decision is sent back, the appeal process can take two years, and by then an inmate is usually entitled to a new hearing anyway. Last year, a State Supreme Court judge ordered a new hearing for Rudolph Williams, a convicted murderer, and criticized the board for basing its denial on a “boilerplate list of factors” that included letters opposing his release when, in fact, there were no letters at all. An inmate named John Kelly had his hearing last January. “It says here, since Aug. 25, you’ve been taking your associate’s program in liberal arts,” said Gail Hallerdin, the lead commissioner for the hearing. “That’s not me,” Mr. Kelly responded. “What is your first name?” Ms. Hallerdin said. “John Kelly. ” Ms. Hallerdin checked her file. “That was for Thomas Kelly,” she said. It was a jarring example of how unprepared the board can be. Commissioners have complained that they are not always given an inmate’s complete criminal history, and sometimes cannot obtain records. At times, two or more inmates with the same name were included in the same case file, they said. John Kelly, who was 59 at the time, explained that he had completed only the sixth grade. “I can’t read or write,” he said. He is classified by the corrections department as seriously mentally ill and was homeless when he was arrested for shoplifting at Duane Reade. Despite the confusion, the hearing proceeded, with the commissioners deciding to release Mr. Kelly, who is white. Darryl Dent, a black inmate who, like Mr. Kelly, has an extensive history of petty crime and is severely mentally ill, was not so fortunate. When he stood before the parole board in March, he was serving five to 11 years for stealing a wallet in a Manhattan church, his eighth prison stint for petty theft. “Some people would have given you a life sentence, even though it’s not what people call the crime of the century,” said Ellen Alexander, a commissioner. “I was a little confused because I was hearing voices,” Mr. Dent explained. “They was telling me I should commit crimes before — to make money and get involved with girls and stuff — and I went along with it. ” For people like Mr. Dent, the parole process can be especially hard to navigate. They have trouble making an argument for themselves. In an interview with a reporter at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in September, Mr. Dent said that during his hearing, he felt rushed and could not think of the right answers quickly enough. He had trouble making eye contact during the interview, continuously rubbed his face and stuck out his tongue compulsively, a possible side effect of antipsychotic medications. He looked older than his years, walked with a limp as he came into the visiting room and said that if released, he would pose no danger to anyone. “I wouldn’t be able to outrun the police,” he said. “I couldn’t lift a box. ” “I really am sorry for the crimes I committed,” he told the commissioners. “I’m tired of coming to jail. I’m 56 years old, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail. ” Mr. Kelly made an almost identical plea, explaining that he had had two strokes. “I’m done,” he said. “I’ll be 60 years old. I don’t want to die in prison. ” What tipped the scales in favor of Mr. Kelly and against Mr. Dent? The commissioners who heard their cases? The inmates’ mental health on the day of the hearing? The fact that Mr. Kelly was a rare inmate to be interviewed in person, while Mr. Dent spoke via video? Race? Whatever the reason, the white inmate doing time for shoplifting walked out of prison. And the black inmate who stole the wallet was sent back to spend at least two more years behind bars. “Your release would be incompatible with the welfare of society,” the board’s decision said. If there is one factor that drives the selection of commissioners, it is politics. Spots on the board are prime patronage gifts. Many board members have given generously to campaigns. Diversity is seemingly an afterthought. Since 2000, W. William Smith, who joined the board in 1996, has donated nearly $20, 000, mostly to Republican campaigns in the Buffalo area. Commissioner G. Kevin Ludlow has given about $29, 000 since 2004, primarily to conservative and Republican candidates, according to filings with the State Board of Elections. Positions have also been given to Democratic supporters. Joseph Crangle, the son of a longtime Democratic leader, was appointed to the board by Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, in 2008. Mr. Crangle and his family have donated nearly $14, 000, mostly to Democratic candidates. Another commissioner, Lisa Beth Elovich, is the daughter of a former Democratic political leader in Long Beach and a family friend of the former Republican senator Alfonse M. D’Amato. When she was appointed in 2006, she was married to Michael Avella, who was then a counsel to the Republican majority in the State Senate. A request by The Times to interview individual commissioners was denied by the corrections department, which oversees the parole board. Board members are nominated by the governor and confirmed by the State Senate. Selections are typically worked out ahead of time, and at the confirmation hearings nominees usually spend only a few minutes describing their credentials before being approved. These hearings sometimes sound like reunions of upstate law enforcement veterans. At the 2012 hearing, State Senator Patrick M. Gallivan, then a Republican member of the corrections committee and a former sheriff of Erie County, backed the appointment of Marc Coppola, his former deputy sheriff. They joked about it. A committee member asked Mr. Coppola, “Was former Sheriff Gallivan a good boss?” “Yes, he was,” Mr. Coppola said. Henry Lemons, who was the lone black male commissioner for years, was not reappointed when his term expired in 2012, though he had strong credentials. He had spent 20 years with the New York Police Department, 10 years as a narcotics investigator with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, and five years as a deputy chief investigator for the state attorney general’s office. He said in an interview that while he would have liked to be reappointed, he was unwilling to play politics. “Commissioners who want to play this game must go around to their senators and get letters of support — that’s how it works,” he said. “My work should be enough. My decisions, I think, were solid. I didn’t want to have to ask people to write me letters saying, ‘Reappoint Henry Lemons.’ The result? Next year, I’m out. ” Instead, on June 20, 2012, the State Senate confirmed one white woman, four white men and a Hispanic woman, for a time leaving the board without a single black man. There was a rare dissent that day. State Senator Ruth a Democrat on the corrections committee at the time, declined to cast any confirmation votes. “I have withheld my support of any of the candidates today in protest of the governor’s failure to appoint anyone of African descent,” said Ms. who is black and whose comments were recorded on video. “There is no way that I can sit here and vote for a board that does not constitute something that for me is about fairness to the numbers of prisoners that are in our prison system. ” None of those on the committee, which is controlled by Republicans, responded to Ms. ’s remarks. In recent years, the board has become slightly more diverse — there is again a single black man, and the chairwoman, Tina Stanford, is also black — but nine of the 13 commissioners are white. “The administration has been a strong proponent of bringing more diversity to the Board of Parole,” Jason Elan, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said in a statement. “This administration is committed to going even further and will continue to identify for appointment individuals with a broad range of professional expertise, such as social workers, defense attorneys, psychologists and others with criminal justice expertise. ” In June, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, nominated five more commissioners, including several minorities, but the corrections committee never held confirmation hearings. Mr. Gallivan, who now leads the corrections committee, said the governor’s office was at fault for submitting the nominations only a few days before the legislative session ended. Diversity would make the parole process fairer, said Mr. Lemons, who was named to the board by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat. “If a commissioner is from the suburbs and is an attorney, he may not see things the way I did growing up in ” Mr. Lemons said, referring to the neighborhood in Brooklyn. “I’ve spoken to commissioners who couldn’t understand why a person committed a robbery. But you might interview the person and find out he or she has been on the streets since 16 or 17 because their parents were addicts and they had to live day by day. ” He said he and his colleagues also differed in their views of crimes. “Many commissioners would say, ‘It’s just a money crime no one was hurt,’” he said. “Well, I’d say the person defrauded this woman out of her money and made off with a quarter of a million dollars. What’s the difference between him and a kid snatching a purse with $15 in it, and he’s doing 10 years? To me, a person with some advantages in life, some education, I expect his conduct to be better. ” The promise of parole — early freedom for acknowledging mistakes and behaving well in prison — rarely lives up to reality. Around the country, 20 states have dismantled their boards altogether. A primary problem is the arbitrariness in decision making: Why do some inmates go free while others with nearly identical records stay in prison? “The whole field of parole, when you shine a light on it, so much of it is unforgivable,” said Kevin R. Reitz, a director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School. Mr. Reitz was involved in revising the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code to recommend the elimination of parole release. In 2014, a state judicial commission recommended the elimination of New York’s parole board, but the political leadership in Albany has taken no action. New York State officials over the past 20 years have adopted a hybrid system of release that is less reliant on parole. About half the state’s inmates, including most drug offenders, now receive what is called a determinate sentence, a fixed period of incarceration with limited opportunity for early release. Instead of getting a to sentence for selling drugs, an offender may receive a sentence of three years. The Times analyzed a decade’s worth of state prison data and found that doing away with parole eliminated the racial disparity in release rates. But it also kept inmates of all races in prison longer — which makes determinate sentences unpopular with inmate advocates. A central purpose of parole is to give inmates an incentive to rehabilitate themselves, said Jack Beck, a director of the Correctional Association of New York, a watchdog group empowered by the state to monitor prison conditions. “Determinate sentences undermine the whole philosophy that incarceration should be a time for people to prepare themselves to integrate back into society,” Mr. Beck said. In an effort to make the parole process more objective, New York implemented a tool called Compas in 2012 that seeks to measure an inmate’s chances for success upon release. Prisoners fill out a assessment form that includes their criminal history, education background and mental health status. They also answer a long list of hypothetical questions about managing money, avoiding risky situations and controlling their tempers. Based on their answers, they are assigned scores of one to 10 that assess how likely they are to commit new crimes. Theoretically, the lower the score, the lower the risk. Commissioners are required to take Compas into consideration, but they can ignore the results if they find that other factors, including the severity of the original crime, are more compelling. In the 109 parole hearing transcripts reviewed by The Times, Compas scores were usually given a perfunctory mention but rarely appeared to be the deciding factor. The Cuomo administration recently proposed regulations that would require a detailed written explanation from commissioners if they decided to ignore Compas. The regulations would also require the board to give special consideration to inmates who were convicted when they were juveniles and sentenced to a potential maximum of life in prison, taking into account their age at the time of the crime as well as “any demonstrated growth and maturity. ” But at a time when the state is specifying a detailed checklist of variables parole commissioners must consider, race is not even on the list. In fact, the state has never studied its effect on board decisions. And so the inequities continue. Braxton Bostic, a young black man, was 17 in 2014 when he and a group of friends stole money from a purse in a church. A judge gave him probation, but he missed two meetings with his probation officer and was sent to prison to serve one to three years. Robert Summa, a white man, has a record dating to 1992 for theft and drug possession. In 2003, he was convicted of mugging and robbing a woman and sent to prison for nine years. Within a year of being released, he was convicted again, for robbing a Staten Island deli, and was sentenced to 3½ to 7 years. He has spent 12 of the past 15 years in prison. The men had similar prison disciplinary records. Mr. Bostic had one minor infraction for creating a disturbance and being out of place Mr. Summa had two minor infractions, according to the hearing transcript. But he also had a certificate indicating that he had completed all of his programs, which Mr. Bostic did not have. Both said they had family and jobs waiting if they were released. Mr. Bostic expressed remorse, telling the board that he had been hanging around with the wrong crowd. “There’s really no excuse for why I did it,” he said. “I was hurting my mother, my father. They’re the only ones sending me money and letters. ” Mr. Summa was more vague about his crimes. “It is actually not that I am stealing,” he told them. “It is that I buy these things from people in the neighborhood. I know they are stolen when I bought them, but for the price I get them, I can’t say no. ” The board sent Mr. Bostic back to prison for at least a year he is incarcerated at Wyoming Correctional Facility. Mr. Summa was freed in July. But that did not last. In September, he was caught on video robbing a Chinese restaurant on Staten Island. He told the police he had been drinking heavily, blacked out and did not remember committing the robbery, though he pleaded guilty after seeing the security video. Shortly afterward, a reporter visited him on Rikers Island to ask about the board’s decision to release him. Mr. Summa said that given his lengthy criminal history, he had not expected it. “I was surprised,” he said. | 0fake |
CHICK-FIL-A Caves To Gay Mafia And Does Unthinkable In New NYC Store | A move that would surely cause now deceased Christian Chick-Fil-A founder, S. Truett Cathy to roll over in his grave In 2012, the fast-food restaurant Chick-fil-A came under intense criticism from homosexual groups and their supporters after CEO Dan Cathy said he was guilty as charged for supporting traditional marriage. Christians overwhelmingly gave their support, filling restaurants with new customers who turned out, not only for the food, but to make a statement. That may all be about to change. Chick-fil-A is now listed as a sponsor for Level Ground, a faith-based LGBT film festival, reports Christian News Network a discovery that has sparked an online petition demanding the company clarify its corporate stance regarding previously stated Christian values on marriage and stewardship. According to Level Ground s website, the group creates safe space for dialogue about faith, gender, and sexuality through the arts. The group s film festival started as a student-run event in 2013. It has since expanded and hosted programming in six cities across the U.S., billing itself as the world s first film festival connecting lesbian, gay and transgender sexuality with faith and evangelical Christianity. Baptist Press reported participants in Level Ground s most recent film festival, held Oct. 8-10 in Nashville, Tennessee, included former contemporary Christian artist Jennifer Knapp, who came out as a lesbian in 2005, and Karen Swallow Prior, a Liberty University English professor and research fellow for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Gracepointe Church, an evangelical church in Franklin, Tennessee, that came out in January in support of same-sex marriage was also a sponsor. Pryor tweeted her appreciation to Chick-fil-A for its support in Nashville: While the restaurant has had an outpost in New York University s food court with limited access and menu items for more than a decade, the new restaurant will be the first of two slated for the Big Apple. The chain plans to open another location near Rockefeller Center at 46th Street and 6th Avenue. The nation s eighth biggest chain by sales, Chick-fil-A grew its sales 14.4 percent last year and its unit count 6.3 percent domestically, according to market research firm Technomic. This makes it the largest chicken chain in the country, beating out Yum Brands KFC unit. In private hands since its founding in the early 1960s, Chick-fil-A has expanded more quietly that publicly traded competitors like KFC or Bojangles . Via: wnd | 1real |
Syrian War Report – November 10, 2016: Kurdsh YPG Clashing with Turkey-led Forces | 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 |
Exclusive: A New York hotel deal shows how some public pension funds help to enrich Trump | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Public pension funds in at least seven U.S. states have invested millions of dollars in an investment fund that owns a New York hotel and pays one of President Donald Trump’s companies to run it, according to a Reuters review of public records. That arrangement could put Trump at risk of violating an obscure constitutional clause, some legal experts say. The Trump SoHo Hotel and Condominium in Manhattan is an upscale 46-story property owned by a Los Angeles investment group, the CIM Group, through one of its real estate funds. (Read the most recent amendment to the Trump SoHo’s offering plan: tmsnrt.rs/2q3HJH8) The possible problem for Trump lies in the fact that state- and city-run pension funds have invested in the CIM fund and pay it a few million dollars in quarterly fees to manage their investments in its portfolio, which includes the Trump SoHo, according to state investment records. In return for marketing and managing the hotel-condo, CIM pays Trump International Hotels Management LLC 5.75 percent of the SoHo’s operating revenues annually. That payment chain merits closer scrutiny because it could put Trump at risk of falling foul of a little-known constitutional rule prohibiting the flow of money from states to the pockets of a sitting president, five ethics and constitutional law experts interviewed by Reuters said. (Graphic on Trump SoHo payment chain: tmsnrt.rs/2pfkZ40) No other public pension fund investments in Trump-affiliated businesses have been reported. The White House referred comment to the Trump Organization, the parent conglomerate for Trump’s businesses, which did not respond to repeated calls and emails for comment. While Trump turned over management of the Trump Organization in January to a trust controlled by his two elder sons, he still earns revenue from the SoHo. That’s because he still owns the businesses in the Trump Organization, including Trump International Hotels Management LLC. Article II of the U.S. Constitution bars the president from receiving additional payments beyond his salary from state governments. This so-called “domestic emoluments clause” prohibits “any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.” This clause and a “foreign emoluments clause” prohibiting similar payments from foreign governments have been thrust to the fore because of Trump’s vast, complicated network of businesses, which ethics experts say has created unprecedented conflicts of interest. A group of constitutional and ethics experts have filed a lawsuit alleging Trump was violating both clauses by letting his hotels and other businesses accept payments from public officials. Trump said the suit was without merit. The lawsuit does not refer to the CIM fund. The group’s April complaint cited dozens of violations, including foreign government leases and purchases at Trump’s properties in the United States, which have resulted in unknown amounts being paid to Trump since he was inaugurated. The SoHo hotel-condo management contract is a significant revenue generator for Trump through his hotel management company. In 2015 and the first five months of 2016, Trump International Hotels Management LLC drew at least $3.1 million from the SoHo, and Trump received $3.3 million in income from the hotel management company, hotel records and campaign filings show. (Read the 2014 and 2015 financial statements for the Trump SoHo: tmsnrt.rs/2q3VNjP) CIM said its policy is not to comment on its private funds, agreements, or the operations of its funds’ investments. The state- or city-run pension funds are in California, New York, Texas, Arizona, Montana, Michigan and Missouri. They have more than 5 million members - from state lawmakers in California to teachers in Texas and police officers in New York. They include the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the nation’s largest public pension fund. The pension funds’ money accounts for about half of the total capital CIM raised from its investors to invest in the properties in the fund, including the Trump SoHo, according to the pension funds’ financial records and SEC filings. CIM declined to disclose how many properties are in the fund. Some of the 11 pension funds contacted by Reuters declined to comment on the payment chain between them and Trump. Others referred the question to CIM, saying their investment in the CIM fund does not give them control over its asset acquisitions. Reuters presented its findings to six lawyers with expertise in constitutional law and emoluments issues. One of the lawyers, David Rivkin Jr., associate White House counsel during the George H. W. Bush administration, said the public investments do not put Trump at risk of violating the Constitution. Payments clearly related to non-official activities that “have nothing to do with the discharge of duties in office” are not emoluments, Rivkin said. Three, however, said if Trump financially benefited from a business whose owner drew millions of dollars in fees from U.S. states - in this case CIM - this presented a serious argument for a domestic emoluments violation. “If you take a step back and look at this transaction, it’s a payment chain from state pension funds to President Trump,” said Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Fordham University. “This looks like an emolument to me.” Two other lawyers said the arrangement raised significant questions, but all depended on how broadly a court interpreted the constitutional clause. “We’re in largely uncharted territory on that front given that past presidents have gone to great lengths to avoid the kinds of issues we’re now confronting,” said Brianne Gorod, chief counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, a Washington research organization and public advocacy law firm. None of the 11 pension funds contacted by Reuters said they were prepared to divest from the CIM fund. For instance, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which has invested $225 million in the CIM fund, said it was “not our practice to comment on questions of this nature.” One member of the Texas teachers’ pension fund, Byron Hildebrand, 61, state secretary for the Association of Texas Professional Educators, however, said he would alert teachers across his state to the pension fund’s exposure to the Trump hotel and call on the state to consider divesting. Divesting from the CIM fund would likely force the public pension funds to sell their CIM shares at a loss, said Tom Lopez, the chief investment officer of the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions, one of the pension funds in the CIM fund, which is also known as a real estate partnership. Even though the partnership’s returns on investment are overall quite strong, trying to sell interest in a 10-year-old partnership is like “trying to sell a used car,” he said. Lopez noted that all the public funds invested in the CIM fund long before it acquired the SoHo – and long before anybody thought Trump would become president. | 0fake |
Must Watch: When People Laughed At Donald Trump And Anyone Who Said He Would Win | Who’s laughing now?
( Watch at Youtube )
And for some good comedy from Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle On Saturday Night Live’s Election Nigh wrap-up:
| 1real |
New U.S. government rules restrict travel and trade with Cuba | WASHINGTON/HAVANA (Reuters) - The U.S. government made it tougher on Wednesday for Americans to visit Cuba and do business in the country, making good on a pledge by President Donald Trump to roll back his Democratic predecessor s move toward warmer ties with Havana. The restrictions, which take effect on Thursday, are aimed at preventing the military, intelligence and security arms of Cuba s Communist government from benefiting from American tourists and trade, the White House said. They fill in the regulatory detail on a Trump policy speech in June, in which the Republican president called for a tightening of restrictions. He said then that the Cuban government continued to oppress its people and former President Barack Obama had made too many concessions in his 2014 diplomatic breakthrough with Washington s former Cold War foe. The regulations include a ban on Americans doing business with some 180 Cuban government entities, holding companies, and tourism companies. The list includes 83 state-owned hotels, including famous hotels in Old Havana such as Ernest Hemingway s erstwhile favorite haunt the Hotel Ambos Mundos, as well as the city s new luxury shopping mall. All these measures hurt the Cuban people, said Cuba s Foreign Ministry chief for U.S. Affairs Josefina Vidal. She said that government revenue funds Cuba s free education and healthcare systems. Speaking to reporters in Havana, she called the list arbitrary and the regulations a further setback in U.S.-Cuban relations. The new rules were criticized as too lax by Republican leaders who favor a hard line, but as counterproductive by those who agreed with Obama s rationale for the detente: that Washington s many decades of isolating the Caribbean island failed to force change. The Cuban hotels listed included those run by military-linked chains Gaviota and Habaguanex. Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Cuban-American, said the list failed to go far enough because it omitted companies like Gran Caribe Hotel Group and Cubanacan that have ties to the Cuban government. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy said the regulations were unfair to Cuba, coming as Trump was being feted in Beijing by a Communist government in a country to which Americans can travel freely. The hypocrisy of the White House ideologues is glaring, Leahy said in a statement. While U.S. travelers will still be able to make authorized trips to Cuba with a U.S.-based organization and accompanied by a U.S. representative of the group, it will be harder for them to travel individually, according to the new regulations. Before Obama s opening, travel by many Americans was similarly restricted to such organized trips. Travelers need to be able to show a full-time schedule with activities that support Cuban people and show meaningful interaction, going beyond merely staying in rooms in private homes, eating in private restaurants, or shopping in private stores, a U.S. official told reporters on a conference call. The administration says it is keen to support such small private enterprises that have sprung up around the country under President Raul Castro s reforms to the largely state-controlled economy. Staying or eating or shopping in some of those privately owned places is something that we wanted to encourage. But what we wanted to say is, that alone is not enough, the official said. However, Cubans in the fledgling private sector say the Trump administration s more hostile stance toward Havana has already hurt their business. He is putting us in serious danger by frightening away American visitors looking to rent our properties, said Norma Hernandez, who rents out rooms on Airbnb and who said her business flourished over the last year thanks to a surge in U.S. visitors. Trump s rollback of Obama s opening has not affected a centerpiece of the detente, the restoration of diplomatic ties and the opening of embassies in Havana and Washington. Business contracts and travel arrangements already in place will be allowed to go ahead and will not be subject to the restrictions, officials told reporters. The list of entities that Americans cannot do business with includes a special development zone at Cuba s Mariel port, which Cuba hopes to develop into a major Caribbean industrial and shipping hub with tax and customs breaks. The National Foreign Trade Council, a business lobby group in Washington, called the Mariel restriction counterproductive because it would hurt a Cuban government initiative that could potentially benefit Cuban workers. The head of an educational travel company said there were still many legal avenues - as well as commercial flights, cruise ships, U.S.-owned hotels, and tour providers - to enable Americans to visit Cuba. But he said the new restrictions would hurt Cuba s private sector, at a time when the economy is already struggling. U.S. backtracking on Cuba could not come at a worse time, said Collin Laverty, president of Cuba Educational Travel. | 0fake |
Tim Kaine Readily Moves Out of Spotlight: ‘This Is More Me’ - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — Senator Tim Kaine’s office is much as he left it, with a minifridge full of hummus and an iPod playlist heavy on bluegrass and classic rock. The trademark harmonicas have been holstered, at least for now, his audience shrinking from a spellbound national electorate to a spirited weekday gathering of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. And his campaign plane? It was repurposed this past week to deliver the United States men’s soccer team to a match in Costa Rica, with only one lingering reminder — an H on the tail — of the first female presidential nominee for a major party in American history and the affable running mate who traveled the country making her case. “I like feet on the ground,” Mr. Kaine said with a smile this past week, suggesting he was not dwelling on the trappings of temporary fame. He boarded an elevator in the basement of the Capitol, nowhere to go but up. Such is Mr. Kaine’s view from the great election comedown of 2016: that quadrennial moment of humility, electoral grieving and reverse culture shock, foisted upon members of the losing ticket as they resume less glamorous public lives. Secret Service agents are reassigned. Media scrums migrate elsewhere. The junior senator from Virginia is, as it turns out, a heartbeat away from very little. Yet as Mr. Kaine and his party seek to regain their bearings after a stunning loss, he has identified at least one task for himself in the interim: taking his place, as necessary, in the wall of opposition to Donald J. Trump. “The Democratic Senate minority is about the only emergency brake there is on the train right now,” Mr. Kaine said this past week, adding that the levers of obstruction must be used “judiciously. ” “To avoid a disaster,” he added. “You use it to avoid something really bad for the country. ” Though fellow Democrats, including aides to Hillary Clinton, have long trumpeted Mr. Kaine’s appeal to multiple constituencies — given his fluency in Spanish, genial manner and eloquence on matters of faith — his role in the party’s future is unclear. Progressive activists have emerged from the election with a conviction that new voices must be elevated. Mr. Kaine, who is up for in 2018, said that he would not seek the presidency or vice presidency in 2020. Liberal stars like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have delivered stern, rousing addresses about the way forward. No one is clamoring for a Tim Kaine revolution. But as Senate Democrats gird for bruising policy squabbles and confirmation hearings in a Trump administration, they are expected to look to Mr. Kaine with particular urgency on foreign affairs. A member of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, from a state with a major military presence, Mr. Kaine has made foreign policy a priority of his first term in the Senate. He has seized especially the issue of war powers, breaking with President Obama by calling for Congress to provide authorization for military action against the Islamic State. Among his arguments, as he sought to galvanize Democrats: There is no telling who might be president down the line. “With Trump’s maybe erratic foreign policy, his leadership is more important,” Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio said of Mr. Kaine. “I mean, we were sad to lose him,” he added, referring to Mr. Kaine’s prospects in the executive branch. “But we wanted to lose him, obviously. ” Mr. Kaine’s purpose in recent days has seemed at times more therapeutic than strategic. With emotions still raw, he supplied a measure of catharsis for devastated supporters as he introduced Mrs. Clinton before her concession speech. He said what Mrs. Clinton chose not to — that she had won the popular vote — suggesting that the party’s ideals remained resonant despite the outcome. And he channeled William Faulkner to appraise the collective Democratic psyche. “They killed us,” Mr. Kaine said, “but they ain’t whooped us yet. ” Among losing running mates through the years, soul searching has assumed different forms. After the Republican ticket’s defeat in 1976, Hubert H. Humphrey tried to lift the spirits of his despondent friend, Bob Dole, the party’s nominee, with an ice cream outing. After a loss in 1980, former Vice President Walter Mondale went on to be Democrats’ nominee for president in 1984, and lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan. Sarah Palin announced her resignation as Alaska governor eight months after she and Senator John McCain lost the 2008 election. Mr. Kaine, who has communicated occasionally with Mrs. Clinton since the defeat, is accustomed to jarring transitions. He recalled the day of his successor’s inauguration as governor of Virginia in 2010. “They take you home, and they drop you off and then they drive away,” he said. “I had the same feeling this time. Shaking hands with everybody was very emotional, but watching the cars drive away, I had an immense feeling of relief. ” His most turn, a debate with Vice Mike Pence, attracted a smattering of critics, who chafed at his repeated interruptions of his opponent onstage. Mostly though, Mr. Kaine cultivated an unpretentious image during the campaign, introducing comedy viewers to his assemblage of harmonicas, which remain in his briefcase, and urging voters to choose a “you’re hired” president instead of a “you’re fired” president. He often took the stage with a flurry of gesticulations, like a coach flashing signals, proving proficient at vigorous fist pumps and seemingly indiscriminate . He once described life as a nominee, playfully, as being “kidnapped. ” “The entourage felt cool on occasion,” he said this past week, “but it was never me. So this is more me. ” Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said he expected little change from the “energetically engaged, very ” colleague he had come to know before the election. Mr. Cardin did express a measure of concern about Mr. Kaine’s health. “He’s tired,” Mr. Cardin said. “He needs to gain a little weight back. He lost too much weight. But he’ll get back to his fighting weight. ” | 0fake |
Watch Obama Call Donald Trump Out On His Bullsh*t Shenanigans Back In 2005 (VIDEO) | When watching Donald Trump speak, you d think he was running for prom king the way he assumes this election is all about himself and not the country. Just count how many times he uses the words me, I, my or myself within a speech. He s not running to lead the nation, he s running to have the nation line up behind him. He has it exactly opposite of the true intent set forth by our Founding Fathers. The President of the United States serves the nation, it s not the other way around.Knowing this full well, Barack Obama, before he was elected as the 44th President of the United States, delivered a commencement speech to Knox College in Illinois back in 2005. He spoke of who we are as a nation, and what should be expected of us, our nation and our government.One part of his speech touched upon the very important message that we are all in this together. We re not a nation of me, or myself like Trump would like you to believe, but rather a nation of we and us. After all, the nation s motto is E PLURIBUS UNUM, which means, out of many, we are one.Here is that very poignant moment from then Senator Obama: In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it Social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself. It s a tempting idea, because it doesn t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job life isn t fair. It let s us say to the child born into poverty pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes that we will always be the winner in life s lottery, that we will be Donald Trump, or at least that we won t be the chump that he tells: Your fired! But there a problem. It won t work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it has been government research and investment that made the railways and the internet possible. It has been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that has allowed all of us to prosper. Our economic dominance has depended on individual initiative and belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we re all in it together and everybody s got a shot at opportunity that has produced our unrivaled political stability. Bravo! That man should be president. Oh wait, three years later he was.We need to remember that we re all in this together, and we really don t need someone who thinks he s running for prom king as our next president. Part of being an American is embracing the fact that we are all individuals striving for excellence, but recognizing that our excellence is only possibly because we have a society set up for all of us, not just the few. Or rather, that s the way it should be, and what we need to get back to. Electing Trump would further destroy the fabric our the nation that Republicans have been trying to tear apart slowly but surely since 1980. So, come November, no matter who get s the Democratic nomination, vote blue.Watch Obama s speech here, with those remarks beginning at the 13:19 minute mark:Featured image via video screen capture | 1real |
WikiLeaks: Hillary Clinton knew Saudi, Qatar were funding ISIS – but still took their money for Foundation | SEE ALSO: Why Hillary Clinton is Responsible for US Failures in Libya and Syria
According to FOX News , FBI sources have said that ‘indictments are likely’ for the Clinton Foundation investigation. One only wonders how this latest Assange revelation will factor into the wider investigation – as it goes right to the heart of the national security and foreign policy – two things which Clinton trades heavily on in her campaigning.
Assange went on to explain the deep ramifications of this latest criminal allegation against Clinton and her family foundation:
“All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”
During their 25-minute interview filmed at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange and Pilger discussed the obvious conflict of interest between Clinton as Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation and Gulf monarchies who financed them. The following is an excerpt from the interview transcript:
John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.
Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the US doubled in dollar value.
JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?
JA: Yes.
Watch a brief preview of the interview here :
Courtesy Peter Myers | 1real |
Baltimore, race and matters of perception | Comments about recent events in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray provide a glimpse at perhaps one of our greatest challenges — perception.
In this case, as in too many others involving police, perception seems to be black and white.
“I think that if you look at what’s happened over the course of the last year, you’ve just got to scratch your head,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R) on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to the rash of fatal incidents involving police officers and African American males.
“I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace,’ ” said Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby (D) to demonstrators in her city and around the country, as she announced charges against six police officers involved in the arrest of Gray. To the youth of Baltimore, she declared, “Our time is now!” and urged peaceful demonstration.
Both comments made headlines. And both, though well intentioned, carried subliminal messages freighted with racial (not racist) undertones.
Boehner’s overly cautious remark was as starkly white as his OxiClean-ed, hand-pressed shirts. A man more accustomed to golf courses and marble hallways than to gritty urban streets, he was plainly trying to acknowledge that we have a police and race problem in the United States. But he sounded like he’d just landed on the planet.
Yes, quite head-scratching, all this police business.
Mosby’s remarks, jubilantly received by the Baltimore crowd, provoked high dudgeon elsewhere. Some of the words used to describe her performance have included “showboating,” “demagoguing” and “grandstanding.”
To some ears, Mosby sounded as though the cops’ convictions were a fait accompli. That she found the evidence convincing enough to justify the charges may ultimately also justify her bravura. Let’s do keep in mind that Gray’s offense was making eye contact with an officer and running away.
Gray’s voice box was crushed and his spine all but severed, according to his family. Anyone who watched the video could see that Gray was in terrible pain as he was led to the police van, where he was shackled and his pleas for help apparently ignored.
That his life ended in pain and horror is not in dispute. But no less a legal luminary than Alan Dershowitz has taken issue with the charges, saying, “There’s no plausible, hypothetical, conceivable case for murder under the facts as we now know them.”
Charges brought against the six officers included one count of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, assault and misconduct in office.
In other words, Mosby threw everything she could against the six officers. Many have asked: For justice? Or to quell the passions of the streets? Perhaps both. Mosby surely calculated that announcing the charges as she did — with a microphone in a public place — would have a dramatic effect. (She declined to be interviewed for this column.)
Mosby also was speaking as a member of her community, long plagued with a history of police brutality, including last year’s fatal beating of Tyrone West. The medical examiner’s report concluded that West died of a prior heart condition that was exacerbated by dehydration, the July heat and his police encounter.
No charges were leveled against the police in that case. Thus, from the perspective of many among Baltimore’s protesters, the current charges are long overdue. Even so, one does worry that the six officers are paying not only for their role in Gray’s death, to whatever degree this is determined, but also for the cumulative sins of others.
To the officers, the cheering and horn-honking following Mosby’s words must have sounded like the Colosseum mob’s cry for blood. To an older generation of Americans, they were reminiscent of the reaction 20 years ago when a mostly black jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
Whites: He totally did it.
African Americans: It’s our turn, in so many words.
This past week, whites across the United States spoke softly about the Freddie Gray case: “Thank God three of the cops were black.”
President Obama, speaking after Mosby leveled her charges, called for truth. How, indeed, do we get to it? In a diverse nation, we’ll never all see things exactly the same way, nor would we want to, but we might at least strive to recognize our own biases and judge our own perceptions as harshly as we do others’.
Read more from Kathleen Parker’s archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook. | 0fake |
‘Ring of Fire’ Eclipse Travels Across South America and Africa - The New York Times | People in parts of South America and Africa were treated to a rare sight on Sunday: a “ring of fire” eclipse, when the moon moves in between the Earth and the sun, briefly replacing it with a blazing, fiery ring. An event of this kind — technically called an annular eclipse — is a byproduct of the moon’s elliptical nature around the Earth, which means it is sometimes further away from the planet than at other times. An annular eclipse is one that happens when the moon is unable to completely block our view of the sun because it is at one of its greater distances from Earth. The countries with the best chance of viewing an annular eclipse are those that lie along the path of annularity, an invisible line that traces the path taken by the moon’s shadow as it moves across the globe, according to C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist from NASA. They include Chile and Argentina in South America and Angola, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa, where viewers were able to see the full “ring of fire” effect for roughly one minute. Skywatchers on the ground in those countries — including more than a few government agencies — their experience on Sunday, with some complaining that overcast weather dampened their views. People outside the direct path of annularity could still get a glimpse of the show although it was only be a partial eclipse. For everyone else, there is always the internet. Slooh Community Observatory, a system of telescopes, broadcast the eclipse online via live stream beginning around 7 a. m. Eastern time on Sunday. Americans will also get to watch an eclipse of their own soon enough. A total solar eclipse is due on Aug. 21. | 0fake |
THE ULTIMATE HYPOCRITE: Who Are The Billionaires Funding Campaign Of Candidate Who Mocks…Billionaires | While Bernie Sanders has pitched himself as the presidential candidate for the little guy tapping into the wallets of voters angry over Wall Street s influence in politics a deeper dive shows Sanders has enlisted an arsenal of millionaire and billionaire backers who have backed his political career since his early Senate runs a decade ago.That big-money support stands in sharp contrast to Sanders calls for corporate fat-cats and the uber-wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes by closing loopholes and removing breaks that benefit the mega-rich.At a rally last Sunday at The Ohio State University, Sanders told a cheering crowd, You can tell a lot about a candidate based on how he or she raises money for his or her campaign. The comment goes hand-in-hand with the theme Sanders has been hammering for months. I am not raising money from millionaires and billionaires, Sanders said during the CNN Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas on Oct. 13. In fact, tonight, in terms of what a political revolution is about, there are 4,000 house parties 100,000 people in this country watching this debate tonight who want real change in this country. Sanders war chest has been driven by smaller donations he raised $26 million in small increments in the third fund-raising quarter.Jeff Weaver, Sanders campaign manager, insists the fancy fundraisers and big-name donors are few and far between and that there is no contradiction in what the Vermont Democrat and self-described socialist practices and what he preaches. We don t have a super PAC, Weaver told FoxNews.com. We rely on small contributions. Average contribution is $27. Are there some, a few people in there who have more money, personal money who give larger contributions? Yeah, of course they do, but within the federal $2700 limit. No, you know, no 50, 100, 2 million contributions. But for years Sanders has enjoyed donations from a handful of wealthy donors including media moguls Leo J. Hindery and Steven C. Markoff.Markoff, who donated to Sanders 2012 Senate campaign, began trading rare coins when he was 11. By 2004, his company A-Mark Entertainment was listed as the 65th largest privately held company in the U.S., and the second largest in Los Angeles.Hindrey, managing partner of the private equity fund InterMedia Partners and former chief executive of AT & T Broadband and of the YES Network, also maxed out on contributions to Sanders. Hindrey, while advocating for fewer tax breaks for the wealthy, is among the biggest Democratic fundraisers in the country.Another big money donor to Sanders campaign is David Geffen, co-founder of DreamWorks Animation and worth a cool $6.9 billion. According to campaign finance records, Geffen donated the max at the time $2,500 to Sanders Senate campaign on Jan. 27, 2012.But Lara Brown, director of George Washington University s political management program, told FoxNews.com that she doesn t see a big push-back from Sanders supporters. By and large, Democrats tend to believe these individuals are giving because they have a strong progressive/liberal orientation in their politics and they are doing this because it equates to them giving to a cause, she said, adding that the same would be true for big-money donors in Silicon Valley and the tech industry.Via: FOX News | 1real |
Hillary’s Attorney General Makes Disgusting Joke About Missing Children | Gingrich Infuriates Libs With MASSIVE Call to Trump Voters on Election Day
You can watch the video here:
It is no secret that under the direction of President Barack Obama, Perez directed the challenge of South Carolina’s 2011 Voter ID Law , asserting that the estimated 81,000 South Carolina voters without any photo identification were helpless, hapless victims and not simply irresponsible. Advertisement - story continues below
He also blocked voter ID requirements in Texas, and was well known for testifying that political leadership did not play a factor in the decision to dismiss three of the four defendants in the criminal voter intimidation case of the New Black Panther Party, a radicalized faction considered by virtually every other advocacy organization to be a hate group.
More than an isolated incident, this systemic disconnect from the concern Americans have for their children, their families and their communities is typical of the Clinton administration, and since Hillary Clinton has been literally at the center of U.S. power for 8 years, that term isn’t a stretch.
Despite four years of backpedaling on Benghazi and eight years of excuses for the loss of hope and confidence in America’s strength and power to provide for our children and generations to come, Hillary Clinton has no answers beyond empty rhetoric.
If Hillary Clinton won’t stand up for our children, won’t make them and their future her first priority, we must turn to a leader who will: her Republican rival Donald Trump. Advertisement - story continues below | 1real |
Gathering to Remember Bill Cunningham, Outside the Picture Frame - The New York Times | At Bill Cunningham’s funeral on Thursday morning, Anna Wintour wore blue Carolina Herrera, Annette de la Renta had on a light pleated summer dress that went to the knee, and Mercedes Bass opted for basic black. They came to the Church of St. Thomas More on East 89th Street in Manhattan to pay their respects to a man who had taken their pictures for the last 40 to 50 years. One of the many sad things about this day was that there were no photographers, in keeping with a request by Mr. Cunningham’s family, who asked that things stay simple and private. In a way, it made sense. Although Mr. Cunningham, who died on Saturday at 87, had been photographing New Yorkers since 1967, the year the illustrator Antonio Lopez gave him his first camera, he hardly appreciated being the subject of attention. A documentary was made about Mr. Cunningham in 2010, and he said until the end of his life that he had not seen it. Standing outside the church, David Wolfson, a longtime friend of Mr. Cunningham’s, told a story about a birthday dinner that was organized last October in Mr. Cunningham’s honor. “He looked great,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Even though he didn’t like the fuss of it. ” That was Mr. Cunningham’s way. He was the sort of fellow who found his greatest enjoyment in simply doing his work. And he did it all the way to the wire, darting around town on his bicycle to attend everything from galas at the Museum of Modern Art to raucous parties with drag queens and gym bunnies. Susanne Bartsch, who arrived in a leatherette and lace jacket with exaggerated shoulder detailing, had seen Mr. Cunningham at one of those parties back in April. For once, she thought, he had seemed a little off his game. “I could tell it was getting hot for him,” she said. “He wasn’t running around as fast as he usually did. He couldn’t hear well anymore. He looked more frail. ” Yet Mr. Cunningham nevertheless took her picture, wearing a very baroque pink and gold biker jacket with lacy boots and one of her trademark wigs, for The New York Times. Shortly before Mr. Cunningham had a stroke and wound up in the hospital, he encountered Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, and his wife, the writer Dylan Landis, at a party. Mr. Cunningham snapped their picture. A few days later, Mr. Baquet recalled, Mr. Cunningham walked into the office and dropped off a print. Which was business as usual with the people he photographed. Right around 10:30 a. m. on Thursday, a group of Mr. Cunningham’s nieces and nephews arrived at the church, along with the procession. A car from the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home delivered the coffin that carried Mr. Cunningham. It was covered with an American flag, and carried into the church by a group of men in boxy suits. A simple religious ceremony followed, along with an emotional tribute from John Kurdewan, Mr. Cunningham’s assistant at The Times. He said that even in the hospital, toward the end, Mr. Cunningham was counting the photos for a layout of his Evening Hours column. After the service, mourners streamed onto the sidewalk as a kilted bagpiper played a solemn tune. Pallbearers carried out the coffin and marched with it toward the car. A trumpeter began to blow a rendition of “America the Beautiful. ” The flag was removed from the coffin, and the crowd looked out at the summer sky. It was not a crowded scene, though a memorial planned for this summer certainly will be. On this day there were just a hundred or so of Mr. Cunningham’s closest friends, relatives and admirers. On one side of the stairs was Ms. Wintour, who began appearing in Mr. Cunningham’s columns years before she became the editor of Vogue. On the other was Ms. de la Renta, who long ago discovered that Mr. Cunningham’s favorite shots were not of her traipsing around in couture, but of her stepping into a puddle. In life, Mr. Cunningham had always been a little elusive, yet here he was surrounded by the patchwork of families he had amassed. There were blood relatives, colleagues from The Times, including the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and people Mr. Cunningham had discovered on the street. Among this last group was Louise Doktor, an administrative assistant at a Midtown holding company, who wore a black pleated Issey Miyake shawl and carried a Céline bag covered in feathers. With her was Jenny Kee, with a big red pair of glasses and a dark red kimono. Nearby was a more simply dressed man in his 30s, looking over the funeral program, which ended with a quote from Mr. Cunningham: “It is as true today as it ever was. He who seeks beauty shall find it. ” | 0fake |
Canada granting asylum to U.S. border crossers at higher rates: data | TORONTO (Reuters) - Asylum seekers who illegally crossed the U.S. border into Canada this year are obtaining refugee status at higher rates, new data shows, as authorities accept claims from people who say they feared being deported by U.S. President Donald Trump s administration. More than 15,000 people have crossed the U.S.-Canadian border illegally to claim refugee status in Canada this year. Many were in the United States legally and some interviewed by Reuters said they might have stayed were it not for an immigration crackdown. The influx, mainly at the Quebec/New York border, prompted the military to set up a temporary tent encampment in Quebec and sparked a backlash from anti-migrant groups. Lawyers who have handled dozens of cases said that members of refugee tribunals, who evaluate requests for asylum, have grown more sympathetic toward people who have spent time in the United States and who say they now fear immigration policies under Trump. Trump took office in January with a goal of sharply cutting refugee admissions, in line with the hard-line immigration policies that were a focal point of the Republican s 2016 election campaign. Of the 592 claims from border crossers finalized between March and September, 69 percent - or 408 in total - were accepted, according to Immigration and Refugee Board figures. An additional 92 appeals of rejected claims are pending. That 69 percent acceptance rate is higher than the acceptance rate for all refugee claims from people who came to Canada through any method last year. In a January asylum hearing whose transcript was seen by Reuters, a tribunal member told a Syrian refugee claimant and her daughter who had crossed near Lacolle, Quebec, that their explanation for not staying in the United States was reasonable, citing the woman s worries about the new U.S. government. Certainly, that seems to be playing out as you have feared, and today on the news I know that President Trump has suspended the Syrian refugee program, the member is quoted as saying. You have provided, in my view, a reasonable explanation of your failure to claim in the U.S. A second refugee decision reviewed by Reuters, issued in May, cites an Iraqi woman s detention in a U.S. airport and subsequent racist incidents she said she experienced at school as credible reasons for her leaving the United States. | 0fake |
New Poll Paints A HUMILIATING Picture For Trump Just One Month Into His Presidency | As Trump prepares to kick off his 2020 campaign so he can avoid doing real work in the White House, a new poll has devastating news for him: If the 2020 election were held tomorrow, a generic, unnamed Democrat would beat him. That means that more people would vote for pretty much any Democrat in order to keep Trump from being re-elected.The Politico/Morning Consult poll has 43 percent of respondents saying they would probably pick the Democrat even without a name right now. Only 35 percent said they would vote for Trump.Worse, the number of Trump voters who would vote for him again is slipping. 71 percent of Trump voters said they d vote for him again, compared to 87 percent of Hillary s voters who would vote for the generic Democrat.And perhaps even worse than that is the fact that 26 percent of people who answered this poll believe Trump is the worst president we ve had since WWII. 25 percent hold that same opinion of Obama, but Trump s presidency is all of one month old. Obama served his eight years and has a legacy for people to look at.It s really not often that people believe history will view a president that badly just thirty days into his first term.For Trump, where his image and ego are everything, the idea that people would rather support a generic someone over him has got to be horrifying. This is a poll he would probably call fake news, because of the people who line the streets outside Mar a Lago (who are protesters), and all the electoral votes he won, and so on.Add all of this to the fact that he really is planning a campaign event in Florida for this weekend, and has declared himself eligible for candidacy for 2020 already, and what it shows right now is that people believe he can t do the job. Presidents often enjoy a certain honeymoon period with both the press and the populace following their election. Trump has been screwing up so badly so quickly that his honeymoon didn t even happen.The only people who still think he s doing a good job are his most ardent supporters. But those people would support him even if he nuked the U.S. back into the Stone Age.Featured image by Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images | 1real |
Go Fuck Yourself, Kurt Eichenwald! | Perhaps, you have not heard of Kurt Eichenwald. He is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and Newsweek senior writer. He has around 182,000 followers on Twitter. Many of the messages sent from his account receive hundreds if not thousands of retweets. He has influence so that is why I am taking the time to say what Eichenwald will not write. And that is go fuck yourself.
Why should Eichenwald go fuck himself? Does Eichenwald deserve to be told to do this? Or am I, as people commonly say when met with profanity, better than that? Let’s see.
Eichenwald published a nearly 3,000-word screed centered on an encounter in the Philadelphia International Airport with someone who said they were a fan of his work. In fact, as Eichenwald admits, he almost assaulted this person.
The man recognized him from a news program. According to Eichenwald, the man thanked him for his reporting on Donald Trump. He expressed outrage that Trump won and added, “Get back to work.” Eichenwald apparently lacks the ability to engage in basic social interactions with those who say they are his fans because he thought he detected a bit of “arrogance.” So, he asked who the man voted for.
Instead of telling Eichenwald it was none of his damn business, the fan was friendly. He said he voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. A gasket blew inside Eichenwald. He interrupted his fan and said, “You’re lucky it’s illegal for me to punch you in the face.” He told his fan to go fuck himself (although Newsweek and/or Eichenwald apparently do not want to print it so the column says he told the fan to “have sex with himself”).
Eichenwald bashes Stein and Bernie Sanders supporters and blames them for spreading “conspiracy theories” that helped cost Democrats the election. The entire column is a toxic slab of slime with a level of contempt and hostility that is staggering, given that he centers it on someone who claimed to be a fan of his work. One can only imagine what he would have done if that person said they were not a fan but tried to talk to him.
This is absolutely the wrong reaction to the outcome of the election, however, it is the culmination of the worst genre of reporting and writing pumped out to the masses and popularized in the last year: vote shaming.
Journalists like Kurt Eichenwald feel it is their place to shame voters for their choices and tell them what to do. At the same time, trust in journalists, who work for mass media, is at a historic low. Is it any wonder why people trying to navigate a broken and corrupt electoral system that only gives them two choices every four years do not have confidence in the press, which elevates people who will attack them for refusing to fall in line?
“Shut the Hell Up” Eichenwald goes off on a “certain kind of liberal” he cannot stand, the kind that preens about their “narcissistic purity as they cast their ballot for a person they know cannot win.” This is truly rich coming from someone, who is a contributing editor for a magazine with a synonym for narcissism in its name, and who updates his followers on what he is doing with his stocks and uses his Twitter to prattle on and on about himself. The post does not address the substance of the so-called myths until about 1,000 words after he calls more attention to the struggle he endured trying to diligently write about Trump for the past months.
In blunt terms, Eichenwald states, “I have no problem with anyone who voted for Trump, because they wanted a Trump presidency. I have an enormous problem with anyone who voted for Trump or Stein or Johnson—or who didn’t vote at all—and who now expresses horror about the outcome of this election. If you don’t like the consequences of your own actions, shut the hell up.”
Eichenwald acts like he performed a public service, and without him, the electorate never would have been able to tell the difference between Clinton and Trump. He somewhat contradicts his demand to shut the hell up, too.
“If they supported Trump or truly didn’t care who won after acquiring a real understanding of both candidates’ positions—rather than spouting some self-indulgent, bumper-sticker logic—I have no complaints,” Eichenwald asserts. “If they opposed Trump while refusing to do what they could to keep him out of office—that is, vote for the only other candidate who could win —then they need to go perform sex with themselves. And I mean that in much cruder terms.”
Which brings us back to the basic idea that Eichenwald should go fuck himself. And I can print that without writing it out in some censored form so I can later pat myself on the back for maintaining some semblance of civility.
Stein Voters Could Not Have Helped Clinton Win If They Were “With Her” During election night, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight.com reported , “As of current vote counts, the number of voters who cast ballots for candidates other than Clinton and Trump exceeds Trump’s winning margin — or lead, in races that haven’t yet been called — in many important states, including Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But don’t pin Trump’s win on those voters who eschewed the two major candidates. Not all of them would have voted for Clinton had they been forced to choose only between her and Trump. And some might not have voted at all. Far more Democrats in Florida in 2000 voted for George W. Bush than voted for Ralph Nader.”
Nate Cohn of the New York Times even said Stein is not responsible for Clinton’s defeat.
Trump earned a sizable chunk of votes from Obama voters. Bialik reported on November 11, “A smaller share of eligible voters cast ballots in 2016 than in either of the previous two presidential elections,” and it was lower in states that went for Clinton.
This is probably the case because the Clinton campaign did not craft a message geared toward winning white working class or white middle class voters. She did not make overhauling free trade agreements a cornerstone of her campaign, and that hurt her in states like Michigan . It also could be that the Clintons represent something in establishment politics that millions of Americans felt they needed to reject.
However, Eichenwald is so enraged by the self-determination of voters—citizens who would vote for candidates on the ballot that the system intentionally tries to suffocate—that he insists the reason Clinton lost is because liberal Democrats are “consumed by provably false conspiracy theories.”
Oh Boy! Someone Gave Eichenwald A Peek at a “Republican Playbook” Against Sanders The “conspiracy theories” liberal Democrats (i.e. Sanders supporters) “believe” is the Democratic National Committee is an “all-powerful” entity that rigged the election against Sanders and Sanders would have won against Trump.
Eichenwald maintains “Sanders had not yet faced a real campaign against him” so he would not be able to win. By the end of May, the Clinton campaign had misrepresented Sanders’ role in the civil rights movement, accused Sanders of attacking President Obama for being “weak,” disingenuously claimed Sanders’s plan for single-payer healthcare would “dismantle Obamacare” to scare voters, and suggested the Sanders campaign planned to commit voter fraud in Iowa, allowed “Bernie Bros” to spread “vicious lies and sexism,” and sided with right-wing Republicans against immigration reform.
The campaign also dishonestly attacked him as a supporter of anti-immigrant Minutemen vigilantes, had a surrogate grotesquely claims Sanders’s wife, Jane, palled around with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, insisted Sanders supported the indefinite detention of immigrants, fabricated attacks on him for supposedly voting against the auto bailout, and pushed the inaccurate idea that he supported market deregulation in 2000. They also went after him for being a “single issue” candidate and pushed the notion that he ran for Democrat just to get “media attention” for himself, like he was an egomaniac.
At a Univision debate in March, a video clip of Sanders praising Cuban leader Fidel Castro was played. Clinton attacked Sanders over his remarks and used Cuban exiles in Florida to attack him for opposing U.S. imperialism in Cuba.
Despite all of those attacks, Sanders still appeared to do better than Trump in the polls and was ahead of Trump in a few state polls, where Clinton was behind Trump.
What’s most incredible about Eichenwald going off on Sanders supporters for “conspiracy theories” is the fact that he peddles and fabricates conspiracy theories in his work. For example, he published an entire piece claiming NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden acted as a Chinese spy because he told the Washington Post to publish documents on the same day the U.S. had a meeting with China about surveillance. He also pushed propaganda that Snowden left all the documents in Hong Kong.
Eichenwald claims to have seen the “Republican playbook” for attacks on Sanders. They bear a striking similarity to attacks already pushed out to the public. Sanders was asked about a rape fantasy essay he wrote when he appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” He said, “It was bad fiction. I learned my lesson.” The Sanders campaign told the Washington Post it was a “dumb attempt at dark satire intended to attack gender stereotypes in the 1970s, and it looks as stupid today as it was then.”
That Sanders “sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped,” was an attack pushed by the David Brock-funded Blue Nation Review , and it was part of a viral graphic fact-checked by PolitiFact in September 2015. PolitiFact deemed it “ largely accurate .”
Republicans may have enjoyed attacking him for his sympathy to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but Clinton tried the attack on him for his comments on Castro and that did not gain much traction outside Cuban exile communities in Florida. Simply, that kind of attack that hearkens back to the days of Ronald Reagan does not have much currency with the electorate these days.
A lot of these attacks Republicans planned to deploy were already peddled by Clinton. In that regard, whether they would have been effective is highly questionable.
The next fan who encounters Eichenwald should probably run into him and knock his coffee over so it lightly burns his crotch because this sentiment is vile:
When Sanders promoted free college tuition—a primary part of his platform that attracted young people—that didn’t mean much for almost half of all Democrats, who don’t attend—or even plan to attend—plan to attend a secondary school. In fact, Sanders was basically telling the working poor and middle class who never planned to go beyond high school that college students—the people with even greater opportunities in life—were at the top of his priority list.
Asshole, they do not plan to go to college because they cannot afford it. He pushed for free college tuition so poor, working class, and middle class Americans could go to college without graduating in an ocean of debt. Once more, go fuck yourself, Kurt Eichenwald!
Eichenwald is oblivious to the fact that Democrats may have deployed these Republican attacks or perhaps he does not care. Sanders supporters on Twitter have sent messages directed at him suggesting Sanders would have beat Trump and that is enough to piss him off and lead to this awful excuse for a political rant.
Of Course The DNC Should Have Backed Clinton Before Primary Ended Turning to the other myth, Eichenwald argues it was “stupid” for anyone to believe the Democratic National Committee had rigged the Democratic primary. He maintains that they do not have the power to do such a thing.
Eichenwald cleverly crafts a frame that makes it easy to obscure political corruption that upset voters. What really happened is the DNC was a captive of the Clinton campaign that did everything the Clinton campaign wanted to serve its needs, even if that meant Sanders was put at a disadvantag e.
The DNC and Clinton campaign falsely accused the Sanders campaign of “stealing” voter file data. The Hillary Victory Fund funneled millions of dollars through state parties to the DNC. Democratic women supporting Sanders faced forms of retaliation .
Nearly half of superdelegates in the Democratic establishment lined up to support Clinton by July 2015, before a single vote was cast in a primary.
Now, Eichenwald makes a big to-do about the allegations that the debates were rigged without bothering to specifically mention the contents of a memo written by Clinton campaign chief administrative officer Charlie Baker in April 2015.
It reads:
Through internal discussions, we concluded that it was in our interest to: 1) limit the number of debates (and the number in each state); 2) start the debates as late as possible; 3) keep debates out of the busy window between February 1 and February 27, 2016 (Iowa to South Carolina); 4) create a schedule that would allow the later debates to be canceled if the race is for practical purposes over; 5) encourage an emphasis on local issues and local media participants in the debate formats; and 6) ensure a format that provides equal time for all candidates and does not give the moderator any discretion to focus on one candidate.
The campaign mostly succeeded because from February 11 to March 6 there were no debates even though there were major primaries. Regardless of whether more debates were added to the schedule in 2016, it also worked with the DNC to fight Sanders’ efforts to schedule more debates.
Eichenwald declares, “Once only one candidate can win the nomination, of course the DNC gets to work on that person’s behalf.” He contends after May 3 there was no chance Sanders would win. But before the primary, the DNC and Clinton campaign were coordinating on opposition research in preparation for a campaign against the Republican nominee. This is hugely alienating to the millions of Democratic voters, who do not support the corporate Democratic politics of Clinton, and had the DNC approached the election differently they may not have faced such discontent during the general election.
As if all of the above weren’t enough, here is another reason to thrust your middle fingers in the air next time you see Eichenwald at an airport:
Debates cost money, and the more spent on debates, the less available for the nominee in the general election. Plus, there is a reasonable belief among political experts that allowing the nominees to tear each other down over and over undermines their chances in the general election, which is exactly what happened with the Republicans in 2012.
This is quite anti-democratic. To Eichenwald, Democrats should not debate issues and defend their records in numerous debates, even though the election lasts for around 18 months, because it gives Republicans ammunition to attack the Democratic nominee. He also advocates against spending money on debates so it can go to a nominee that already benefits from side-stepping loopholes expanded by Citizens United . For that alone, I hope he gets stuck on an elevator with millennial Sanders supporters for hours but loses his voice and can’t chime in to lecture them.
Eichenwald is not the only journalist with prejudice toward democracy. But let’s be clear: at minimum, all presidential candidates able to get a percentage of support in a national poll, qualify for federal matching funds, or get on enough state ballots to win the number of electoral votes needed to become president should have a right to run in elections in the United States.
Yet, Eichenwald concludes, “If you didn’t vote for the only person who could defeat [Trump] and are now protesting a Trump presidency, may I suggest you shut up and go home. Adults now need to start fixing the damage you have done.”
For all of the crass, sanctimonious, and self-righteous bullshit, because this is the kind of journalism we need to destroy, I say put your middle fingers proudly in the air and shout it loud. Go fuck yourself, Kurt Eichenwald!
The post Go Fuck Yourself, Kurt Eichenwald! appeared first on Shadowproof .
| 1real |
Texas Governor Signs Law to Crackdown on Teacher Sex Misconduct | Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill into law Thursday that crack downs on the vexing epidemic of sexual misconduct by the state’s teachers with students. [“Unfortunately, a small number of teachers are tarnishing the image of some of our best and brightest teachers,” said Abbott at a signing ceremony in the State Capitol building flanked by several key legislators, notably Senator Paul Bettencourt ( ) who authored this piece of legislation, Senate Bill 7, and has called the year upward surge in these improper relationships a statewide plague. “Texas has racked up a dubious ranking, a ranking that has an incredibly high number of inappropriate relationships,” added Abbott. “Today, by signing this law, we’re saying no more are we going to allow that to happen. ” Abbott continued onto say that under S. B. 7 Texas is “going to impose real and stiff consequences for any teacher who dares to have an inappropriate relationship with one of his or her students. ” The Governor expressed dismay that “unbelievably” some of these purported teacher sex offenders against whom accusations are made and cases even proven “have faced no real consequences. ” This law mandates the automatic revocation of a teaching license when an educator receives deferred adjudication or must register as a sex offender for this abhorrent behavior. It may also result in jail time. S. B. 7 also holds principals and superintendents to account with fines and jail time when they look the other way and purposely fail to report teacher wanton misdeeds to the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Even an administrator’s unintentional failure to report sexual misconduct results in a $500 fine. S. B. 7 also criminalizes when an educator becomes romantically involved with a student under 18 years old, regardless of what school district the teacher works or where a student attends classes, which, until now, was not an offense. While the law does not not name a particular curriculum, it requires that teachers attend an ongoing percentage of professional development classes to ensure they maintain “appropriate relationships, boundaries, and communications between educators and students. ” Abbott concluded: “I am proud to sign S. B. 7 to restore the trust that should exist between teachers and students, and also between parents and teachers to ensure that our schools remain a place where a child can go into that school with excitement to explore, to learn and to advance. ” Breitbart Texas reported that, since 2008, the number of these cases opened by the Educator Investigations Unit of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) jumped 80 percent to an alarming all time high of 222 reported incidences in the school year. So startling the numbers, the TEA asked state lawmakers to fund nearly $400, 000 in their academic budget for hiring two investigators and one administrator to better tackle the problem. The agency opened 159 new cases between September 1, 2016 and March 31, 2017 they estimated a 65 percent increase in these improper sexual interludes statewide from April 2015 to April 2017. At the signing ceremony, Abbott thanked Bettencourt for his leadership. Also present were Education Commissioner Mike Morath Representative Tony Dale ( Rock) who authored companion House legislation plus two adopted S. B. 7 amendments and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who named this issue one of his top 10 legislative priorities for the state’s 85th Legislature. During the interim session, Patrick charged Senate Education Committee members with developing policy solutions for this troubling problem. Representative Gary VanDeaver ( Boston) attended in the place of the bill’s House sponsor Ken King ( ). S. B. 7 has been among the few education related bills both chambers agreed upon, passing unanimously through the Senate and the House. Following the signing ceremony, Bettencourt commented, “It is very clear that the scourge of teachers preying on students for sexual relationships will not be tolerated. ” He thanked Abbott for signing the bill and Patrick plus his fellow legislators for their full support. “It’s time for inappropriate relationships to be stamped out. ” This law goes into effect on September 1. Follow Merrill Hope, a member of the original Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter. | 0fake |
Trump will get wake-up call when he takes office, Obama says | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump is in for a quick wake-up call and will have to adjust his temperament when he confronts the realities of his new job on Jan. 20, President Barack Obama said on Monday. In a news conference at the White House, Obama said the freewheeling Trump could not be as outspoken as he was during the long and bitter campaign that ended last week with the Republican’s surprise win over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Subdued and carefully choosing his words, Obama gave what appeared to be dispassionate advice to his successor free of much of the partisan rancor that marked the election campaign. “This office has a way of waking you up,” Obama said. “Those aspects of his positions or predispositions that don’t match up with reality, he will find shaken up pretty quick because reality has a way of asserting itself.” The two men met in the Oval Office last week to begin the transition of power. Obama said on Monday he believed Trump would be pragmatic in office and not approach the country’s problems from an ideological perspective. “There are going to be certain elements of his temperament that will not serve him well, unless he recognizes them and corrects them,” Obama said. “Because when you’re a candidate and you say something that is inaccurate or controversial it has less impact than it does when you’re president of the United States. Everybody around the world is paying attention. Markets move,” he said. Obama declined to wade into a controversy over Trump’s appointment of right-wing firebrand Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist, saying it would “not be appropriate” for him to comment on Trump’s appointments. But Obama, who criticized Trump’s temperament during the campaign, said it was important for Trump to send signals of unity after the hard-fought campaign. He said the political gifts that allowed the Republican to upset Clinton would be put to good use in the White House. “I’ve been encouraged by his statements on election night about the need for unity, his interest in being president for all people,” Obama said. “In an election like this that was so hotly contested and so divided, gestures matter.” The president-elect, a businessman who has never held public office, and his transition team are working on picking members of his Cabinet and the heads of federal agencies. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has emerged as a leading candidate for secretary of state, a source familiar with the process said. John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is also being considered for the job of the nation’s top diplomat, the source added. Giuliani became one of Trump’s closest advisers during the campaign, functioning as his most vocal defender on cable news programs and introducing him at many rallies. Giuliani has also been mentioned as a possible attorney general or homeland security secretary. A Trump transition team official denied media reports on Monday that Trump was seeking security clearance for three of his children and his son-in-law. Such clearance would allow Trump to discuss matters of national security with his daughter Ivanka, sons Eric and Donald Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Federal law prohibits him from hiring family members to serve in his administration, but all four played key advisory roles through the campaign. Trump has insisted that to avoid conflicts of interest, his children would run his sprawling business operations once he assumed the presidency. Democrats, civil rights groups and even some Republicans slammed Trump for choosing Bannon as a key aide, saying it would elevate the white nationalist movement into the top levels of the White House. Making his first appointments since last week’s upset win, Trump picked Bannon as his chief strategist and counselor, and Washington insider Reince Priebus as his chief of staff on Sunday, saying the two would share the task of steering his administration as “equal partners.” The choice of Priebus was seen as a conciliatory signal of Trump’s willingness to work with Congress. But critics blasted the selection of Bannon, who spearheaded a shift of the Breitbart News website into a forum for the “alt-right,” a loose online group of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites. “There should be no sugarcoating the truth here: Donald Trump just invited a white nationalist into the highest reaches of the government,” said Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, who called on Trump to rescind the choice. The Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said Bannon’s appointment sent “an alarming signal that President-elect Trump remains committed to the hateful and divisive vision that defined his campaign.” Even some conservatives and Republicans voiced dismay on Bannon. Evan McMullin, who ran as a conservative independent presidential candidate, wondered on Twitter if any national Republican leaders would condemn the pick of “anti-Semite” Bannon. John Weaver, a top strategist for Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich, tweeted that the “racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office. Be very vigilant America.” Kasich was one of 16 Republican presidential hopefuls Trump defeated in the party primaries. Priebus defended Bannon on Monday, calling him a wise and well-educated former naval officer and saying he had not encountered the sort of extremist or racist views that critics are assailing. “He was a force for good on the campaign,” Priebus said on Fox News, adding they were in agreement on “almost everything” in terms of advising the president-elect. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and a senior adviser, told reporters in New York she was offended by the reaction to Bannon, describing him as a “brilliant tactician.” Police in New York on Monday were investigating two cases involving swastikas drawn or painted in public spaces, as civil rights activists said there had been a surge in hate crimes following last week’s election. Local media reported hundreds of students walked out of a high school to protest Trump on Monday in Silver Spring, Maryland, and students gathered at the University of Washington in Seattle to protest Trump. | 0fake |
Even under oath, Trump struggled with the truth | The lawyer gave Donald Trump a note, written in Trump’s own handwriting. He asked Trump to read it aloud.
Trump may not have realized it yet, but he had walked into a trap.
The mogul had sent the note to a reporter, objecting to a story that said Trump owned a “small minority stake” in a Manhattan real estate project. Trump insisted that the word “small” was incorrect. Trump continued reading: “I wrote, ‘Is 50 percent small?’ ”
“This [note] was intended to indicate that you had a 50 percent stake in the project, correct?” said the lawyer.
For the first of many times that day, Trump was about to be caught saying something that wasn’t true.
It was a mid-December morning in 2007 — the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump’s life.
Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.
For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.
The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.
Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.
That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did.
“Have you ever lied in public statements about your properties?” the lawyer asked.
“I try and be truthful,” Trump said. “I’m no different from a politician running for office. You always want to put the best foot forward.”
In his presidential campaign, Trump has sought to make his truth-telling a selling point. He nicknamed his main Republican opponent “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz. He called his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, “A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR!” in a recent Twitter message. “I will present the facts plainly and honestly,” he said in the opening of his speech at the Republican National Convention. “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”
Trump has had a habit of telling demonstrable untruths during his presidential campaign. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has awarded him four Pinocchios — the maximum a statement can receive — 39 times since he announced his bid last summer. In many cases, his statements echo those in the 2007 deposition: They are specific, checkable — and wrong.
Trump said he opposed the Iraq War at the start. He didn’t. He said he’d never mocked a disabled New York Times reporter. He had. Trump also said the National Football League had sent him a letter, objecting to a presidential debate that was scheduled for the same time as a football game. It hadn’t.
Last week, Trump claimed that he had seen footage — taken at a top-secret location and released by the Iranian government — showing a plane unloading a large amount of cash to Iran from the U.S. government. He hadn’t. Trump later conceded he’d been mistaken — he’d seen TV news video that showed a plane during a prisoner release.
But, even under the spotlight of this campaign, Trump has never had an experience quite like this deposition on Dec. 19 and 20, 2007.
He was trapped in a room — with his own prior statements and three high-powered lawyers.
“A very clear and visible side effect of my lawyers’ questioning of Trump is that he [was revealed as] a routine and habitual fabulist,” said Timothy L. O’Brien, the author Trump had sued.
The Washington Post sent the Trump campaign a detailed list of questions about this deposition, listing all the times when Trump seemed to have been caught in a false or unsupported statement. The Post asked Trump whether he wanted to challenge any of those findings — and whether he had felt regret when confronted with them.
He did not answer those questions.
In 2005, O’Brien, then a reporter for the New York Times, had published a book called “Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald.” In the book, O’Brien cited people who questioned a claim at the bedrock of Trump’s identity — that his net worth was more than $5 billion. O’Brien said he had spoken to three people who estimated that the figure was between $150 million and $250 million.
Trump sued. He later told The Post that he intended to hurt O’Brien, whom he called a “lowlife sleazebag.”
“I didn’t read [the book], to be honest with you. . . . I never read it. I saw some of the things they said,” Trump said later. “I said: ‘Go sue him. It will cost him a lot of money.’ ”
By filing suit, Trump hadn’t just opened himself up to questioning — he had opened a door into the opaque and secretive company he ran.
O’Brien’s attorneys included Mary Jo White, now the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Andrew Ceresney, now the SEC’s director of enforcement. The lawsuit had given them the power to request that Trump turn over internal company documents, and they used it. They arrived at the deposition having already identified where Trump’s public statements hadn’t matched the private truth.
The questions began with that handwritten note and the 50 percent stake that wasn’t 50 percent.
“The 30 percent equates to much more than 30 percent,” Trump explained. His reasoning was that he had not been required to put up money at the outset, so his 30 percent share seemed more valuable.
“Are you saying that the real estate community would interpret your interest to be 50 percent, even though in limited partnership agreements it’s 30 percent?” Ceresney asked.
“Smart people would say it’s much more than 30 percent.”
TRUMP: I got more than a million dollars, because they have tremendous promotion expenses, to my advantage. In other words, they promote, which has great value, through billboards, through newspapers, through radio, I think through television – yeah, through television.
And they spend – again, I’d have to ask them, but I bet they spend at least a million or two million or maybe even more than that on promoting Donald Trump.
LAWYER: But how much of the payments were cash?
LAWYER: So when you say publicly that you got paid more than a million dollars, you’re including in that sum the promotional expenses that they pay?
TRUMP: Oh, absolutely, yes. That has a great value. It has a great value to me.
LAWYER: Do you actually say that when you say you got paid more than a million dollars publicly?
On to the next one.
“I was paid more than a million dollars,” Trump said when Ceresney asked how much he’d been paid for a speech in 2005 at New York City’s Learning Annex, a continuing-education center.
“But how much of the payments were cash?”
Trump said his personal math included the intangible value of publicity: The Learning Annex had advertised his speech heavily, and Trump thought that helped his brand. Therefore, in his mind he’d been paid more than $1 million, even though his actual payment was $400,000.
“Do you actually say that, when you say you got a million dollars publicly?” Ceresney asked.
As the deposition went on, the lawyers led Trump through case after case in which he’d overstated his success.
The lawyer played a clip from Larry King’s talk show, in which King asked Trump how many people worked for him. “Twenty-two thousand or so,” Trump said.
“Are all those people on your payroll?” Ceresney asked him.
“No, not directly,” Trump said. He said he was counting employees of other companies that acted as suppliers and subcontractors to his businesses.
Another one. In O’Brien’s book, Trump had been quoted saying: “I had zero borrowings from [my father’s] estate. . . . I give you my word.”
“Mr. Trump, have you ever borrowed money from your father’s estate?”
“I think a small amount a long time ago,” Trump said. “I think it was like in the $9 million range.”
Another one. In one of his own books, Trump had said about one of his golf courses: “Membership costs $300,000. I think it’s a bargain.”
“In fact, your memberships were not selling at $300,000 at that time, correct?”
“We’ve sold many for two hundred” thousand, Trump said. Then, Trump pushed it upward: “We’ve sold many for, I think, two-fifty.”
But this was not the place to push it.
The lawyer had an internal Trump document that showed the true figure — “$200,000 per membership,” Ceresney said.
LAWYER: You didn’t correct it when you read the book?
TRUMP: Well, I did correct it, and she didn’t correct it.
But you could have her in as a witness, and I’m sure we’ll bring her in as a witness because what she wrote was — I asked her to change it to “billions of dollars in debt,” and she probably forgot.
LAWYER: And when you read it, you didn’t correct it?
LAWYER: You didn’t see it.
TRUMP: I read it very quickly. I didn’t see it. I would have corrected it, but I didn’t see it.
In some cases, Trump acknowledged he was wrong — but not that he was at fault. Instead, he sought to turn the blame on others.
“This is somebody that wrote it, probably Meredith McIver,” Trump said at one point when confronted with another false statement. “That is a mistake.”
McIver, a staff writer with the Trump Organization, blazed into the public eye last month for having inserted plagiarized material — taken from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech — in the convention speech of Trump’s wife, Melania. McIver said it had been an innocent mistake.
But in this deposition more than eight years earlier, Trump was blaming her for a mistake in one of his own books, “How to Get Rich.” In the 2004 book, co-written with McIver, Trump described his massive debt load during a low period in the early 1990s. “I owed billions upon billions of dollars — $9.2 billion to be exact,” the book said as it retold the story of his rise back to success.
The depth of that financial hole made it seem even more impressive that Trump had climbed out again. But the figure was wrong. His actual debts had been much less.
“I pointed it out to the person who wrote the book,” Trump said, meaning McIver.
“Right after she wrote the book?”
Then the lawyer showed Trump another book he’d written with McIver, three years later.
“In fact, I was $9 billion in debt,” Trump read aloud. A similar error, repeated. It was McIver’s fault again.
“And when you read it, you didn’t correct it?”
“I read it very quickly,” Trump said about a book he was credited with writing.
LAWYER: When you wrote, “O’Brien . . . threatened sources by telling them he can, quote, ‘Settle scores with enemies by writing negative articles about them,’ ” what was the basis for that statement?
TRUMP: Just my perception of him.
I don’t know that he indicated anything like that to me, but I think he probably did indirectly. Just my dealing with him.
In other cases, the lawyers prodded Trump into admitting that he had made authoritative-sounding statements without any proof behind them. These statements were another kind of untruth.
They were not necessarily false. They might have been true.
But Trump said them without knowing one way or the other.
“What basis do you have for that statement?” Ceresney asked in one case, about an assertion from Trump that O’Brien had been reported to the police for stalking.
“I guess that was probably taken off the Internet,” Trump said.
On to the next one.
“You wrote, ‘O’Brien . . . threatened sources by telling them he can, quote, settle scores with enemies by writing negative articles about them,’ ” Ceresney asked, reading Trump’s words from a legal complaint. “What was the basis for that statement?”
“Just my perception of him,” Trump said. “I don’t know that he indicated anything like that to me, but I think he probably did indirectly.”
The most striking example was a question at the very heart of the legal case: What was Trump’s actual net worth?
Trump had told O’Brien he was worth up to $6 billion. But the lawyers confronted him with other documents — from Trump’s accountants and from outside banks — that seemed to show the real figure was far lower.
The lawyers asked: “Have you ever not been truthful” about your net worth?
Trump’s answer here was that the truth about his wealth was — in essence — up to him to decide.
“My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings,” Trump said. “But I try.”
The interrogation finally ended after two days. Trump’s attorney made a final demand.
“I want the record to be crystal clear that every single word, every question, every answer, every word, is confidential,” said the attorney, Mark Ressler.
In 2009, a judge dismissed Trump’s case against O’Brien. Trump appealed, but in 2011 that was denied, too.
Along the way, this once-confidential deposition became part of the public record when O’Brien’s attorneys attached it to one of their motions.
In a brief statement this week, Trump said he felt the lawsuit was a success, despite his loss.
“O’Brien knows nothing about me,” Trump said. “His book was a total failure and ultimately I had great success doing what I wanted to do — costing this third rate reporter a lot of legal fees.”
O’Brien, now executive editor of Bloomberg View, said Trump got that wrong. The publisher and insurance companies covered the cost.
“Donald Trump lost his lawsuit and, unlike him, it didn’t cost me a penny to litigate it,” he said. | 0fake |
Obama visits Midway Atoll, a symbol of his climate, Asia legacy | MIDWAY ATOLL (Reuters) - President Barack Obama snorkeled on Thursday in the electric-blue water off Midway Atoll, a remote coral reef that serves as a reminder of both modern global climate challenges and the United State’s dominance in the Pacific since its World War Two victory there. The journey was aimed at sending a message about the need to protect vulnerable species and spaces from the ravages of climate change. But it was also timed as Obama makes his way to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and other world leaders in his last visit to Asia, having sought to refocus U.S. defense and trade policy on the region. “It’s a signal, it’s a message saying the United States is committed to staying in the Pacific, and not sort of backing away,” said naval historian Tom Hone, who has studied the Battle of Midway. Zipping around the island in an 18-golf-cart motorcade filled with Secret Service, aides and camera crews, Obama stopped to see several endangered green sea turtles lazily paddle in to bask on the white sand beach. “When I grew up, we’d see these turtles all the time. You almost never see them beaching like this, just basking in the sun,” said Obama, who grew up in Hawaii, more than 1,100 nautical miles to the southeast. Obama, whose presidency comes to an end in five months, has tried to use his time in office to make Americans more passionate about climate change. Less than 5 percent of American voters say the environment is the most important issue facing the country, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling between July 24 and Aug. 21, and 35 percent say climate change will not affect the way they vote in the Nov. 8 election to pick Obama’s successor. The island visit bookends Obama’s trip last year to Alaska, where he hiked on a shrinking glacier. “These aren’t ‘photo ops’ - I think these are real opportunities to help the American people understand,” said Carol Browner, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency who advised Obama on climate issues in his first term. “He can get a level of attention that nobody else can get,” Browner said. Last week, Obama quadrupled the size of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument to create the world’s largest marine monument, protecting the area off the coast of Hawaii from commercial fishing and drilling. “This is going to be a precious resource for generations to come,” said Obama, his dress shirt undone an extra button in the sauna-like heat. “This is hallowed ground,” he said near a beach where young soldiers hunkered down under pillboxes, awaiting Japanese fighter planes during the World War Two Battle of Midway, one of the most-studied battles in military history. “Had it not been for the courage and the bravery of those airmen, we might have not seen the tide turn in the battle of the Pacific,” he said. In June 1942, U.S. forces, tipped by code-breakers that the Japanese navy was planning an attack, sank four Japanese aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser in a giant air and sea battle. Obama’s golf cart motorcade bumped over a tarmac pock-marked by shrapnel from the battle, passing old hangars and a “bone yard” of scrap metal, old office chairs, and broken appliances. Massive bags held some of the 20 tons of plastic ocean garbage that land on the island each year, 5 tons of which come from the bellies of albatrosses, which feed the plastic to their young, often fatally. Curious tern fledglings checked out his entourage, which tripled the island’s average population of about 35 humans. “Watch the burrow!” called Miel Corbett, a Fish and Wildlife Services spokeswoman, as a visitor narrowly avoided stomping the underground home of the bonin petrel. About a million of the birds swoop out of their nests each night at dusk. Vestiges of the island’s former life as a large naval base remain, although many have fallen into decay. Visitors have not been allowed since 2012 because of tight budgets. Reporters wrote their stories in a still-working 1970s bowling alley, just down the way from barber shop. | 0fake |
DEMOCRATS FUMING Over Vote To Keep “Hurtful” Word In Library Of Congress | The left wants to change hurtful words to whatever they deem to be ok but they got some push back with the order to keep the word illegal alien in the Library of Congress In a victory against political correctness, the House voted to order the Library of Congress to continue referring to illegal aliens rather than change the designation to noncitizen. The party line vote had Democrats fuming, claiming the term was pejorative and that liberal doublespeak can never be repealed once it s in use.Well that s not exactly what one Democrat said. Texas Democrat Rep. Joaquin Castro told the House, The words illegal alien will be retired. This will change, whether it s now or six months from now or 10 years from now. For the first time in history, conservatives hijacked a legislative appropriations bill to stop the Library of Congress from abandoning the term illegal alien from how it catalogs the 162 million-item collection it manages. Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro attempted to make an amendment to the legislation allowing the Library of Congress to make the change, but it failed to gain traction in the Republican-dominated House. Each year, the Library of Congress makes thousands of changes to its subject headings; in 2015 alone, it added 4,934 new subject headings. Never before has Congress weighed in on the Library of Congress subject headings in any way, let alone legislated on the issue, Castro said in a statement.Via: PJ Media | 1real |
Prominent Psychiatrist Gives One DAMNING Reason Why We Shouldn’t Call Trump ‘Mentally Ill’ (IMAGE) | Given Donald Trump s disastrous presidential campaign and his even worse first month in the White House, several experts have raised suspicions that Trump is mentally ill and must be evaluated immediately. However, for prominent psychiatrist Allen Francis, M.D., there s one major reason we shouldn t be calling Trump mentally ill because he s something far, far worse.Dr. Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavior sciences at Duke University Medical Center, has just written a damning letter to the editor of The New York Times stating that regarding Trump as mentally ill is a direct insult to those with mental illnesses. According to Dr. Frances, who was involved in writing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV), Trump is bad, not mad and crazy only like a fox. Frances said that claiming Trump has a mental illness is: a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).Unlike those with actual mental illnesses, Dr. Frances argues that Trump causes distress rather than experiencing it and has been rewarded for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. Instead of busying ourselves trying to decide if Trump is mentally ill or not, Dr. Frances believes that: He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers. Many mental health experts have spoken out about Trump before, but this is by far the most critical of them. No one can argue with Dr. Frances assessment; everything Dr. Frances has pointed out about Trump s behavior have been things that Trump has done very publicly. You can read his full letter in The New York Times below: And is just the icing on the cake. Dr. Frances also wrote a blog post in Psychology Today in which he urged people to focus on Trump s actions instead of his mental state. Dr. Frances wrote: The urge among amateur diagnosticians to mislabel Trump as mentally ill is perfectly understandable. They are terrified (as am I) by his dictatorial and impulsive behavior and feel compelled to resort to psychiatric name calling as a way of delegitimizing him. But this is inaccurate, unnecessary, unfair to the mentally ill, ineffective, and badly off target.We must challenge Trump on his outrageous behaviors and constant lies, not on his mental status. Speculations on Trump s psychological motivations, or whether he believes his own lies, are both distracting and irrelevant.At this crucial moment, with our fragile democracy at serious risk, I really couldn t care less why Trump does what he does. It is his dangerous actions that count, not the psychological reasons he does them. Dr. Frances also tweeted this on Tuesday: I m so tired of amateur analyses of Trump s psychology or diagnosis. Focus on real danger- his grab of dictator power. Dr. Frances is dead right. While we may never understand what goes on in Trump s mind, the real threat to America is his love of unchecked power and we shouldn t lose sight of that.Featured image via Mark Wilson / Getty Images | 1real |
Social Media Happy Shot Elephant Crushed a Hunter to Death - Breitbart | A hunting expedition went seriously wrong in Zimbabwe on Friday when South African big game hunter Theunis Botha was crushed to death by a charging elephant, after it was shot by a fellow hunter. [Botha, better known for his prowess as a leopard and lion hunter, led hunting excursions with his company Game and Hounds Safaris. The father of five paid the ultimate price by choosing to lead a safari to hunt wild elephants, when he mistakenly steered his party into a herd of breeding pachyderms. One elephant charged the hunters and surprised Botha by picking him up with his trunk, reported the Daily Wire. A fellow hunter shot the creature to save Botha, but it crashed to the ground and crushed Botha to death. Many who knew Botha described him as a “passionate and professional hunting pioneer,” and paid tribute to him on his company’s website: “RIP Theunis Botha. Our heartfelt condolences to Carike and family. He was a great man! So sad!” “A legend has fallen but will never be forgotten … It’s with a sad heart that we say goodbye to you Oom Theunis Botha. ” “Our deepest condolences to the family. May God be with you all in this difficult time. ” Botha’s daughter posted pictures of her father, including one of them together after shooting a gazelle a few years back. The hunter had his detractors as well. Commenters posting on his 2012 YouTube safari video (below) demonstrated their glee that Botha was killed. ”Karma took care of you! ,” “Hey a**hole. I hope you rot in hell,” and “I am super glad he got what was coming to him,” commenters wrote. | 0fake |
Protesters in Kentucky claim they were assaulted at Trump rally | LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Reuters) - Protesters at a Donald Trump rally in Kentucky last Tuesday have filed complaints with police claiming they were assaulted by Trump supporters, according to police and protesters. Henry Brousseau, 17, of Louisville, said he went to the Super Tuesday event at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville to protest Trump’s campaign and was punched in the stomach by a woman who was wearing a T-shirt of the Traditionalist Worker Party. “We’re going to see how the police can find out who she is and hopefully we’ll move on from there,” he said in a telephone interview. Another protester, Molly Shah, 36, also of Louisville, said that she, too, had filed a complaint. Alicia Smiley, spokeswoman for the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department, said three complaints were filed on Wednesday and Thursday and were under review. These would mark the latest clashes between Trump supporters, security, and protesters. The day before Trump visited Louisville, black students were removed from a rally in Georgia. A website for the Traditionalist Worker Party describes it as a grassroots political organization that believes, among other things, that “European-American identity is under constant attack.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights and public interest advocacy organization that monitors groups it considers extremist, classifies the Traditionalist Worker Party as a white nationalist hate group, said Ryan Lentz, a writer and researcher for the center. Brousseau, who is white and transgender, said he joined people from Black Lives Matter, Parents for Social Justice, Showing Up for Racial Justice and other groups that went to the Trump rally to protest. Video footage that has been circulated on social and traditional media shows people in Traditionalist Worker Party t-shirts pushing people, notably a young black woman, and taking their protest signs. Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email that the campaign does not comment on security matters. The Traditionalist Worker Party did not respond to requests for comment, and its website, tradworker.org, does not say where it is based. Matthew Heimbach, the group’s chairman, wrote in a blog on the website of the Traditionalist Youth Network that the protesters, including those from Black Lives Matter, were the aggressors. And he tweeted, “Its (sic) funny how BLM comes to a Trump event to fight, starts the fight and then loses the fight but plays big victims to the media.” Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lentz said, “Matthew is a figure who is core to the white nationalists and white supremacist culture as it is right now in the U.S.” For more on the 2016 presidential race, see the Reuters blog, “Tales from the Trail” (here). (Editing by Fiona Ortiz and James Dalgleish) 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 |
Bill Clinton’s Victims Strike Back at Megyn Kelly | We Are Change
On Tuesday evening, Megyn Kelly used the term “sexual predator” while referring to Donald Trump, but would not use the same words to describe Bill Clinton, during a heated exchange with Newt Gingrich.
Now, two of the former president’s victims are slamming the Fox News star over her hypocrisy.
During the exchange, the former speaker accused Kelly of being biased against Trump, and “fascinated with sex.” He argued that the media is focusing too much attention on allegations against the Republican candidate and not enough time on the Wikileaks’ release of Clinton’s secret paid speeches to Goldman Sachs.
“Let me point out something to you, the three major networks spent 23 minutes attacking Donald Trump that night and 57 seconds on Hillary Clinton’s secret speeches. You don’t think this is a scale of bias worthy of Pravda and Izvestia?” Gingrich asked.
“If Trump is a sexual predator, that is –” Kelly began to interrupt.
“He’s not a sexual predator,” Gingrich exclaimed. “You can’t say that, you could not defend that statement. I am sick and tired of people like you using language that is inflammatory that’s not true!”
Kelly then interrupted again, demanding that Gingrich has no idea if it is true or not, and that she is not taking a position on the issue either way — despite the fact that she clearly has.
“When you used those words you took a position,” Gingrich asserted.
After Kelly reiterated the allegations against Trump, and the fact that he denies it. She demanded that the news needs to cover the allegations, whether they are true or not.
“You are fascinated with sex, and you don’t care about public policy,” Gingrich asserted, as Trump supporters nationwide jumped off their couches to give him a standing ovation.
Kelly laughed his statement off, and declared that she is “not fascinated by sex,” but is “fascinated by the protection of women, and understanding what we are getting in the oval office.”
“Do you want to comment on whether the Clinton ticket has a relationship to a sexual predator,” Gingrich replied calmly. He then repeatedly asked her to use the words, “Bill Clinton sexual predator,” which Kelly refused to do — asserting that he is not on the ticket.
I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73….it never goes away.
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) January 6, 2016
After the show aired, Juanita Broaddrick, who has asserted and vividly described being raped by the candidate’s husband, tweeted out that Kelly is “ugly as hell on the inside.”
Beauty is only skin deep. Megyn Kelly is ugly as hell on the inside.
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) October 26, 2016
Broaddrick also accused Kelly of being biased, after someone tweeted out a reminder that both Kelly and Shep Smith have donated $70,000 each to Clinton’s campaign.
Yeah she's fair and balanced. Change your slogan FOX https://t.co/BnSNRcFdPr
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) October 26, 2016
Paula Jones , the former Arkansas state employee who sued President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, and received a $850,000 settlement, also had harsh words for Kelly.
“Lets get this straight…Megyn Kelly isn’t for all women…she hates Trump, so she’s only for those so called victims! NEVER for me!” Jones tweeted.
Lets get this straight…Megyn Kelly isn't for all women…she hates Trump, so she's only for those so called victims! NEVER for me!
— PJGirlie (@ThePaulaJones) October 26, 2016
Check out Broaddrick’s heartbreaking interview with Breitbart News here:
The post Bill Clinton’s Victims Strike Back at Megyn Kelly appeared first on We Are Change .
| 1real |
Merkel suggests Iran-style nuclear talks to end North Korea crisis | BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a newspaper she would be prepared to become involved in a diplomatic initiative to end the North Korean nuclear and missiles program, and suggested the Iran nuclear talks could be a model. South Korea on Saturday braced for a possible further missile test by North Korea as it marked its founding anniversary, just days after its sixth and largest nuclear test rattled global financial markets and further escalated tensions in the region. If our participation in talks is desired, I will immediately say yes, Merkel told Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in an interview to be published on Sunday. She pointed to negotiations that led to a landmark nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers in 2015. Back then, Germany and the five countries on the United Nations Security Council with veto power took part in talks that led to Iran agreeing to curb its nuclear work in return for the lifting of most sanctions. Merkel said that was a long but important time of diplomacy that ultimately had a good end last year, referring to when the deal was implemented. I could imagine such a format being used to end the North Korea conflict. Europe and especially Germany should be prepared to play a very active part in that, Merkel added. She said she thought the only way to deal with North Korea s nuclear program was to come to a diplomatic solution, adding: A new arms race starting in the region would not be in anyone s interests. Europe should stand united in trying to bring about a diplomatic solution and do everything that can be done in terms of sanctions , she said. Merkel is expected to win a fourth term in office in a Sept. 24 vote, with polls giving her conservatives a double-digit lead over their rival Social Democrats. Merkel is widely seen in Germany as a safe pair of hands at a time of global uncertainty such as the North Korea crisis, Britain s looming departure from the European Union and Donald Trump s presidency in the United States. Merkel has spoken to leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe about North Korea this week. The newspaper said, without naming its sources, that she would speak by telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday. | 0fake |
Kashmiris observes Black Day decades after India occupied Kashmir | Kashmiris observes Black Day decades after India occupied Kashmir Thu Oct 27, 2016 10:22PM Pakistanis shout slogans in the support of the Kashmiri people during a protest in Lahore on October 27, 2016. © AFP
Javed RanaPress TV, Islamabad
Kashmiri people observe the Black Day all over the world particularly in their disputed region which is divided between Pakistan and India. The date marks almost 7 decades of violence in Kashmir. On the eve of the event Pakistani, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif warned India that it will face serious consequences if its soldiers do not stop killing civilians in border regions along the so-called Line of Control (LoC) which divides Indian-controlled Kashmir from the Pakistani side. Loading ... | 1real |
Trump picks opponent of higher minimum wage for Labor Department | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump named fast-food executive Andy Puzder to head the U.S. Department of Labor on Thursday, drawing criticism from labor advocates worried about his opposition to a higher minimum wage and government regulation of the workplace. Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants Inc, which operates the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fast-food chains, has frequently argued in the media that higher minimum wages would hurt workers by forcing restaurants to close. He has bashed a new Labor Department rule aimed at extending overtime pay to more than 4 million U.S. workers and has praised the benefits of automation in the fast-food industry. Fast-food workers, who are largely not unionized, are engaged in a multi-year campaign known as the “Fight for $15,” which is supported by labor unions, to raise minimum wages to $15 an hour. They have had state-wide successes in New York and California and in cities and municipalities such as Seattle. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Workers in states that have higher minimum wages are entitled to the higher rate, the Labor Department says. Trump, in a statement released by his transition team, praised Puzder for a “record fighting for workers” and said he would ensure occupational safety standards. “He will save small businesses from the crushing burdens of unnecessary regulations that are stunting job growth and suppressing wages,” Trump said. In the same statement, Puzder, 66, said he agreed with Trump that “the right government policies can result in more jobs and better wages for the American worker.” The Labor Department regulates wages, safety and discrimination in the workplace. Republican Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in last month’s election by carrying swing states - and some traditionally Democratic states - in the U.S. Rust Belt after promising to create jobs and to review or cancel trade deals that he said were bad for workers. National labor leaders had urged their rank-and-file members to back Clinton, saying Trump’s appointments and policies would not align with his promises to workers. Labor leaders have been girding for Trump to appoint pro-business regulators at the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board, and to roll back key regulatory initiatives of the Obama administration such as the Labor Department rule granting overtime pay to more than 4 million salaried workers, both unionized and not unionized. “He was talking a good game when he was running for president, as far as helping workers and leveling the playing field for them, but with the nominations he’s made it’s just the opposite,” said Lee Saunders, president of the public employees union AFSCME. Shake-ups are expected under Trump at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, which enforces federal anti-discrimination laws. Trump will have an early opportunity to shape the EEOC when he replaces its general counsel, Obama appointee David Lopez, who is leaving the agency this month, and a vacancy on the commission. Trump will also be able to fill two current vacancies on the five-member NLRB early in his term, likely tipping the agency to a more business-friendly posture. Although just 11.1 percent of U.S. workers were represented by a union in 2015 - down from 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year government statistics were kept - labor unions are a powerful force in Democratic politics. But union members’ support for Clinton at the election was lower than it had been for President Barack Obama four years ago. About 51 percent of voters from union households backed Clinton, with 42 percent supporting Trump, a CNN exit poll showed. Democrat Obama won 58 percent of the same voters in his 2012 re-election win against Republican Mitt Romney. Business groups welcomed the appointment of Puzder. Robert Cresanti, president of the International Franchise Association, an industry group, praised him as an “exceptional choice” who would bring “business experience and policy acumen on so many issues impacting employers and employees.” Democrats were critical. “In Andrew Puzder, Trump found a labor secretary that would help him roll back the minimum wage, end the overtime rule that will raise wages for millions, weaken safeguards for workers, and to wipe out unions,” said American Bridge, a liberal advocacy group. Trump’s decision to pick Puzder comes as he engaged in a Twitter dispute with the head of a local United Steelworkers union in Indiana. United Steelworkers Local 1999 President Chuck Jones, who represents workers at United Technologies Corp’s Carrier plant in Indianapolis, criticized Trump for inflating the number of jobs that would be saved by his intervention in the company’s decision to move some production to Mexico. Trump responded on Twitter that Jones had done a “terrible job representing workers.” Jones said after speaking to the company that 800 jobs would remain in Indianapolis, of which 730 will be union jobs and 70 management positions. Trump said last week that a deal by Indiana to give the company $7 million in tax breaks would keep 1,100 jobs in the region. “Our people, at that point in time, got their hopes back up that they might have a job,” Jones told CNBC on Thursday. “All he had to do is come back and say I was misled by (United Technologies),” Jones said about Trump. “Instead of doing that he goes on the attack on me?” | 0fake |
BEGGIN’ MEGYN KELLY’S New Book Ripped To Shreads In Amazon Reviews…Karma! | Megyn Kelly started out like a shooting star as an anchor on FOX News but is now crashing down in so many ways. Here s the latest epic failure She s been out hawking her new book all over the place but the people just aren t buyin it. What s even better is they re totally ripping her in the Amazon reviews and giving her one out of five stars (see below).We d like to say that a big dose of karma has hit Ms. Kelly and we can t think of a more deserving person.She literally used her position against Donald Trump to promote her book and career. Who knows if her accusations that Donald Trump screamed at her are true. How can he defend himself from the horrible things she s said about him?We think his supporters have done a great job of helping him out. Amazon is on fire with one star reviews for Kelly. We think she should rename her book Settle for More to Settle for One Star Real, Raw Gimme a Break! | 1real |
Mo Brooks: There ’Must Have Been 50-100 Shots Fired’ Between Security and Shooter at Baseball Practice - Breitbart | “The gun continued to fire” . @RepMoBrooks gives first person account of shooting at baseball field in Alexandria https: . On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “New Day,” Representative Mo Brooks ( ) described the scene at the Congressional baseball practice where House Majority Whip Representative Steve Scalise ( ) was shot. Brooks stated that the shooter was using a rifle, while members of the Congressional security details were firing handguns back at the shooter, and that there “must have been shots fired. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 0fake |
GANG OF DOMESTIC TERRORISTS Violently Attack Lone Trump Supporter For Putting Out Huge Fire Started On Street In DC [VIDEO] | ***WARNING*** Violence is graphic***This Trump supporter used a fire extinguisher to put out a fire on the street in DC that was started by domestic terrorists who were rioting in opposition to Trump s presidency.Watch how these animals attack this brave young man for doing the right thing:https://twitter.com/TEN_GOP/status/822629269109178369 | 1real |
Dr. Mercola: The Dangers of LED Lights | Leave a reply
Alexandra Bruce – Dr. Joseph Mercola interviews Dr. Alexander Wunsch about the hidden dangers of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting.
Our eyes were designed to receive the light frequency of the Sun. Rays strike the optic nerve, which signals the pituitary gland, triggering the release of hormones and neurotransmitters that regulate our bodily functions.
The mitochondria of each cell in the human body produce almost one’s entire bodyweight in adenosine triphosphate (ATP) per day (!) and the human body can only live for 15 seconds without it, as compared to 4-10 minutes without air, 3-4 days without water. Another shocking thing we learn is that we only receive 1/3rd of what is converted into ATP from the food we eat. The overwhelming percentage of our ATP production comes from the light we receive through our eyes and skin.
With many of us staring at screen devices or spending most of our time indoors with energy-saving LED lighting, few of us are aware of the adverse effects that LEDs have on retinal health, hormonal health and mental health, because these do not emit the correct frequency of light, in order for us to produce ATP.
Dr. Mercola calls his conversation with Dr. Wunsch “One he most important interviews you will ever see.” SF Source Forbidden Knowledge TV Nov. 2016 Share this: | 1real |
Highlights: The Trump presidency on February 3 at 6:25 P.M. EST/2325 GMT | (Reuters) - Highlights of the day for U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday: DODD-FRANK Trump orders reviews of major banking rules put in place after the 2008 financial crisis, drawing fire from Democrats who said his order lacked substance and squarely aligned him with Wall Street bankers. Wealth managers from Wall Street to Wisconsin have spent the last six years lobbying against the retirement advice rule that Trump began killing off with a swipe of his pen. The United States ratchets up pressure on Iran, putting sanctions on 13 individuals and 12 entities days after the White House put Tehran “on notice” over a ballistic missile test. Instead of tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration is exploring how to tighten its enforcement and renegotiate key terms, but it may be impossible to get other major powers and Iran to consider revisions. A federal judge in Boston declines to extend a temporary restraining order that allowed some immigrants into the United States from certain countries despite being barred by Trump’s recent executive order. Tens of thousands of visas were revoked under Trump’s travel ban, the State Department says. U.S. immigration officials have postponed interviews with asylum seekers in an Australian camp since Trump’s executive order on immigration, suggesting Washington is already blocking progress on a controversial refugee resettlement deal. Chief executives of major U.S. companies met with Trump at the White House, with some expressing concern about the ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries traveling to the United States. Congressional Republicans repeal a securities disclosure rule aimed at curbing corruption at energy and mining companies and vote to ax emissions limits on drilling operations, part of a push to remove Obama-era regulations on extractive industries. Trump’s agenda to repeal Obamacare and punish “sanctuary cities” for resisting him on immigration is making its presence felt in the $3.8 trillion municipal bond market. European Union leaders agree to stick together in dealing with Trump, but at their first summit since he took office they are at odds on how far to confront or engage with him. The Trump administration is in the midst “of a full review of all U.S. policies towards Cuba” with a focus on its human rights policies. | 0fake |
MEET “LYIN’ LIZZIE”: Why Was Obama’s AG LORETTA LYNCH Using Her Grandmother’s Name As An Alias In Email Communication With DOJ? | More bad news for Lyin Loretta or Lyin Lizzie, depending upon who Obama s former AG (the chief law enforcement officer and chief lawyer of the United States government) decided she needed to be on any given day.So much for Obama s most transparent government ever LOL!On Friday internet sleuth Kim Dotcom dropped a bomb on Twitter.Kim posted an email Friday showing Loretta Lynch using an alias to contact DOJ officials.Yesterday, we reported about the new DOJ emails that were released to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) as part of an ongoing investigation into the secret meeting between former AG Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton, whose wife Hillary Clinton, was under investigation by the FBI at the time of the meeting.One of those emails reveals that Obama s crooked AG Loretta Lynch, was hiding her name, and using her grandmother s name (Elizabeth Carlisle) as an alias:Melanie Newman from the Department of Justice leaked it in the email. And AG Lynch (Elizabeth Carlisle) then responded with a thanks to all who worked on this. Here is Kim DotCom s tweet:BREAKING: Did Loretta Lynch use an alias to communicate with DOJ officials and why? Who is Elizabeth Carlisle? Dear Internet, investigate! pic.twitter.com/oqngTKDhLY Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 5, 2017Here s another example of an email where Lyin Lynch used her grandmother s name:DOJ FOIA request dump, on page 210, it appears DOJ employees are sending someone named Elizabeth Carlisle email messages meant for Lynch. pic.twitter.com/wshcRpWGD6 Washington's Ghost (@solight111) August 5, 2017Now this Reddit The Donald users discovered that Loretta Lynch used her grandmother s maiden name Lizzie Carlisle as her alias.Loretta s grandmother s name is Lizzie Carlisle Harris. Loretta s mother s name is Lorine Harris Lynch.Here is her grandmother s death certificate.h/t Gateway Pundit As it turns out, Lyin Loretta wasn t the Obama s only AG to use an alias while conducting government business. According to Buzzfeed investigative reporter Jason Leopold, Obama s first crooked AG Eric Holder also used the alias Lew Alcindor in his official government capacity:3 yrs later. DOJ responds to my #FOIA re: media leaks. Here's a few emails from "Lew Alcindor" aka Eric Holder https://t.co/MZfqnnW4Hz Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) March 3, 2017 | 1real |
Hillary To Be Indicted After Election: Trump Responds To FBI Investigation | Hillary To Be Indicted After Election: Trump Responds To FBI Investigation Clinton scrambles following FBI announcement on new email evidence Infowars.com - October 28, 2016 Comments
Alex Jones breaks down the FBI’s Friday announcement on the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server as new evidence surfaces.
The new data was reportedly uncovered during a separate investigation into Anthony Weiner – the husband of Clinton ally Huma Abedin.
FBI Director James Comey cited “recent developments” for the bureau’s decision in a letter to committees and lawmakers today.
“In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony,” Comey wrote.
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
These new revelations could undoubtedly spell trouble for Clinton as Trump has vowed to fully investigate her actions upon winning the election. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles | 1real |
This Anti-Gay, Anti-Science Creationist Could Soon Be Allowed To Rewrite School Textbooks | In the coming days, a creationist conspiracy theorist who thinks President Obama is a gay prostitute, could be in a position to rewrite school textbooks and decide what is taught in class.Mary Lou Bruner has promised voters that, if elected to the State Board of Education in Texas, she will promote conservative curriculum standards aligned with Texas values. The problem is, a quick look at what Bruner considers Texas Values make the proposition of putting her in a place to shape young minds utterly terrifying.Among Bruner s regular Facebook rants, she has claimed that:These are just the highlights. Statements that, in any right-thinking world would preclude a person from being elected to a position of authority within the State education system. Sadly, this is not the case in Texas.Far from being some outsider, no-chance candidate, she has been endorsed by none other than the Former Chairman of the Texas State Board of Education Gail Lowe, and a raft of others. She won 48 percent of the vote in the GOP primary on Tuesday, putting her well-above her opponents. She ll now face a run-off election, and she ll likely win.Bruner has every chance of being allowed a say in what goes in our children s textbooks and what they are taught in class. This racist, anti-gay, anti-science conspiracy theorist might very soon have a central role in shaping the minds of young Americans. If that doesn t care you, nothing will.Featured Image via Campaign Website | 1real |
Ten interesting facts about Vladimir Putin | Ten interesting facts about Vladimir Putin 07.11.2016 1. Childhood dream Since his childhood, Putin has been fond of Soviet films about intelligence officers and spies. He always wanted to work in security agencies. His dream came true in 1975. Having graduated from the law department of the Leningrad State University, the would-be president was assigned to the State Security Committee. 2. Working under cover From 1985 to 1990, Putin had worked in the German Democratic Republic under the guise of the director of the Dresden Friendship House. 3. Family On July 28, 1983, Putin married Lyudmila Putin; the couple had two daughters, Mary (1985) and Ekaterina (1986) Also read: Exclusive hairdresser trims Putin's dogs in lion style 4. Pets Putin has many pets, many of which were gifted to him: four dogs - black labrador Koni, two poodles and Bulgarian Shepherd Dog Buffy, goat Skazka her goatling, and a dwarf horse named Vadik. 5. Judo Print version Font Size Vladimir Putin is a master of sports in judo and sambo. Putin is a champion of Leningrad in judo, he is a winner of the USSR Cup, winner of DSO "Zalgiris" and "Kalev" championships. In judo, Putin earned championship titles in competitions between universities. During his young years, Putin's judo coach was Anatoly Rakhlin (1938-2013), who then coached the Russian women's national judo team. 6. Writer's Experience In 1999, Putin's first book was published in collaboration with Vasily Shestakov and Alexei Levitsky. The book was devoted to practical judo training and was titled "Let's Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin." | 1real |
Bernie Sanders: Now More Than Ever, It's Our Revolution | Bernie Sanders: Now More Than Ever, It's Our Revolution Share on Facebook Tweet
The Senator from Vermont remains optimistic about the country's future, and urges citizens to become more deeply involved in the political process. [watch video below] | 1real |
John McCain Wanted Another 74 Twitter Followers, But His Plan Backfired Miserably (TWEETS) | All Senator John McCain wanted to achieve on the morning of Monday, December 4 was to hit that magic milestone of three million Twitter followers, a goal of which he was just 74 followers shy. So what was McCain s approach to gaining those new followers? Simple, he would go on Twitter and rely on word-of-mouth, how could that possibly fail?We're only 74 Twitter followers away from 3M spread the word & help us reach this big milestone! John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) December 4, 2017There was just one little thing Senator McCain had forgotten to factor in His significantly waning popularity since he voted for the Republican tax bill. Being the Republican Senator for Arizona, some may have seen this as him just batting for his own team, but let s not forget that John McCain was one of the few glimmers of hope as he was also one of the only Republicans that has been openly critical of President Trump and this is a terrible tax bill.Not only will the new tax measures raise taxes on those earning less than $75,000 per annum, it would also take healthcare from 13 million Americans and raise the national debt by almost $1.5 trillion dollars over the coming decade! To add insult to injury, the 479-page bill wasn t even completed when it was released on Friday night, with some pages crossed out and others with hand-written amendments in the margins. Furthermore, nobody even had a chance to read it when they were forced to vote on it, but that didn t sway McCain and the bill somehow managed to pass the Senate.UPDATE: Senate Republicans are so desperate to pass their tax bill tonight that they're now making handwritten changes to their already handwritten changes Seriously. pic.twitter.com/KQfW7bOyk1 Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) December 2, 2017Some people had grown to believe that Senator McCain wasn t too bad for a Republican, but when he shocked everyone and voted in favor of the new tax bill, one where 13 million taxpayers will lose their healthcare but still subsidize his treatment for brain cancer, he proved he was no different and people decided to revolt. So when McCain put out the plea for another 74 followers to reach the three million mark, Twitter-users instead instigated a massive unfollow campaign using the hashtag #UnfollowMcCain, costing him hundreds of followers every minute.Over 5,000 people have unfollowed you since you sent this this two hours ago.One reason is you because you a man undergoing cancer treatment voted to strip $25 BILLION dollars from the part of Medicare which pays for CANCER TREATMENT.#unfollowmccain https://t.co/gWl6KsAaLE Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) December 4, 2017I m happy to report that @SenJohnMcCain has lost more than 10,000 followers since I posted the below tweet. Please retweet to spread the word!! #UnfollowMcCain https://t.co/TSb8B9Oj1B Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) December 4, 2017Yeah, I'm a 'no' on that. You can have all the Twitter followers you want AFTER you prove that you care more about this country than you do about the corrupt GOP & your stinking donors by voting *NO* on the #GOPTaxScam.Meantime: #UnfollowMcCain jessica james (@MontaukBuzz) December 4, 2017His vote alone would've made it 50/50 giving time to fight/fix whatever,, he's the one who so openly said "No" gaining more trust & support from Dems. He blew it giving his family tax-free $. He also said yes to drilling in the Arctic reserve. #UnfollowMccain Suomi_Tytt (@musiikkia) December 4, 2017I am so disgusted in your #GOPTaxScam vote. Your legacy as an American Hero and a Maverick ended right there. Denying cancer treatment for Medicare/Medicaid patients gets you #UnfollowMcCain JustDe (@bobnde79) December 4, 2017So, how bad has the #UnfollowMcCain campaign been for the Arizona Senator? Well, at the time of writing this article he needed approximately another 30,000 followers to achieve his goal. Probably just should have kept quiet at 74 and hoped for things to improve organically.Featured image via William Thomas Cain/Getty Images | 1real |
Austrian Social Democrat poll suggests late boost: source, newspaper | VIENNA (Reuters) - A new poll by Austria s Social Democrats (SPO) suggests they may be poised for a boost at parliamentary elections on Sunday after having been relegated to third place behind the conservatives and the far right in opinion polls for months. An SPO source and a report by newspaper Kurier said on Friday the Social Democrats have come within less than a handful of percentage points of the conservatives, who have been leading polls for months at around a third of the vote. The SPO and the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) have both attracted approval ratings of around a quarter, with the FPO taking second place more often than not. We will win this, you will see, an ebullient Christian Kern, Social Democrat Chancellor and party leader, told supporters. Whichever party wins the most votes on Sunday is likely to miss the 50-percent mark, meaning it will have to enter coalition talks. | 0fake |
California & Oregon Want To Secede From The U.S. After Trump Election | California & Oregon Want To Secede From The U.S. After Trump Election Nov 12, 2016 2 0
In what is shaping up to be the beginning of a revolution within the United States, residents from California and now Oregon are wanting to secede from the U.S. after Donald Trump was elected President…and they want Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Washington state to join them to create an entirely new country altogether.
Two days after the Trump election in the U.S. residents in California began a campaign called “ Yes California Independence Campaign ,” which is to initiate the process to officially secede from the U.S. California residents are pushing for secession.
Ruiz Evans said Yes California intends to launch an initiative that asks Californians whether they believe the state should remain part of the United States or break away on its own. Similar to the Citizens United ballot measure voters approved Tuesday, it would begin as an advisory proposal to kick-start an arduous process. Marcus Ruiz Evans is the vice president of the group and s aid that Californians have a choice :
“The reason that we’re here today is we wanted to point out to everybody in California that the American system is broken. It’s failing. It’s sinking. You as a Californian have a choice to make: Do you go down with that ship out of tradition or sail on your own?”
Their website states that Californians should follow Brexit’s lead: In our view, the United States of America represents so many things that conflict with Californian values, and our continued statehood means California will continue subsidizing the other states to our own detriment, and to the detriment of our children. However, this independence referendum is about more than California subsidizing other states of this country. It is about the right to self-determination and the concept of voluntary association, both of which are supported by constitutional and international law. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the international community with their “Brexit” vote. Our “Calexit” referendum is about California joining the international community. You have a big decision to make. To add to Calexit’s momentum, an Oregon lawyer has joined the movement and filed the Oregon Secession Act , which has formally invited the states of California, Alaska, Washington, Hawaii and Nevada to secede with them and form a new nation together. The Act was filed by lawyer Jennifer Rollins and writer Christian Trejbal, who said that Oregonian values are no longer the values held by the rest of the United States and that joining with these other states to create a new nation “is a viable way to go forward.” However, just 24 hours after the Act was filed, they withdrew it due to the amount of violence they saw in the streets around the world. Trejbal said that they were receiving death threats and that their movement is not about violent protesting, so it was best to withdraw it at this time. Though Oregon has suspended their secession campaign for now, California’s campaign is growing stronger. With Texas speaking of secession just months ago, we now have the most populated state in the U.S. speaking of secession as well. Regardless of one’s political stance, it is clear to see that the people are growing restless and that something is going to have to give, and give soon. How do you see this playing out? Will California be able to secede and will other states join them? Will the U.S. Congress allow something like this to happen? Will revolution be the result? | 1real |
Stricter Rules for Voter IDs Reshape Races - The New York Times | SAN ANTONIO — In a state where everything is big, the 23rd Congressional District that hugs the border with Mexico is a monster: eight and a half hours by car across a stretch of land bigger than any state east of the Mississippi. In 2014, Representative Pete Gallego logged more than 70, 000 miles there in his white Chevy Tahoe, campaigning for to the House — and lost by a bare 2, 422 votes. So in his bid this year to retake the seat, Mr. Gallego, a Democrat, has made a crucial adjustment to his strategy. “We’re asking people if they have a driver’s license,” he said. “We’re having those basic conversations about IDs at the front end, right at our first meeting with voters. ” Since their inception a decade ago, voter identification laws have been the focus of fierce political and social debate. Proponents, largely Republican, argue that the regulations are essential tools to combat election fraud, while critics contend that they are mainly intended to suppress turnout of constituencies like minorities and students. As the general election nears — in which new or strengthened voter ID laws will be in place in Texas and 14 other states for the first time in a presidential election — recent academic research indicates that the requirements restrict turnout and disproportionately affect voting by minorities. The laws are also, as in the case of Mr. Gallego, reshaping how many campaigns are run — with candidates not only spending time to secure votes, but also time to ensure those votes can be cast. states now have ID laws, at least 17 of them — including Texas — requiring not just written proof of identity, but requiring or requesting a photograph as well. Most research suggests that the laws result in few people being turned away at the polls. But a study of the Texas ID requirement by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy released in August found that many more qualified voters, confused or intimidated by the new rules, have not tried to vote at all. “What voters hear is that you need to have an ID,” said Mark P. Jones of the Baker Institute, an author of the study. “But they don’t get the second part that says if you have one of these types of IDs, you’re O. K. ” A second study, by the University of California, San Diego, concluded in February that the strictest voter ID laws — those that require an identity card with a photograph — disproportionately affect minority voters. After Mr. Gallego’s narrow loss in 2014, researchers from the Baker Institute and the University of Houston’s Hobby Center for Public Policy polled 400 registered voters in the district who sat out the election. All were asked why they did not vote, rating on a scale of 1 to 5 from a list of seven explanations — being ill, having transportation problems, being too busy, being out of town, lacking interest, disliking the candidates and lacking a required photo identification. Nearly 26 percent said the main reason was that they were too busy. At the other end, 5. 8 percent said the main reason was lacking a proper photo ID, with another 7 percent citing it as one reason. Most surprising, however, was what researchers found when they that response: The vast majority of those who claimed not to have voted because they lacked a proper ID actually possessed one, but did not know it. Moreover, Dr. Jones of the Baker Institute said, “The confused voters said they would have voted overwhelmingly for Gallego. ” Whether such voters would have changed the outcome of the election is unknown. But Mr. Gallego said the issue goes far beyond how the laws affect individual races. “It’s tremendously undemocratic in a democratic society when you deliberately disenfranchise thousands of people,” he said. “Turnout is good for the system. ” While the numbers vary, studies consistently indicate that a modest but significant share of adult Americans — up to 13. 6 percent — lack photo ID cards, like driver’s licenses and university IDs. And the studies consistently show that, compared with whites, the share of minorities without photo IDs is far higher. In Texas, more than 600, 000 people are eligible to vote or are already registered but have no acceptable photo ID, according to an analysis admitted as evidence in 2014 in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s law. Most of the strict photo ID laws have been enacted in the past decade by legislatures over Democratic objections. Many are in Southern states whose election procedures had been under federal supervision for compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act until the Supreme Court invalidated key provisions of the act in 2013. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who defended the state’s voter ID law against legal challenges when he served as attorney general from 2002 to 2015, says the law’s ID requirements have maintained election integrity and have not disenfranchised voters. “As the Supreme Court has already held, the voter ID requirement is no more burdensome than other voting requirements, including registering to vote,” Ciara Matthews, a spokeswoman for Mr. Abbott, said in a statement. “That minimal burden is far outweighed by the state’s compelling interest in protecting elections and voter confidence in the outcome of those elections. ” Texas officials say they are spending millions of dollars to help voters understand and meet the new ID requirements, including deploying mobile offices to help citizens apply for election IDs. “We just haven’t seen any problem,” said Alicia Pierce, the communications director for the Texas secretary of state. But in Wisconsin, Todd Allbaugh resigned as chief of staff to a leading Republican state senator last year after attending a party caucus in which, he said, some legislators “were literally giddy” over the effect of the state’s voter ID law on minorities and college students. “I remember when Republicans were the ones who helped Johnson pass the civil rights bill in the ’60s — not Democrats,” Mr. Allbaugh said in an interview last week. “I went down to the office and said, ‘I’m done. I can’t support this party any more.’ ” In North Carolina last week, a federal judge upheld sweeping changes to election rules, including a voter ID provision, that had been contested by the Justice Department and civil rights groups. Wisconsin’s voter ID law will get its debut this year after first being rejected by the Supreme Court, then rewritten by Republican legislators. Texas’ photo ID law, which took effect in 2013, remains in place despite being struck down three times in federal courts, and faces another court test later this year. To enter a voting booth in Texas one of the following is required: a Texas driver’s license, a Texas election or personal ID card, a Texas license to carry a handgun, a military ID, a passport or a citizenship card. People without the required identification can cast a provisional ballot, but they must produce an approved ID within six days or their ballot will be nullified. The law’s critics say the list is notable for what government documents it does not include — a Texas university student ID, a tribal identity card or a state employee ID, to cite three examples that could be more likely used by Democratic voters than by Republicans. Mr. Abbott, perhaps the law’s most ardent backer, has said that voter fraud “abounds” in Texas. A review of some 120 fraud charges in Texas between 2000 and 2015, about eight cases a year, turned up instances of buying votes and setting up fake residences to vote. Critics of the law note that no more than three or four infractions would have been prevented by the voter ID law. Nationally, fraud that could be stopped by IDs is almost nonexistent, said Lorraine C. Minnite, author of the 2010 book “The Myth of Voter Fraud. ” To sway an election, she said, it would require persuading perhaps thousands of people to commit felonies by misrepresenting themselves — and do it undetected. “It’s ludicrous,” she said. “It’s not an effective way to try to corrupt an election. ” As attorney general, Mr. Abbott argued that the law’s critics “turn a blind eye to illegal voting and instead rail against voter ID as discriminatory. ” That is not so, he wrote in 2012: “States with voter ID laws have seen minority vote participation increase, not decrease. ” That is misleading, said Zoltan L. Hajnal, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of the study on photo ID laws and minority turnout. The relevant question, he said, is how minority turnout in states with photo ID laws compares with that in states without such laws. His study, which relied on a sample of more than 50, 000 verified voters collected annually since 2006, reached a stark conclusion. “We’re finding typically that strict voter ID laws double or triple the gap in turnout between whites and nonwhites,” he said. The Texas law also has a smaller, but potentially significant consequence: Many voters who cast provisional ballots — because they either lack an ID or forgot theirs on Election Day — never return with proper documents to make their votes count. For example, in Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s largest county, only 27 of 389 provisional voters later produced proper IDs in three elections in 2014 and 2015. Finlay K. McCracken, 19, a history major at Trinity University in San Antonio, was among those whose vote went uncounted in November 2014. On Election Day, three months after moving there from Virginia, he presented an unexpired Virginia driver’s license and a voter registration card at his polling place, and was told neither was acceptable. “It’s a valid ID,” he said. “Texas has a lot of gall to deny me the right to vote when I have a driver’s license from another state and a valid voter registration card. ” | 0fake |
VIDEO: Top 10 Most Embarrassing Presidential Family Members | 21st Century Wire says These family members made the president s life miserable, and a few just might continue for years to come Three members of our Top 10 actually managed to get stage time for the balloon drop at the closing of this week s Democratic National Convention.Notably, #3 on our list, Roger Headache Clinton moshed to the DNC s new pop anthem Stronger Together but it appears this has already been cut out of most mainstream video footage.As #8 on our list, Jeb would say, Please clap Not to be outdone: BROTHERLY LOVE: Hillary Clinton s brother, Hugh Rodham (center), seen lurking about the convention stage. THE BROTHERS RODHAM: Tony (left) and Hugh Rodham make #6 on our list of most embarrassing presidential family members as brothers-in-law of ex-President Bill Clinton.Certainly, these men may have just edged Billy Carter right off all master lists.WATCH THIS VIDEO AND MORE HEREREAD MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files | 1real |
WikiLeaks Fends Off Cyber Attack | By Kurt Nimmo Remember when the Pentagon promised to put a missile down the smokestack of anybody who hacks the elite? It hasn’t done that... | 1real |
Reuters/Ipsos Poll: Trump Closes in on Clinton's Projected Electoral Lead | Republican Donald Trump appears to have carved out a wider path to the White House as a number of states including Florida and Ohio are no longer considered likely wins for Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project released on Saturday.
The project, which combines opinion polls with an analysis of voting patterns under different election scenarios, still shows Clinton would have the best chance of winning the presidency if the Nov. 8 election were held today. Yet Trump has caught up to her level of support in several states.
Clinton now has an 83 percent chance of winning the election by an average of 47 votes in the Electoral College, the body that ultimately selects the president. In late August, the States of the Nation estimated that Clinton had a 95 percent chance of winning by an average of 108 electoral votes.
Over the past few weeks, Clinton's lead in the national polls has slipped considerably. Polls tend to narrow as Election Day nears, and the Clinton campaign has struggled to overcome controversy about how she handled classified information while serving as secretary of state.
A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll of likely voters showed an 8-point lead for Clinton has vanished since the last week of August.
Clinton is still favored to win 17 states, including many with large, urban populations such as New York, New Jersey and California that heavily influence the outcome of the election. Trump would likely win 23 states, many of them with smaller populations.
The number of states projected for Clinton has dropped over the past few weeks. Two of those states, Ohio and Florida, were considered likely wins for Clinton in late August. Now the candidates are about even in support. Five more states, including Michigan and North Carolina are also up for grabs.
The sample size was insufficient to determine the outcome in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska and the District of Columbia, though Alaska usually votes Republican and Washington D.C. for the Democratic Party candidate.
The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project is driven by an online survey that gathers responses from about 15,000 people per week. Their responses are weighted according to the latest population estimates, and each respondent is ranked according to their likelihood to vote.
Once the poll is complete, the project tallies the levels of support and estimated error for both candidates, and then runs multiple election simulations given their respective support. | 0fake |
Donald Trump, Courting Evangelicals, Faults Hillary Clinton’s Policies and Character - The New York Times | Donald J. Trump tried out several lines of attack against Hillary Clinton, at one point calling her “unfit to be president,” as he delivered an otherwise noticeably restrained speech to an audience of evangelical activists here Friday. Appearing before the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference, Mr. Trump promised to “uphold the sanctity and dignity of life” and to “restore respect for people of faith. ” But he also used the opportunity to press his case against Mrs. Clinton, portraying her as arrogant, attacking her economic policies and willingness to admit Syrian refugees into the country and questioning her judgment as secretary of state. “She’ll appoint radical judges who will legislate from the bench, overriding Congress, and I’ll tell you, the will of the people will mean nothing — nothing,” Mr. Trump said. “She will undermine the wages of working people with uncontrolled immigration, creating poverty and income insecurity. Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street agenda will crush working families. She’ll put bureaucrats, not parents, in charge of our lives, and our children’s education. ” Referring to Mrs. Clinton’s call for Mr. Obama to take in 65, 000 Syrian refugees, Mr. Trump also challenged her to instead “replace her support for increased refugee admissions” with “a new jobs program for our inner cities. ” “We have to temporarily stop this whole thing with what’s going on with refugees where we don’t know where they come from,” he said, adding: “We have to take a timeout. We have to use the money to take care of our poorest Americans and work with them so they can come out of this horrible situation that they’re in. ” Mrs. Clinton has been calling Mr. Trump temperamentally unsuited for the White House, and he tried to turn the tables. Mrs. Clinton “refuses to even say the words radical Islam — refuses to say it,” Mr. Trump said. “This alone makes her unfit to be president. ” He has vowed to deliver a major speech Monday attacking both Mrs. Clinton and her husband as personally corrupt, and on Friday Mr. Trump asserted that the email scandal that has overshadowed Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for months had its origins in such venality. “Hillary Clinton has jeopardized — totally jeopardized — national security by putting her emails on a private server, all to hide her corrupt dealings,” he said. The claim appeared to refer to concerns that the private server Mrs. Clinton used as secretary of state may have been more vulnerable to being hacked by foreign adversaries than the State Department’s email system. (Although the emails were supposed to contain only unclassified information, the department has retroactively withheld some of their contents as classified when reviewing them for release in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.) But Mr. Trump offered no backup for his claim that the private server was used to hide “corrupt dealings. ” Noting that President Obama had officially endorsed Mrs. Clinton on Thursday, Mr. Trump added, “First time ever, by the way, a president of the United States endorsed somebody under criminal investigation. ” But that assertion also goes beyond the known facts. The FBI is investigating Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private server, but agents have not yet interviewed her and it is not clear if she herself is a target of a criminal inquiry. A few young protesters interrupted Mr. Trump’s remarks, shouting “Dump Trump” and other slogans. After they were muscled out by security guards, Mr. Trump called them “professional agitators” who were “sent in by the other party — believe me. ” Mr. Trump’s speech Friday came as he is battling to regain his footing after weeks of missteps, none more damaging than his questioning whether a federal judge could preside fairly over a case against Trump University because the judge is of Mexican heritage. With party leaders expressing outrage and voicing doubts that he can unify Republicans and defeat Mrs. Clinton in November, Mr. Trump noticeably curbed his impulsiveness Tuesday night, promising in a prepared speech not to let his supporters down. Still, in a Bloomberg Politics podcast published Friday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised the possibility of rescinding his endorsement if Mr. Trump did not “change directions. ” Alluding to what he called Mr. Trump’s “obvious shortcomings,” Mr. McConnell said, “It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t know a lot about the issues. ” Before the Faith and Freedom Coalition Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump again stuck mainly to a script, reading from teleprompter screens. But he still in his characteristically clipped syntax. “We want to uphold the sanctity and dignity of life, marriage and family as the building block of happiness and success,” he said. “And by the way, I know many, many very successful people. The happiest people are the people that have had great religious feel and that — incredible marriage, children. It’s more important than the money, folks. Believe me. ” Mr. Trump — who has been married three times — does not hew to traditional conservative orthodoxy. He previously supported abortion rights, and he said earlier this year that Planned Parenthood has done “some very good work” for millions of women. And in response to North Carolina’s controversial new bathroom law, Mr. Trump said that transgender people should be able to use whatever bathroom where they feel most comfortable. But he nonetheless won the early endorsement of leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. president of Liberty University, and successfully wooed evangelical voters during the primary, exit polls showed. Hogan Gidley, a former aide to Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, said that while evangelicals “would love to have a true evangelical in the White House,” they understood that Republicans required a broader coalition to win in November. “Republicans cannot win without getting evangelicals, and they can’t win only getting evangelicals,” Mr. Gidley said. “They have to expand the voter universe and so far, Trump has done an amazing job with that. ” | 0fake |
STUNNING VIDEO REVEALS Why We Have The Current Hateful Lunacy In The Press [Video] | The video below is unbelievable in its honest look at the press and how they didn t and won t accept the election of Donald Trump. These people exposed themselves to be leftists on the night of the election with their editorializing and outright hate speech. Is it any wonder that we have the current hateful and twisted media coverage that we do? LANGUAGE ALERT:President Donald Trump has been bashed by the press since day one by these people they want to destroy him. We say we need to destroy the leftist media behind all of the lies about our president. Please take the time to call out lies from the media when you see them! | 1real |
The Modern History of "Rigged" US Elections | License DMCA
The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world's "gold standard" that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The "wise men" of the system simply insist otherwise.
We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens' judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000).
Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated.
The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation's leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized.
Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn't vote). - Advertisement -
That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners.
Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century.
Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks.
Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy's vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South's heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners.
However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon's Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960. - Advertisement -
Nixon's "Treason"
So, by 1968, the Democrats' once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn't want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that -- with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided -- President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam. President Richard Nixon with his then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972. License DMCA
The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon's campaign went behind Johnson's back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson's Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon's emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam. | 1real |
Greece debates bill on legal gender change, divisions laid bare | ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece began debating on Monday a bill allowing people to change their gender identity without medical treatment, a move that was welcomed by human rights groups but exposed political divisions and church opposition. Greece currently requires persons who wish to have their desired gender legally recognized to be diagnosed with gender identity disorder and have their reproductive organs removed. This practice has been widely condemned as a violation of human rights though is common in many European countries. The bill, tabled by the leftist Syriza party and to be put to a vote on Tuesday, says that changing legal gender is a matter of personal choice and should not be contingent on medical tests, therapies or surgeries that are all optional. It has been condemned as immoral by Greece s influential Orthodox Church and as a monstrosity by far-right wing politicians. The draft legislation says persons have the right to change legal gender twice, and applicants must not be married. A court will decide on their application. A group of supporters rallied outside parliament holding a banner reading: Transgender rights are human rights . I can t wait! The moment the bill passes, I m changing my identity, said Raffaela, 40, adding that she has lived in waiting for 27 years. The ironic stares, the mocking when people see that my identity doesn t correspond to my looks, will finally end, she told Reuters, covered in a rainbow flag. An article setting the minimum age for the change to 15 years has bared cracks in Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras coalition. His ally, the right-wing Independent Greeks, said it would vote against it unless the age was amended to 17 years. Campaigners say the bill is a step in the right direction but falls short of fully recognizing the rights of transgender people. Denmark was the first European country to allow legal gender changes without any medical intervention in 2014. The government has 153 deputies in the 300-seat parliament. The bill is expected to be approved in principle by ruling lawmakers and center-left parties. The main conservative opposition, New Democracy, tabled its own proposals. To have access to the labor market, to travel and deal with daily life under a name that they want, and which corresponds to how they feel, should not be negotiable, said ruling Syriza lawmaker Anneta Kavadia. The Holy Synod, the ruling body of the Greek Orthodox Church, thinks differently. The proposal, it said, was an affront to society , and a threat to the sanctity of family . | 0fake |
U.S., Japan first ladies: both unconventional yet poles apart | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When Japanese first lady Akie Abe made her rounds in Washington on Friday, noticeably absent was the high-level chaperone of previous visits - America’s first lady. Rather than Melania Trump, it was the wife of the Japanese ambassador to the United States who accompanied Akie Abe on a visit to a local university, a Japanese embassy official said. That was a departure from Akie Abe’s previous visits to Washington. In 2007, she was treated to a tour with Laura Bush to George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, and in 2015, she and Michelle Obama stopped by a northern Virginia elementary school with a Japanese immersion program. The break with convention, three weeks into husband Donald Trump’s presidency, is another sign that Melania Trump may have different designs on the first lady’s role than her predecessors. Melania Trump has elected to stay in New York for now while her son finishes his school year. It is not yet clear if she will take a prominent role in White House social events, including accompanying fellow first ladies on their visits to the capital. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife are scheduled to spend the weekend at the Trumps’ Florida Mar-a-Lago retreat, where the two leaders will golf and the task of hosting Mrs. Abe will fall to Melania. While their husbands strive to appear in lock-step on U.S.-Japan relations this weekend, Melania Trump may find in her Japanese counterpart someone who is in many ways her opposite - a political spouse who does not shun the limelight and disagrees publicly with her powerful husband. Melania Trump, a former model from Slovenia, rarely airs differences of opinion with her husband. Akie Abe, in contrast, has used news interviews to make policy recommendations for his administration, leading some to dub her the “household opposition.” She told Reuters in 2014 that Japan should consider cutting spending and boosting the economy before further raising the sales tax, to 10 percent. She said she had urged her husband not to go forward with the first stage of the rise, to 8 percent, to no avail. Critiquing Japan’s male-dominated professional culture, Akie Abe told Bloomberg last year that Japanese women are held back by pressure from men to be “cute” rather than “capable and hardworking.” Her public profile makes her a rarity in Japan as well as a stark contrast with Melania Trump, who largely avoided the campaign trail, has not shown deep interest in public policy, and has rarely disagreed with Trump in public despite some damaging revelations. When a videotape of Trump emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign in which he boasted about grabbing women by their genitals, Melania said in a brief statement that his words were “unacceptable and offensive” but that she had accepted his apology. The differing styles could keep the weekend conversations on the light side. “I would certainly expect no discussion of global politics” between Melania and Akie, said Jean Harris, a University of Scranton professor who has studied the role of first ladies. “I don’t see Melania as wanting to be part of those conversations.” Akie Abe’s openness in stating points of disagreement with her husband has few parallels even in American politics, where first ladies tend not to diverge from their husbands in public, though they may be crucial advisors behind the scenes, Harris said. Just after the election, Melania Trump said in a CBS interview that she chides her husband “all the time” for his Twitter attacks. “Sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t,” she said. “I give him my opinion. And he could do whatever he likes with it.” | 0fake |
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