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“They Got In There And Totally Took It Over” – The Tea Party, Black Lives Matter and the 99% Protesters Have All Been Absorbed By The Establishment | If there’s one thing that the rise of Donald Trump and Britain’s Brexit has proven, it’s that the people have had it with the establishment. No matter what side of the aisle you’re on, you are likely sick and tired of the outright corruption prevalent in every aspect of the system.
Over the last decade we have seen several movements try to take the initiative to create real, lasting change by upending the business-as-usual behavior of entrenched politicians, corporate lobbyists and mainstream media. All have thus far failed and were eventually absorbed by the power structure.
The Tea Party was co-opted by the establishment right. The 99% Protesters were co-opted by the establishment left. And according to recent Wikileaks releases, the Black Lives Matter movement has been sucked up by the Clinton camp and Soros-funded globalists.
Joe Joseph of The Daily Sheeple explains how politicians, including Hillary Clinton, have used these grass roots movements for their own nefarious purposes and to push forth their own agendas:
If you remember back in 2006-2007 there was something called the Ron Paul Revolution that took off… at one point in time there was a million man march that took place and there was close to a million people that marched on Washington… it was a tremendous grass roots effort and uprising that took place… and after that you had the Tea Party take off… and then it got co-opted. The-Powers-That-Shouldn’t-Be put their operatives in there.. they got in there and totally took it over… and now the Tea Party today is nothing but your mainstream Republican operation that advances the Republican Party platform… certainly not what Ron Paul was doing… certainly doesn’t have the Constitution in mind…
Watch At Youtube
Also from Joe Joseph:
The Election Is In The Process Of Being Stolen With Rigged Voting Machines
2016 “Selection” to Usher in Period of Chaos and Turmoil in U.S.
Sh*t Is Getting Real: Is Martial Law Coming to a Town Near You? | 1real |
William Weld: Never Mind Libertarianism, He's Running as Himself | Boston magazine has a long take on William Weld, former Massachusetts governor, currently Libertarian vice presidential candidate.
The main takeaway, after some of the usual slightly sneery scene-setting about weirdo libertarians (reported from July's FreedomFest in Las Vegas) and the lovely color detail of the patrician Weld being amazed he's staying in a New York hotel whose price is three digits beginning with "one"?
That while Weld totally thinks of himself as libertarian and has for a long time, he's also a guy who just likes to do strange and challenging things as a lark, like writing novels, and hates being bored and likes being in the political mix.
An unnamed former adviser says "There's nothing more he would like than to be flying around the country on somebody else's dime, flying first class, and talking to political reporters all day." Another unnamed former staffer says of Weld "He is old money, white, and fucking brilliant...Everybody tries to distance himself from those traits when running for office, and he always embraced them and made them his own."
Reason has written quite a bit on some conflicts between Weld and libertarianism as most define it, despite Weld's long-time affection for that self-identification, and this profile is decent on explaining that aspect of the Weld/Libertarian story.
The profile by Simon van Zuylen-Wood sums up that conflict:
Weld's strategy isn't to try to defend libertarian ideas. Instead he articulates the ones he thinks disaffected centrists want to hear. When Johnson suggests abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, Weld raises an eyebrow and clarifies that he wouldn't go that far. When asked about gun control, Weld suggests the formation—cue a million Libertarians choking on their dinner—of a massive new FBI task force.... .... I ask him, at random, about climate change. He advocates pragmatic, mainstream, and essentially unlibertarian ideas about the urgent need for governing bodies to prevent the rise of global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius. These aren't ideas his free-market brethren take kindly to. He smiles. He doesn't care: "I'm running as myself."
Weld to Reason TV in May on why Libertarians can trust him: | 0fake |
Russia, before Tillerson visit, says worried USA may attack North Korea | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said it hoped forthcoming talks in Moscow with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would be productive, but said it was extremely worried the United States might decide to unilaterally attack North Korea. North Korea is emerging as one of the most pressing foreign policy problems for U.S. President Donald Trump. Pyongyang has conducted five nuclear tests and is working to develop nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach the United States. A U.S. official told Reuters over the weekend that a U.S. Navy strike group led by a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was steaming towards the western Pacific as a show of force. Tillerson, on his first visit to Moscow as secretary of state, is due to hold talks with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, on Wednesday at a time when U.S.-Russia ties are languishing at a post Cold War low. The Russian foreign ministry, in a statement ahead of his visit, said it was concerned about many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, including on Libya, Yemen and Syria, but said it was particularly concerned about North Korea. “We are really worried about what Washington has in mind for North Korea after it hinted at the possibility of a unilateral military scenario,” the statement said. “It’s important to understand how that would tally with collective obligations on de-nuclearising the Korean peninsula, something that is underpinned in U.N. Security Council resolutions.” Russia slammed U.S. cruise missile strikes on a Syrian air base on Friday calling them an illegal attack on a sovereign state. There are growing fears in Moscow that Trump, who it once thought would be isolationist, is becoming increasingly confident about using force to achieve his foreign policy goals. Russian foreign ministry said on Tuesday it hoped the United States would agree to an international investigation of the nerve gas attack which prompted the U.S. missile strike on Syria and that U.S. officials would also take part in Afghanistan talks in Moscow later this week. | 0fake |
Slovenian President Pahor fails to win majority, faces runoff | LJUBLJANA (Reuters) - Slovenian President Borut Pahor will face a second-round election on Nov. 12 after he fell short of a majority in Sunday s first round, as he tries to win a second five-year mandate. With 99 percent of the vote counted, according to the State Election Commission, Pahor had 47.1 percent of the vote. In next month s runoff, he will face Marjan Sarec, the mayor of the city of Kamnik, who took 25 percent. Turnout reached 43.5 percent. The result contradicted exit polls by TV Slovenia that showed Pahor winning in the first round. In the second round anything is possible, although Pahor is a big favorite, Peter Jancic, the editor of political website Spletni Casopis told Reuters. Although the office is mostly ceremonial, the president leads the army and also nominates several top officials, including the central bank governor. Most of his nominations have to be confirmed by parliament. The vote amounted to a warning for Prime Minister Miro Cerar and his Party of Modern Centre (SMC) before the general election due next June or July. Its candidate, Education Minister Maja Makovec Brencic, took only 1.7 percent of the vote and came seventh out of nine candidates. SMC will surely have a lot to show at parliamentary election, Cerar told TV Slovenia. We have a lot of ideas for the future. Pahor, 53, who ran as an independent candidate, is a former long-time leader of the center-left Social Democrats. He told reporters he will focus on connecting people, cooperation, political stability and security if he wins in the second round. He was Slovenia s prime minister from 2008 to 2012, the years that led to the worst financial crisis in Slovenia s history. In 2013, the country only narrowly avoided an international bailout for its banks. A former fashion model, he is also known as the king of the Instagram , for posting photos on Instagram showing him in his official duties but also in various sports activities. Sarec, 39, is not affiliated with parliamentary parties but is running as a candidate of his own non-parliamentary, center-left party, Lista Marjana Sarca. He is a former actor. I am happy about this result, which shows that us mayors do a lot for people at the local level and are working hard, he said. | 0fake |
In battleground Florida, tough stance on felons may sap votes for Democrats | TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Reuters) - Leonard “Roscoe” Newton has been in and out of Florida’s prisons since before he could vote, starting with a youthful conviction for burglary. He’s been a free man for six years now with an important exception: he still can’t vote. Newton, who is African American, is among nearly 1.5 million former felons who have been stripped of their right to vote in a state with a history of deciding U.S. presidential elections, sometimes by razor-thin margins of just a few hundred votes. Felons have been disenfranchised in Florida since 1868, although they can seek clemency to restore their voting rights. Since 2011, however, when Republican state leaders toughened the restrictions on felon voting rights, just 2,339 ex-felons have had that right restored, the lowest annual numbers in nearly two decades, according to state data reviewed by Reuters. That compares with more than 155,000 in the prior four years under reforms introduced by Governor Rick Scott’s predecessor, moderate Republican governor Charlie Crist, the data shows. Crist, who was governor from 2007 to 2011, made it much easier to restore ex-felons’ voting rights. “When I tried to be an effective member of the community, I saw that I was voiceless,” said Newton, whose expectations of getting his rights restored were dashed when the rules changed under a new administration. “I’m 45, and I have never voted.” The dramatic slowdown has stoked a racially charged debate over whether political bias taints the process of restoring felon voting rights in the largest battleground state in the Nov. 8 presidential election. Florida’s toughened ban means racial minorities are disproportionately excluded from voting because of higher incarceration rates, data shows. Black voters tend to favor Democrats. “Republicans oppose the felon vote change because they are concerned about the political implications,” said Darryl Paulson, a conservative Republican voting rights expert who sees wide restoration of voting rights as “a huge political advantage for the Democratic Party.” Paulson says non-violent ex-felons should have the right to vote. Almost all U.S. states deny incarcerated felons the right to vote but many restore those rights after they have completed their sentences. Over the last two decades, more than 20 states have taken action to help people with criminal convictions regain their voting rights. Since July, Virginia’s governor has restored voting rights to 67,000 felons. Florida is the largest of four remaining states that strip all former felons of voting rights, accounting for nearly half of those barred from voting nationally. Along with Virginia, the others are Kentucky and Iowa. In March 2011, two months after he became governor, Scott reversed Crist’s reforms, which had allowed many non-violent felons to automatically get their voting rights reinstated after they had completed their sentences. Crist had also simplified the process for felons convicted of more serious crimes to regain their votes. Scott, a millionaire former health care executive, put in place new restrictions, requiring ex-felons to wait for five to seven years before applying to regain the right to vote, serve on a jury or hold elected office. He said the new rules ensured ex-felons had proven they were unlikely to offend. Florida has disenfranchised about one in five voting-age black voters, according to research collected by the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group. That compares with about 8.6 percent of the state’s non-black potential voters. Data on the Hispanic voting-age population who can’t vote because of the law was unavailable, although Hispanics make up 12.5 percent of Florida’s inmates. The rates reflect racial disparities in criminal convictions. Florida’s current prison population is nearly 48 percent black, more than any other racial group, although blacks are only 17 percent of the state’s population. Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, which includes the capital city of Tallahassee, accused the Republican administration of repealing the felon voting reforms “to reduce the number of African Americans who had their rights restored because those voters were perceived to be more Democratic voting and so therefore were targeted for elimination.” Sancho is a former Democrat who is now unaffiliated with either party. Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Republican officials who drove the 2011 policy changes, did not agree to be interviewed by Reuters or respond directly to questions on the accusations that the law is intended to influence elections. But Bondi has previously denied the policy amounts to racially motivated disenfranchisement. “For those who may suggest that these rule changes have anything to do with race, these assertions are completely unfounded. Justice has nothing to do with race,” Bondi wrote in a 2011 newspaper editorial. Scott’s office, in a statement to Reuters, said former felons need to “demonstrate that they can live a life free of crime, show a willingness to request to have their rights restored and show restitution to the victims of their crimes” in order to have their voting rights restored. Democrats have seized on the issue as a civil rights concern, regardless of the political impact, said Nell Toensmann, who chairs the Democratic Party of St. Johns County, a north Florida region of about 225,000 people dominated by Republicans. “Yes, it does disenfranchise a lot of African Americans, but it disenfranchises a lot of white people who would be voting as Republicans as well,” she said. The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation polling project shows a tight race in Florida. It estimates that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a 48 percent chance of winning the state, compared to her Republican opponent Donald Trump’s 42 percent. Political scientists say the voting ban can sap votes from both parties, but some research suggests that Democrats pay a steeper price. An analysis of voting patterns by race and economic status found that if the ban had not existed during the 2000 presidential election, Democrats would have had enough votes to overturn Republican George W. Bush’s 537-vote victory in Florida that won him the White House. “In very close elections won by Republican candidates, felon disenfranchisement could be decisive,” said Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota professor who led the study. Applying for voting rights can be difficult. Ex-felons must submit certified court documentation of each felony conviction — documents that can be difficult to secure for those unable to spend time and money tracking down records in courthouses. Cases involving serious crimes are heard in person by a clemency board consisting of the governor and Florida’s cabinet officers, in quarterly meetings in Tallahassee. During a Sept. 21 meeting in a windowless room in the Florida Capitol building, 48 petitions to restore voting rights were on the agenda presented to the governor and three state officers in an all-day session punctuated by tears and emotional pleas. Some petitioners were represented by attorneys, others showed up solo or accompanied by a friend or relative. “Clemency is an act of mercy. There is no right or guarantee,” Scott told them, urging applicants to accept culpability. State rules give him the deciding vote. “If I deny, it’s over,” he said. Learlean Rahming approached the podium in a black and white flowered dress, accompanied by her adult daughter. State records show dozens of criminal charges over two decades that include larceny, drug possession and shoplifting. “I accept my responsibility for all of my stupid mistakes of the past,” said the 63-year-old woman, who had traveled from Miami, adding that she has been out of prison for more than 20 years. Officials were impressed by her turnaround story, until Bondi noticed a discrepancy. Records showed Rahming had voted under a married name after her release. “Just to see if I could vote,” she told the panel, explaining that for many years she had not realized that her rights were taken away. Scott moved to deny. Rahming left, wiping tears. The board ultimately cleared 23 residents to get back their civil rights. More than 10,500 applications are still pending. Crist, the former governor who championed leniency, switched to the Democratic Party in 2012. In an interview, he questioned whether the policy changes on felons voting cost him a 2014 bid to reclaim the governor’s mansion. He lost by about 64,000 votes - in the ballpark of the number of people in the state who complete felony sentences in a typical year, Florida Department of Corrections data shows. “We will never know for sure,” Crist said. <^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Felons face tougher road to Election Day tmsnrt.rs/2dsol2q) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^> | 0fake |
Everyone worried winter hats make them look like dicks | Everyone worried winter hats make them look like dicks 15-11-16 MILLIONS of Britons are feeling unconfident in their warm winter headgear. As temperatures drop, streets are full of people checking themselves out in reflective surfaces while nervously fiddling with headwear that they do not feel quite right about. Beret-wearer Nikki Hollis said: “I thought it was sophisticated, but I’ve just seen myself in the window of the bookies and I look like an A-level philosophy student or minor Mad Men character.” Tom Booker, the owner of a new beanie, said: “I started with a bobble hat, but my girlfriend said I looked ‘adorable’ and pinched my cheek. “I bought this one last week, but now I’m thinking it’s too big. Do I look like Brian Harvey from East 17? “We desperately need more good hat role models.” The Institute for Studies confirmed that everyone would be too busy worrying about their own hat to judge others, although anything with animal ears would be rightly shunned.
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Kuwait replaces oil and finance ministers in cabinet reshuffle | DUBAI (Reuters) - Kuwait replaced its oil, finance and defense ministers in a cabinet reshuffle on Monday, state news agency KUNA reported. Bakhit al-Rashidi was appointed the new oil minister of the OPEC member state and Nayef Falah al-Hajraf was named the new finance minister, KUNA said, citing a royal decree. Sheikh Nasser Sabah Al-Ahmad, son of the ruling Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, was appointed the new minister of defense. The previous cabinet resigned on Oct. 30 when its information minister was questioned by parliament and faced a no-confidence vote over alleged violations of budgetary and legislative rules. Mohammed Nasser Al-Jabri was named the new minister. The major oil producer has the oldest legislature among the Gulf Arab states and experiences frequent cabinet reshuffles. The previous government was formed in February. Rashidi, who replaced Essam al-Marzouq as oil minister, is chief executive of Kuwait Petroleum International (KPI), the international downstream subsidiary of state-run Kuwait Petroleum Corp. There was no immediate announcement about his KPI post but in the past, Kuwaiti ministers have resigned positions as corporate executives when they take government posts. Rashidi, who has an engineering background, is also a former executive of state refiner Kuwait National Petroleum Co. Hajraf replaced Anas al-Saleh, who had been finance minister since early 2014. Hajraf was previously chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the Capital Markets Authority, the securities regulator. He has also served as an acting finance minister. Saleh was named deputy prime minister and state minister for cabinet affairs. | 0fake |
Thai police arrest 16 protesting against coal-fired power plant | BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai authorities have arrested 16 people who were protesting against the construction of a coal-fired power plant, drawing criticism of the military government from rights activists and environmentalists. The planned power plant in the southern province of Songkhla will consist of two 1,000-megawatt units, and is part of a power development plan to 2036, but activists object to its expected environmental and health impact on communities in the area. The 16 protesters were arrested on Monday as they traveled from Thepa district, the site of the plant, to the provincial capital to present a petition to Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who was due in the city on Tuesday for a meeting. This incident shows the true face of Thailand s military dictators, who have committed a long list of abuses and repressions since the May 2014 coup, Sunai Phasuk, Thailand researcher for U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch, told Reuters. Six protesters were injured in a scuffle with police, said anti-coal activist Supat Hasuwannakit. The use of force was uncalled for, Supat told Reuters. A few police officers were injured, police said, adding that the 16 had been charged with blocking traffic, assaulting authorities, and resisting arrest. Police have requested that a court detains them. Tara Buakamsri, country director for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said in a statement the action against the protesters reflected a complete failure by the government to promote a peaceful and inclusive society. The Thepa power plant has no legitimacy to be built, the group said. The first unit of the power plant is due to begin operating in 2021. Its environmental health impact assessment was completed in August and is pending approval by the National Environment Board. | 0fake |
Thai activists ordered to pay $16 million for occupying airports | BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thirteen activists were ordered to pay a total of $16 million in compensation on Thursday for shutting down Bangkok s two main international airports during protests in 2008. Thailand s Supreme Court told the leading members of the People s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) to pay the money plus interest to the Airports of Thailand operator. Protesters occupied Don Muang and Suvarnabhumi International Airports for more than a week in late 2008, disrupting hundreds of flights and stranding hundreds of thousands of travelers. One of the PAD leaders affected by the ruling, Suriyasai Katasila, told Reuters it might take years for them to find all the money. If we cannot pay the compensation then the AOT (Airports of Thailand) will have to sue us for bankruptcy, he said. I believe what we have done was for the public interest in opposing a corrupt government at the time, it was not motivated by personal interests at all, he added. PAD was formed 2005 in opposition to Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai prime minister who was ousted in a 2006 military coup. It supporters include members of the urban middle class and support the traditional royalist-military elite. A total of 98 PAD protesters, more commonly known as the Yellow Shirts, have also been charged with terrorism and other criminal offences linked to the airports occupation. | 0fake |
U.N. nuclear watchdog opens uranium bank in Kazakhstan | ASTANA (Reuters) - The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. global nuclear watchdog, opened a uranium bank in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, a $150-million facility designed to discourage new nations from enriching the nuclear fuel. The Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) Bank in the city of Oskemen, in eastern Kazakhstan, will store up to 90 tonnes of the fuel, enough to power a large city for three years, and sell it to IAEA members if they are unable to procure it elsewhere. The LEU Bank will serve as a last-resort mechanism to provide confidence to countries that they will be able to obtain LEU for the manufacture of fuel for nuclear power plants in the event of an unforeseen, non-commercial disruption to their supplies, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in a statement on Monday. Countries such as Iran have said they need enrichment facilities to ensure a steady supply of fuel for nuclear power plants, and the idea behind the bank is to make such supply available without domestic enrichment. Russia has operated a similar bank since 2010 but the one in Kazakhstan will be the first one fully owned and operated by the global nuclear watchdog. By hosting the IAEA LEU bank, Kazakhstan has made another contribution to strengthening the global non-proliferation regime, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said as he handed Amano a symbolical key to the facility at a ceremony in the Kazakh capital, Astana. I am confident that the IAEA LEU Bank will make a valuable contribution to international efforts to ensure the availability of fuel for nuclear power plants, Amano said. The IAEA said in a statement it would begin buying uranium soon, with the aim to ship it to the bank next year. The project was funded by donors, including the United States, the European Union, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Norway and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. | 0fake |
Australian Site Could Rival Stonehenge As World’s Oldest Observatory | posted by Eddie Scientists studying ancient stone arrangement alongside Aboriginal traditional owners in Australia’s Victorian bush say the site could pre-date Stonehenge and even Egypt’s Great Pyramids. But Wurdi Youang, as it’s known by the people of the Wada Warrung nation, is apparently not the only mysterious stone circle in Australia — just the most intact. Monash University astronomer Dr. Duane Hamacher has been studying Indigenous Australian astronomy for years, and told ABC’s Lateline he believes the Wurdi Youang structure could date back more than 11,000 years. If that’s proven, it will be yet another example of the world’s longest surviving culture’s innovations pre-dating their better known European equivalents. “Some academics have referred to this stone arrangement here as Australia’s version of Stonehenge,” Dr Hamacher said on the program Wednesday. “I think the question we might have to ask is: is Stonehenge Britain’s version of Wurdi Youang? Because this could be much, much older.” Traditional owners like Bryon Powell and the scientists they’re working with say the stones have possible solar indications, marking the movements of the sun over the year, including the summer solstice, equinox and winter solstice. A sacred sundial, if you will. The egg-shaped area is fifty metres wide and contains over 100 basalt boulders. After being noted by early European settlers and recorded by archaeologists in 1977, Wurdi Youang was only relatively recently given the attention it deserves as a site once sacred and significant. Local custodian Reg Abrahams sees the site as playing a role in contesting the increasingly-dated disproved notion that Indigenous Australians were simply nomadic hunter-gatherers. “If you’re going to have a stone arrangement where you mark off the seasons throughout the year with the solstices and equinoxes, it kind of makes sense if you’re at least most of the year in one specific location to do that,” he told the ABC. He continued: “You see a lot of agricultural and aquacultural practices, so evidence of this agriculture may go back tens of thousands of years, pre-dating what anthropologists commonly think of as the dawn of agriculture which is about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.” Mysterious Mullimbimby site Wurdi Youang is just one of many stone arrangements created by Aboriginal nations that have been recorded across Australia, including in Carisbrook, Victoria and outside Mullumbimby, northern New South Wales. The site 40 kilometres outside of Mullumbimby is the stuff of legend. But a few amateur archaeologists say it’s based on much more than hearsay. It was said to contain 181 large standing pieces of sandstone — with the nearest sandstone deposit located over 20 kilometres away. In 2015, a teacher at the Brunswick Valley Historical Society, Richard Patterson unearthed letters from 1939 president of the Australian Archaeological and Education Research Society, Frederic Slater . “The mound is one of the oldest; I should say the oldest, forms of temples in the world and dates back to the Palaeolithic age with the advent of first man,” Slater is alleged to have written. Slater documented inscriptions from the site’s stones, which he said were made up of hand signs, letters and “sacred signs” that amounted to 28,000 words in the ancient language. In the 1940, the site was reportedly bulldozed by the farmer with a deed to the land, following government threats to seize his property, making further investigation virtually impossible.
A documentary on Indigenous astronomy called Star Stories of the Dreaming was released earlier this year, featuring the CSIRO’s Ray Norris and Euahlayi lawman Ghillar Michael Anderson sharing Indigenous belief systems associated with astronomy. Source: | 1real |
WOW! WHISTLEBLOWER TELLS CHILLING STORY Of Massive Voter Fraud: Trump Campaign Readies Lawsuit Against FL Sec Of Elections In Critical District [VIDEO] | This is truly a chilling story of organized voter fraud We reported on a massive voter fraud operation was discovered in Democratic Broward County, Florida ealier this week:https://twitter.com/TEN_GOP/status/793890171058085888The amazing citizen journalist Mike Cernovich broke this story this morning at Danger and Play. Florida residents have been complaining that they re not getting their absentee ballots. Chelsey Marie Smith, was working full-time at Broward County Supervisor of Elections main office blew the whistle on the voter fraud scheme:LIVE on #Periscope: Breaking news! Voting fraud uncovered in Florida #MAGA3X https://t.co/q7jeEz6Rgh Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) November 4, 2016The Florida State Attorney is actively investigating the fraud case that involves Secretary of Elections Brenda Snipes: Source: FL State Attorney investigators are actively reviewing Broward County Voter Fraud Case Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) November 4, 2016 Democrat Dr. Brenda Snipes was appointed by Jeb Bush in 2003 and is no stranger to controversy. On October 20, the Sun Sentinal reported that former Oakland Park Commissioner Anne Sallee noticed something troubling about her vote-by-mail ballot. It is missing Constitutional Amendment 2, the medical marijuana question.Sallee, now Broward chapter director of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, knows her way around government. Yet she said she spent a week unsuccessfully trying to get someone at the Broward elections office to pay attention to her complaint.She was cleared on Wednesday of another election snafu, the early posting of primary election results. Her office also was criticized for sending out inaccurate voter ID cards, and for printing ballots for November that include the word no in the yes line on the county s transportation sales surtax question.There were multiple reports that Hillary personally met with Brenda Snipes days ago:There were multiple reports Hillary personally met with Brenda Snipes days ago. No photos, but where there's smoke Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) November 4, 2016According to a former Secretary of Elections Department employee, there is a secret room where Democrat insiders fill out those absentee ballots.The woman provided her sworn testimony via affidavit.The affidavit by Chelsey Marie Smith accuses Broward County officials of filling out blank absentee ballots to officials who she saw filling the ballots out at the Supervisor of Elections headquarters. Via: GP Page 1:Page 2: Source: FL State Attorney investigators are actively reviewing Broward County Voter Fraud Case Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) November 4, 2016 | 1real |
Trump Supporter Full Of Regret Because Her Undocumented Immigrant Husband Is About To Be Deported | A woman in Indiana is feeling the pain of Donald Trump s immigration policies personally. Apparently, she believed her family would be exempt because she voted for him.In 1998, Roberto Beristain crossed the southern border of the United States without documents to seek a better life. He found one.He opened a restaurant called Eddie s Steak Shed, fell in love with a woman named Helen, married her, and had four children.Immigration and Customs ignored Roberto and decided not to follow an order to deport him for over a decade. After all, he proved himself to be a model citizen and a productive member of society. Plus, he routinely checked in with ICE.His hypocrite wife, on the other hand, only has herself to blame for what Roberto is going through now.Because of Trump s obsessive anti-immigration crusade, Roberto has now been arrested and is going to be deported on Friday after being in the United States for nearly 20 years.As it turns out, Helen is a Trump supporter. She voted for him because she ironically believes that undocumented immigrants should be deported. However, she seriously bought Trump s claim that he would only deport criminals. The problem is that Trump and his rabid conservative base believe being an undocumented immigrant is a criminal act (it isn t). [Trump] did say the good people would not be deported, the good people would be checked, Helen whined to Indiana Public Media.Of course, Trump lied. Surprise!Did Helen think that because she supported Trump that his policies for everyone else would not touch her own family? After all, Roberto is an undocumented immigrant and she was warned repeatedly during the 2016 campaign that Trump s immigration policies would even target immigrants who had not committed crimes.It s really hard to sympathize with Helen at this point. She willingly voted for a man who has an open disdain for immigrants and her vote is now coming back to haunt her.One wonders if she will continue supporting Trump after this or will she be yet another of the growing number of Trump supporters who turned their backs on him after they discovered they had been duped?Trump s immigration policies are literally tearing families apart and creating an atmosphere of fear and hate across the nation.This story just further demonstrates that you get what you vote for.Featured image via Jim Lo Scalzo Pool/Getty Images | 1real |
THE BIG QUESTION: Why Do We STILL Take 1,000 Somali Refugees A MONTH? | Please understand that our government is unable to know the exact number of Somalis we re taken in through all the different ways the government imports them. The number above does not include all the Somalis who got in to the US through other means including the Diversity Visa Lottery (50K admitted in the name of diversity), those who received student visas and disappeared into the American woodwork, are here protected by Temporary Protected Status, or who came across one of our borders and applied for asylum (or simply disappeared) over the last 3 decades.And, in order for there to be only 129,000 people of Somali ancestry here it would require us to believe some who came to the US left the country, that a whole heck of a lot of them died while they weren t having babies for nearly 35 years! It is nuts!When the government does census counts do they rely completely on who is willing to answer surveys, or do they make some attempt to look at government-held numbers about those who entered the country? Apparently they rely on Somalis willing to tell them something!In addition to the 136,376 through FY16, we have admitted 4,478 in the last 4 months and 19 days.And, we pick up Somalis all over the world, and I can assure you that vetting the wandering Somalis is impossible.Here is where that 4,478 were placed since October 1, 2016 (according to Wrapsnet): Please check out Wrapsnet if you want to dig into your state or any other numbers. It s a great resource! The top five states welcoming Somalis since October 1, 2016 are Minnesota (609), New York (397), Ohio (306), Kentucky (283) and Arizona (276). Virtually all Somalis are Muslims. WHERE ARE THE CONGRESSMEN FROM THESE TOP FIVE STATES? RAND PAUL, JOHN MCCAIN and others have been silent on the effort for the UN to push Somalis into our towns! And, of all the ethnic groups entering the US right now, Somalis (I believe) lead the pack in the number of terrorist attacks or attempted terrorist attacks, or who have been arrested and convicted of helping to support jihadists in some form or another.Frankly, there is absolutely no reason for the US to take in more Somalis! The UN is pushing them on us!Read more: RRW | 1real |
Secret Memo Shows That Every Single Congressman Could Be Hit In Russian Investigation | Yet another day and yet another leak. A secret Republican National Committee memo was released on Monday that shows that Republicans are preparing for what may be inevitable. They may all be implicated, or at least investigated, in the growing Russian scandal.According to a Buzzfeed report, the RNC has issued a memo to their employees telling them to preserve absolutely everything regarding the 2016 election. Given the important role that the RNC plays in national elections and the potentially expansive scope of the inquiries and investigations, it is possible that we will be contacted with requests for information, reads a July 28 memo to staff from the RNC Counsel s Office. Therefore, we must preserve all documents potentially relevant to these matters until they are resolved or until we are informed by all necessary parties that preservation is no longer necessary. BuzzFeed News obtained a copy of the memo, which orders employees not to delete, destroy, modify, or remove from your paper files, laptop computer, desktop computer, tablet, mobile device, e-mail, or any storage system or device, any documents, records, or other materials that relate to the 2016 presidential election or that may relate to any investigation concerning the election. An RNC source confirmed the memo s authenticity Monday morning.Source: BuzzfeedGotta give them credit. At least they aren t telling their minions to shred everything. Perhaps that s in the subtext.The RNC insists that they aren t currently being investigated and that they don t have a specific reason to believe that they will be, but they are taking the measures, just in case. If Russia did hack voting machines, you can be sure that the RNC, along with every GOP Congressman, should be investigated.This is all pretty ironic, given all the hubbub surrounding the Democratic National Committee, who should be laughing all the way to the White House. Instead, they re still drowning their sorrows in vodka tonics over an election that was stolen.Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | 1real |
CROCODILE TEARS: Watch Obama Use Phony Outrage To Gain Sympathy For Gun Control | Following Obama s phony tears, he launched directly into attack mode of the Republican majority Congress (who have already proven their not on our team) and the gun lobby. All of us need to demand a Congress brave enough to stand up to the gun lobbies lies. Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad, he said, as he bowed his head for ultimate effect, and then boom as though he never shed a tear, the attack against Republicans and gun lobbies began.Where was his outrage when Kate Steinle was killed by an illegal alien in a Sanctuary City? Where was his outrage when cops were being killed as a result of his war against cops? Obama s selective outrage and faux tears aren t fooling anyone who s paying attention This isn t the first time Obama used a fake dramatic scene to promote his agenda. Remember this phony scene? Obama was in the middle of his speech promoting socialized medicine, but somehow was able to see a woman behind him about to pass out. Watch him save her just in the nick of time. | 1real |
A Congressman Just Exposed The Republican Plot To Force Comey’s Attack On Hillary | Comments
Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) was the ranking minority member on the House Benghazi committee, so he knows firsthand how Republican witch-hunts work from up close personal experience.
On CNN’s New Day this morning, he revealed the real motivation behind the FBI Director’s stunningly improper memo to Congress last week.
“I don’t think the American people have a clue how hard the Republicans – particularly on my committee – have been on the FBI. This is a man – Director Comey – who they loved. They said he was the greatest thing in the world, very honorable.”
“When he came out with the decision in July to not prosecute Mrs. Clinton, they suddenly turned against him. He knows that if he makes any misstep, the Republicans are going to be all over him and they’re going to try and bring harm to him. The thing that he did say in our hearing, and it stuck with me, is that ‘there should not be a double standard to the disadvantage of Mrs. Clinton.'”
Cummings is heavily implying that the FBI Director was so intimidated by Congressional Republicans and the threat of being dragged in front of a Congressional investigation committee himself that he caved in and fed them the kind of vaguely worded red meat memo the Trump campaign desperately needed to keep their failing campaign on life support.
Even Comey himself admitted that his memo was going to be widely misinterpreted , which is probably why CNN’s host began her interview with Congressman Cummings by saying, “Trump is lying about the email probe.”
It hasn’t taken long for the roof to cave in on Comey’s career anyway, as his obvious meddling in the election has drawn bipartisan complaints about illegal electioneering by the FBI Director, his former boss to condemn his actions and for the Senate minority leader Harry Reid to demand answers from the FBI about the Republican candidate’s love affair with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Reid’s point was not lost on the Congressman from Maryland who told CNN:
“There has been a lot of information out there about Mr. Trump, Mr. Manafort and the Russian government and alleged attempts to take over our election. Members of Congress have asked for months, for the FBI to provide us with information if Mr. Trump, Mr. Manafort and any elements of the Russian government have any coordination or connection with each other.”
“They have not given us one syllable. So the question here is: Do we have a double standard here?”
Of course there’s a double standard!
The FBI has a responsibility to keep certain things secret, and when it comes to partisan elections that responsibility is key to the ability of our electoral democracy’s basic functioning. Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald pointed out cogently that Republican George W. Bush was investigated by the FBI in 1996, prior to running for President. Yet, the Clinton White House didn’t grab his FBI file and air all of the dirty laundry claiming a very partisan need for transparency during an election. Otherwise, the FBI could decide to influence every election in America, and over time the FBI would pick the elected officials to their liking.
Nothing can un-ring the bell that FBI Director Comey struck by letting loose his vague memo, but everyone can understand there is a sexist, partisan and blatant double standard at play by Republicans celebrating a vague memo, which only happened because an official sworn to be non-partisan decided he valued his political career more than the integrity of our electoral system.
Watch it here: | 1real |
Hillary Clinton Is Now Radioactive (VIDEO) | in: Multimedia , Politics (image: Gage Skidmore) Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall (King James Bible). Throughout recorded history, hubris has been the Achilles’ Heel of political despots. Hillary Clinton and her political crime machine has been operating above the law for decades, stretching back at least to when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas. “Hillary Clinton is a toilet scrubber for Goldman Sachs” – John Titus on the Shadow of Truth During her 2016 Presidential Campaign, it became routine for her get in front the public and lie with convincing ease. In Greek tragedy, “hubris” was an anti-hero’s excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to the character’s unforeseen demise. When Hillary was deposed by the FBI about the 33,000 emails on her private server that were wiped clean forever using BleachBit, she assumed her tracks were irrevocably covered up. But it wasn’t just 33,000 emails that were incinerated, reams of evidence including laptops, server back-ups and Blackberries either “disappeared” or were wiped clean. But out of the blue, as if sent to earth from a Higher Power, the FBI in its child pornography investigation of Anthony Weiner stumbled on to a laptop with 650,000 emails that appeared to have been downloaded from Hillary Clinton’s private server. It is highly probable that among this treasure trough of emails will be copies of the 33,000 emails that Hillary arrogantly assumed were wiped from the Universe. Hubris gets ’em every time. But it gets better than that. 650,000 is decade’s worth of emails. It’s also possible that Weiner’s laptop will finally shed the light of Truth on Benghazi. “Jim Comey did not re-open this investigation of to go over old ground. Worse infractions were discovered.” – John Titus In addition to exposing Hillary to all sorts of felonies, here statement to the FBI under oath could be undermined by this unforeseen “Black Swan” event that has engulfed her campaign. The Shadow of Truth is pleased to present John Titus of Best Evidence productions and his unique insight into this event. The two-part podcast covers analysis that has not been presented in either the mainstream or alternative media: Part 1 | 1real |
DEMOCRATS CONVENIENTLY FORGET 6,000 Prisoners Obama Pardoned Including Crack Dealer Who Committed Horrific Crime Against 3 Innocent Americans | Democrats are calling for President Trump s scalp after he pardoned America s toughest law enforcement officer on illegal aliens, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. How quickly the Left and their allies in the media forget about the massive release of felons that were returned to the streets after Obama released them just before he left office. The criminals he released included terrorists and even prisoners from America s Most Wanted list. One of his most reckless and horrific releases however, was that of Wendell Callahan, a convicted crack dealer who committed an unimaginable crime against an innocent family.A convicted crack dealer who left prison early as part of the Obama administration s mass release of federal inmates was indicted by a grand jury for fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend and her two kids in Columbus, Ohio. The gory crime drew national attention because the children, ages 7 and 10, were murdered to eliminate them as witnesses in the brutal massacre of their 32-year-old mother.This week a grand jury in Franklin County returned a 10-count, death-penalty indictment against the ex-con, 35-year-old Wendell Callahan, for the triple murders. Callahan broke into his ex-girlfriend s apartment and stabbed the three victims, according to a statement issued by Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O Brien announcing the indictment. The bloody crime scene was discovered by the woman s current boyfriend, who subsequently engaged in a fight with Callahan before he fled. The indictment includes charges of aggravated murder with prior calculation and design and aggravated murder of victims under the age of 13. There are multiple charges regarding the three victim deaths because there are different methods to commit the crime of murder and the Prosecutor s Office typically charges all methods , O Brien stated. Callahan is in jail on $3 million bail and is scheduled to be arraigned later this week.Callahan should have been in jail when the crimes occurred, but he was released four years early because federal sentencing guidelines for crack dealers got reduced. The change was part of President Obama s effort to reform the nation s justice system as a way of ending racial discrimination. The initiative was technically launched back in 2010 when the president signed a measure that for the first time in decades relaxed drug-crime sentences he claimed discriminated against poor and minority offenders. This severely weakened a decades-old law enacted during the infamous crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged urban communities nationwide in the 1980s. As part of the movement the U.S. Sentencing Commission lowered maximum sentences for drug offenders and made it retroactive, leading to the early release of thousands of violent thugs like Callahan.In November of 2016, the administration began releasing 6,000 drug convicts coined non-violent offenders whose sentences were too long under the old guidelines. News reports quickly surfaced contradicting the administration s assessment that the newly released convicts were not violent. Among them was the leader of a multi-million dollar operation that smuggled drugs from Canada to Maine. Prosecutors refer to the 29-year-old con as a drug kingpin who was one of America s Most Wanted. Shortly before the administration s mass release of drug convicts, federal prosecutors warned that drug trafficking is inherently violent and therefore the phrase non-violent drug offenders is a misnomer. The nation s prosecutors also cautioned that reducing prison sentences for drug offenders will weaken their ability to bring dangerous drug traffickers to justice.As if it weren t bad enough that the administration is rewarding thousands of criminals with get-out-of-jail cards, huge amounts of taxpayer dollars are being spent on programs to help them find housing and jobs. Judicial Watch | 1real |
JUST IN: Documents Reveal Hillary Clinton “Struck a Deal” to Keep Records Private | Here s yet another reason to be very suspicious of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton:Via Free Beacon: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a deal with the State Department while serving in the Obama administration that allowed her to take ownership of records she did not want made public, according to recently released reports.Clinton and her then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin were permitted to remove electronic and physical records under a claim they were personal materials and unclassified, non-record materials. Judicial Watch made the revelation after filing a FOIA request with the State Department and obtaining a record of the agreement:The newly released documents show the deal allowed Clinton and Abedin to remove documents related to particular calls and schedules, and the records would not be released to the general public under FOIA. Abedin, for instance, was allowed to remove electronic records and five boxes of physical files, including files labeled Muslim Engagement Documents. The released records included a list of designated materials that would not be released to the general public under FOIA and were to be released to the Secretary with this understanding. Electronic copy of daily files which are word versions of public documents and non-records: speeches/press statements/photos from the website, a non-record copy of the schedule, a non record copy of the call log, press clips, and agenda of daily activitiesElectronic copy of a log of calls the Secretary made since 2004, it is a non-record, since her official calls are logged elsewhere (official schedule and official call log)Electronic copy of the Secretary s call grid which is a running list of calls she wants to make (both personal and official)16 boxes: Personal Schedules (1993 thru 2008-prior to the Secretary s tenure at the Department of State.29 boxes: Miscellaneous Public Schedules during her tenure as FLOTUS and Senator-prior to the Secretary s tenure at the Department of State1 box: Personal Reimbursable receipts (6/25/2009 thru 1/14/2013)1 box: Personal Photos1 box: Personal schedule (2009-2013) STICKY FINGERS CLINTON:A physical file of the log of the Secretary s gifts with pictures of gifts was also handed over to Clinton. Gifts received by government employees is highly regulated, and often strictly limited. However, gifts that are motivated by a family relationship or personal friendship may be accepted without limitation. | 1real |
Pence says Trump will take aggressive action to combat cyber hacking | (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will take aggressive action against cyber hacking in the early days of his government, Vice President-elect Mike Pence told reporters in New York on Friday. In a brief statement he delivered outside Trump Tower, Pence commented on a report by U.S. intelligence agencies that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian government to use hacking to try to help Trump win the Nov. 8 election. Trump was briefed on the contents of the report earlier on Friday in what Pence called “a constructive and respectful dialogue.” “The president-elect has made it very clear that we are going to take aggressive action in the early days of our administration to combat cyber attacks and protect the American people from this type of intrusion in the future,” Pence said. | 0fake |
China's C919 jet completes first long-distance flight | SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China s self-developed C919 passenger jet completed its first long-distance flight on Friday, in a milestone that its manufacturer said marks the plane s move into an airworthiness certification phase. The Commercial Aircraft Corp of China Ltd (COMAC) said in a statement the C919 flew for 2 hours and 23 minutes from Shanghai to the central Chinese city of Xi an, traveling more than 1,300 km (800 miles) and reaching an altitude of 7,800 meters (25,590 feet). The jet, which China wants to compete with Boeing Co s 737 and the Airbus SE A320, is a symbol of China s civil aerospace ambitions. It will remain in Xi an to undergo further testing, the planemaker said. This ferry flight indicates that the C919 possess the ability to fly inter-city routes, COMAC said in the statement. (It) marks the move into research and development flight-testing and airworthiness certification work. The latest flight is the plane s sixth test since it flew for the first time on May 5. Analysts had questioned the long time gaps between previous test flights. COMAC is aiming to obtain certification for the plane from Chinese regulators as well as Europe s aviation safety regulator, which in April agreed to start the certification process. COMAC said it planned to eventually test six C919 planes and will carry out the first flight for its second jet by the end of this year. The plane currently has 27 customers who have placed orders and commitments for 730 jets, it added. | 0fake |
Building owner, manager arrested in South Korean fire that killed 29 | SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean police have arrested the owner and the manager of a building where 29 people died in a fire last week, accusing the pair of multiple safety lapses, including blocked exits and malfunctioning sprinkler systems. On Thursday, a fire ripped through an eight-story high-rise in the small city of Jecheon. At least 20 of the victims were women who were overcome by toxic fumes in a second-floor sauna. Jecheon police have only identified the owner by his last name of Lee, and the manager by his last name of Kim. Both men are in custody in Jecheon after being arrested on Sunday, police announced on Tuesday. Lee faces two charges of violating fire safety regulations and committing involuntary homicide by professional negligence, while Kim also faces the involuntary homicide charge. If convicted of involuntary homicide, Lee and Kim could face up to five years in prison or 20 million won ($16,000) in fines. The sprinkler system on the building s first floor did not work properly when the fire erupted, a police detective, who asked not to be named as he was not authorized to speak on an ongoing investigation, told Reuters. If the sprinkler system worked, the fire probably would not have spread as fast as it did. Police said on Tuesday that Lee has retained a lawyer but declined to name the lawyer or firm. Police said Kim has not yet hired a lawyer. Photos released by the Yonhap news agency showed a smoke-stained stairwell and a fire exit filled with shelves and supplies on the second floor, where most of the deaths occurred. The emergency exit on the building s second floor was blocked by iron shelves and other miscellaneous items, the detective confirmed. Officials are still investigating the cause of the conflagration. According to police, both Kim and Lee had denied reports they were trying to remove ice on the ceiling of the first floor, where the fire appeared to have originated, but later changed their statements after police confronted them with evidence. The Korea JoongAng Daily newspaper reported on Tuesday that Lee had at one point told police he did not alert the women in the sauna because they were undressed, however, the police detective told Reuters he could not confirm that as investigations were ongoing. Anger mounted over the weekend at reports of shoddy construction, broken doors, blocked roads and other problems that may have contributed to the deaths. A number of cars parked along the narrow roads around the building impeded the ability of firefighters to reach the fire, an official with the Jecheon fire department told Reuters, but noted that none of the parked vehicles appeared to have violated parking rules. Although vehicles can park there legally, it was quite difficult for fire trucks to go through to get to the scene, because the road was too narrow, said the fire official, who declined to be named as he was not authorized to speak publicly. Visiting the scene on Friday, President Moon Jae-in promised a full investigation. The government as a whole will thoroughly probe this accident s cause and process of response, and although after the fact, the investigation and measures will be such that, at least, there will not be lingering deep sorrow, he said. On Monday, a separate fire at a construction site at an apartment complex south of Seoul killed one person and injured 14 others, according to Yonhap. | 0fake |
Clinton opens up double-digit lead over Trump nationwide: Reuters/Ipsos poll | NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton has opened up a double-digit lead over Republican rival Donald Trump, regaining ground after the New York billionaire briefly tied her last month, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday. The shift in support comes as Clinton steps up her attacks on the real estate mogul’s policy positions, and as Trump fends off criticisms of his eponymous university and the pace at which he doled out money that he raised for U.S. veterans. Some 46 percent of likely voters said they supported Clinton, while 35 percent said they supported Trump, and another 19 percent said they would not support either, according to the survey of 1,421 people conducted between May 30 and June 3. Trump had briefly tied Clinton in support among likely U.S. voters in mid-May, raising expectations for a tight race between the two likely contenders in November's presidential election. Trump has all but sealed the Republican nod after a string of big wins in state nominating contests forced his party rivals to drop out, while Clinton is still fending off a long-shot bid for the Democratic spot on the ballot by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Clinton is hoping to seal the nomination next week, when a slew of big states including New Jersey and California will hold primaries, allowing her to consolidate her party’s support ahead of a general election matchup against Trump. Clinton’s polling surge comes as Trump is been harangued by criticisms over his Trump University, the target of a trio of lawsuits that claim it misled thousands of people who paid up to $35,000 for seminars to learn about Trump’s investment strategies. Trump has defended the school and said he will relaunch it once the litigation ends. Trump this week also outlined the recipients of millions of dollars in donations he raised at an event in January for veterans’ groups, in a bid to end speculation that he had not yet handed over all of the money. On Thursday, Clinton used a foreign policy speech in California to paint Trump’s policy platform as “dangerously incoherent” and cast her Republican rival as both a frightening and laughable figure. Trump responded by saying she lied about his positions and by ripping her record as secretary of state, which he says was marred her handling of government emails and the death of a U.S. ambassador in Libya. | 0fake |
Coming to Carnival Cruises: A Wearable Medallion That Records Your Every Whim - The New York Times | DORAL, Fla. — Inside a clandestine Carnival Corporation complex here, two former Disney executives have been plotting a drastic cruise industry overhaul. Their mission: Take lessons learned at Walt Disney World, where they helped bring about a $1 billion vacation management system involving bracelets that link to personal information, and apply them to cruises. The result: Millions of passengers on Carnival ships will soon be using a similar but more advanced system that allows travelers to do everything from plan vacations to open stateroom doors to order poolside cocktails. “As long as bigger, newer, cooler ships have kept coming, the cruise industry has treated guest liabilities — standing in long lines, having a frustrating embarkation experience — as acceptable,” said John Padgett, who joined Carnival in 2014 as chief experience and innovation officer after 18 years at Disney. “That thinking stops now. ” Carnival, which operates more than 100 ships worldwide under 10 brands, will unveil its ambitious technology initiative on Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In a keynote speech, Arnold W. Donald, Carnival’s chief executive, intends to announce that the system — an app called Ocean Compass paired with a smart medallion that can be carried in a pocket or worn as jewelry — will arrive on the company’s Princess Cruises fleet this year. Mr. Donald declined in an interview to give a timeline for bringing the technology (code name: Trident) to other Carnival brands. But he emphasized that rolling out the personalized disks and app was a companywide priority. “The cost is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and, over time, more than that,” Mr. Donald said. “People want the world to be organized around them. On vacation, even more so. ” Analysts expect the technology to increase profits in multiple ways, including allowing Carnival to charge more for tickets, particularly on older ships. Ease of purchase is another big component — cruisers will be able to pay for food, drinks and merchandise simply by having their credit Ocean Medallion in their pocket. Carnival’s disks, each with the guest’s name, will also power a new, shipwide gambling platform. And Carnival gift shops will be stocked with a wide array of jewelry, clips and key chains that passengers can buy to carry and display their disks. Carnival’s top rival, Royal Caribbean Cruises, already offers smartbands on ships like the Anthem of the Seas. Called WOW bands, they serve as room keys, allow for wireless payment and make it faster and easier to embark and disembark. But Carnival says that its offering takes such systems much further, in part because its technology is designed to be invisible. Unlike with smartbands, there is no need to tap a sensor on a stateroom door for entry simply approaching the correct room with the Ocean Medallion in your pocket will unlock the door. Among the medallion system’s other offerings is a navigation tool designed to help family members find one another on the ships. Under Mr. Donald, who took over Carnival in after a string of ship debacles, the company has boomed. In the most recent quarter, Carnival had a record $1. 4 billion in net income, a 17 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. But he remains under pressure to recruit new customers. About 24. 2 million people worldwide took a cruise in 2016, according to the Cruise Lines International Association. That sounds like a lot, but “cruise vacations only represent about 2 percent of all vacations,” said David Beckel, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “Because there is such a low penetration rate, any increase in penetration — even a minor, minor one — represents a big difference, and hence the effort to improve the customer experience,” Mr. Beckel said. As part of its Ocean Medallion plan, Carnival has turned to television, paying to produce three travel shows designed to make cruising look fun and easy. The shows has been broadcast on weekends in recent months on ABC, NBC and the CW. In one episode of “The Voyager with Josh Garcia,” the host is seen chatting with artists in Puerto Rico about making masks from coconuts. Carnival plans to produce at least 80 episodes in total. Analysts have praised the effort. “People have a lot of preconceived notions about cruising that largely aren’t true,” said Robin M. Farley, an analyst for UBS. The system that Carnival plans to introduce on Thursday still has a lot to prove. The technology will require the mass retraining of employees and substantial retrofitting of ships, including the installation of roughly 7, 000 sensors per boat. And do passengers really want to sacrifice privacy for personalization? One feature will allow guests to watch live entertainment in ship lounges on their stateroom televisions — and the performers will know who is watching and will be trained to do . (“Hello to Brooks, tuning in from his bed on the Promenade Deck! ”) Mr. Padgett acknowledged that some guests will have “creepiness factor” questions. But he expects the vast majority to participate. “As long as you benefit the guest, they don’t mind sharing” personal information, he said. Using the connected app, guests can order food to be delivered wherever they plan to be at a designated time. (Waiters will know who you are because your photograph will pop up on an device when they get close to your medallion.) By loading preferences into the app while still at home, Carnival will be able to offer tailored lists of activities. “The goal of preplanning is learning more about our guests,” said Michael G. Jungen, who joined Carnival in 2015 as vice president for design and technology after 15 years at Disney. He noted that passengers would have the option of linking their medallions with social media accounts, allowing Carnival to delve even deeper. As Carnival designed the Ocean Medallion system inside an unmarked building here in suburban Miami, it built a replica set of staterooms, corridors and other ship facilities to test concepts. Scribbles on a monumental white board in one area contained algorithms and personalization ideas. (“What time you eat dinner. What channels you watch. ”) When they were leading Disney’s technology effort in 2013, Mr. Padgett and Mr. Jungen built a similar laboratory, experimenting with ideas that ultimately became MyMagic+ the theme park wristband system that serves as wallet, room key, admission ticket, photograph collector and pass. As he gave a reporter a tour of the Carnival site, Mr. Padgett continually returned to the topic of Disney — how the cost of cruising compares with a family trip to Disney World, and how Disney frames vacations as overarching stories. “The ultimate goal here,” he said, turning to a Disney phrase, “is to delight and surprise our guests. ” | 0fake |
Avoiding Peanuts to Avoid an Allergy Is a Bad Strategy for Most - The New York Times | This article originally ran in April. We are resurfacing it in light of new guidelines from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that advise giving peanuts to children early and often as a strategy to forestall an allergy. It has become an article of faith among many women I know to eliminate some foods during pregnancy, out of concern that their children could become allergic to them: shellfish, dairy and, most of all, peanuts. After their babies arrive, they continue to abstain from certain foods while and they certainly keep their children from eating them. But research in the last few years has consistently shown that all this avoidance often does more harm than good. In many cases, we need to be doing the opposite. Mothers didn’t adopt this behavior out of nowhere. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics released guidelines on reducing a child’s risk for developing allergies. They recommended that mothers “eliminate peanuts and tree nuts (e. g. almonds, walnuts, etc.) and consider eliminating eggs, cow’s milk, fish, and perhaps other foods from their diets while nursing. ” Further, they recommended that children at high risk for allergies be given no solid foods until six months of age, no dairy products until 1 year old, no eggs until age 2, and no peanuts, nuts or fish until age 3. A debate has been raging in the health care system for decades on this topic. I was part of a systematic review that examined the relationship between early solid food introduction and allergic disease in children. We found no good evidence to support the idea that being exposed to solid foods earlier led to persistent food allergies. To its credit, the A. A. P. changed its recommendations based on new research. In 2008, updated guidelines reported that maternal restrictions in pregnancy or no longer seemed like advice that should be widely recommended. It also acknowledged that there didn’t seem much reason to delay the introduction of “allergy” foods like peanuts after six months, around the age babies move from milk or formula to a wider range of food. Unfortunately, this did little to change people’s behavior. Many had already internalized the advice. It seemed logical to them that avoiding foods would give children less of a chance to develop allergies. If it was still a good idea not to expose children until they were six months old, why not keep going? A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine last year turned all of this on its head. Researchers enrolled 640 infants at high risk for allergies, between 4 and 11 months of age, in a trial and randomized them to one of two groups. One of them was to avoid peanut protein the other was to eat at least six grams of peanut protein a week given in three or more meals. All participants were followed until they were 5 years old. What was most surprising in this work was that 15 percent of the infants already had evidence of peanut sensitivity by allergy testing. They were enrolled in the trial despite this, and half of them were given peanut extract every week. The results were remarkable. At the end of the study, about 3 percent of those exposed to peanuts had developed a peanut allergy, compared with more than 17 percent among those who avoided peanuts. More surprising, if you looked just at the children who already had evidence of peanut sensitivity when they were babies, fewer than 11 percent of those regularly exposed to peanuts developed an allergy. But more than 35 percent of those who avoided peanuts developed an allergy. Children who had proven sensitivity to peanuts, but consumed them in their diet regularly, were less likely to develop a peanut allergy than children without sensitivity who avoided them. Recently, results were published. After the trial ended, researchers asked all the participants who had been regularly consuming peanuts to avoid them for the next 12 months. At the end of that period, when the children were 6, there was no significant increase in new peanut allergies in that group. Avoidance at this point made no difference. The critical need for exposure appears to be somewhere from infancy until age 5. These results were so convincing that, once again, experts are changing their recommendations. In September 2015, the A. A. P. — along with others — argued that “health care providers should recommend introducing products into the diets of ‘ ’ infants early on in life. ” These changes dovetail nicely within what has become known as the hygiene hypothesis, the gist of which is that as we’ve made our environment more and more sterile, our immune systems develop differently than they used to. Without exposure to outside things to fight, our defenses turn inward and toward more benign substances, leading to increased levels of eczema, asthma and allergies. Of course, many people used to die from infections that no longer threaten us because of advances, so no one should take this as a call for living in filth. Nor should anyone take these recent findings as advice to feed babies and small children peanuts and other foods without concern. All changes to an infant’s diet, especially in children with allergies, should be done in consultation with a health care professional. As with many things in health care, however, we went too far with our response to peanut and other food allergies. Avoidance is sometimes needed for those with severe reactions. When we apply those same rules to everyone else, however, things can backfire. | 0fake |
Meet Peter Kadzik – Another Clinton Stooge at the Justice Department | Liberty Blitzkrieg October 27, 2016
The name Peter Kadzik probably doesn’t ring a bell for many of you, although it probably should. This guy is a real piece of work, as an excellent article published earlier today at the Daily Caller demonstrates.
Here’s some of what we learned:
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, the Democrat’s campaign chairman, met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department.
The dinner arrangement, revealed in hacked Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices.
Podesta and Kadzik, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, were in frequent contact, other emails show. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.
“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.
Kadzik, who started at the DOJ in 2013, helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.
Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office.
In a Sept. 2008 email , which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign.
Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”
Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time.
“He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe.
Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.
Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.
Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon.
To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001.
A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”
The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon.
On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.
The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the WikiLeaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant.
The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just a day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.
Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows . And in an email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.
I’ll have the lobster risotto with a side of cronyism and middle class destruction.
As head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation.
The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.
But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress.
Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.
Seems like a pretty important decision for a Clinton crony to make.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the record for this article.
Could the Department of Injustice have any less credibility?
For more on the shameless and shady FBI “investigation” into Hillary Clinton, see: | 1real |
British woman sentenced in Egypt to three years in jail for smuggling painkillers | CAIRO (Reuters) - An Egyptian court sentenced a British woman to three years in prison on Tuesday for smuggling around 300 painkiller tablets into the country, in a ruling her defence team said she would appeal to have overturned or commuted. Laura Plummer, a 33-year-old shop worker from Hull, was arrested in October after the Tramadol tablets were found in her suitcase. Her family told British newspapers she bought the tablets for her Egyptian partner living in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada. Plummer attended a hearing in her case on Monday, before Tuesday s sentencing. The court also ruled that she must pay a fine of 100,000 Egyptian pounds ($5,600). Tramadol is a legal, prescription medicine in Britain, but it is banned in Egypt. Plummer was arrested on arrival from Britain in October, and her detention was extended twice prior to her court appearance. Plummer s family said on Tuesday they were disgusted by the way the trial had been conducted. From day one, this has been a complete nightmare. Yesterday in the court she wasn t even allowed her own interpreter. She had to get the court s interpreter who was interpreting the wrong answers, her sister Jayne Synclair said, speaking on BBC television. The family said Plummer had also been forced to sign Arabic-language documents which she did not understand. She s on the verge of a mental breakdown ... It s just horrendous, her sister said. Her lawyer said Plummer would appeal, seeking to reverse the verdict or get a commuted sentence, which is possible in the two months after sentencing. He added that she did not know Tramadol was banned in Egypt. Speaking to the court on behalf of Plummer, the lawyer, said she had no criminal intent in bringing in the painkillers. On Monday the lawyer, Mohamed Othman, told Reuters: It is illogical that she was dealing in Tramadol. She had only 320 pills. Even the plane ticket is almost double the price of those pills. A spokesman from Britain s Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: We will continue to provide assistance to Laura and her family following the court ruling in Egypt, and our embassy is in regular contact with the Egyptian authorities. | 0fake |
SICKENING! READ OBAMA’S RAMADAN MESSAGE: “I stand firmly with the Muslim American communities…” | THE ARTICLE BELOW IS FROM POLITICO This article is a perfect example of the main stream media s bias combined with Barack Hussein Obama s lies and spin of the truth. First of all, it s pretty ironic that supposedly Obama plans to Protect Muslims from people like Donald Trump who threaten their religious liberties . Who the HELL is threatening any Muslim s religious liberties? The irony in all this is that CHRISTIAN religious liberties are being threatened EVERY DAY around the world! Christian persecution is happening everywhere yet you hear NOTHING from this jackwagon of a president! Obama also says he will continue to bring Muslim refugees despite the voices that seek to divide us ? What the heck is he talking about? Americans have welcomed and paid for over one million Muslim immigrants and refugees since 2001:Twelve years after the September 11th hijackers were invited into the country on temporary visas, the U.S. decided to admit 280,276 migrants from Muslim countries within a single fiscal year.To put these numbers into perspective, this means that every year the U.S. admits a number of Muslim migrants larger in size than the entire population of Des Moines, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; or Dayton, Ohio.The rate of Muslim immigration has been increasing since September 11. Between 2001 and 2013, the United States permanently resettled 1.5 million Muslim immigrants throughout the United States. Unlike illegal immigrants, legal immigrants granted lifetime resettlement privileges will be given automatic work permits, welfare access, and the ability to become voting citizens. Via: BreitbartThis year, we ve welcomed over 1,000 refugees with ONLY TWO being Christian! ONLY TWO! Entire towns have been transformed into little Iraq with the call to prayer five times a day ringing in the ears of welcoming and tolerant Americans. We ve literally bent over backwards to bring in all these refugees at our own expense!Donald Trump was SO RIGHT when he called for a moratorium on Muslim refugees! This has nothing to do with anything other than PROTECTING OUR OWN PEOPLE! We have every right to do so!Please read the article below on Obama s message and you ll be sickened by his attitude and support of one community over all others:President Barack Obama had a message for Muslim Americans preparing to observe the beginning of Ramadan on Sunday: He ll protect them from people like Donald Trump who threaten their religious liberties.In an official statement, Obama said America would continue to welcome immigrants and refugees, despite the voices that seek to divide us. Obama s official statement on the start of Ramadan, a monthlong holiday observed by Muslims through fasting during daylight hours, did not mention Trump by name, but the president s remarks clearly seemed to be a swipe at the presumptive GOP nominee. I stand firmly with Muslim American communities in rejection of the voices that seek to divide us or limit our religious freedoms or civil rights, the president said in the statement. I stand committed to safeguarding the civil rights of all Americans no matter their religion or appearance. I stand in celebration of our common humanity and dedication to peace and justice for all. Obama said he looks forward to hosting Muslims at the White House as the monthlong observation concludes in July. Trump on Sunday suggested that a Muslim judge may be biased against him in a Trump lawsuit because of his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.Read more: POLITICO | 1real |
Kasich bows out. Did he do 'the right thing?' | Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a political insider who believed in civility, suspended his campaign Wednesday – one day after Sen. Ted Cruz bowed out.
How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
Republican presidential candidate John Kasich arrives to Central Medford High School in Medford, Ore. on April 28. The Ohio governor suspended his campaign Wednesday.
John Kasich, who ran as a hug-providing political insider in a year dominated by voter anger and the rise of outside candidates, suspended his political campaign on Wednesday. The move leaves Donald Trump standing alone as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Mr. Trump sounded conciliatory after news broke that Governor Kasich was quitting. He said that the Ohio governor might be helpful in the Buckeye State for the general election and that he would be interested in vetting Kasich as a possible vice presidential running mate.
“I think John’s doing the right thing,” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Did he? Not everyone was so sure. Kasich supporters bemoaned the loss of what they felt was the last source of civility in the race. Over the months of a campaign where other candidates resorted to deeply personal insults, innuendo, and shouting, the Ohio governor stood alone in emphasizing the complexity of political problems and the need to work with others to find answers.
“If this is his last campaign, he went out admirably,” tweeted Yahoo News National Political Correspondent Matt Bai on Wednesday.
Others pointed out that Kasich had finally reached his strategic goal – a one-on-one match-up with Trump – only to withdraw. Whether he could have beaten Trump or not was irrelevant, in this view. He’d have been able to rally anti-Trump forces in a way Ted Cruz could not, and show that Trumpism had not conquered the entire Republican Party.
The problem is that Trump, if not Trumpism, does conquer all in the GOP. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus last night referred to Trump as the “presumptive nominee.” Given that, and fact that Trump is almost certain to pile up a winning majority of 1,237 delegates by the end of the primary season, Kasich felt he had no choice but to look for the exits.
And there were never enough of those supporters, anyway. Kasich won only his home state of Ohio and by the end was at less than 20 percent in the national polls in a three-man race.
Technically, Kasich finished 2016 in fourth, even though he was the last losing contender to drop out. Trump, Senator Cruz, and Marco Rubio all won more delegates. It’s amazing that he stayed in the race so long, given that he won more than 20 percent of the vote only once in the first 20 GOP primaries or caucuses, notes FiveThirtyEight polling guru Harry Enten.
“Most candidates would have seen the writing on the wall and gone home. Kasich didn’t see the wall or the writing, or he didn’t care,” writes Mr. Enten.
Would Trump actually ask Kasich to be his running mate, and if so would Kasich accept? Trump’s said he wants a politician as a VP, and the Ohio governor would provide balance to the billionaire in terms of experience and message. The pair never really clashed, though Trump did mock Kasich’s losing ways and his enthusiastic methods of eating.
For Kasich, a VP slot might validate his quixotic effort and provide a cap to his long and varied political career. But Kasich also described himself as a “Prince of Light and Hope,” and he’d be joining a presidential candidate who’s shown no eagerness to embrace either of those characteristics. | 0fake |
HILLARY JUST CAN’T STOP LYING…Even after she lost the election | The chance encounter a mother hiking with her daughter had with Hillary Clinton the day after losing the election may not be what it has been made out to seem.Margot Gerster was out hiking with her daughter when she ran into Hillary and Bill Clinton in the upstate New York town of Chappaqua, where the Clintons have a home. She took a photo with the former first lady who beamed from ear to ear, appearing to have had the weight of the world lifted from her shoulders as she stood next to Gerster. Clinton was said to have been out walking her dogs with former president Bill Clinton, when Gerster spotted them.The chance encounter Gerster had with Clinton gained national media attention as it was the first time Clinton had been photographed after losing the election. However, some critics allege that their meeting while hiking was staged and not random at all. Adding more fuel to those claims is the fact that it s actually not the first time they ve met. When Gerster was in high school, her mother held a fundraiser for Clinton at Crabtree s Kittle House in Chappaqua. Gerster and her sister posed for a photo with Clinton inside the restaurant which happens to be one of the politician s favorites, as the siblings smiled next to a beaming Clinton. The fundraiser their family hosted may have been during the period of time Clinton was running for senator or when she served as senator for New York. Read more: DAILY MAIL | 1real |
TV Host Buys and Forgives $15m Worth of U.S. Medical Debt | 21st Century Wire says This latest stunt only goes to show what a complete rip-off the US healthcare industry truly is.This week, John Oliver, host of HBO s Last Week Tonight trumped media mogul and billionaire Oprah Winfrey by announcing he will forgive the medical debt of 9,000 people. Presently, the US healthcare industry has the world s highest and most inflated medical pricing on goods and services pushing millions of Americans into debt over health treatments which should not cost the same as a brand new Lexus SUV or Land Rover. Despite the hype, Obamacare did nothing to address this fundamental flaw in the US system. In fact, it made the situation worse, and has turned out to be absolute boon for the corporate insurance racket.If Obamacare was really all it was cracked up to be, then it would ve done en mass what John Oliver demonstrated on his show buying up medical debt at a merger one half cent on the dollar, and then putting that into cold storage. Instead, Obamacare only succeeded in RAISING the cost (and debt) of healthcare for individual payers.More on this story here Watch out, Oprah Winfrey. John Oliver, host of HBO s Last Week Tonight, outdid TV s biggest gift giver on Sunday when he forgave nearly $15m worth of medical debt on his show.Oliver s giveaway came at the end of a 20-minute segment on debt collectors. The segment focused on the bad actors in the industry, who buy debt from banks for cents on the dollar. These predatory collectors attempt to recoup the debt they purchased using threats and other aggressive tactics without first verifying the exact details of the debt. Once the company has bought your debt, whether the information is accurate or not, they are going to try to collect on it, Oliver explained on Sunday.Last Week Tonight spent about $50 to create a debt-acquisition company in Mississippi. The corporation s name is Central Asset Recovery Professionals Inc also known as Carp. According to Oliver, soon after its creation, Carp was offered a portfolio of medical debt worth $14,922,261.76 at a cost of less than half a cent on a dollar, which is less than $60,000 .( ) Thanks to this 5 June airing of the HBO comedy series, Last Week Tonight show with John Oliver, there are a lot more of us now privy to this collection industry practice and the debt treadmill it creates, said Craig Antico, co-founder of RIP Medical Debt. In a painfully hilarious (debt as funny? Somehow, yes) piece, John Oliver triumphantly out-Oprah s Oprah in giving away valuable gifts. Continue this story at The GuardianREAD MORE HEALTH NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Health Files | 1real |
Billionaire: “Single Digit Millionaires” Are Too Poor to Get Justice In America | Two Systems of Justice In America: One for the Ultra-Wealthy … Another For Everyone Else
Billionaire Peter Thiel said yesterday:
If you’re a single-digit millionaire … you have no effective access to our legal system.
Thiel is saying even plain vanilla millionaires can’t afford justice in America.
Fordham Law School professor and criminal justice expert John Pfaff notes that – using 2007 numbers – many states’ entire budgets for legal defense for people who can’t afford a lawyer is in the single-digit millions: 1. As of 2007, four states’ ENTIRE INDIGENT DEFENSE BUDGET were “single-digit millionaires.”
Maine: $9.6M | 1real |
A Digital 9/11 If Trump Wins | Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Many of his recent articles appear on the renowned Canadian-based news website Globalresearch . He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He specializes in Middle East and East Africa issues and has also given several American radio interviews as well as TV interviews on Press TV and Russia Today. His interests include capitalism, imperialism and war, socialism, justice and peace, agriculture and trade policy, ecological impact, science and technology, and human rights. He is also a musician and songwriter. Previously, he was based in Bahrain and witnessed the political upheavals in the Persian Gulf kingdom during 2011 as well as the subsequent Saudi-led brutal crackdown against pro-democracy protests. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted many human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream media, including ,The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. A Digital 9/11 If Trump Wins By Finian Cunningham on November 6, 2016 It is a green light for a coup d’état by the Deep State forces who found that they could not win through the “normal” rigging methods.
by Finian Cunningham
SPUTNIK
There are disturbing signs that a digital 9/11 terror attack is being readied for election day in the US to ensure that Donald Trump does not win.
Such an attack – involving widespread internet and power outage – would have nothing to do with Russia or any other foreign state. It would be furnished by agencies of the US Deep State in a classic “false flag” covert manner. But the resulting chaos and “assault on American democracy” will be conveniently blamed on Russia.
That presents a double benefit. Russia would be further demonized as a foreign aggressor “justifying” even harsher counter measures by America and its European allies against Moscow.
Secondly, a digital attack on America’s presidential election day this week, would allow the Washington establishment to pronounce the result invalidate due to “Russian cyber subversion”. That option stands to be invoked if the ballot results showed Republican candidate Donald Trump as the imminent victor.
Democrat rival Hillary Clinton is the clear choice for the White House among the Washington establishment. She has the backing of Wall Street finance capital, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex and the Deep State agencies of the Pentagon and CIA. The fix has been in for months to get her elected by the powers-that-be owing to her well-groomed obedience to American imperialist interests.
The billionaire property magnate Trump is too much of a maverick to be entrusted with the White House, as far as the American ruling elite are concerned. The trouble is, however, that despite the massive campaign to discredit Trump his poll support remains stubbornly close to Clinton’s.
The latter has been tainted with too many scandals involving allegations of sleazy dealings with Wall Street, so-called pay-for-play favors while she was former Secretary of State, and her penchant for inciting overseas wars for regime change using jihadist terrorist foot-soldiers.
As one headline from McClatchy News only days ago put it: “Majority of voters think Clinton acted illegally, new poll finds”.
Trump is right. The US presidential election is “rigged”. Despite handwringing condemnations by pundits, it seems obvious that the system is heavily stacked against any candidate who does not conform with the interests of the establishment. The massive media-orchestrated campaign against Trump is testimony to that.
But such is popular disgust with Clinton, her sleaze-ball husband Bill and the Washington establishment that her victory is far from certain. Indeed in the last week before voting this Tuesday various polls are showing a neck-and-neck race with even some indicators putting the Republican narrowly ahead.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post, which has been one of the main media outlets panning Trump on a daily basis, reported this: “The electoral map is definitely moving in Trump’s direction”.
This is where a possible Deep State contingency plan is being readied to scupper a shock win by Trump.
In recent days, American media are reporting a virtual state of emergency by the US government and its security agencies to thwart what they claim are Russian efforts to incite “election day cyber mayhem”.
In one “exclusive” report by the NBC network on November 3, it was claimed that: “The US government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to undermine next week’s presidential election and is mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling.”
On November 4, the Washington Post reported : “Intelligence officials warn of Russian mischief in election and beyond.”
Apparently, the emergency security response is being coordinated by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Security Agency and other elements of the Defense Department, according to NBC.
These claims of Russian state hackers interfering in the US political system are not new. Last month, the Obama administration officially accused Moscow of this alleged malfeasance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has lambasted American claims that his country is seeking to disrupt the presidential elections as “hysterical nonsense”, aimed at distracting the electorate from far more deep-rooted internal problems.
The Obama administration and its state security agencies have not provided one iota of evidence to support their allegations against Russia. Nevertheless the repeated charges have a tendency to stick. Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder.
The Clinton campaign has for months been accusing Trump of being a “pro-Russian stooge”. Her campaign has also claimed that Russian hackers have colluded with the whistleblower organization Wikileaks to release thousands of private emails damaging Clinton with the intention of swaying the election in favor of Trump.
Wikileaks’ director Julian Assange and the Russian government have both rejected any suggestion that they are somehow collaborating, or that they are working to get Trump elected.
But on the eve of the election, the US authorities are recklessly pushing hysteria that Russia is trying to subvert American democracy. Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 is quoted as saying: “The Russians are in an offensive mode and the US is working on strategies to respond to that, and at the highest levels.”
NBC cites a senior Obama administration official as saying that the Russians “want to sow as much confusion as possible and undermine our process”.
Ominously, the news outlet adds that “steps are being taken to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including a cyber-attack that shuts down part of the power grid or the internet.”
Nearly two weeks ago, on October 21-22, the US was hit with a widespread internet outage.The actors behind the “distributed denial of service” were not identified, but the disruption was nationwide and it temporarily disabled many popular consumer services. One former official at the US Department of Homeland Security described the event as having “all the signs of what would be considered a drill”. Could that cyber-attack have been the work of US Deep State agencies as a dress rehearsal for an even bigger outage planned for November 8 – election day?
The Washington establishment wants Clinton over Trump. She’s the marionette of choice for their strategic interests, including a more hostile foreign policy towards Russia in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere.
But Trump might just snatch an election day victory from the jaws of defeat. George Soros-NGO manipulator
In which case, the shadowy forces that really rule America will trigger a “digital 9/11”. It’s not difficult to imagine the chaos and mayhem from internet blackout, power, transport, banking and communications paralysis – even for just a temporary period of a few hours.
Months of fingering Russia as a destabilizing foreign enemy intent on interfering in US democracy to get “Comrade Trump” into the White House would then serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that event, the US authorities could plausibly move to declare the election of Donald J Trump null and void.
In fact the scenario could be contrived to a far more serious level than merely suspending the election result. The US authorities could easily feign that a state of emergency is necessary in order to “defend national security”.
That contingency catapults beyond “rigged politics”. It is a green light for a coup d’état by the Deep State forces who found that they could not win through the “normal” rigging methods. | 1real |
Obama says Trump 'unfit' for presidency | Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama offered one of his sharpest denunciations of Donald Trump to date Tuesday, declaring the Republican nominee entirely unfit to serve as president and lambasting Republicans for sticking by their nominee.
The strong rebuke in the White House East Room came after Trump's criticism of the family of a slain Muslim US soldier, along with comments that displayed apparent confusion related to the Russian incursion into Ukraine.
"The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president," Obama said at a White House news conference with the Prime Minister of Singapore. "He keeps on proving it."
The Trump campaign responded by going after the Democratic nominee as well as the President.
"Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office," a Trump statement said, listing a number of policy concerns. "Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi."
Later Trump in an interview with WJLA said of Obama: "He's a terrible president. He'll probably go down as the worst president in the history of our country. He's been a total disaster."
Obama on Tuesday described his feelings about Trump as unprecedented, recalling disagreements with previous GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney -- but never an outright sense they were unfit to serve.
"The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have basic knowledge of critical issues in Europe, the Middle East, in Asia, means that he's woefully unprepared to do this job," Obama said.
Speaking alongside Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the White House East Room, Obama said there are now weekly episodes in which even Republican party leaders distance themselves from Trump.
"There has to be a point at which you say, 'Enough,' " Obama said.
Obama placed responsibility for Trump's statements squarely on his fellow Republicans, many of whom denounced his statements on the slain soldier's family but didn't withdraw their support.
"What does this say about your party that this is your standard-bearer?" Obama asked of GOP leaders. "This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily and weekly where they are distancing themselves from statements he's making. There has to be a point at which you say, 'This is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party.' "
Obama said that denunciations from Republicans of Trump's remarks "ring hollow" without an accompanying withdrawal of support.
"I don't doubt their sincerity. I don't doubt they were outraged by some of the statements that Mr. Trump and his supporters made about the Khan family," Obama said. "But there has to come a point in which you say, 'Somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn't have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world.' "
Trump and the family of the slain soldier have been locked in an increasingly bitter dispute over Muslims in America and the nature of patriotic sacrifice.
After Khizir Khan, who lost his son in a suicide bombing in Iraq, declared at last week's Democratic National Convention that Trump had "sacrificed nothing," the Republican nominee claimed he'd been "viciously attacked" and questioned why Khan's wife, Ghazala, didn't make her own remarks.
Criticism from Trump's own party came swiftly, including in a lengthy statement from McCain, whom Trump previously derided for having been taken captive in the Vietnam War. But he and other top GOP leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, made little indication they would withdraw support for the Republican candidate.
Trump has also taken flak for appearing unaware that Russian forces had annexed Crimea in early 2014, saying on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that President Vladimir Putin is "not going into Ukraine." Later, he argued that the people of Crimea "would rather be with Russia than where they were" -- an argument that Putin himself has made in justifying his annexation of the disputed Ukrainian territory.
Trump looks for better Russia ties
And he's maintained his view that fostering better ties to Putin would benefit areas of American foreign policy, including in the fight against ISIS. "If we could get along with Russia, wouldn't that be a good thing, instead of a bad thing?" Trump asked Monday during a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania.
Trump also took heat for calling on Russia last week to release deleted emails from Clinton if they had obtained them in a hack of the Democratic National Committee, which US officials have fingered Moscow for.
At the news conference, Obama said the alleged Russian hacking wouldn't necessarily prompt a complete freeze in relations between the the country and the United States.
Noting that the FBI was still investigating the hack, Obama said cybersecurity was just another dispute of many between Putin and himself.
"If in fact Russia engaged in this activity, it's just one on a long list of issues that me and Mr. Putin talk about," Obama said. "I don't think that it wildly swings what is a tough, difficult relationship that we have with Russia right now."
Obama's administration, through the Justice Department's national security division, continues to investigate the hack. Neither the White House nor the FBI have publicly blamed Russia for the intrusion. But federal officials said there is strong evidence indicating the breach was perpetrated by hackers working on behalf of Russia intelligence.
Trump has brushed off Democratic charges that Putin could be behind the hack in order to tip the US election in his favor, claiming he's never met the Russian leader and doesn't maintain a relationship with him. In statements from only a few years ago, however, Trump said he enjoyed warm ties with Putin.
Obama's remarks Tuesday intensify his patten of inserting himself into the rancorous presidential race. While the President has freely criticized Trump in the year since the businessman entered the race, his denunciations have come faster and harsher in the last several weeks.
At last week's convention, Obama named Trump repeatedly, arguing the candidate was ignorant of facts and intent on dividing the nation. And in June, Obama lit into Trump's response to the mass shooting in Orlando, saying he was peddling a dangerous vision.
The President is expected to play an outsized role on the campaign trail in the coming months as Clinton works to motivate the supporters who helped elect Obama to office twice. | 0fake |
Fiscally Conservative GOP Governor Begs The Public To Pay His Bills For Him | Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has blown so much money on his vanity presidential campaign that he put himself $1.2 million dollars in debt. An odd accomplishment for a fiscally conservative Republican who says that our government s debt is the most evil thing ever.Walker is trying to sell off the surplus garbage campaign merchandise that nobody wanted to buy the first time around, in order to cover his debts. He sent out an e-mail begging people to buy t-shirts from him for $45. If you really want to wear a t-shirt which will announce to everyone how stupid you are, you can find similar Walker merch online for about half the price.Walker isn t even able to fulfill color or size requests due to a lack of resources. He wants you to pay 45 bucks for something you may not even want to, or be physically able to, wear properly. Don t worry, though! If you get a shirt that is 3 sizes too small or a hideous color, he also said in the e-mail that the shirts can be framed or used for crafty things like a pillow cover or bag.That exactly what I d do; Lay my head on a Scott Walker pillow as I stare at a Scott Walker framed t-shirt on my wall.Walker dropped $90,000 a day on his 70-day presidential run, which is a fact he isn t divulging to the people he s asking for cash. 70 days is pretty impressive to go from the great white right-wing hope to Scott who? In the e-mail that he sent out to the people who are now upset that they forgot to unsubscribe from his mailing list months ago, Walker made some strange statements about how careful he is with money. If there is one thing the American people learned about me during our presidential campaign, it is that I am thrifty. Source: APWalker then went on to cite how he uses coupons and loves hitting up the discount racks when shopping. Do they give coupons for failed presidential vanity campaigns intended for boosting speaking fees and book deals?There s $1,200,000 worth of irony to be found in a thrifty guy, who is against big spending, asking people to waste 45 bucks on what is essentially an I m with stupid t-shirt. He would need a little over 26,000 people who are bad enough with their money to think this is a good deal, in order to cover his debt.Featured image via Scott Olson / Getty | 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 |
Morgen in PamS 46/2016: Kommt die nächste Flüchtlingswelle aus dem Westen? | Morgen in PamS 46/2016: Kommt die nächste Flüchtlingswelle aus dem Westen? Außerdem in dieser Ausgabe: Hillary wieder zu Hause: Bill freut sich endlich wieder über warme Malzeit und frische Wäsche - Große Homestory auf Seite 14-17 So füllen Sie Ihr Magazin mit Schwachsinn - Seite 18-89 Stiftung Warentest: So gut ist deine Mutter im Bett - Seite 91 Rezension der letzten Ausgabe auf Postillleaks: PamS 45/2016 Artikel teilen: | 1real |
In blustery call, Trump pressured Mexico on border wall payment | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump pressured the Mexican president to stop voicing opposition in public to his plan to have Mexico pay for a border wall, according to transcripts of phone calls published on Thursday that gave an insight into Trump’s attempts to influence foreign leaders in his first days in office. The Washington Post published texts of sometimes fraught calls with Mexico’s Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull just days after the Republican took office on Jan. 20. The substance of the calls has previously been reported but the lengthy transcripts reveal Trump, whose first elected office is the presidency, trying to use a mixture of bluster, tough talk and charm as he fully enters the world of diplomacy. Trump argued with Turnbull over refugees in an acrimonious call on Jan. 28 which the new U.S. president told his counterpart was “unpleasant.” In a Jan. 27 call, Trump pressed Pena Nieto to avoid saying in public that Mexico would not fund the planned border wall. But he complimented the Mexican leader’s “beautiful words” and said he hoped Mexico would change its constitution to allow Pena Nieto to extend his stay in office. The proposed wall, aimed at preventing illegal immigration to the United States, is a bone of contention between Mexico and Washington. Pena Nieto has repeatedly rejected Trump’s promise that Mexico will end up paying billions of dollars for its construction. Trump told the Mexican leader in the call that “if you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that,” according to the transcript. “You cannot say that to the press,” Trump said. Pena Nieto had earlier scrapped a plan to hold talks with Trump in the United States due to tensions over the wall and trade. The two men have since met, holding talks at a summit of the Group of 20 nations in Germany last month. The White House has said the U.S. government will pay for the wall initially to get the project off the ground but that Mexico will eventually reimburse it for the work. Both the White House and Mexico’s foreign ministry did not have any immediate comment on Thursday about the release of the call transcripts. It was the latest in a series of leaks from inside Trump’s administration which have angered the president. The Republican won some sympathy over leaks from a political opponent on Thursday. “I am alarmed at leaks of conversations between two heads of state,” Democratic U.S. Senator Brian Schatz wrote on Twitter. “It doesn’t matter what I think of this president, this is terrible.” In the conversation with Pena Nieto, Trump said both leaders were “in a little bit of a political bind” due to Trump’s campaign pledge to build the wall and have Mexico foot the bill. “I have to have Mexico pay for the wall – I have to. I have been talking about it for a two-year period,” Trump said. He suggested that the two men avoid the issue of paying for the wall when asked. “They are going to say, ‘Who is going to pay for the wall, Mr. President?’ to both of us, and we should both say, ‘We will work it out,’” Trump said. “It will work out in the formula somehow. As opposed to you saying, ‘We will not pay’ and me saying, ‘We will not pay,’” the U.S. president said. Pena Nieto said he understood Trump’s position on how to refer to paying for the border wall and suggested seeking “a creative way to jump over this obstacle.” Toward the end of their conversation, Trump responded effusively to a comment by Pena Nieto about the Mexican leader’s wish for a constructive relationship with the United States. “Your words are so beautiful. Those are beautiful words and I do not think I can speak that beautifully, okay?” Trump said. “I want you to be so popular that your people will call for a constitutional amendment in Mexico so that you can run again for another six years,” he said. By law, Mexican presidents can only serve one six-year term. ‘DRUG INFESTED-DEN’ In comments likely to upset voters in New Hampshire - an important early voting state in the U.S. presidential election primaries - Trump described the state as “a drug-infested den.” “I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den,” he said, complaining that drugs from Mexico are damaging the United States. While Trump won the Republican primary there, he narrowly lost the state to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the general election. New Hampshire officials from both parties lashed out at Trump, with several saying his push to repeal the Obamacare healthcare law would worsen the nation’s opioid crisis. Speaking to Australia’s Turnbull, Trump became irritated that the United States was expected to honor an agreement made by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, to accept as many as 1,250 refugees held in Australian processing centers on remote Pacific islands. Trump said that would make him look bad given his campaign promises to reduce the number of refugees entering the United States, according to the transcript. “This is going to kill me. I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country,” Trump said. Seeking to win Trump’s support, Turnbull on Friday said Washington could honor the deal while taking as few as 100 refugees from the two offshore centers, should the rest fail to satisfy its vetting. “It has always been subject to American vetting procedures,” Turnbull told reporters in Western Australia state. “Those procedures from the Department of Homeland Security are ongoing.” The dialogue was a “frank conversation between adults”, he added. Trump told Turnbull that their conversation was the most difficult he had held that day, after speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin and others. “I have had it. I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call all day,” Trump said. “Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous.” | 0fake |
MEXICO Says They Won’t Build A Wall…Watch Trump Destroy Them With THIS Brilliant Answer [Video] | Republican candidate Donald Trump was asked about the statement from the former President of Mexico saying Mexico wouldn t pay for a border wall. Quick witted Trump shot back saying, The wall just got taller . Love it! | 1real |
Your election night survival guide: what to expect as polls close | To become the 45th president of the United States, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump has to win 270 electoral college votes. The candidates have spent what feels like 100 years locked in mortal combat, but in the next few hours there will finally be a victor. (Well, probably. If there’s a 269-vote tie, or a mandatory recount, prepare for constitutional chaos.)
Each state is assigned a certain number of electoral votes, ultimately based on its population. California has the most, with 55. Seven states – Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming – have just three electoral votes. Washington DC gets three too.
While there are 50 states in the US, most of these are “safely” Republican or Democrat. They vote the same way every time going back at least six elections. So the presidential election boils down to just a handful of “swing states” – the 10 or 11 states that have a recent history of selecting both Republicans and Democrats.
This is why voters in places such as Ohio, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado and New Hampshire are subjected to a barrage of television advertising and campaign stops. It’s also why you have not seen Clinton and Trump holding rallies in Louisiana (safely Republican) or Washington (safely Democratic).
Trump faces a much more difficult path to victory. He needs to win almost all of these swing states to become the next president, whereas if Clinton wins two or three, she wins the race.
This is because Democrats start from a stronger position. There are 18 states plus DC that have voted for a Democrat for president in every election since 1992. That batch amounts to 242 electoral votes. There are only 13 states that have voted for a Republican in every election since 1992. Those states carry just 102 electoral votes.
If Clinton simply wins all the states that have voted for her predecessors in the recent past, then adds Florida (which has 29 electoral votes), she is the next president. If she loses Florida but wins, say, Virginia and North Carolina, she will be the next president.
Trump needs to hold on to all the historically Republican states, win states such as Georgia and Arizona – which are usually Republican but where he has struggled in the polls – and then win enough swing states to tip him over 270.
Buckle in because now the real fun begins: polls close in eastern Kentucky and most of Indiana. (Parts of each state are on central time, so the polls there close at 7pm ET.)
Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, is the governor of Indiana. In the past 50 years the state has voted Democrat only once – for Barack Obama in 2008.
In some states we will know the winner almost immediately after the polls close. Most news outlets, including the Guardian, rely on the Associated Press to “call” races.
AP is able to announce the winners so quickly because it deploys thousands of people on election night to collect results from states, counties and locales as they are announced. It also uses exit polls and voting history.
Solidly Democratic or Republican states are likely to be called quickly. Swing states are likely to take longer.
Election drinking: Donald Trump doesn’t drink. But Donald Trump doesn’t have to worry about the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. A nice way to toast – and mock, if you were minded to do so – the 70-year-old builder might be to mix up a “The Donald” cocktail as you settle in for the night. It’s got vodka, Goldschläger gold-leaf cinnamon schnapps and orange juice. But the most fun bit is the cotton candy on top. Doesn’t it look just like his hair?
Election fuel: It could be a long night, or a short one. But at this stage we likely do not yet know, so our advice is to fuel yourself for a marathon, not a sprint. And you can feed yourself and honour Ohio’s prominent role in US elections by preparing a Cincinnati chili. It’s a more Mediterranean take on your traditional chili, brought to Cincinnati by Macedonians in the 1920s. If you’re drinking more than one of “The Donald” cocktails, you will want to line your stomach!
Election soundtrack: Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. A perfect kick-off to election night, given that both candidates are incredibly unpopular with the American public. Trump likes the Rolling Stones and played this song at his rallies. The Rolling Stones do not like Donald Trump, and asked him to stop. He didn’t.
Voting ends in three key swing states: Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire (where a minimal number of polling stations may stay open until 8pm ET).
Florida’s 29 electoral college votes have proved crucial in the recent past. Al Gore can tell you that. He narrowly lost the state – some still believe he actually won – and the election to George W Bush, despite winning the national popular vote.
Away from the top of the ticket, Florida senator and one-time Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio is up for re-election. He has been running a bit ahead of Democrat Patrick Murphy in the polls. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who resigned as chair of the Democratic National Committee in July after leaked emails showed the party favoring Clinton’s campaign, is expected to comfortably win re-election to Congress.
Virginia was a reliably Republican state until Obama won there in 2008 and again in 2012. The state’s mix of less-educated, rural voters; wealthy suburbanites; federal government employees and military families; academics; jet-setters and so on make it difficult to read, but Clinton has been decisively ahead this year.
New Hampshire has been won by a Democrat in five of the past six presidential elections. But the Granite State gave Trump his first big primary win, and recent polling here has shown a tight race.
Other states closing at 7pm ET include South Carolina and Vermont – Bernie Sanders’ home state. Sanders won the Democratic primary in Vermont by an amazing 73 points. But now he’s with her.
Election drinking: Supercall.com has a cocktail called “Hillary’s Dirty Little Secret”. It’s a vodka martini with hot sauce in it, a reference to an interview in April where Clinton said she always carried a bottle of hot sauce. You could quip to your friends that it’s a perfect choice, as the race is “beginning to heat up!”
Polls close in West Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio. Expect the result from West Virginia very quickly – Trump should win easily.
North Carolina and Ohio are swing states and will take longer. Ohio has been seen as a reliable bellwether state, voting for the presidential winner in every election since 1964. That run might be coming to an end, however, either because of the state’s changing demographics or because of the strangeness of the current contest, in terms of the unfavorability of both candidates.
While its demographics are complicated – a mix of Rust Belt, big cities, Appalachia, farmland and more – the Ohio electorate has grown more white and less educated than the national mean. That trend appears to account in part for Trump’s strength in the Buckeye State this year.
Election soundtrack: The Pretenders, Message of Love. Because Chrissie Hynde is was born in Akron, Ohio. You could also make a point about spreading a message of love. Or of someone pretending to spread a message of love. Not that we’re questioning, in any way at all, how much politicians love the voters.
In 2012, the Associated Press called the Indiana result just before 8pm. Vigo County, which borders Illinois in west Indiana, is seen as the ultimate bellwether. It has voted for the winner of every presidential election in 30 of the past 32 elections – dating back to 1888. Keep an eye out for its result.
Republicans have long dreamed of winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes, based on growing support among once flourishing manufacturing and mining sectors in the south-western and north-eastern corners of the state. But Clinton has been creaming Trump in polls in Philadelphia and its suburbs, which is where most of the people live, and she has been comfortably ahead in statewide polls for months.
Pennsylvania will also be under scrutiny on election day because of Trump’s controversial claims that there has been voter fraud in Philadelphia in the past and his calls for “volunteer election monitors”.
The results in non-swing states will start to come in thick and fast. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey and Rhode Island all close at 8pm ET, and we can expect AP to call all these states pretty much immediately.
Maine’s polls also close at 8pm. It is one of only two states – the other is Nebraska, where voting finishes at 9pm – that splits its electoral votes according to congressional district.
The state as a whole is likely to vote Democrat, but Trump may steal an electoral vote in Maine’s second district, which is made up of more rural voters.
Election fuel: There’s a whole “Chefs for Hillary” page on Pinterest, a tribute to Clinton’s attempts to win the foodie vote. One of the recipes is provided by John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign. It’s called Salsa di Noci and is basically nuts and pasta, but arranged into a large “H” shape.
The polls in Georgia close at 7pm or 8pm, depending on location. In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was declared the winner just before 8.30pm. A Democratic candidate hasn’t won in Georgia since proper southern boy Bill Clinton in 1992, but strong support for Hillary Clinton in Georgia counties with a high African American population, and in Atlanta, have made her a threat to Trump.
If Clinton wins Georgia, Trump might as well concede. (Don’t hold your breath.)
Election tunes: Marvin Gaye, Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler). The African American vote is in, and Trump gets a big 1%.
Polls close in two traditional swing states: Wisconsin and Colorado, and in Arizona, which is usually firmly Republican but is swingy this year.
An increasingly influential Hispanic bloc and Mormons who can’t stand Trump – not to mention a superior Democratic ground game – mean that Clinton has a decent chance of becoming the first Democrat to win Arizona since her husband in 1996.
When the polls close in New York, at 9pm ET, they will have been open for 15 hours – the longest polling window of any state. Barring an almighty upset, Clinton will quickly be declared the winner.
Wyoming, Louisiana, North and South Dakota, Kansas and Texas all close at 9pm too. The networks should swiftly call these for Trump … unless loose talk of Clinton taking Texas, which last went Democratic in the Watergate era, comes true? If it’s that kind of night, water the horses and go to town.
Nebraska, which like Maine splits its electoral votes by congressional district, shuts its polls at 9pm ET. Barack Obama won Nebraska’s second district – Omaha – in 2008. Clinton could do the same this year, thanks to a well-financed get-out-the-vote effort spearheaded by Susan Buffett, daughter of Warren.
Election fuel: New York cheesecake. Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago but was a senator from New York for eight years. Donald Trump was born in Queens, New York, before inheriting his father’s successful real estate business. In January, Trump claimed his popularity was such that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue [in New York City] and shoot somebody” without losing voters. Trump has been trailing Clinton by 20% in New York.
Election soundtrack: Fleetwood Mac, Silver Springs. “I know I could’ve loved you, but you would not let me,” laments Arizona’s Stevie Nicks. Might Trump be thinking the same thing when the Grand Canyon State’s results come in?
Given Clinton’s apparent strength in Pennsylvania, we may see the state called for her by 10pm (or, in a deeply troubling upset for her, Trump may win). The New Hampshire result should also come in around this time. They will offer one of the first concrete indications of how the night is going.
Nevada and Iowa are the final swing states to close their polls. In the past two elections, Iowa was called quickly for Obama. Montana and Utah also close at 10pm; both are traditionally safe Republican states, but Trump’s unpopularity means independent Evan McMullin, who’s from Utah, has a strong chance of becoming the first non-Republican or Democrat to win electoral college votes since 1968.
Utah has been called soon after the polls close in the recent past. If McMullin is declared the winner, it’s a good sign that the night is truly in uncharted territory, terra incognita, in the most exciting way. Former congressional staffer Evan McMullin: buckle up, America.
More election drinking: Yuengling brewery – the oldest brewery in the US – is based in Pennsylvania. Its owner came out in support of Trump in October, a move which has seen some drinkers boycotting the beer. You could however source some craft ale from the Victory Brewing Company, also based in Pennsylvania. We might be getting an idea of who will be victorious around this time.
Election soundtrack: Neon Trees, Your Surrender. It’s almost definitely not about conceding a presidential election, but if Trump fails to win Utah, Neon Trees’ home state, then he might want to think about surrendering to Clinton.
Polls in California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington close at 11pm ET. These are all safe Democrat states that are unlikely to unexpectedly impact the outcome.
Back in 2012, the Associated Press called the swing states of Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio – worth a combined 48 electoral votes – in the space of 30 minutes at around 11pm, then declared Obama’s re-election at 11.38pm.
In 2008, networks announced Obama had won just after 11pm.
We might know the outcome sooner this time. Or we might not know for a while.
If Clinton’s lead in opinion polls translates to the actual polls, then we may see states called for her earlier, on the back of strong early voting results. If enough swing states are called quickly, we could find out the result before 11pm ET. Or, if Trump proves the polls wrong, the race could as quickly run to him.
Separately, there are some individual states to look out for.
Ohio is one. Some polling experts believe that if Trump doesn’t win there, it is effectively game over. Fivethirtyeight.com gave him less than a 1% chance of winning the presidency if he fails to take the Buckeye State.
Likewise, if Trump loses North Carolina or Pennsylvania or Florida, it also becomes very difficult for him to win.
And beyond that, if Clinton can win Georgia – remember, these are usually solidly Republican – it would suggest she is in for a blowout victory that could see the election called for her very early.
In 2012, Virginia was only called for Obama after midnight and Florida was not called for four days. Clinton is polling well ahead of Trump in Virginia, and strong early voting results might see her announced the winner early.
Election soundtrack: Queen Latifah, U-N-I-T-Y. We may see the first female president, following a campaign marked by sexism and inappropriate behaviour towards women. Queen Latifah called out the disrespectful treatment of women in this 1994 hit.
Election fuel: Cuban sandwich. Florida’s signature dish is said to have originated in Cuba or in Key West, part of the Florida Keys archipelago. It’s got ham, swiss cheese, mustard and pickles in it, and might be a good way to soak up the booze.
In the early hours, we would expect a victory speech and a concession speech –though Trump has spoken of a threat that the election could be rigged and refused to say that if he loses he will accept the result.
If elected, Clinton would be the first woman to be elected US president. She has repeatedly spoken about breaking the “glass ceiling” in politics, and has chosen to hold her election night party at New York City’s Javits Center, which actually has a glass ceiling.
If Trump is elected, he will be the first person with his own vodka line to be elected president, and only the fifth president to have never held elected office.
The winner will have 73 days to set up a new government before they are sworn into office on 20 January 2017.
But if you’re concerned about post-election withdrawal symptoms, don’t worry: the midterm elections, sometimes seen as a referendum on the president, will take place in November 2018. All 435 members of the House of Representatives will be up for re-election, along with a third of the Senate and more than half the governors.
And then, in summer 2019, a whole new cast of hopefuls will announce their presidential campaigns, and the whole thing starts over again. Great!
On theguardian.com, obviously. We’ve got reporters and videographers stationed around the country. We’re liveblogging all day and night.
NBC’s coverage of the 2012 election night was the the most watched of all channels, with an average of 12.1m viewers. Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd will be co-hosting on Tuesday, and veteran Tom Brokaw will be involved as an analyst. NBC will be superimposing a map of the United States onto the Rockefeller Center ice rink.
Fox News has Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier lined up to anchor its coverage of the night. They’ll have Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer on hand to dissect the results. Rove didn’t have such a good time of it in 2012, when he refused to accept that Ohio had voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Let’s see how he gets on this time.
ABC will have George Stephanopoulos anchoring from New York City. Robin Roberts will be tracking Clinton, Amy Robach will be with Trump. Michael Strahan will be out in Times Square interviewing the men and women on the street and getting reaction as the votes come in.
NPR will be manned by Robert Siegel, Audie Cornish, Rachel Martin, and Ari Shapiro until 2am ET. As well as Clinton v Trump, they’ll be following congressional and senate races around the country. NPR has also commissioned an artist to live-paint a mural of the electoral college map, filling in states as they are called. You’ll be able to watch that on Facebook.
The BBC will have Andrew Neil and World News America host Katty Kay stationed in Times Square. North America editor Jon Sopel will be with Clinton and World News America Laura Trevelyan will be following Trump, and Jeremy Vine will be explaining the results as they come in.
Sky News will also be based in Times Square. Jeremy Thompson will anchor Sky’s America Decides special on election night, Adam Boulton will be in Washington DC, and Kay Burley will be out and about talking to voters and campaigners. The news channel says it is sending “more people than ever” to cover the election.
Katy Perry, Roar. Played at almost every Clinton rally over the past year. Perry is a big Clinton supporter.
Lady Gaga, Hair. There aren’t very many songs devoted to hair. This is one that is. Gaga has endorsed Clinton.
OMD, If You Leave. A lament to us losing Barack Obama as president. “Seven years went under the bridge, like time was standing still.” He’s served eight years, but you get the idea.
Yoko Ono, Sisters O Sisters. A cry for gender equality and female empowerment. What better way to ring in the country’s first female president? If that happens.
Ice T feat Jello Biafra, Shut Up, Be Happy. For the dread moment when Trump looks like he might win.
America is now under martial law.
All constitutional rights have been suspended.
Do not attempt to contact loved ones, insurance agents or attorneys.
Do not attempt to think or depression may occur.
Curfew is at 7pm sharp after work.”
Simon & Garfunkel, America. For that shining-eyed moment when Clinton is heading for victory, but how you wish it was Bernie.
REM, I Believe. For that moment when the state of Georgia turns Democratic Blue.
The Delfonics, Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time). Pennsylvania turns away from Clinton? How about a classic Philly soul walk-out tearjerker.
Roy Ayers, We Live In Brooklyn Baby. Clinton campaign HQ needs a home-borough anthem. “Our time is now, we gonna make it baby...”
The Donald: It comes with a thing of cotton candy on the top that looks like Trump’s hair. What more do you want? From Liquor.com:
Pour the vodka and Goldschläger into an ice-filled Collins glass, and top with the orange juice. Garnish with an orange wheel and big puff of cotton candy.
Hillary’s Dirty Little Secret: Cocktail website Supercall.com came up with this. It uses hot sauce, referencing an interview in April where Clinton said she carried hot sauce around with her.
Put the ingredients in a shaker tin with ice. Shake it up for 12 seconds. Strain it into a coupe cocktail glass and garnish with a cornichon pickle.
Potus Punch: Thank you to Omni Hotels for this one.
It’s pretty easy to make: “muddle berries”, the recipe says, then add ice, add the remaining ingredients, stir it up and pour it over ice.
There’s a whole “Chefs for Hillary page” on Pinterest. One of the dishes is by John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign.
Salsa di Noci: Use a blender to grind up 2.5 cups of walnuts to a paste. Coat a sauté pan with olive oil and toast the nuts. When they’re golden brown, add half a stick of butter and 1 cup of chopped canned tomatoes. Add 1tsp of salt and .5tsp of pepper. Stir it up then add 1.5 cups of chicken stock. Simmer, then add 3tbsp of chopped fresh basil. Toss 1lb pasta with the sauce, and add .5 cup of parmesan cheese. To finish, arrange the pasta into a “H”. For Hillary.
You can also find six of Trump’s favorite recipes here.
What’s the mood where you are? Share your pictures and views with us. | 0fake |
Trump: I Don’t Meet With The Press Because They Mangle My ‘Beautiful Flowing Sentences’ | Donald Trump once bragged that he had the best words but researchers found that his speeches were at an average of about a 7th-grade reading level. Trump generally scored the lowest of all of his rivals. But, Trump being Trump, he s doing it again and bragging about his beautiful flowing sentences. This week, Trump canceled a much-anticipated press conference on his private business dealings, saying he was too busy nominating Cabinet members, but he was seen meeting with Kanye West. Trump promised to address his conflicts of interest but we suppose meeting with a rapper is more of a priority for the president-elect. Trump has not held a press conference since July 27th even though he blasted Hillary Clinton for not meeting with the press during the campaign.Vox reports that Trump now has a different excuse for not meeting with the press for interviews:The press mangles his beautiful sentences, and he has had enough of it, Trump told a crowd in West Allis, Wisconsin, at one of his Victory Tour rallies.Trump literally said that. For the last month I decided not to do interviews, because they give interviews and they chop up your sentences and cut them short, he said. You will have this beautiful flowing sentence where the back of the sentence reverts to the front and they cut the back of the sentence off, and I say I never said that. So, I said, you know what, I am not going to deal with them. They are very dishonest people, I said. Vox had linguists weigh in on Trump s speeches. His speeches are full of non sequiturs, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a Calvin College historian who has done a comparative study of Trump and Clinton s speaking styles. It s a completely different style from nearly any other politician you normally see on a big stage.What s even more peculiar about his remark is that after each incendiary statement he made during his campaign, it was as if his defenders felt the need to step in to say what he really meant. In March, the New York Post said that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level and suggested he might do that intentionally. We wonder what speaking level Trump is in Russian.Photo by Scott Olson via Getty. | 1real |
Russia says Kiev's belligerence forced its observers to quit east Ukraine | MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian military observers had to pull out of a joint ceasefire control group due to Kiev s determination to solve the crisis in the rebel-held eastern regions of the country by force, a spokesman for Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. Earlier this week, the ministry said it was recalling officers serving at the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination in Ukraine, accusing the Ukrainian side of obstructing their work and limiting access to the front line. Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also said on Thursday that the United States encouraged the resumption of large-scale bloodshed in eastern Ukraine by Washington s approval of lethal arms sales to Ukrainian army. | 0fake |
Want Proof of Voter Fraud? Look at What’s Happening in Chicago… | Voter fraud is all too real — particularly so in Chicago, Illinois, where it seems dead Americans have been voting for decades.
How many dead Americans? A lot.
In fact, an investigation by local news station WBBM showed that “119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade.”
Here are just a few examples: Susan Sallee, who died in 1998 but voted in 2010 … Victor Crosswell, who died in 1994 but has voted six times since his death … Floyd Stevens, who died in 1993 but has voted 11 times since his death … Earl Smith, who died in 1997 but has voted twice since his death … Tadeusz Cielsa, who died in 1998 yet managed to somehow cast a ballot in 2010 …
Who the heck is going to vote next, huh — Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, JESUS!?
This sort of voter fraud exists because state governments refuse to do their due diligence and remove deceased voters from their records. Susan Sallee’s son would know. He claimed that despite having reported his mother’s death numerous times, she still remains on the voter roll.
“They’re just not taking her off the rolls,” he said.
Wonderful …
Obviously, 119 dead Americans voting 229 times seems like a small number, correct? Multiply that by 35,000 cities and towns, as estimated by The National Map , and suddenly those 119 Americans and 229 votes transform into 4.165 million Americans and 8.015 million votes.
See the problem?
Of course, the easiest way to remedy this dilemma would be to simply implement voter ID laws across the board, thus making it nearly impossible for cheaters and frauds to cast ballots on behalf of deceased Americans.
Unless the fraudsters were to look identical to the dead individuals whose identities they desire to co-opt, they would simply be out of luck. Case closed.
Except that liberals keep fighting voter ID laws tooth and nail, trying their hardest to prevent such laws from taking hold across the nation.
Why? Because they refuse to even acknowledge the existence of voter fraud, claiming instead that it “is very rare” and “nearly non-existent,” in the words of the liberal Brennan Center for Justice .
Just like with every other issue that divides Republicans and Democrats, the left refuses to recognize the facts, which are that voter fraud is real, and voter ID laws represent a reasonable solution to this problem.
Even worse, they have taken to outputting phony arguments such as this: “Voter ID laws are racist!”
Bull … | 1real |
Trump ex-adviser Flynn yet to indicate whether he will honor subpoena: senator | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawyers for President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn have not yet indicated whether Flynn plans to comply with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s subpoena for documents, the panel’s chairman said in a statement on Thursday. “General Flynn’s attorneys have not yet indicated their intentions regarding the Senate Intelligence Committee’s subpoena,” Republican Senator Richard Burr said in a statement. Burr told reporters earlier on Thursday that Flynn’s lawyers had said he would not honor the subpoena issued in connection with the committee’s investigation into Russia and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Congressional aides told Reuters the committee was still negotiating in the hopes of obtaining the requested documents. “Consistent with the committee’s position since the beginning of (our) investigation, I welcome their willingness to cooperate,” Burr said in his two-sentence statement. | 0fake |
China's Xi says will support Interpol raising its profile | BEIJING (Reuters) - China will support Interpol, raising the profile and leadership of the global police cooperation agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday at the opening of Interpol s general assembly in Beijing, state media reported. Last year, Interpol elected a senior Chinese public security official, Vice Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei, as its president, prompting rights groups to ask whether Beijing could try and use the position to go after dissidents abroad. Xi said China s stability was just as much its contribution to the world as its economic development, and that it firmly supported the international struggle against terrorism. China highly commends Interpol s efforts to protect the world s security and stability, and will continue to support Interpol to play an even more important role in global security governance, the official Xinhua news agency cited Xi as saying. Beijing has tried for many years to enlist the help of foreign countries to arrest and deport back to China suspected wanted for crimes including corruption and terrorism Such requests have met resistance, particularly from Western countries where there have been concerns over whether evidence submitted by China met acceptable standards for Western courts. There were also worries that suspects might be mistreated and would not get a fair trial in China, and that allegations could be politically motivated. In cross-border law-enforcement cooperation, Xi said, the laws of each country must be respected equally without double standards . China s Public Security Minister, Guo Shengkun, told the assembly that China hoped to use international police cooperation to strengthen its defense against the threat of militants returning from abroad to join groups like the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. Rights groups have criticized China for misusing Interpol s red notice system to target exiled Uighurs from Xinjiang, accusing them of terrorism, including Dolkun Isa, the general secretary of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress. Interpol Secretary-General Juergen Stock, a German national, said the organization had significantly increased vetting of red notice requests from all 190 member countries and last year 99 per cent complied with Interpol s internal regulations. Stock reiterated that red notices were not international arrest warrants but rather an alert system that enabled member countries to decide whether to take action on the basis of their own legal assessment and situation . | 0fake |
Letter to Judge in Bundy Case in Oregon | .
Your Most Honorableness, October 30th, 2016
I read in the papers and on the Internet that the Bundy’s and their cohorts were acquitted in your courtroom in Portland of all charges.
I also read that the defendants were not released.
I also read that their defense attorney, while asking for the papers that would keep his clients in jail, was attacked in your courtroom by the bailiffs and tasered on the floor after he’d been gang tackled.
Is this your idea of justice?
Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” said that, “The courts are the great levelers.” I don’t think that he meant the defense attorney should be leveled in the courtroom by government goons.
You numbnuts in the court system are losing all, and I mean ALL, of your credibility with the public. We don’t believe in your robes and badges and court orders and bits of paper demanding this and that. We look at you as robbers.
You have all become a farcical, dangerous, and way too powerful.
You and I are the same age. You should know better.
Sincerely, | 1real |
Budget 2016: Obama moves left, testing Republicans (+video) | President Obama's 2016 budget seeks higher spending on education, roads, and bridges, and a boost to middle class incomes. Republicans want to spend more on defense. The search for common ground is on.
It’s Budget Day in Washington, and President Obama is taking a sharp turn from the past.
Gone is an emphasis on deficit reduction. Talk of putting Social Security and other safety net programs on a more sustainable path has also been put to the side. Now, with deficits down, Mr. Obama is focused on boosting the middle class and reducing income inequality. That means higher taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations and more government spending.
“What I’d like to see is not only that the economy continues to grow, but I also want to make sure that everybody’s benefiting,” Obama told NBC News Sunday, looking ahead to his final two years in office.
The result is a nearly $4 trillion federal budget plan for fiscal 2016 that ditches what Obama calls “mindless austerity” and raises spending for domestic priorities – foremost on education, infrastructure, and tax relief for middle-income Americans – as well as on national security. By proposing higher defense spending, Obama hopes to lure Republicans into a deal.
Many Republicans agree that the “sequester” – the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts put in place two years ago – is a bad way to budget. But they’re not ready to go along with what Obama has in mind. And so while deficits are down, that doesn’t necessarily mean Washington is on the verge of a spending spree.
Political reality points to a tough slog ahead. Republicans now control both houses of Congress, and if they can agree amongst themselves on what to present Obama – and that’s a big “if” – he could face tough choices of his own later this year to keep the government running.
What’s more, deficit hawks have hardly given up. They point to retiring Baby Boomers and the prospect of skyrocketing interest payments on the debt with alarm. Though annual deficits have shrunk markedly from the early Obama years, they will begin to rise again in 2018, reaching $1.1 trillion in 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last week. If Obama’s 10-year budget plan were to become reality, nearly $6 trillion would be added to the federal debt, which now stands at $18 trillion.
But for now, Obama is all about planting a flag for the middle class, which involves “investment” – i.e. spending. Presidential budget proposals are a statement of priorities, and the opening bid in a negotiation, not a blueprint for what will happen.
This year, as the race to succeed Obama gets under way, the budget is especially political. It’s also a reaction to the blowout of last November’s midterms, when Republicans won control of the Senate and built a larger majority in the House. Just as Obama appeared ebullient, even liberated, in his recent State of the Union address, so too is his budget almost a declaration of independence.
“The president is not running for reelection, so he’s a little freer to propose what he wants,” says Stan Collender, a budget expert and executive vice president at Qorvis MSL Group. “Since he’s proposing it to a Republican Congress and it’s dead before type-setting, he’s also free, because he doesn’t need to come up with something Democrats will accept.”
The budget is also a campaign document. Not only does it set the table for Hillary Rodham Clinton, strongly favored to win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, it also affects the party’s bid to retake the Senate and win back House seats. Whether former Secretary of State Clinton, known as more of a centrist, wants to move so far to the left is another matter. But for now, Obama may have at least mollified the restive liberal base of the Democratic Party.
And there is plenty in Obama’s budget for liberals to cheer about, including free community college (costing $60 billion over 10 years) and a six-year, $478 billion program to repair the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure. To pay for his college plan, Obama would change how inherited wealth is taxed. Money for the infrastructure plan would come from a one-time 14 percent tax on corporate wealth repatriated from overseas.
Obama also proposes a 19 percent minimum tax rate on corporate profits earned overseas, as part of a larger overhaul of taxes that would take the corporate rate down from 35 percent to 28 percent, and 25 percent for manufacturers.
An overhaul of the entire tax code has long been on Washington’s agenda, but amid partisan gridlock, the process hasn’t gotten off the ground. Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin, the new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which handles taxation, signaled on Sunday that he’s open to working on tax reform with Obama, but warned it will be difficult.
"We want to work with this administration to see if we can find common ground ... and we want to exhaust that possibility and if and when that possibility is exhausted, then we will put out what we think ought to be done," Congressman Ryan said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
"We haven't done tax reform since 1986, because it is just that hard,” he added.
Other elements of Obama’s budget were telegraphed in advance. In calling for an end to the sequester, Obama proposed a 7 percent hike in discretionary spending for both domestic and defense spending by roughly equal amounts. Domestic non-entitlement spending would go up $37 billion over the sequester caps to $530 billion; defense spending would rise by $38 billion to $561 billion.
The rest of the budget is consumed by nondiscretionary spending: entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, plus interest on the debt.
Obama used to speak regularly about the perils of deficits, and the ever-rising federal debt, which is the cumulative total of annual deficits. In 2010, he appointed a panel, the Simpson-Bowles commission, to come up with proposals for tackling the nation’s unsustainable fiscal path. The Budget Control Act of 2011 did bring spending down, via sequestration, but now both parties are ready to move away from that technique.
Some economists argue that deficits and debt are sustainable, as long as they remain at a reasonable percentage of the size of the US economy. But deficit hawks are as alarmed as ever.
“Entitlement reform – the most critical piece of fixing our fiscal situation – is the disappearing story of the upcoming budget cycle,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “The debt levels are still quite scary, and yet we’re about to see a budget that no longer even aspires to get control of the debt.” | 0fake |
Clinton's Policies Look Like a Death Sentence for Americans | 22 Shares
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As Donald Trump gains more bad press, Hilary Clinton rides the political wave with quick responses, deflections and denials. Without question, and largely due to Trump's obnoxious candor and grandiose proclamations, she is working her way back into the favor of disgruntled democrats and even right wing firebrands like the notorious Glenn Beck. She is, without question, a wolf in sheep's clothing. While Trump is unbelievably hard to take, constantly, we need to focus on one simple question, which of these candidates will lead to world devastation first?
I suspect it would be Hillary Clinton who would be most inclined toward involving Americans in another military conflict, and she doesn't go small, as she constantly demonizes Russia with threats of military action. In Clinton's own words, "You've seen reports, Russia has hacked into a lot of things, China has hacked into a lot of things, Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So we've got to step up our game, make sure we are well defended and can take the fight to those who go after us. As President, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses."
Military responses to a nation the US stood on the verge of war with for more than four decades? Military response against Russia? Over suspected hacking? Hillary Clinton betrayed her real mindset once and for all during the recent debate with Donald Trump when she spoke those words of war that would surely lead to only disastrous consequences.
It all stems from the Wikileaks release that included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from leaders at the Democratic National Committee. Clinton says the Russians did it, the national mainstream media parroted those words. It's the American media's political conditioning system at its finest, convincingly reaching tens of millions of Americans, and yet nobody knows if the blame is properly attributed to the Russians. In a USA Today article from July 2016, Elizabith Weise wrote, "Computer security researchers say it’s difficult to definitively say the cyber theft of files from the Democratic National Committee subsequently posted online by Wikileaks was the work of Russian hackers, as some media outlets have reported."
Russia's leader, Vladmir Putin, says the US long ago tipped the scales in the wrong direction, well before the Cold War even ended. Peace with Russia should be a top priority for any US Presidential candidate. The truth is that American politicians, perpetually convinced they are making the right political moves, created a road block on the highway to peace during the Vietnam War. Putin said during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2016, "It is not in my nature to scold someone -- but when the United States unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty (in) 1972 they delivered a colossal blow to the entire system of international security. That was the first blow when it comes to assessing the strategic balance of power in the world".
MORE... 10 Things to Expect with a Hillary Clinton Presidency Hillary Clinton must be indicted How Hillary Clinton ushered in a one party dictatorship of monopoly capital Voting for the “Lesser Evil” Now we have Clinton warmongering over unfounded allegations.
World Rivals in the Air
There is a decades-old history of rivalry between eastern and western jet fighter design and technology. While American designs are more expensive and generally considered to be better, the fastest jet fighter ever made is the Russian MiG-25; it can break Mach III, more than three times the speed of sound. Such demands lessen the life of an aircraft. The MiG-25 is typically not flown at anything close to that speed. As an interceptor however, it was supreme, no allied fighter in the sky could outrun it.
The Korean War was the first test. Soviet MiG-15's initially dominated the skies. With Russian and Chinese pilots often at the controls, the MiG's were deadly.
On 1 November 1950, at least sixteen American F-51 fighters (P-51 Mustangs) were shot at by six Soviet MiG-15 interceptors led by Soviet WWII ace Mayor Nikolay V. Stroykov. The WWII "prop" planes like the Mustang, along with the U.S. F-80 Shooting Star and F-84 Thunderjet jet fighters, had a job on their hands fighting the robust and highly maneuverable MiG fighters.
Everything changed when the U.S. Air Force launched the F-86 Sabre. Wikipedia explains that the F-86 Sabre pilots enjoyed advantages they learned to exploit to the fullest. Foremost among those was a radar ranging gun sight on their six .50 caliber machine guns, which ensured that even short bursts of fire generally found their target. F-86 pilots were also equipped with G-suits, which prevented pilot blackout in high-speed turning maneuvers.
It is unlikely that anybody will ever fully agree on the casualties and "kill" ratios over "MiG Alley" during the Korean War.
The Soviets claimed 1,106 United Nations planes of all types shot down, including about 650 Sabres. (The USAF only admits to losing less than 200 aircraft in air combat.)
The F-86 pilots claimed 792 MiG-15s shot down, while B-29 gunners claimed a further 16. These numbers were later reduced to 379 MiGs. The Chinese air force claimed only 85 kills.
In Vietnam, the competitors varied. The MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighters were widely used by the North Vietnamese Air Force. They fought planes like the F-100 Super Sabre, F-5 Tiger and the F-4 Phantom. Once again, if you believe western sources which are fairly reliable for the most part, the U.S. planes dominated in most air to air combat, though the other side had plenty of talented pilots and more aces overall than the Americans. During the end of the Cold War in the 1980's, the Soviet MiG-29 was the terror of the skies. There was more speculation about it than real knowledge at first. While MiG aircraft were only built in odd numbers, the movie Top Gun references the aircraft by calling them MiG-28's - "MiG-28's, no one's been this close before!" The planes used in the movie were actually American F-5 Tigers painted black with red stars applied to the tails. Today the United States spends obscene amounts on planes like the F-22 Raptor and these aircraft do not have any clear advantages over modern Russian planes like the SU-30. Both in this case, are capable of "thrust vectoring" which means the pilot can change the direction of the jet blast and create an entirely separate way to control the jet in flight. The ultimate western jet in the world of thrust vectoring is the AV8/b Harrier which can actually take off and land like a helicopter. Hopefully the world will not have to put these machines against each other in a future war, but with Clinton at the helm it is entirely possible and the advantages the US used to hold over the Russian military have evaporated into thin air.
Russia's Modern Approach to Warfare
During the decades-long Cold War, the Soviet Union operated under archaic rules that essentially prevented a commander, or a pilot, from knowing their mission until they were dispatched to carry out the order. Kemp Freund, a US Army sergeant major that I met while I was covering the war in Afghanistan, was Quote: d in my 2007 video report "Camp Joyce: Remote Fire Base Near Afghanistan-Pakistan Border" saying, "We're trying to break the old Soviet methods that they use and the Soviet method had that Lt. Col. completely in the dark until he needed to move.” He added, “We're still working with the higher echelons to get that to move downhill." The Soviet ways were detrimental and offered little freedom to a trained soldier or pilot but all that is over now. Today's Russian pilots not only fly superior aircraft that cost far less than US taxpayer funded military planes, they also utilize tactics of Western pilots. Hillary Clinton surely knows these facts but she wants to play with fire and be another "war president" which was so important to former President George W. Bush, and Obama too for that matter.
Other Looming Conflicts
Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton's unwavering support of Israel, the apartheid religious nuclear state that has long been protected by US taxpayer money and military hardware. The government of right wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians constantly, while building settlements which are completely illegal under international law. Then there are the attacks in Gaza that target schools and hospitals, leaving hundreds and hundreds dead and thousands severely injured. Never does Clinton speak out against the barbaric treatment Israel reserves for non-Jews, never does she refer to the fact that the country we now call Iran hasn't attacked a nation outside of its borders for more than three hundred years. Yet Iran has been savagely attacked by the United States both directly and indirectly. Maintaining her warmongering spirit, Clinton said, "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm president we will attack Iran." She added that, "We would be able to totally obliterate them." | 1real |
Factbox: Raqqa - Battle for Islamic State's Syrian HQ near end | BEIRUT (Reuters) - The battle for the city of Raqqa, which Islamic State had used as its headquarters in Syria, is drawing to an end. Islamic State militants have lost swathes of land to various offensives across Syria and Iraq, forced into a diminishing foothold along the Euphrates river valley. Their defeat in Raqqa would be a milestone in the fight to roll back the theocratic caliphate Islamic State declared in 2014 in both countries. Following are some facts about Raqqa: Raqqa sits on the Euphrates river around 90 km (56 miles) from the Turkish border in north central Syria. Hardline Sunni militant group Islamic State overran Raqqa in January 2014, seizing control from rebel factions opposed to the rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The United States has said Islamic State planned and sent teams from Raqqa to carry out attacks on cities including Paris, Brussels and Istanbul. THE ANTI-IS OFFENSIVE The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of mostly Kurdish and Arab militias, began to advance towards Raqqa city in November 2016. After encircling the city, they launched the offensive to take it, facing tough resistance. The United States-led coalition supports the SDF with air strikes and special forces on the ground. The battle for Raqqa has taken a severe toll on civilians. The United Nations said in March the city contained around 200,000 people, just under its pre-war population. Since late last year, fighting around and in Raqqa has displaced tens of thousands of people. Many have fled the city to camps in surrounding territory now under the control of the SDF and its strongest component, the Kurdish YPG militia. Civilians trapped inside the Islamic State enclave in the city have endured miserable conditions for months, lacking water, power, food and healthcare. Parts of Raqqa that the SDF captured have mostly been cleared of residents. Air strikes, fighting and Islamic State snipers and mines have killed many hundreds of people. The coalition says it is careful to avoid civilian casualties in its bombing runs in Syria and Iraq. But the U.N. human rights office and rights group Amnesty International have raised concerns about reports of high civilian deaths. Islamic State has imposed its very strict interpretation of Islamic law on Raqqa s residents. The fighters have carried out public executions, lashings and violent punishments for infringements of their rule. The Raqqa campaign has stirred tension between the United States and NATO-ally Turkey. Potential Kurdish influence in the future of the mainly Arab city is sensitive both for some activists from Raqqa and for Turkey. The YPG has become the main U.S. partner in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria. Ankara views it as a Syrian extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency within Turkey, and fears growing Kurdish power along its border. The SDF s political allies have set up a Raqqa Civil Council of people from the city, which the SDF says it will hand control to once its fighters have defeated Islamic State. This echoes the pattern in other towns and cities that the SDF captured. The U.S.-led coalition has helped train a new police force for the city. Islamic State has made enemies of all sides in the more than six-year Syrian conflict, with separate offensives now trying to clear it from its last foothold in the towns along the Euphrates river in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border. Besides the U.S.-backed SDF, the Syrian army, with Russian jets and Iran-backed militias, is also waging its own campaign against Islamic State in eastern Syria. A modern-day provincial transport hub and market town, Raqqa was built by the Abbasid Islamic Caliphate in the eighth century, serving as its capital at one point. It has been inhabited since antiquity and contains important archaeological and architectural sites. The United Nations has said they have been extensively looted during the war and religious buildings have been damaged. Islamic State militants released a video of them bombing a large part of the Uwais al-Qarani shrine complex in March 2014. | 0fake |
Thai junta and Muslim separatists trade blame over peace steps | BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand s junta and a Malay Muslim separatist faction have blamed each other for a delay in setting up a safety zone as a confidence-building measure towards ending a decades-old insurgency. Talks on the zone ended last week in Malaysia without full agreement to be followed by bombings that killed a soldier and a policeman in the Thai south, where more than 6,500 people have been killed since 2004. No group claimed responsibility for the latest attacks. On Monday, the Mara Patani faction said that implementing a safety zone had been a little delayed , because some details, especially from the Thai side , had not been satisfactorily addressed, but that did not mean talks had failed. The correct approach is to continue dialogue, not walking away from it, Abu Hafez Al-Hakim, a leader of the group, said in a statement. At the weekend, Thailand s chief negotiator had said the insurgents were not ready for the safety zone, despite the sincerity of the Thai government. If the dissidents are not ready, then people s participation in the process will be delayed, General Aksara Kerdphol said, adding that talks would continue. The proposed safety zone would be jointly administered by Thai authorities and the separatists in a district of the three southern provinces that formed part of a Malay Muslim sultanate until being annexed by the mostly Buddhist Thai kingdom in 1909. Within the safety zone, neither side would attack the other. If you want to create peace you have to work with your enemy, Al-Hakim told Reuters, saying he was hopeful a safety zone could be set up within three to six months. But the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) group, which has greater control over combatants than other factions, has not joined talks. A leader of the group told Reuters last week that the current negotiations were doomed. Pak Fakih said in a rare interview that safety zones could be a trick by the military in trying to uncover the insurgent networks . The BRN neither claims nor denies responsibility for any specific attack, but says it is continuing to fight to send a signal to the government. The leader of another insurgent group, Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO), also said he was uneasy about the government s safety zone plan, but would go along with it in the spirit of cooperation. Violence would continue for now as the only way to get the government to listen, Kasturi Mahkota told Reuters. | 0fake |
Verified Report: These Cops Left Standing Rock and Refuse to Return | Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/verified-report-these-cops-left.html Standing Rock, North Dakota ( TFC ) — Widespread outrage over both the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and violent police crackdowns rages on. That outrage is spreading even to police agencies now returning from deployment to the reservation. Two departments have already refused to return, citing personal and public objections. As if that wasn’t enough, an army of sympathizers is re-purposing social media to combat police efforts in Standing Rock.Minnesota’s Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department is among that group. Lawmakers, according to MPR News , found police activities in Standing Rock “inappropriate”.It’s to the point where they’re considering rewriting legislation to avoid future deployments to incidents like the pipeline resistance.Police officials, of course, declined to comment on their return from North Dakota or their feelings on what’s happening there. It’s also made the task of rebuilding trust with the community an even loftier uphill battle. “I do not support Sheriff Stanek’s decision to send his deputies to North Dakota”, says LT. Governor Tina Smith, “nor did we approve his decision to begin with. I do not have any control over the Sheriff’s actions, which I think were wrong, and I believe he should bring his deputies home if he hasn’t already.”Smith’s comments split the state’s government, however, and she was targeted. Minnesota State Rep. Tony Cornish condemned Smith for prioritizing “the rights of protesters over the needs of law enforcement”, saying she should apologize to the cops.Sheriffs from Wisconsin’s Dane County were more empathetic, pulling out and refusing to return. According to the Bismarck Tribune , Sheriff Dave Mahoney made the decision after a “wide cross-section of the community” decried the deployment. “All share the opinion that our deputies should not be involved in this situation”, says Mahoney. Dane County’s deputies were deployed to Standing Rock for around a week. Sources report Dane County wasn’t involved in recent arrests, a string of which scooped up an alderwoman from Madison Wisconsin.Ald. Rebecca Kemble traveled to North Dakota as a “legal observer”, filming and participating in prayer ceremonies. When Morton County officers–if they cans till be called that–grabbed and arrested her for engaging in a riot. According to Kemble, no riot was happening. Other Wisconsin departments have been recalled, with at least one staying behind for a more couple weeks.Many other citizens have been charged for trespassing and participating in non-existent riots, including journalists. One of the most renowned reporters who’s faced DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline)-related charges was Amy Goodman of Democracy Now . Goodman’s team filmed dog attacks by DAPL contractors who lacked proper K9 licenses. The contractors have also been accused of unethical surveillance, intimidation, and sabotaging the movement by attempting to make authorities believe the protesters have finally turned violent.Other journalists, including documentarian Deia Schlosberg, face decades in prison for filming climate activists at a separate oil project. Journalists from the independent outlet Unicorn Riot, who recently reported use of a sound cannon on water protectors, have also been arrested.Thousands of opponents to the pipeline have flooded Standing Rock to repel construction and police brutality. More still have taken to the internet, spreading information in the form of writing, video, photography, and art. Among the renegade tactics is using Facebook to “check-in” at Standing Rock. According to the Guardian , over a million people – even people I know – have joined the action.It began with a Facebook post, disclosing that Morton County sheriffs are allegedly using Facebook check-ins to track protesters. “Checking in”– whether you’re at a friend’s, restaurant, or escalating resistance – pinpoints your location to a tee. Once you check in, a notification is sent out to, yes, your friends, but theoretically anyone who’s capable of watching. It’s yet another tool in the bag of tricks authorities have deployed against civilians, and are likely utilizing in Standing Rock.Some detractors have dismissed the social media action as a waste of time. An editor at The Fifth Column challenged these in a Facebook post, narrating a debate on the subject he’d had. Editor Justin King pointed out that even if the check-in’s wasted two minutes of time, multiplied by hundreds of thousands, that equates to two months of wasted police work. Now imagine how ineffective the surveillance may be with millions continuously checking.Morton County Sheriff’s, Guardian reports, called claims of police surveillance misguided “rumors”. Morton County, by their own account, isn’t “monitoring Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location for that matter.”Before you trust them, consider that Facebook access for water protectors was reported as “blocked’ during a military-style raid on a camp . Data Collection Nationwide Other police departments are similarly sketchy when pressured to speak on their surveillance technologies. Wisconsin’s Milwaukee PD hid the use of cell site simulators , or Stingrays, from courts for months. Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, thus tricking phones into providing all manner of user information and data.Nearby, the Wauwatosa Police Department , despite having admitting to “collecting and analyzing cell phone data” in its public reports , denied ever even coming close to a Stingray. It took the department 5 weeks to respond to that open records request, which is considered unusually long. It remains unknown how Wauwatosa PD, which has been blasted for lack of transparency before , collects cell phone data. The Hand’s Fingers In Open Rebellion In addition to the general retreat of departments, two officers have already turned in their badges in support of the protesters. North Dakota water protector Redhawk, MintPress reports , disclosed the revelation. The individual also pointed out “you can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions.”“Some are waking up”, they continued, “we must keep reminding them that they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against the pipeline as well.”Hints of shame could be seen in the faces of officers who confronted protesters as they blocked them from prayer grounds. As the protesters condemned officers , some of whom looked down or off to the horizon in shame.The modern era of internet and technology gifts us with a plethora of ways to express ourselves, and help one another. Standing Rock is quickly becoming a stand out of that fact.Citizens, journalists, and activists are all using the internet to achieve their own goals. Whether that be spreading information being blocked, tracking police movements, sending food and rations or just voicing opinions. Standing Rock’s resistance is spreading globally, with protests occurring in Europe and elsewhere. As long as construction doesn’t stop, the movement won’t rest. | 1real |
CHELSEA CLINTON Lashes Out At TRUMP “Hate Speech” In Appearance at MSU: “That’s not our country” | Has she seen what s going on with her mom s buddies at Black Lives Matter? The violence and hate is astounding!How about her own mother s hateful rant to Union members admonishing them in a big way: Michigan State University students were delighted to hear that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has a plan to relieve them of at least some of their massive college loan debts.The message was delivered Thursday night to a packed MSU Union lobby by the candidate s daughter, Chelsea Clinton, who s stumping for her mother in Michigan. Federal loans would automatically be set to the prevailing interest rate, she said. Right now Interest rates are low, and if we can renegotiate mortgages and our car loans we should be able to have our federal student loans set to the lowest rate. Clinton s speech lasted eight minutes without a mention of her mother s rival for the White House Republican nominee Donald Trump.But during a 20-minute question-and-answer period, she spoke of the rise in hate speech, the way it s cropped in with the election and in society as a whole. I never thought I would see in my lifetime I certainly didn t think I d see it in my children s lifetime all this normalization of hate speech that we re hearing from the Republican nominee, she said to a woman asking about hate crime toward Muslims.Clinton criticized what she called rhetoric undisputed by the GOP against women, other races, people with disabilities, veterans and immigrants. That s not our country, Clinton said, and that s also what s at stake, the core values of our country. Read more: DFP | 1real |
U.S. calls Myanmar moves against Rohingya 'ethnic cleansing' | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday called the Myanmar military operation against the Rohingya population “ethnic cleansing” and threatened targeted sanctions against those responsible for what it called “horrendous atrocities.” “The situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement, using a term he avoided when visiting Myanmar, also known as Burma, last week. “The United States will also pursue accountability through U.S. law, including possible targeted sanctions” against those responsible for the alleged abuses, which have driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh, he said. The United States shifted its stance in part to raise pressure on Myanmar’s military and civilian leaders, who have shared power for the past two years under an uneasy arrangement after decades of military rule, to address the crisis. Rights monitors accused Myanmar’s military of atrocities, including killings, mass rape and arson, against the stateless Rohingya during so-called clearance operations after Rohingya militants’ Aug. 25 attacks on 30 police posts and an army base. More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine state in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, mostly to neighboring Bangladesh, since the crackdown, which followed the insurgent attacks. “These abuses by some among the Burmese military, security forces, and local vigilantes have caused tremendous suffering and forced hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to flee their homes,” Tillerson said. While repeating U.S. condemnation of the insurgent attacks, he added: “No provocation can justify the horrendous atrocities that have ensued.” Myanmar’s 2-year-old government, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has faced heavy international criticism for its response to the crisis, though it has no control over the generals with whom it shares power. “It’s not a situation that is completely under her authority, but certainly we are counting on her to show leadership and also to work through the civilian government with the military to address the crisis,” a senior U.S. official told reporters in a conference call. The term “ethnic cleansing” is not defined in international or U.S. law and does not inherently carry specific consequences, a second senior U.S. official said on the call. Murray Hiebert, a Southeast Asia analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said the State Department’s use of the term and threat of sanctions “will likely have limited to no impact on the ground.” “It is likely to create more distrust between the United States and Myanmar’s military and government and push them closer to China, Russia, and its more authoritarian neighbors in Southeast Asia,” he added. The U.S. move came the same day as a U.N. tribunal convicted former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic of genocide and crimes against humanity for massacres of Bosnian Muslims and ethnic cleansing campaigns, and imprisoned him for life. The second U.S. official said Washington was analyzing whether genocide or crimes against humanity had occurred in Myanmar, which would violate international law, but has made no determination on either and that this would take time to assess. “In the end it’s a court that has to decide that, as we’ve just seen with the verdict against Mladic,” he said. A top U.N. official in September described the military actions as a textbook case of “ethnic cleansing,” but the United States until Wednesday had avoided the term. Washington has sought to balance its wish to nurture the civilian government in Myanmar, where it competes for influence with China, with its desire to hold the military accountable for the abuses. U.S. officials also worry that the mistreatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority may fuel radicalism. The first U.S. official said Washington would work with Bangladesh and Myanmar to encourage the voluntary repatriation of Rohingya. “We have focused on the issue of voluntary returns,” the official said. “We don’t want people to be forced to return to a situation in which they feel uncomfortable.” Congressional pressure for a tougher U.S. response to the Rohingya crisis mounted before President Donald Trump’s first visit to Asia this month to attend a summit of Southeast Asian countries, including Myanmar, in Manila. U.S. government sources told Reuters in October that officials were preparing a recommendation for Tillerson that would define the military-led campaign against the Rohingya as ethnic cleansing, which could spur new sanctions. In early November, U.S. lawmakers proposed targeted sanctions and travel restrictions on Myanmar military officials. Rights group Amnesty International called for a comprehensive arms embargo against Myanmar as well as targeted financial sanctions against senior Myanmar military officials. | 0fake |
Digisexual Robot Pimps, Swamp Chess, Hollywood & DC Cannibalism: Boiler Room EP #137 | Tune in to the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR) for another LIVE broadcast of The Boiler Room tonight 6:00 PM PST | 8:00 PM CST | 9:00 PM EST for this special broadcast. Join us for uncensored, uninterruptible talk radio, custom-made for bar fly philosophers, misguided moralists, masochists, street corner evangelists, media-maniacs, savants, political animals and otherwise lovable rascals.Join ACR hosts Hesher and Spore along side Andy Nowicki of the Nameless Podcast, Fvnk$oul and Randy J (ACR & 21WIRE hosts, DJs & contributors) and the rest of the boiler gang for the hundred and thirty seventh episode of BOILER ROOM. Turn it up, tune in and hang with the ACR Brain-Trust for this weeks boil downs and analysis and the usual gnashing of the teeth of the political animals in the social reject club.On this episode of Boiler Room the ACR Brain-Trust is having a fireside-chat regarding the latest grinding of gears in the political, social (engineering) and media machines.Direct Download Episode #137 Please like and share the program and visit our donate page to get involved! Reference Links, for your consideration and research: | 1real |
Trump signs repeal of U.S. broadband privacy rules | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday signed a repeal of Obama-era broadband privacy rules, the White House said, a victory for internet service providers and a blow to privacy advocates. Republicans in Congress last week narrowly passed the repeal of the privacy rules with no Democratic support and over the strong objections of privacy advocates. The signing, disclosed in White House statement late on Monday, follows strong criticism of the bill, which is a win for AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc. The bill repeals regulations adopted in October by the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama administration requiring internet service providers to do more to protect customers’ privacy than websites like Alphabet Inc’s Google or Facebook Inc. The rules had not yet taken effect but would have required internet providers to obtain consumer consent before using precise geolocation, financial information, health information, children’s information and web browsing history for advertising and marketing. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai praised the repeal in a statement late on Monday for having “appropriately invalidated one part of the Obama-era plan for regulating the internet.” Those flawed privacy rules, which never went into effect, were designed to benefit one group of favored companies, not online consumers.” Pai said the FCC would work with the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees websites, to restore the “FTC’s authority to police internet service providers’ privacy practices.” Republican FCC commissioners have said the Obama rules would unfairly give websites the ability to harvest more data than internet service providers. The action is the latest in a string of reversals of Obama administration rules. On Monday, the FCC reversed a requirement that Charter Communications Inc extend broadband service to 1 million homes that already have a high-speed provider. On Friday, Comcast, Verizon AT&T Inc said they would voluntarily not sell customers’ individual internet browsing information. Verizon does not sell personal web browsing histories and has no plans to do so but the company said it has two advertising programs that use “de-identified” customer browsing data, including one that uses “aggregate insights that might be useful for advertisers and other businesses.” The American Civil Liberties Union said last month Congress should have opposed “industry pressure to put profits over privacy” and added “most Americans believe that their sensitive internet information should be closely guarded.” Trade group USTelecom Chief Executive Jonathan Spalter in a statement praised Trump for “stopping rules that would have created a confusing and conflicting consumer privacy framework.” Last week, 46 Senate Democrats urged Trump not to sign the bill, arguing most Americans “believe that their private information should be just that.” Republicans later this year are expected to move to overturn net neutrality provisions that in 2015 reclassified broadband providers and treated them like a public utility - a move that is expected to spark an even bigger fight. | 0fake |
Holy Voter Fraud: Reverends Caught on Cam, “We Tell Them Who To Vote For” | We Are Change
In a new video investigating voter fraud released by Project Veritas Action Fund (PVA), a plot to bus impoverished voters – – told who to vote for – to the polls is caught on hidden camera.
In the video, PVA journalists posing as political consultants met Reverend Marlon Mack of Sweet Home Baptist Church in Gary, Indiana to discuss how to influence the election. Mack spoke of his political influence, prompting the PVA journalists to schedule a meeting with Reverend Mack and a friend of his, Reverend Marion Johnson, to see what their plans were for Election Day.
“We’ve got people to get on school buses and go to Indianapolis and the state houses and we just need you to show up,” said Mack.
“They didn’t even know what they were going down there for, all they know is the Pastor asked them,” said Johnson.
Mack and Johnson explained how they bus minority members of their community congregation to the polls and tell them how to vote.
“The thing is, I keep repeating this, our people getting to the polls. If we get our people to the polls they know who to vote for. It’s not going to be, ‘Oh who do I vote for?’ Because we’re going to tell them who to vote for,” said Johnson.
IRS code provides that 501 (c) 3 organizations cannot “Participate in, or intervene in, any political campaign on behalf of/in opposition to any candidate for public office.” Pastors and church staff should not be using church resources to engage in political campaigns.
“My thing is this. What I do is tell people who I am going to vote for. I say I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. And that’s automatically telling our congregation to vote for Hillary Clinton,” said Johnson…And you see all these vans rolling to the polls. With the name of the church and the pastor’s name on the side. And they know that the Pastor’s providing that. They know who they’re voting for. They know who they’re supporting,” said Johnson.
“We have church vans… I mean literally, we can have twenty vans roll up,” said Mack.
Reverend Mack and Reverend Johnson told PVA journalists times that they were sure their community would follow their lead at the polls, as long as they had the funds. They also were hoping that the PVA journalists would connect them with a donor to fund their “get out the vote” efforts and they had a very specific way they wanted the donation to be made so that a paper trail wasn’t left.
“He could possibly make the check to you. You cash the check and give cash. Or he could make the check to a particular church and then it works out as a charitable donation, because it looks like he just gave a donation to the church,” said Mack.
In an effort to avoid making their 501(c) 3 violation apparent, the Reverends suggested that the check be made as an anonymous charitable donation.
On Election Day, PV journalists traveled to Gary, IN to see if they would be told for whom to vote.
PV Journalist: “So should I just vote straight ticket Democrat?”
Mack: “That would be nice…you’re heading to the polls and don’t really have a lot of information to deal with issues…that would be probably the best bet…So prayerfully you’ll go in and just hit straight Democratic ticket and give us the help that we need.”
The post Holy Voter Fraud: Reverends Caught on Cam, “We Tell Them Who To Vote For” appeared first on We Are Change .
| 1real |
U.S. Behind Huge Weapons Shipments To Saudi Arabia Prior to Yemen Funeral Attack | The United States shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia just weeks prior to the Saudi-led coalition’s funeral bombing in Sanaa, Yemen, according to a new analysis of U.S. government data conducted by Shadowproof.
The October 8 bombing killed 140 and wounded over 500. It was widely condemned by human rights groups and exposed U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen to greater scrutiny.
In response to a query from Shadowproof about the funeral strike, State Department spokesperson Frankie Sturm replied, “ We have regularly expressed our concerns to the Saudi-led coalition, and urged them – as we have urged all sides, including the Houthis – to take all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian objects and return to a cessation of hostilities .”
Despite the US government’s purported desire for a “cessation of hostilities” and “concerns” for civilians, Shadowproof’s analysis shows that large quantities of U.S. weapons continue to flow to the Saudi government, impeding a sustained ceasefire and enabling civilian carnage.
In July and August, the U.S. shipped Saudi $8.8 million in bombs, $47.3 million in parts for bombs, 313 guided missiles worth $26 million, one military helicopter worth $15.7 million, and 334 armored fighting vehicles and 19 armored vehicles, which together are worth over $197 million.
From April to July, when peace talks were active, the U.S. shipped $50 million in armored vehicles and $82 million in parts for bombs. Talks broke down in July and were followed by a major increase in coalition air assaults in Yemen.
Following the attack on a funeral, the U.S. government announced it was “ reviewing ” its support for the Saudi coalition; however, as of October 10 , there were no changes to U.S. military support for coalition operations.
A UN-brokered ceasefire implemented in April ushered in a major reduction in fighting. Yet, U.S. weapons shipments continued.
In fact, over the course of President Barack Obama’s administration, it has approved a staggering $115 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia—including a $1.29 billion sale in November 2015, which included over 19,000 bombs and a $1.15 billion sale of tank components, ammunition, and other weapons.
The U.S. government has also provided logistical and intelligence support that has facilitated the Saudi coalition’s carnage.
Given Saudi’s dependence on the U.S. government for military support, it is difficult to overstate the degree of influence the U.S possesses over the Saudi government. For example, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said in April, “If the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow.”
Kristine Beckerle, who researches Yemen for Human Rights Watch, told Shadowproof, “The Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign in Yemen has been devastating for civilians, hitting marketplaces, factories, homes and hospitals. There is no question US weapons have been used in some of these unlawful attacks, including one of the most deadly. The US should be suspending arms sales to Saudi, until it not only curbs unlawful strikes but also credibly investigates those that have already occurred.”
A survey conducted by the Yemen Data Project found that, from the beginning of the Saudi coalition’s air campaign in Yemen in March 2015, through August of 2016, more than one-third of the coalition’s 8,600 strikes hit non-military targets.
“The coalition is responsible for twice as many civilian casualties as all other forces put together, virtually all as a result of air strikes,” UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said back in March.
Nasser Arrabyee, a journalist in Sanaa, told Shadowproof, “In the first weeks of the war the battle for Sanna was over, all the military sites were destroyed, yet the coalition strikes continue on a daily basis, often hitting civilians.”
The U.S. government continues to insist the Saudi coalition isn’t intentionally targeting civilians, but Colette Gadenne, who heads Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) Yemen mission told Shadowproof, “We’ve seen airstrikes hit civilian locations so often. For example, there was a strike on a crowded marketplace in Harad at 8 pm on July 4. It took place after people broke their Ramadan fast. And we only know about the strikes we see directly.”
Three MSF hospitals, one MSF mobile clinic, and an MSF ambulance were attacked by coalition forces.
After the funeral attack, images appeared on social media allegedly showing fragments of a U.S-supplied tail fin for a JDAM guidance kit for a U.S-made Mark 82 500 lb. bomb.
Ali Al-Ahmed, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the Institute for Gulf Affairs and himself a Saudi, told Shadowproof the Saudis indeed target civilians.
“They couldn’t defeat [the Houthis] on the battlefield so they’re killing women and children, bombing schools, to get that result,” Ahmed explained.
Back in 2010, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning disclosed a State Department cable from the same year that showed the U.S. government provided “imagery” of the Yemen border to the Saudi government, despite evidence Saudi aircraft were attacking civilians when attacking Houthis in northern Yemen. Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation Prince Khaled bin Sultan appealed to a U.S. ambassador to give them a Predator drone to help limit civilian casualties.
Another cable from 2009 that was also disclosed by Manning shows the U.S. government approved military assistance for Saudi Arabia or Yemen if aid was not used against Houthis. Since then, the U.S. government has allowed the Saudi Kingdom to pull them into an open-ended war.
With regard to al Qaida, Ahmed noted, “Hundreds of Saudi jets and their allies bombing Yemeni forces have avoided bombing…positions in Yemen of al Qaida.”
“The Saudi air force is really becoming the air force for al-Qaida,” Ahmed said. “The Saudi bombings have helped mostly one group: al-Qaida.”
Ahmed also stressed the bombings fuel “anti-Americanism.” Prior to the war, the Yemeni government cooperated closely with the U.S. in counterterrorism matters.
In a letter to President Obama, 36 members of congress urged him to block the $1.15 billion arms deal announced in August. The letter stated, “Amnesty International has documented at least 33 unlawful airstrikes by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition across Yemen that appear to have deliberately targeted civilians and civilians facilities, such as hospitals, schools, markets, and places of worship. These attacks may amount to war crimes.”
According to a recent report by Reuters, the coalition has hit sites the U.S. government put on a “do not strike” list. The U.S. designated these locations as being vital infrastructure for delivery of food aid and for post-war reconstruction.
The Saudi coalition declared as a target the entire Saada Governorate (measuring 4,000 square miles), which borders Saudi Arabia. It also reportedly used incendiary weapons, white phosphorous, as well as cluster weapons, which are banned by most countries.
Both of these weapons were supplied by the U.S.
The war’s effect on civilians in Yemen is enormous. “The jets overhead scare the children. There is no place people can go to be safe, even hospitals are hit in strikes. The population is traumatized,” Gadenne said.
More than 10,000 civilians have been killed since the Saudi-led coalition began, including more than 1,000 children. More than 80 percent of the population now requires some form of humanitarian assistance for survival.
Beatriz Ochoa from Save the Children told Shadowproof, “The number of children that are severely malnourished has doubled to 370,000 since the beginning of the coalition bombing. 1.6 million women and children under 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition with over 14 million, or roughly half of Yemen’s population, are considered food insecure.”
The coalition imposed a blockade, which has resulted in shortages of medicine and food, as well as price spikes and hoarding of goods.
Recently, there was a reported cholera outbreak, which may exacerbate the already dangerous health crisis.
Another serious concern is unexploded ordnance. “A 16-year-old girl was collecting firewood in Sadaa, and there had been an air strike in the area 3 months prior. An unexploded ordnance went off and she lost a leg,” Gadenne recalled.
Ms. Gadenne said MSF has seen victims from unexploded ordnance all over the country. Research from Amnesty International found thousands of unexploded munitions in northern Yemen, following a 10-day tour of the region earlier this year.
The dire humanitarian crisis resulting from the war has given rise to a great deal of anger in Yemen, according to Arrabyee. “Yemenis see the war as an American war, as the coalition couldn’t carry out the strikes in Yemen without U.S. support. There is a big campaign saying Americans are the ones killing the Yemenis people.”
William Hartung from the Center for International Policy told Shadowproof the U.S. is directly involved in Yemen, even if it’s not the one dropping the bombs.
“Without U.S. support there’s no way Saudi coalition could wage the war at this level,” Hartung said. “The large weapons deals and mid-flight refueling provided by the U.S. play an important role in Saudi’s ability to conduct strikes in Yemen.”
The post U.S. Behind Huge Weapons Shipments To Saudi Arabia Prior to Yemen Funeral Attack appeared first on Shadowproof .
| 1real |
More anti-Trump action planned after second night of protests across US | Protesters across the US were on Friday gearing up for weekend demonstrations over the election of Donald Trump, as other activists began work on plans to disrupt the Republican’s inauguration in Washington early next year.
Rowdy protests against Trump and his divisive campaign have spread to cities all over the country following his victory on Tuesday, leading to dozens of arrests and a complaint from Trump in one of his first public remarks as president-elect.
More than 10,000 people have signed up to attend a noon march on Saturday from New York’s Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters, while several other actions are planned for other cities.
“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda,” the organizers of the New York event said in a Facebook post.
Trump complained in a tweet late on Thursday that “professional protesters, incited by the media” were tarnishing his electoral success, which he said was “very unfair”. Amid intense criticism, Trump said hours later in a second post that he appreciated the “passion for our great country” shown by demonstrators.
Activists expressed determination to build momentum for major activity on 20 January, when Trump will officially enter the White House.
A “million women” march on the capital is being planned for the day of Trump’s inauguration, amid intense anger that the next US president allegedly sexually assaulted multiple women and boasted of doing so in a leaked recording.
Leftwing and anarchist groups were also making plans for protests in Washington on inauguration day, according to flyers circulating online, raising the prospect of chaotic scenes as Trump takes the oath of office.
Other activists were biding their time before mounting a response to Trump’s election. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, said their movement was “grieving and mourning” following the result.
“We are bringing folks together to imagine what kinds of organizing we will need to do under a Trump presidency,” said Cullors. “I do think we can organize as we have been, and build something bigger and stronger than the hate Trump and his team have exhibited towards marginalized communities.”
Thousands of people took to the streets from Thursday night into Friday in Denver, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, Oakland and several other US cities, as well as Vancouver, Canada. The protests were for the most part peaceful and orderly, though there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.
The rowdiest scenes were in Portland, Oregon, where about 4,000 people marched into the city centre late on Thursday. At least 29 people were arrested after a minority of protesters threw objects at officers, smashed shop windows and damaged a car dealership, the Portland police department said, declaring the demonstration a riot. Officers used pepper spray and rubber projectiles to disperse the crowd, the department added.
In Minneapolis, dozens of people marched on to Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles highway before police cleared them off.
Baltimore police reported that about 600 people marched through the Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested, police said. One of the largest demonstrations was in Denver, where a crowd estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through the city centre.
Earlier in the day, high school students staged walkouts across the country. Authorities told the LA Times that at least 4,000 students from the LA County school system had walked out in protest by Thursday afternoon.
Hundreds of high school students in San Francisco walked out of class too, and took to the streets of downtown, shouting “Not my president”, “My body, my choice” and “Love trumps hate” as they marched in the middle of traffic.
Malkia Williams, 15, who carried a sign that said “Pussy grabs back” – a reference to a leaked recording where Trump bragged he could sexually assault women because of his fame – said it was important for students to speak out since they could not vote.
“A lot of adults voted for Donald Trump and they think we don’t care, but we do,” she said as she marched down a busy downtown street where student activists were temporarily halting vehicles, with many honking in support. “My loved ones and friends could be taken out of this country.”
Williams said she was still processing Trump’s victory. “I still don’t feel it’s real. This is not the future we want,” she said.
In Oakland, where 30 people were arrested on Wednesday night, a crowd gathered on Thursday but the protests were more subdued than the previous evening, when a series of small fires were set, some windows were smashed and a few people threw rocks at police.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, according to a local ABC affiliate station, WISN 12, a number which later swelled to over 2,000 as the group marched downtown, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
Lewis & Clark College student Gregory McKelvey, who organised a protest in Portland on Thursday, told local NBC affiliate KGW: “We think that because Trump is president, it becomes even more urgent for our city to become what people want it to be. It’s an anti-Trump protest but also a call for change in our city because we need to push for progress here.”
Elsewhere on Thursday, hundreds protested in Salt Lake City, Utah; San Francisco; Houston, Texas; and in Washington DC, where about 100 protesters marched from the White House to Donald Trump’s newly opened hotel several blocks away.
At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many of them chanting “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and carrying signs with such slogans as “Impeach Trump” and “Not my president.”
“I can’t support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It’s heart-breaking,” said 25-year-old Joe Daniels from Virginia.
While protesters marched against Trump, at least one group was preparing to take to the streets in celebration. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan said on their website they would be holding a “victory parade” in North Carolina next month. Men in KKK-style white hoods were seen walking in the state on the morning after Trump was elected. | 0fake |
Truth Will Out Radio: The Laconia Incident | Radio Aryan October 28, 2016
Sven Longshanks , Dennis Wise and Messerschmitt bring us another episode of Truth Will Out Radio, this week looking at the Laconia incident and the British Freikorps.
Messerschmitt deviates somewhat with his Axis War Heroes series in that the main subject is not a person but the so-called “Laconia Incident”. In September 1942 a German U-boat under the Command of Werner Hartenstein torpedoed the British troopship Laconia. As Hartenstein realized that a lot of Italian prisoners of war and even civilians including women and children were among the survivors struggling for their lives he ordered that as many as possible were to be taken on board the U-boat. Even though he radioed his intentions to all surrounding vessels in plain English and had a Red Cross flag draped across the U-boat he and the survivors they were carrying were attacked by an American B-24. What happened to the survivors and what the response of the German Navy was when it learned of this atrocity is elaborated on by Schmitt and the presentation ends with a letter from a relative of one of the casualties, thanking the U-boat commanders for their courageous and honourable behaviour.
This presentation shows how the Allies were breaking the rules of war while the Germans were keeping to their treaties. During the Nuremberg trials this incident was brought up in the hopes of convicting Admiral Doenitz for advising the U-boats not to pick up survivors, but it had the inadvertent effect of exposing the British and Americans of waging unrestricted submarine warfare, in itself a possible war crime as it breaks the law of the sea that any shipwrecked mariners must be rescued, no matter who they are. Dennis points out the hypocrisy of the British and Americans in this before reminding us that not all the British behaved like this during the war. Some became members of the Freikorps and fought to defend Europe from the Bolshevik menace alongside the other SS Volunteer Legions. These heroes were called traitors by the British establishment, yet their oath was to protect Europe from Communism, not to fight against Britain. It is a testament to the truthful ideology of National Socialism that prisoners of war could be set free to fight against Communism once they had heard the truth about it from their kinsmen in the League of St George.
After giving us a brief history of these brave young British men, Dennis and Sven conclude the podcast by talking about the importance of race and how the Freikorps highlighted this in their propaganda.
Presented by Sven Longshanks, Dennis Wise and Messerschmitt
Truth Will Out Radio: The Laconia Incident â TWOR 102816 | 1real |
House of Representatives reignites gun-control debate with planned vote | WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, under mounting pressure to advance gun-control legislation, will vote next week on a measure to keep guns out of the hands of people on government terrorism watch lists. Republican and gun lobby sources said the legislation, due to be introduced as part of a terrorism package, was likely to be a National Rifle Association-backed bill brought by Representative Lee Zeldin of New York as the companion to a Senate Republican measure from Senator John Cornyn of Texas. House Democrats, who last week staged a 25-hour sit-in on the House floor to push for gun control after the June 12 mass shooting in Orlando, condemned the Cornyn-Zeldin measure as the handiwork of the NRA. Senate Democrats blocked the same legislation last week. “House Democrats will keep up our efforts to push for the majority to allow a vote on gun violence legislation, but bringing up a bill authored by the NRA just isn’t going to cut it,” said Drew Hammill, an aide to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. The NRA denied writing the legislation. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced the plan in a conference call with lawmakers. Republican leadership aides declined to provide details. One said the package was still being negotiated. After the Orlando, Florida, shooting that killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at a gay nightclub [nL1N19L1WH], gun-control proponents ratcheted up pressure for meaningful legislation. “We are going to get something done this year, I predict,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid told reporters. “I think we’re going to take a bite out of the NRA.” Reid said he was hopeful for a bill introduced by Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, and a bipartisan House companion bill backed by Republicans including Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida, to prevent gun sales to anyone on the government’s “No Fly List” for terrorism suspects or the “Selectee List” for extra airport screening. Before Thursday’s announcement, Representative Bob Dold of Illinois, a Republican backer of the Collins-Curbelo bill, urged Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to opt for the bipartisan measure, according to a Dold aide. But hopes for a vote on that measure could be dashed if House Republicans move first on the Cornyn-Zeldin bill, which would allow party leaders to say they had acted on gun control. “It would really be a sharp blow,” said Representative Scott Rigell, a Virginia Republican and NRA member who supports the Collins-Curbelo measure. The NRA-backed measure would give officials three days to decide whether a gun sale should be blocked. Democrats argue the timetable is insufficient and say the government would have to persuade a court that a would-be buyer “has committed or will commit an act of terrorism” before it could block a gun sale. Under the Collins-Curbelo bills, a court would have 14 days to decide on appeals. | 0fake |
President James K. Polk’s Body May Be Moved. Again. - The New York Times | NASHVILLE — It is the latest chapter in one of the more tangled stories of an American presidential corpse — a tale of love and cholera, betrayal and real estate, honor and probate law. But having been interred in three different places since his death in 1849, James K. Polk, the 11th president of the United States, now faces the prospect of having his sleep disturbed yet again. A new proposal making its way through the Tennessee legislature calls for digging up the bodies of Polk and his wife, Sarah Childress Polk, both of which have been buried on the grounds of the state Capitol for more than a century. They would then be relocated to a final resting place at a Polk family home and museum in the small city of Columbia. Supporters say the move will properly honor an unjustly overlooked president, a man who expanded the territory of the United States by a third, signed a law establishing the Smithsonian Institution and created the Naval Academy. Opponents, including Teresa Elam, 65, a distant relative of Polk’s, are calling it nothing short of macabre, and an unsavory effort to promote tourism in Columbia, a city of 37, 000 about 50 miles south of Nashville that is otherwise known for a colorful yearly celebration of its industry. “They’re desecrating a grave,” said Ms. Elam, who has walked the halls of the Capitol with a sheaf of historical documents, making her case to lawmakers. “It’s been on the Capitol grounds for about 124 years. It’s dishonor and disrespect. ” The relocation of a president’s body after death is not . In 1858, the remains of James Monroe, the fifth president, were moved from New York to his native Virginia, at a time of rising sectional tension. And the coffin of President Abraham Lincoln has been moved around his burial spot in Springfield, Ill. at least 17 times, by one count, including a bizarre thwarted effort in 1876 to steal his body and hold it for ransom. Here, the prospect that the presidential remains could be moved yet again has prompted rare fits of passion on the topic of Polk, a man historians have called “priggish” and “colorless,” and one whose legacy is often overshadowed by his mentor, Andrew Jackson, who is buried at the Hermitage, his family plantation, a major tourist draw here. Indeed, when President Trump, who often likens himself to Jackson, visited Nashville this month, he laid a wreath on Jackson’s tomb, honoring him in a speech as a president who “understood that real leadership means putting America first. ” If Mr. Trump knew where Polk’s tomb was, he did not let on. On Monday, the State Senate is expected to vote on a resolution that would be the first step in an approval process for relocating the bodies. Disinterring the remains will also require the approval of the state’s House of Representatives, the governor, the Tennessee Historical Commission and a local judge. The Polks’ grave, which is currently tucked away on a grassy patch, was designed by William Strickland, the noted Greek Revival architect who designed the state Capitol and George Washington’s sarcophagus at Mount Vernon in Virginia. A handsome monument framed by classical columns notes that Polk “planted the laws of the American union on the shores of the Pacific. ” The grave is dwarfed by a nearby equestrian statue of Jackson. State Senator Joey Hensley, a Republican representing Columbia and the sponsor of the bill, said the grave seems overlooked in its current spot. “I honestly served up here 14 years and had never seen the site,” he said on Thursday. “It’s not handicap accessible. It’s not really talked about much when they do the Capitol tour. Not many people visit it. It’s just not a very good place to honor his legacy. ” Much drama preceded the grave’s ultimate location. Polk had numerous ailments. An operation for urinary stones as a teenager is likely to have left him sterile or impotent, and may explain why he did not have children, according to John Seigenthaler, one of his biographers. Polk left the White House in 1849 after serving just one term, as he had promised, and returned that April to Nashville, where he had previously served a term as governor. But the city was in the midst of a cholera outbreak, and Polk contracted the disease and died in June at age 53. Tom Price, the curator of the President James K. Polk Home and Museum in Columbia, said that by city ordinance, cholera victims at the time had to be buried at the municipal cemetery on the edge of town. By May 1850, however, Polk was moved to Polk Place, a grand home a few blocks from the Capitol that he had bought in 1847. His wife, a formidable woman who did much to shape his career, remained in Polk Place, celebrated as one of the nation’s most famous widows, until her death in 1891. Then things got complicated. In a will he drew up five months before his death, Polk, a lawyer, stipulated that both his body and that of his wife should be buried on the premises of Polk Place. He also stipulated that after his death and his wife’s, the property should be held in trust by the state, which must always allow a blood relative to live there. Upon the death of Polk’s wife, a number of heirs filed a lawsuit arguing that the will was invalid. According to Bill Carey, a local researcher and writer, the court ruled in their favor, on the grounds that the will violated the rule against perpetuities, which limits an owner’s ability to leave property to unborn future generations. Polk Place was sold and torn down today, there is a boutique hotel on the property. On Sept. 19, 1893, Polk’s body was moved to the Capitol, where he was buried alongside his wife. “In my mind,” Mr. Carey wrote in 2015, “the reinterment of President and Mrs. Polk is one of the most disrespectful deeds ever committed by the state of Tennessee. ” Critics of the new plan include Carroll Van West, the state historian. “When Polk left the White House he came home to Nashville, and his wife stayed there for decades afterward,” Mr. Van West told The Nashville Scene last week. On Wednesday, Mr. Price, the curator of Polk House, gave a tour of the historical property. It was late afternoon and there were no other visitors. The handsome home was built by Polk’s father in 1816. Polk lived in it as a young man from 1818 to 1824. Today it is furnished with much of the furniture from Polk Place. A gift shop sells jars of Polk Pickles and bottles of President’s Choice wine. Mr. Price acknowledged that it was difficult to get students, even from schools around Columbia, to tour the home because Jackson’s famous Hermitage is so close by. But he insisted that the proposal to move Polk’s body was not about tourism, as much as it was about honoring a president’s wishes. “He wanted to be buried at home,” he said, and this was as close as Polk could get. | 0fake |
Outrageous! Apparently $68 Billion Isn’t Enough For A Cali Train Project | Does anyone else see the lunacy in this? You have a broke state that s trying to build a massive bullet train system and is over budget only in America s big government system where the goofballs think money grows on trees Is anyone else 100% FED Up! with this bullish*t? I know I am! The monumental task of building California s bullet train will require punching 36 miles of tunnels through the geologically complex mountains north of Los Angeles.Crews will have to cross the tectonic boundary that separates the North American and Pacific plates, boring through a jumble of fractured rock formations and a maze of earthquake faults, some of which are not mapped.It will be the most ambitious tunneling project in the nation s history.State officials say the tunnels will be finished by 2022 along with 300 miles of track, dozens of bridges or viaducts, high-voltage electrical systems, a maintenance plant and as many as six stations. Doing so will meet a commitment to begin carrying passengers between Burbank and Merced in the first phase of the $68-billion high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco.However, a Times analysis of project documents, as well as interviews with scientists, engineers and construction experts, indicates that the deadline and budget targets will almost certainly be missed and that the state has underestimated the challenges ahead, particularly completing the tunneling on time. It doesn t strike me as realistic, said James Monsees, one of the world s top tunneling experts and an author of the federal manual on highway tunneling. Faults are notorious for causing trouble. The California High-Speed Rail Authority hasn t yet chosen an exact route through the mountains. It also is behind schedule on land acquisition, financing and permit approvals, among other crucial tasks, and is facing multiple lawsuits. The first construction began in Fresno in July, 21/2 years behind the target the rail authority had set in early 2012.A confidential 2013 report by the state s main project management contractor, New York-based Parsons Brinckerhoff, estimated that the cost of building the first phase from Burbank to Merced had risen 31% to $40 billion. And it projected that the cost of the entire project would rise at least 5%.Parsons Brinckerhoff briefed state officials on the estimate in October 2013, according to the document obtained by The Times. But the state used a lower cost estimate when it issued its 2014 business plan four months later.Jeff Morales, the rail authority chief executive, said he was not aware of the Parsons Brinckerhoff projection. A spokeswoman for the authority declined to discuss the differences in the estimates.Public opinion polls taken over the years have shown that support for the project has ebbed as costs have risen and at $68 billion, the budget is already more than double the $33-billion estimate made by the rail authority before California voters approved bonds for the project seven years ago.Via: LA Times | 1real |
Texas Father Disowns Teenage Daughter For Her ‘Sickening’ Interracial Relationship (TWEETS) | It has been nearly fifty years since the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Loving v. Virginia, that made interracial marriages (relationships) legal in the United States, but apparently some people are unaware of the ruling. A teenager in Texas recently tweeted an infuriating letter from her dad explaining the reason why he s disowning her: the relationship she was in with an African-American male.Stephanie Hicks, 19, is dating a black male and apparently this pissed her father off so much that he disowned her. In a letter she posted on Twitter, her father says: My belief is that interracial relationships are despicable. Vulgar and reprehensible. There s nothing worse than a half-black, and I m crushed that my own daughter has entered into such a disgusting relationship Mistakes can be forgiven, but you have willingly and consciously chosen a lifestyle of sickening choices, and I won t tolerate it. Her father then tells her that is she does not break up with her boyfriend, Nike, that she is not welcome in his life any longer: If you choose this black kid over your parents fill [suitcases] up and leave my house Change your name as soon as possible, because I won t have any association with you. Ever. First of all, as a parent, I am disgusted by this piece of garbage who has the audacity to call himself Dad. If he s are willing to disown his child over who they are dating, he never had any business raising a kid in the first place.Secondly, it is 2016 and no matter how much the GOP would like us all to believe racism is dead, it is clearly alive and thriving in the state of Texas. Her father called her relationship sickening but the only thing sickening about any of this is that guy s vile, hatred for a person because of the melanin he has in his skin. It is sad that this is even a battle that needs to be fought still, but it does.Like Stephanie, I am super white. I m so white that you could all use me to guide your way through a dark forest and my husband isn t white at all. I also live in the South, just like her and know what it is like to have people stare at me with disgust because my husband and child are naturally tan. Seriously. In 2016.America really has changed that much in the last fifty years because we have an entire political party that campaigns on platforms of racism and hate hell, just look at Donald Trump. And this is going to continue to be a problem until we all step up and fight back. That means that we all have to vote for progressive candidates who want to move this country forward, not back.Hopefully, Stephanie takes this and uses it to become an even stronger human being. Sometimes the best thing a toxic person can do for you is cut themselves out of your life. Featured image via Twitter | 1real |
#ProtestPP: Nationwide Protests Against Government Funding of Planned Parenthood Underway - Breitbart | Activists in 45 states and the nation’s capital are rallying Saturday to urge Congress and President Donald Trump to eliminate taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion business. [It’s their turn now: march against Planned Parenthood on Saturday — https: . @washtimes #protestPP, — Jennifer Harper (@harperbulletin) February 10, 2017, #ProtestPP — a coalition of state and national groups — is organizing the event and is primarily sponsored by Citizens for a Society, Created Equal, and the Action League. The event will feature protests outside over 200 Planned Parenthood facilities across the United States. Demonstrations are also taking place at the London headquarters of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which was recently defunded by Trump’s executive order. The next #ProtestPP rallies will take place on Saturday, February 11. Be there! https: . #prolife pic. twitter. — secularprolife (@secularprolife) February 1, 2017, “The federal government has been subsidizing Planned Parenthood to the tune of more than $430 million annually,” explains Eric Scheidler, national organizer of #ProtestPP. “This, at the same time that the nation’s largest abortion provider holds $500 ticket fundraisers and charges a woman about $500 to abort her baby. On top of that, Planned Parenthood is trafficking baby body parts. Taxpayers are sickened to see their money spent in support of these atrocities. ” Scheidler adds: This is a nationwide event, but at the same time it is a local community concern. As citizens gather to encourage Congress to quit sending money to an organization that specializes in killing children, they are also declaring that they do not want Planned Parenthood to continue operating in their neighborhoods. Citizens for a Society director Dr. Monica Migliorino Miller also states, “The defunding of Planned Parenthood is a matter of moral principle. Not a single cent of American tax dollars should go to an organization that kills innocent human life. ” #ProtestPP #POTUS #maga, Until which time people have had enough of the attacks on our culture and way of life. Are you ready to stand? pic. twitter. — Christian Warrior (@gblair1987) February 11, 2017, #ProtestPP says that, contrary to Planned Parenthood’s claims to be a provider of women’s health care, it is “not a general health care service provider. ” activists are urging Congress and Trump to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s funding and redirect it to other federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) that provide more comprehensive care for women and families, without providing abortions. I believe they are saying ”planned Parenthood tells lies” #ProtestPP #defundpp — Not sure pic. twitter. — Life Line (@LifeLineMI) February 11, 2017, The coalition also asserts, “[F]raudulent Medicaid claims, fetal tissue harvesting, and documented health code violations show Planned Parenthood’s systemic disregard for accountability to taxpayers. ” The protests are taking place as the Republican Party has control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, and Dr. Tom Price — a physician — has just been confirmed as the new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Planned Parenthood and its supporters are also planning Saturday as well. ” … we are a champion of one of the most radical ideas in history — that a woman’s body is her own.” — @dawnlaguens https: . pic. twitter. — Planned Parenthood (@PPact) February 10, 2017, “We are closer than we’ve ever been to defunding Big Abortion — Planned Parenthood. Now is the time for a groundswell of grassroots efforts,” comments Mark Harrington, national director of Created Equal. “We call on Congress and President Trump to reallocate those funds to health centers which help women without killing babies. ” “Americans want to end taxpayer funding of abortion — that includes stopping taxpayer funding for the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and ensuring any Obamacare replacement is and does not allow tax dollars or tax credits to pay for health care plans that include abortion,” says Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “Planned Parenthood is a business that has performed more than 300, 000 abortions in the last three years for which data are available. They do not need or deserve taxpayer dollars, and redirecting their federal funding to rural and community health centers would be a victory for women’s health. ” Dannenfelser notes that FQHCs “outnumber Planned Parenthood facilities 20 to 1 nationwide and provide far more services. The majority of Americans want taxpayer funding to go to real women’s health care, not abortion. ” “This Saturday, that majority will let their voices be heard at #ProtestPP gatherings nationwide,” she adds. . @PPact Nationwide protests planned this weekend to defund America’s Abortion Corporation. #ProtestPPhttps: . — Live Action News (@LiveActionNews) February 11, 2017, | 0fake |
Supreme Court Rules Priests DO NOT Have to Report Child Abuse | In a highly controversial decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic priests are not “mandatory reporters” of child abuse they are made privy to as a result of administering sacramental confessions.
According to Patheos , the ruling references article 609 A(1) of the Louisiana Children’s Code:
With respect to mandatory reporters: Notwithstanding any claim of privileged communication, any mandatory reporter who has cause to believe that a child’s physical or mental health or welfare is endangered as a result of abuse or neglect or that abuse or neglect was a contributing factor in a child’s death shall report in accordance with Article 610.
The Oct. 28 ruling states in part:
… any communication made to a priest privately in the sacrament of confession for the purpose of confession, repentance, and absolution is a confidential communication under La. Code Evid. 511, and the priest is exempt from mandatory reporter status in such circumstances by operation of La. Child. Code art. 603, because “under the … tenets of the [Roman Catholic] church” he has an inviolable “duty to keep such communications confidential.”
The case which originally brought this issue before the court was that of a young woman who told a Baton Rouge-area Catholic priest that a longtime parishioner had sexually assaulted her when she was 14-years-old. The priest in turn did not report the abuse.
Tell us what you think of this controversial ruling in the comments section. | 1real |
An Autopsy on the Ruin of Turkish Tourism in 2016 - Serkan Aydin | An Autopsy on the Ruin of Turkish Tourism in 2016
Getting embroiled in Syria, terrorism, and conflict with Russia devastated one of Turkey's principal industries Donate! The author is a Ph.D. student and teaching assistant at the School of Politics, University of Leeds, UK Frankenstein is on the loose... The demons unleashed from Pandora’s box accompany him taunting the earth...A chaos, unseen since WW2, has been decimating the humanity. The anguish in human institutions, the agony of the social and political establishment is echoed on global basis. The Middle East has been the epicentre of this devastating storm with Turkey, a once stable and secure nation, being drawn deeply into this unprecedented vortex of despair. Turkish tourism has descended into turmoil amidst this unrivalled crisis as well. Wave of armed attacks juxtaposed with the still raw trauma of failed coup d’état coinciding with the high season lacerated tourism. According to analyst Wolfango Piccoli of the consulting firm Teneo Intelligence: ‘Taking into account direct and indirect income, tourism accounts for as much as 12 percent (or $96 billion) of Turkey’s GDP and tourist arrivals were down 45 percent compared to 2015’. This is the sharpest drop ever since 1998. However, is it right to put the blame at the gate of regional problems and terrorism only for this bleak situation? Terrorism and a series of unforgiveable domestic and foreign policy blunders such as meddling in Syria, dispute with Russia, failure to acknowledge the threat posed by the rising wave of Jihadism could obviously be held accountable to a considerable extent yet Turkey has a more challenging issue: the image! What actually deterred the Western vacationers from coming to Turkey is not only the fear of terrorism but also anger at the inflammatory politics of Turkey. Germany issued a travel advisory to its citizens not only for terrorism but also for the pathetic fact that those visiting Turkey should not make public statements against the Turkish state whilst Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders warned that the Netherlands cannot guarantee the safety of citizens travelling to Turkey if they have been ‘critical of Turkish leaders.’ German newspaper Die Zeit reported that flow of tourist to Turkey has shown ‘signs of continuous abating’ due to Erdogan’s clampdown on the opposition media and a series of terrorist attacks in the country. “Erdogan’s foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster for Turkey, but his autocratic domestic tendencies at home have also led to alienation,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. Vienna airport displays news at a screen saying “Turkey allows sex with children under the age of 15” upon a story released by Austrian tabloid Kronen (country’s largest newspaper), that Turkey’s constitutional court to cancel a law that designated all sexual activities with children under the age of 15 as abuse. Thomas Schnoell, a spokesman for the Austrian foreign ministry, confirmed the ambassador had been summoned by Ankara. In a fury, he said “this is for us a matter of freedom of the press.” This allegation could be the truth or a fallacy... whatever it was, yet it caused a massive row, led to ‘Don’t Go to Turkey Campaign’ and tarnished the image of Turkey immensely across Europe voicing concerns about Islamization of the state. An outstanding report titled as ‘Tourism as Politics: Turkey’ published in 2014 by professor Thomas Clayton at Middle East Institute, George Washington University seems to have prognosticated the current plight of Turkish tourism. Clayton posits that ‘ the recent domestic and international political upheavals hold both risks and opportunities for Turkey’s tourism potential. The domestic political controversy over the Gezi Park protests and the government’s response have also tarnished Turkey’s image in a way that officials are quick to dismiss but may prove extremely detrimental to Turkey’s long term plans to become a major international tourist destination.’ Admittedly, terrorism has become a hot potato in the hands of Turkey and the survival of Turkish tourism relies not on entirely combating terrorism and resolving the crisis in the perception of its safety. It is actually more linked with ‘re-construction of its image’ on the global stage. The impressions left at home and abroad have impacted tourism antagonistically. Tourism is a crucial part of understanding, and a creative way to analyze, domestic and foreign policy as well. There is an urgent need for a political reset and long-overdue reforms to embrace the political and legal stability and to strengthen the democracy in the foreseeable future. Considering that boosting halal tourism is not the solution, the abrupt restoration of ties with Europe and other estranged regional powers is therefore of paramount significance for a quick recovery of tourism.
Consequently, the golden segment of Turkey’s economy could be rejuvenated if the relentless and short-sighted policies are disposed of and above all a dovish rather than a hawkish approach is adopted towards domestic and international crises. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount
If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire | 1real |
Hillary Clinton Hits Unfavorability High of 60%, Higher Than Trump | Hillary Clinton Hits Unfavorability High of 60%, Higher Than Trump October 31,
Remember last week when Hillary Clinton was shopping around for White House drapes and the "popular" wisdom was that she was inevitable? That was fun. Wasn't it. Now she hit an unfavorability rating high of 60 percent. That's higher than Trump.
It also means that the candidate who claims she's going to bring Americans together is disliked by most of the country .
Clinton is seen unfavorably by 60 percent of likely voters in the latest results, a new high. Trump is seen unfavorably by essentially as many -- 58 percent. Marking the depth of these views, 49 percent see Clinton "strongly" unfavorably, and 48 percent say the same about Trump –- unusual levels of strong sentiment.
The extent of partisan antipathy in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, is remarkable: Ninety-seven percent of Trump supporters see Clinton unfavorably; 90 percent, strongly so. Ninety-five percent of Clinton supporters see Trump unfavorably -– again, 90 percent strongly so.
But remember Hillary is "inevitable".
Now the Clinton campaign has decided to go after the FBI under the assumption that people like Hillary more than the FBI. That may be a slight misjudgment. And by slight, I mean huge. Because not only is the FBI more popular than Hillary, so are major landfills, UFO cattle mutilations and a number of international war criminals. | 1real |
Iraqi forces enter al-Qaim in final offensive on Islamic State-held territory | ERBIL Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi forces have entered al-Qaim, one of the last remaining territories in the country still held by Islamic State militants, the Joint Operations Command said on Friday. Units from the Iraqi army, Counter-Terrorism Services, Sunni tribal and Iranian-backed Popular Mobilisation forces (PMF) are participating in an offensive to recapture al-Qaim and Rawa, two towns which lie on the border area with Syria. Iraq s security forces retook a border crossing with Syria from the militants, hours after entering al-Qaim, according to the Joint Operations Command. The road runs through al-Qaim in Iraq and Albu-Kamal in Syria, two towns which are very close to each other on opposite sides of the border in the last important territorial stronghold of Islamic State. Welcoming the offensive, the U.S.-led international military coalition, which has run an air campaign against Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq since 2014, said in a statement that approximately 1,500 Islamic State fighters were estimated to remain in the immediate vicinity of al-Qaim. Operations to clear the militants from their final strongholds in Iraq have continued, despite a concurrent military advance on Kurdish-held territory in the north. Iraq s central government launched an offensive on Oct. 16 to seize disputed territories, claimed by both Baghdad and the Kurds, in retaliation for a referendum on Kurdish independence held on Sept. 25. In a lightning strike, central government forces swiftly recaptured large areas, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, from the Kurds, who had seized these areas when Islamic State swept across northern Iraq in 2014. On Thursday, Iraqi forces threatened to resume military operations against the Kurds, accusing them of delaying the handover of control of borders and taking advantage of negotiations to bolster their defenses. | 0fake |
FEDS HUNTING FOR MAN Who Sold Fake CIA, FBI Badges After Attempts To Enter Restricted Areas | This is NOT good at all since a guy was caught trying to enter a nuclear facility using one of the fake badges sold by a Romanian national. The airports are one thing but the restricted facilities like nuclear and electrical plants are big targets for would-be terrorists. We ve reported on lurking around dams before this is a new case of actually producing a badge to try and enter a facility. Federal authorities are trying to track down a man who allegedly manufactured and sold fake U.S. law enforcement badges from the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).Those badges were used to attempt to enter restricted U.S. facilities and impersonate federal agents, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).ICE said Thursday that it s seeking the public s help to find Romanian national Roberto Craciunica, 34, who is believed to be living in Germany. He is accused of operating a company that manufactured and sold the badges.In one case, a man allegedly impersonated an HSI agent, using one of the company s fake badges to enter the Naval Nuclear Training Command in South Carolina while armed with a Sig Sauer pistol last August. The suspect was indicted, officials said.Read more: ABC | 1real |
Iraqi forces take control of Kurdish-held areas in Mosul's Niveveh's province | BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi forces have taken control of areas previously held by Kurdish forces in Mosul s Nineveh province in northern Iraq, a military statement said on Wednesday. The areas were evacuated by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters before the arrival of the Iraqi forces on Tuesday, the statement said. The Peshmerga had taken them over the past three years as part of the war against Islamic State militants. The Mosul Dam, northwest of the city, is among the positions retaken from the Peshmerga, the military statement said. Responding to a Kurdish referendum on independence held last month, Iraqi government forces backed by Iranian-trained paramilitary groups captured the Kurdish-held oil region of Kirkuk on Monday, transforming the country s balance of power. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered the retaking of Kirkuk on Monday, as well as all disputed areas claimed by both the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government and the central authorities in Baghdad. | 0fake |
Texas Legislators Duped on Bathroom Bill by Lefty Progressive Donor | The president of the Texas Association of Business (TAB) duped Texas lawmakers with false claims of economic destruction if legislators pass a bill protecting women and children in the privacy of their bathrooms and dressing areas. Few people know the history of this business association leader’s Democratic voting record and donations to political groups that push a agenda under the guise of equality. [TAB President Chris Wallace appears to be attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of Texas legislators about the possible loss of business and tax revenue to the state if it passes Senate Bill 6, also known as the “bathroom bill. ” Citing “dire consequences” for the state, Wallace is attempting to “warn leaders” that passing the bill would cost the state of Texas 185, 000 jobs and $8. 5 billion in lost revenue from lost sporting events, concerts, conventions and other business related losses. These claims have been discredited by none other than the Politifact who rated his claims as “Mostly False. ” Politifact defines “Mostly False” to mean the statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Politifact surmised: The TAB said a study projects up to $8. 5 billion in lost GDP and up to 185, 000 lost jobs in Texas if lawmakers approve a discriminatory measure like proposals in other states. Such a law might cause economic shivers. But we find this study’s headlined figures, reached about 13 months ago, to be based on predicted or actual effects of discriminatory mandates in Arizona, Louisiana and Indiana that didn’t make it into law or were rescinded or softened. Moreover, not all the study’s numbers, calculations and assumptions proved solid and a key figure, reflecting on Indiana losing $1. 5 billion in conventions, doesn’t appear to have a documented basis. The Texas Tribune summarized the intent of SB6 stating, “Senate Bill 6, one of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s legislative priorities, would require transgender people to use bathrooms in public schools, government buildings and public universities based on ‘biological sex.’ The measure would also local nondiscrimination ordinances that allow transgender Texans to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. ” The bill creates guidelines that only impact government buildings including schools and universities. It does not address what businesses do with their bathrooms or changing rooms. Texas State Senator Paul Bettencourt ( ) also debunked the threats made by Wallace and noted there had been no economic impact in Houston after the city reversed Mayor Parker’s bathroom ordinance. During the Senate committee hearing on the bill, Senator Bettencourt and Senator Kelly Hancock ( Richland Hills) picked Wallace’s testimony apart. This raises the question as to why a respected organization like the TAB would go out on a limb with easily discredited statements. Dr. Steve Hotze suggests in the Conservative Republicans of Texas News that Wallace is more motivated by a political agenda than the interests of the businesses he represents. Hotze wrote: Chris Wallace’s political allegiances and philosophy are demonstrated by his voting record and by his political contributions to the Texas Democrat Party, to numerous Democrat candidates and to the No Nonsense in November PAC that opposed the Texas Constitution Marriage Amendment in 2005. Wallace has made contributions to the Texas Democrat Party, Al Gore against George Bush in 2004, Obama for America in 2008, Bill White for Governor against Gov. Abbott in 2009 and 2010, Wendy Davis against Gov. Abbott in 2014, Leticia Van de Putte against Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in 2014, and four separate contributions to the Human Rights (Campaign) PAC in 2016. The Human Rights (Campaign) PAC describes itself as the “largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer civil rights organization. ” The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) PAC supports candidates who “have a solid history of support for lesbian and gay equality” (www. hrc. org). In 2016, the HRC opposed Donald Trump, while supporting Hillary Clinton. Wallace financially supports this homosexual front group. Wallace has voted numerous times in the Democrat Primary, and yet he has been hired as the spokesman for conservative Texas businessmen. “These facts are well documented,” former Harris County GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill told Breitbart Texas late this week. “We have copies of his voting record and the contributions made to the Human Rights Commission PAC which supports the LGBT agenda. ” SB6, authored by State Senator Lois Kolkhorst ( ) passed the Senate in a bipartisan vote of on March 15 after a lengthy hearing and public testimony on the matter and moved it forward to the House. State Senator Eddie Lucio, Jr. joined with the Republican majority in supporting the bill’s passage. The bill has not yet been scheduled for a committee hearing in the House. It is expected to face tougher opposition and could possibly die in the committee or in the Calendars committee before coming to the House Floor for a vote. “All we want is an up or down vote,” Jared Woodfill told Breitbart Texas. “The people should not be denied the right to know where their representatives stand on this issue. ” Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 0fake |
MUSLIM Candidate For DNC Chair Ignites Party Of Losers: Says Trump Impeachment Proceedings Need To Start NOW [VIDEO] | CNN has once again set the stage for a democratic politician to attempt a smackdown of President Trump. In this case, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) felt the need to parrot what his brothers and sisters in arms have been trying to shove down America s throat; that we need to impeach the President.During the Democratic National Committee leadership debate that aired on CNN, Ellison was asked if he agreed with his fellow democratic party members Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) who have said Congress should draw up articles of impeachment against President Trump.Ellison: I think Donald Trump has already done a number of things which legitimately raise the question of impeachment. (applause) I mean on day one, he was in violation of Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Ellison is the first Muslim member of Congress and a longtime defender of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The fact that he is being considered to be a leader in the Democratic National Committee should tell the American people just how out of touch and dangerous, if not downright ignorant, the entire party has become.Not only are they putting in positions of power men and women who subscribe to a system of belief that requires it s devotees to commit atrocities against people of other religions, it is also letting the fantasy that just because a candidate that they disagree with won the election, they should be able to have him forcibly removed from office.There are a plethora of minor of even middling issues that republicans and democrats disagree with one another on, but this problem of we don t like the president so we want to get rid of him flies in the very face of democracy.Many republicans don t agree with democratic policies, but you don t see us attempting to remove every legitimately elected government official who gets in the way of our agenda.(Source: The Gateway Pundit, The Washington Times) | 1real |
Eighty Wealthy New Yorkers Ask State Government to Raise Their Taxes | A group of New York’s wealthiest residents is asking the state to raise their taxes. [Eighty people, including George Soros, Steven Rockefeller, and Abigail Disney, wrote to New York state lawmakers and Gov. Andrew Cuomo saying they and other millionaires should be taxed more to support infrastructure, schools, and programs to help the poor and homeless, the New York Daily News reported. “Now is the time to invest in the economic viability of New York,” the letter reads. “We need to invest in pathways out of poverty and up the economic ladder for all of our fellow citizens, including strong public education from to college. And, we need to invest in the fragile bridges, tunnels, waterlines, public buildings, and roads that we all depend on. ” The letter endorses a plan called the “1 Percent Tax Plan for Tax Fairness,” which would create new, higher income tax brackets for the state’s wealthiest individuals to raise a projected $2 billion. The Fiscal Policy Institute, a think tank focused on economic policy, and the Responsible Wealth project, a group of America’s wealthiest individuals who support “fair taxes and corporate accountability,” helped formulate the proposal, Ron Deutsch, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, called it “refreshing” that the state’s wealthiest were willing to pay more. The state legislature, however, is not as supportive of the proposal. While the Democratic majority in the Assembly has its own plan to raise taxes on the wealthy, the Senate does not support the idea. “Whether it’s income taxes, property taxes, business taxes, user fees or tolls, we don’t support raising taxes or asking New Yorkers to dig deeper into their pockets to pay more,” Senate leader John Flanagan ( ) said, according to the Guardian. Lawmakers are currently working out the details of the state’s budget and hope to have a deal in place by April 1. Lawmakers largely ignored a similar letter sent to them last year. | 0fake |
QUESTION: Since Paris Terror Attacks, How Muslim Refugees Have Arrived In U.S.? How Many Are Christians? [VIDEO] | The answer to this question should shock every American The government has admitted 605 Syrian refugees for resettlement in the United States since last November s Paris terrorist attack, two of whom are Christians.The rest are 589 Sunni Muslims, 10 Shia Muslims, three other Muslims, and one refugee identified in State Department Refugee Processing Center data as other religion. At the same time, the proportion of Christians among the total cohort of Syrian refugees admitted into the U.S. since the conflict began five years ago has now dropped below two percent.Just 55 Christians (1.9 percent) are among the 2,769 Syrian refugees admitted since March 2011, while a large majority 2,594 (93.6 percent) has been Sunni Muslims.Christians accounted for about 10 percent of Syria s population when the civil war began and Sunni Muslims for an estimated 74 percent.The administration has rejected calls by some Republican lawmakers, and some GOP presidential candidates, for Syrian Christians to be prioritized in the refugee admission process.Here s the truth about how these Muslim refugees who are coming from countries who hate are finding their way to the United States:The ISIS terrorist attack in Paris on November 13 fueled concerns that the terrorist group was exploiting the flow of refugees and migrants as cover to send jihadists into the West to carry out attacks.French authorities said two of the attackers had been carrying fake Syrian passports and warned European Union partners that some terrorists are trying to get into our countries and commit criminal acts by mixing in with the flow of migrants and refugees. Last Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper affirmed during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that ISIS has done so. Isn t it already proven that Mr. Baghdadi is sending people with this flow of refugees that are terrorists that in order to inflict further attacks on Europe and the United States? Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked him, referring to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. That s correct, Clapper replied. That s one technique they ve used is taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow. In addition, he continued, ISIS has become pretty skilled at [producing] phony passports, so they can travel ostensibly as legitimate travelers as well. In December, House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said the U.S. intelligence community has identified already individuals tied to terrorist organizations in Syria that want to exploit and get into the United States through the refugee process. Via: CNS News | 1real |
FLASHBACK: Mark Steyn: Why The US Is Becoming A Banana Republic [Video] | Mark Steyn is dead on when he calls out the feds for wiretapping Paul Manafort since 2014 3 years! Think about that! The ruling party is using the cover of national security rules to get the goods on their political opponents. Steyn calls out James Clapper for lying It s pretty obvious that Steyn s on to Clapper and detests what he s done.Mark Steyn We re huge fans! Mark Steyn s previous commentary on the testimony regarding Russia is spot on: Mark Steyn is fantastic! He was on Tucker Carlson to discuss the intel hearing today on the Russia investigation. He sees through all of the total BS the Dems were throwing out in their testimony on Trump and Russia. Mark Steyn is the adult in the room when it comes to getting to the truth Awesome!Mark Steyn is a gifted guy. One of our favorites! | 1real |
Some Cities Want Their Noncitizen Immigrants to Vote | Some Cities Want Their Noncitizen Immigrants to Vote Caroline Winter, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 28, 2016
“Look at illegal immigrants voting all over the country,” Donald Trump recently claimed in a Fox News interview, part of his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the presidential election. There’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, but some cities are moving to expand voting rights to include noncitizens.
The latest is San Francisco, where the Nov. 8 ballot will include a measure allowing the parents or legal guardians of any student in the city’s public schools to vote in school board elections. The right would be extended to those with green cards, visas, or no documentation at all. “One out of three kids in the San Francisco unified school system has a parent who is an immigrant, who is disenfranchised and doesn’t have a voice,” says San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. “We’ve had legal immigrants who’ve had children go through the entire K-12 system without having a say.” Undocumented immigrants should also have the right, Chiu adds, to bypass the “broken immigration system in this country.”
{snip}
Today there are six jurisdictions in Maryland that let noncitizens vote in local elections. Chicago allows them to take part in elected parent advisory councils but not to vote in school board elections. Four towns in Massachusetts have moved to allow noncitizen voting and are awaiting state approval. And in New York City, where noncitizens make up 21 percent of the voting-age population, the city council is drafting legislation that would allow more than 1.3 million legal residents to take part in municipal elections. The city previously allowed noncitizens to vote in school board elections, but that ended when New York’s school boards were dissolved in 2002.
{snip} | 1real |
Трамп разбушевался | Происшествия
Чем ближе выборы, тем сильнее нервничают кандидаты в президенты США. Особенно тяжко приходится Трампу — мало того, что он в рейтингах отстаёт от своей конкурентки, так ещё и владеть собой не приучен. Взять, хотя бы, недавнюю историю с негром… пардон, афроамериканцем, который взял да и заявился на митинг Трампа, размахивая каким-то письмом.
Поскольку сторонники Трампа, как правило, белые, то при виде афроамериканца кандидат в президенты испытал ощущение, которое психологи называют мудрёным термином “когнитивный диссонанс”. Можно было бы, конечно, прямо спросить у неожиданного визитёра, кто он такой и что ему надобно, но телепаты в расспросах не нуждаются. Пронзив орлиным взором пытающегося обратить на себя внимание негра, Трамп сразу понял: этот человек подослан конкурентами, которые заплатили ему за хулиганскую выходку полторы тысячи долларов. Почему именно полторы? Вероятно, в Америке установлены именно такие тарифы на мелкое хулиганство на митингах: полчаса побуянил, зато потом денег хватит на месяц скромной жизни. Так или иначе, Трамп разнервничался и завопил: “Уведите его!”.
Охранники немедленно подхватили афроамериканца под руки и утащили прочь. Охранники у Трампа к этому делу вполне привычные: они то и дело кого-то выгоняют. Например, 25 августа они выставили с пресс-конференции журналиста Хорхе Рамоса, потому что Трампу не понравилась его эмоциональность. Вероятно, и инцидент с афроамериканцем так и остался бы одним из эпизодов в бесконечной цепи проявлений самодурства миллиардера-политика, если бы за кулисами не выяснилось нечто совсем неожиданное.
Оказалось, что изгнанный афроамериканец Си Джей Кэри мало того, что пришёл на митинг совершенно бесплатно, так он ещё и преданный поклонник Трампа с 1992 года. У него даже есть значок Республиканской партии. А в письме, которым он так размахивал, содержится бурное возмущение нехорошими лжецами “Хилари и Обамой”. Но самое интересное – это то, что даже после весьма невежливого обращения Си Джей Кэри не изменил мнения о своём кумире и будет за него голосовать.
Можно представить, как отреагировали бы западные СМИ, случись эта история в России: в ход пошли бы и заезженные клише о “рабском менталитете”, и обвинения в отсутствии цивилизованности, и прочий арсенал штампов, не обновлявшийся с времён холодной войны. То ли дело США, там выходки разбушевавшегося Трампа проходят под рубрикой “Эксцентричность миллиардера”, и все мило улыбаются. Своё, как известно, не воняет. | 1real |
A Mormon Reader Says Most Mormons Will Still Back Trump | 1real | |
Clinton struggles to contain media barrage on foreign cash | A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups. | 0fake |
How the Clintons’ Haiti development plans succeed — and disappoint | Deep in the Haitian countryside, peanut farmer Wismith Moricette epitomizes the success of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s charitable work: Through an innovative program backed by the Clintons, the 23-year-old has doubled the yield from his one-acre plot. Along with all those peanuts, Moricette said, have come visions of a brighter future for his wife and young son.
Fifty miles away on Haiti’s north coast, Anelle Germinal exemplifies another reality of the Clintons’ work here: disappointment. The 33-year-old mother of four has been standing in the baking sun every day for months waiting for work in the struggling Caracol Industrial Park, which the Clintons have touted as a model that would change the economy of this impoverished country.
“They said we would have work,” Germinal said, “but I have nothing.”
Moricette and Germinal are two faces of the Clintons’ increasingly complicated relationship with Haiti, where their high-profile development efforts after a devastating earthquake in 2010 have produced both success and disillusionment.
As Hillary Clinton moves toward a second run for the White House, her family’s global charitable work, mostly through the Clinton Foundation, has come under intense scrutiny. The foundation has accepted large donations from corporations and foreign countries, raising concerns that the Clintons are creating conflicts of interest by blurring the lines between their political, business and charitable interests.
The Washington Post reported last month that the foundation’s donors include seven foreign governments that contributed millions during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Among those donations was a $500,000 contribution from the Algerian government for earthquake relief in Haiti that the foundation has acknowledged violated the terms of an ethics agreement with the Obama administration.
The Clintons’ defenders have dismissed concerns about the donations as political sniping, saying the test of the foundation is not where it gets its money but how it spends it. They said their work has created economic opportunity, improved lives for women and girls, raised health standards and fought the effects of climate change across the developing world.
The work has been especially visible in Haiti, where the Clintons first traveled as young newlyweds in 1975 and where many people credit them with drawing the world’s attention immediately after the earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people.
With former president Clinton assigned by the United Nations to head up the emergency recovery effort and Hillary Clinton guiding official U.S. assistance as secretary of state, the couple helped a relief effort that has included some of the world’s richest people, biggest celebrities and most successful businesses. The Clintons also helped mobilize an effort in which international donors pledged $10.4 billion, including $3.9 billion from the United States.
Greg Milne, director of the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti Program, said projects include efforts that have helped more than 2,000 small farmers, an artisan-goods company that employs more than 300 people, a fish-farming operation, a cholera treatment center and improvements to schools in some of Haiti’s poorest slums.
Clinton supporters also point out that their successes have come amid Haiti’s chaotic political situation — parliament is not functioning and President Michel Martelly, dogged by scandal, is ruling with virtually no checks on his power — which is marked by endemic corruption, weak institutions, poverty, poor public education, terrible roads and other factors that have historically made it extremely difficult for development efforts to succeed.
The country has long had a fraught relationship with foreigners who come to invest and provide aid. Haitians often regard them with gratitude for desperately needed resources and, at the same time, with suspicion that their motives are more to make a profit in Haiti than to help it.
Nevertheless, the Clintons are facing a growing backlash that too little has been accomplished in the past five years and that some of the most high-profile projects they have backed — including a just-opened Marriott, another luxury hotel and the industrial park — have helped foreign investors and Haiti’s wealthy elites more than its poor.
“Bill Clinton is a good guy and well-intentioned, but the people here don’t think so — they think he’s here making money,” said Leslie Voltaire, a former government official who worked with Clinton on post-earthquake reconstruction. “There is a lot of resentment about Clinton here. People have not seen results. . . . They say that Clinton used Haiti.”
In January, Haitian expatriates picketed the Clinton Foundation’s New York headquarters, demanding to know why more progress has not been made with the billions in international aid pledged after the quake.
Said Raymond Joseph, a former Haitian ambassador to the United States: “People are asking, ‘What has Bill Clinton done for us?’ ”
The Clintons’ long influence in Haiti is hard to overstate.
As president in 1994, Bill Clinton deployed about 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted in a coup in 1991. Clinton’s trade policies as president, which he later called a “mistake,” were devastating to Haiti’s rice production and made it harder for the country to feed itself.
In 2009, Clinton was named U.N. special envoy for Haiti, and he has visited the country 37 times since then.
After the earthquake, Clinton united with former president George W. Bush to create the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which distributed $54.4 million in the two years after the earthquake. Separately, the Clinton Foundation has spent more than $30 million in Haiti and led efforts through the Clinton Global Initiative to persuade private companies to spend vastly more.
“What I think most people don’t know, even if they’ve been on the ground there, is these people are immensely talented,” Bill Clinton said in a 2010 interview with NPR. “They have suffered from 200 years of outside and inside abuses and neglect and misgovernment. And a lot of the people who’ve gone there even to help them in the best of faith have done so in a way that would never have allowed them to support themselves and to lift themselves up. And now there is a true consensus for and determination for a sustainable, comprehensive, long-term, modern society in Haiti. And they can do it.”
But as the initial emergency response has evolved into efforts to ensure Haiti’s long-term development, Haitians increasingly complain that the Clintons’ most ambitious plans are disconnected from the realities of most people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
For instance, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested more than $2 million in the Royal Oasis hotel, where a sleek suite with hardwood floors costs more than $200 a night and the shops sell $150 designer purses and $120 men’s dress shirts.
One recent afternoon, the hotel appeared largely empty, and with tourism hardly booming five years after the quake, locals fear it may be failing. A spokeswoman for Occidental Hotels, the chain that runs the hotel, said that occupancy is up this year and that the project will “mature in the long run.”
Bill Clinton also introduced Marriott officials to Denis O’Brien, an Irish telecom billionaire who has contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation. The result is a $45 million Marriott hotel that opened this month in central Port-au-Prince. O’Brien said no Clinton money was invested in the project.
The ultra-modern hotel is adjacent to the headquarters of Digicel, a communications giant owned by O’Brien. When The Post visited recently, many, if not most, guests seemed to be foreign businessmen connected to Digicel.
Clinton defenders argue that hotels that cater to well-heeled foreign guests can still buy local products and provide local jobs, and those guests are often involved in business investments or aid projects that benefit the neediest Haitians.
O’Brien said his hotel employs 200 Haitians, is filled with locally purchased art and serves food from Haiti. O’Brien leads the Haiti Action Network, a collection of private businesses that have committed through the Clinton Global Initiative to spend $500 million on projects in Haiti. He and his company just built 150 schools and rebuilt Port-au-Prince’s historic Iron Market.
“I don’t know any modern leader that has spent more time helping a country and being so effective,” O’Brien said of Bill Clinton. “He works like a demon in the developing world. Nobody is doing that. Is Tony Blair doing that?”
Other Clinton-backed projects have not delivered on lofty promises: A 2011 housing expo that cost more than $2 million, including $500,000 from the Clinton Foundation, was supposed to be a model for thousands of new units but instead has resulted in little more than a few dozen abandoned model homes occupied by squatters.
Controversy surrounding the Clintons only deepened with the recent revelation, contained in an upcoming book by Peter Schweizer, that Tony Rodham — Hillary Clinton’s younger brother — serves on the advisory board of a U.S.-based company that in 2012 won one of Haiti’s first two gold-mining permits in 50 years. After objection from the Haitian Senate, the permits have been placed on hold.
“Neither Bill Clinton nor the brother of Hillary Clinton are individuals who share the interests of the Haitian people,” said Samuel Nesner, an anti-mining activist who thinks mining poses great environmental risks and will mainly benefit foreign investors. “They are part of the elite class who are operating to exploit the Haitian people.”
Clinton Foundation officials said Bill Clinton had been unaware of Rodham’s involvement in the mine project. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton said she does not know the chief executive of the mine.
“I strongly believe the Clintons came to Haiti in good faith and they wanted to have an impact,” said Jean-Max Bellerive, who was Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake and served as co-chairman with Bill Clinton on the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. (Bellerive is also on the mining company’s advisory board.)
But, Bellerive said, the former president was hampered by a “weak” staff of American aides who were “more interested in supporting Clinton than helping Haiti.” Echoing a common sentiment in Haiti, Bellerive also said Clinton should have listened more carefully to the opinions and needs of ordinary Haitians: “How do you want a guy coming from Davos or Dubai to get the real feeling for what’s happening downstairs?”
Milne, of the Clinton Foundation, said the criticism is wrong and unsurprising.
“President Clinton is one of the most dedicated and highest-profile advocates for Haiti, and he is still engaged while others have moved on,” he said. “So it’s not surprising that, for some, he is an easy target for natural frustration that the change we all want isn’t happening faster.”
Milne said the country has experienced strong economic growth in recent years, with more Haitians employed and more children in school.
“Is Haiti building back better?” Milne said, using a phrase that the Clintons frequently quote. “In many ways, yes, though challenges remain.”
Paul Farmer, a doctor whose Partners in Health has helped provide medical care in rural Haiti since the 1980s and whose health network has received more than $1.8 million from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund for a medical residency program, also praised the Clintons’ work. He said he forged partnerships at CGI meetings with private businesses and other charities for a variety of projects he said would not have taken place without the Clinton connection.
He said that by any objective measure, Haiti has been improving, in part because of the Clintons’ efforts.
“Is the whole country built back better? I doubt it,” Farmer said. “Water insecurity and food insecurity are very pressing problems. But if you look at the health statistics for Haiti . . . infant mortality, child mortality — they’re all improving.”
Still, even some who have benefited from Clinton-backed programs have grown disillusioned.
“I read that Bill Clinton is the most popular politician in America, but he couldn’t get elected mayor in Haiti today,” said Jacky Lumarque, rector of Quisqueya University, a private school that was damaged in the earthquake and received $914,000 from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to create an entrepreneurship center.
Lumarque said the program has helped hundreds of Haitians turn their informal street businesses into formal entities that keep records, pay taxes and have potential for growth.
He said it has been a huge success — but stands apart from the usual strategy of foreign groups, including the Clintons, who tend to favor projects imposed by well-meaning foreigners that are more “about Haiti” than “for Haiti.”
The entrepreneurship center, Lumarque said, “is an example of what Clinton can do, in spite of himself.”
When Bill Clinton came here late last month to help inaugurate the new Marriott, he made a side trip by helicopter to Haiti’s central plateau to have a look at a Clinton-backed program that is revolutionizing the peanut-farming industry.
The Acceso Peanut Enterprise Corp. was started with a $1.25 million grant from the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which is headed by Bill Clinton and Canadian mining executive and philanthropist Frank Giustra, as well as the charitable foundation of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.
Acceso buys feed, fertilizer and fungicide at bulk rates, then sells them to farmers for far less than normal prices. Acceso also hires tractors for farmers who otherwise would be using an ox and plow.
Robert Johnson, an American who runs the program, said the improvements are vastly increasing yields, quality and farmers’ profits.
He said Acceso worked with about 1,000 farmers last year and bought about 120 metric tons of peanuts. This year, it expects to triple the number of farmers and buy almost five times as much peanut tonnage.
At least half of Acceso’s sales have gone to two large Haitian factories that produce a peanut-based paste that is given to malnourished children. Most of the rest goes to local peanut-butter producers, he said. The program’s success, Johnson said, comes from its market-driven approach: It’s not a charity, it’s a business with a charitable purpose.
“We’re building something that is going to be sustainable,” he said. “We talk to the farmers. We’re not going to just bring in something that someone thought up in Davos.”
The program is branching out into lime-growing, and Clinton visited a site last month where thousands of seedlings are being cultivated by dozens of workers.
Benel Auguste, 32, is one of the small landowners who rented his plot, about a third of an acre, to Acceso to plant limes. “It’s a good idea; it’s going to work,” he said. “We know limes and we need them. We can do this.”
The Clintons also were enthusiastic backers of the Caracol Industrial Park, which was built on 600 acres of farmland just east of the port city Cap-Haitien.
They agreed with economists, particularly Oxford University development specialist Paul Collier, who concluded that Haiti is an ideal place to create mass jobs in garment factories because of its proximity to the United States, favorable trade agreements and cheap labor.
The Clintons helped Haitian officials identify Sae-A Trading Co., which operates factories across the developing world and sews garments for giants such as Target, Gap and Wal-Mart, as a potential major investor.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, along with top aide Cheryl Mills, lobbied for the project with South Korean officials and hosted Sae-A executives in Washington to press the plan.
Bill Clinton attended the Sae-A contract-signing ceremony in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 11, 2011 — a day before the first anniversary of the earthquake. He later laid the first stone of the park’s construction. And then in October 2012, the Clintons, Martelly and other officials attended the ribbon-cutting.
Speaking to a group of investors at the ceremony, officials and celebrities that included actors Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, as well as business moguls Donna Karan and Richard Branson, Hillary Clinton said it represented “a new day for Haiti and a new model for how the international community practices development.”
“Haiti is truly open for business, and we want your help,” she said. “We see this partnership between governments like our own and the private sector as absolutely essential in promoting and supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti. We know very well that long-term prosperity cannot come from just the provision of aid. There must be trade and investment like we have seen here today.”
Today, Sae-A employs about 4,500 people. Company spokesman Lon Garwood said the operation has been steadily growing and will open a new facility next month. Henri-Claude Müller-Poitevien, a Haitian government official who works in the apparel industry, said the Caracol project is on schedule and continues to expand.
A power plant was built, but plans for a new port at the industrial park to carry finished goods to the United States have been shelved. Residents of the plant’s housing project say their land floods when it rains, and few said they think the plant will ever create the number of jobs originally promised.
“I believe that the momentum to attract people there in a massive way is past,” said Bellerive, the former prime minister. “You can do interesting things with Caracol, but you have to reinvent the concept. Today, it has failed.”
Each morning, crowds line up outside the park’s big front gate, which is guarded by four men in crisp khaki uniforms carrying shotguns. They wait in a sliver of shade next to a cinder-block wall, many holding résumés in envelopes. Most said they have been coming every day for months, waiting for jobs that pay about $5 a day.
From his envelope, Jean Mito Palvetus, 27, pulled out a diploma attesting that he had completed 200 hours of training with the U.S. Agency for International Development on an industrial sewing machine.
“I have three kids and a wife, and I can’t support them,” he said, sweating in the hot morning sun. “I have a diploma, but I still can’t get a job here. I still have nothing.”
Tom Hamburger in Washington contributed to this report. | 0fake |
NATO's Stoltenberg says North Korea's 'reckless behavior' requires global response | LONDON (Reuters) - North Korea s reckless behavior is a global threat and requires a global response, the head of the NATO military alliance said on Sunday. NATO has not been directly involved in the crisis, which saw Pyongyang carry out its sixth and most powerful nuclear test a week ago, but has repeatedly called on North Korea to abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The reckless behavior of North Korea is a global threat and requires a global response and that of course also includes NATO, NATO head Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview with BBC television. Asked whether an attack on the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam would trigger NATO s Article 5, which requires each member of the alliance to come to the defense of any other, Stoltenberg said: I will not speculate about whether Article 5 will be applied in such a situation. We are now totally focused on how can we contribute to a peaceful solution of the conflict, he said. There is no easy way out of this difficult situation, but at the same time we have to ... continue to work for political solution, continue to press also the economic sanctions. The United States and its allies had been bracing for another long-range missile launch in time for the 69th anniversary of North Korea s founding on Saturday, but no fresh provocations were spotted while the North held numerous events to mark the holiday. Throughout last week, South Korean officials had warned the North could launch another intercontinental ballistic missile in defiance of U.N. sanctions and amid escalating tensions with the United States. British defense minister Michael Fallon also told the BBC he was very concerned about the situation. We are doing now what we can to bring about a diplomatic solution, what we have to avoid at all costs is this spilling over in to any kind of military conflict, he said. The U.S. is fully entitled to defend its own territory, to defend its bases and to look after its people but this involves us, London is closer to North Korea and its missiles than Los Angeles. Fallon said he did not believe North Korea currently had a missile capable of hitting London but said the missile program was accelerating and their range was getting longer and longer . We have to get this program halted because the dangers now of miscalculation, of some accident triggering a response are extremely great, he said. | 0fake |
Game Of Thrones Author Just Ripped Trump, Endorsed Hillary | Comments
Author George R. R. Martin’s books inspired the hit HBO TV series Game of Thrones , and he’s no stranger to political intrigues. Even the legendary fantasy writer Martin never imagined an American demagogue, who could blithely step on every third rail of American politics and survive in the race until the general election. But the man who wrote television’s most hated character – Joffrey Baratheon – just took to his blog to explain definitively why Donald Trump will never be fit to sit on the Iron Throne be president.
In my lifetime, there has never been a presidential candidate more unfit to lead this nation.
You don’t need to like Hillary. You don’t need to listen to what Hillary says about Trump, or what I say about Trump. You just need to listen to Trump. If you can do that, and still consider voting for him… well…
Martin’s book “Song of Fire and Ice” inspired the hit TV series, which is loosely based on the War of The Roses , as the warring clans of Westeros fight for control of the Iron Throne. For much of the series, the throne has been captured by golden haired Joffrey Baratheon, whose endless list of offensive behaviors begins as a callous child, and continues through his disastrous reign. Like the fictional boy-king, Donald Trump loves to sit on fancy, throne-like chairs and using his family’s wealth and influence to play at being king.
The author Martin described the highly unusual nature of this year’s presidential election by zeroing in on the striking difference between negative advertisements for the two candidates. He shrewdly pointed out that Donald Trump’s attack ads are standard political ad hominem affairs – lots of selective editing and bluster, no substance – while Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton doesn’t even create traditional attack ads.
Martin’s list of the many Clinton attack ads doubles as a fine reason that nobody in their right mind, should choose the Republican nominee for President this upcoming Tuesday, November 8th:
Hillary does not need to use the sort of hoary attack ads that Trump is using. She only needs to present him as he is, and let his own words condemn them.
And they do.
No one has to accuse Trump of anything, he has laid it all out there in public for the world to see.
Yes, he mocked a disabled reporter. There he is, doing it.
Yes, he told Billy Bush he liked to kiss women without their consent and grab them by their pussies. There he is, boasting about it. When you’re a star, you can do anything.
No need to accuse Trump of going into the dressing rooms of Miss Universe and Miss Teen USA pagaents when the contestants were changing so he could see them naked. There’s Trump himself, telling Howard Stern about it.
Yes, he said women should be punished for having abortions. There he is, telling Chris Matthews. His own words, his own face.
Yes, he said he wants to ban all Muslims from entering the US. Here, see the clip.
Yes, he’s in favor of Japan and Saudi Arabia and South Korea having nukes, here’s the clip where he says so.
And on and on and on and on. The Gold Star family, the bad hombres, Judge Curiel, the Miss Universe contestant… his own speeches, his own tweets, his own words.
Martin even remarked that for a man whose campaign resembles a nastier version of George Wallace, it is eerily starting to look like his braggadocious claim was correct, when in January, Trump said he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it. If there’s any one moment in the Republican’s campaign that could be described as Joffrey-esqe, that was the one, where like the fictional, twisted boy king , Donald Trump reveled openly in a threat to kill senselessly, and kill with impunity.
The dastardly character Joffrey’s Uncle described him in a way that anyone watching Donald Trump might describe the oddly coiffed Republican candidate, “We’ve had vicious kings, and we’ve had idiot kings, but I don’t think we’ve ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king!”
The same harsh words equally apply to Republican nominee Donald Trump’s disastrous fall as the standard bearer of his failed party, the GOP.
We agree with George R. R. Martin, all any voter needs to do is listen rationally to the irrational Trump speak, and realize that he’s not Presidential material, and has a personality only fit to be an erratic boy-king, and certainly never to sit in the chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
Watch a hilarious mashup here: | 1real |
Trump’s Cabinet Is Record-Breaking — In The Worst Possible Way | Donald Trump, president-elect of the United States, has created a cabinet that has a net worth larger than the world s 70 smallest countries, and it still has open spots.In the calculation to find the net worth of Trump s staff, Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Trump s chief of staff, his Cabinet members and ambassadors were all included. According to the Boston Globe, Trump s selected cabinet s net worth reaches over $13 billion. That s five times the worth of president Obama s, and 34 times greater than George W. Bush s administration. It s also the wealthiest cabinet in the history of the U.S., which is strange when you consider Trump s promise to take the power out of the hands of Wall Street. Best part is, the number is going to get higher as Trump fills the last few open spots in the cabinet.The richest of Trump s cabinet is Betsy DeVos, worth $5.1 billion according to Forbes, and she s been appointed as secretary of education.Wilbur Ross, worth $2.5 billion, has been selected for secretary of commerce.Linda McMahon, former WWE executive and U.S. Senate candidate, has been chosen to serve as small business administrator. She is worth an estimated $1.35 billion.The list goes on, filled with all the billionaires that Trump so readily blamed for killing jobs and ruining our country during his campaign. He lied his way into office, gathering support from those who were blind with hate against Obama and the democratic party. Well, surely now they are realizing how badly Trump is going to screw our country. He s surrounding himself with the people that are corrupting our system, destroying jobs and the middle class, ruining our economy in the process. Trump s term is going to help the rich get richer, not create jobs and a booming economy.Featured image via Sara D. Davis/Getty Images | 1real |
BUSTED: THE ULTIMATE COMMUNIST ORGANIZER…Evidence Shows George Soros Behind Ferguson Race Riots | George, Barack and Hillary the axis of evil Professional race activists Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie (ShordeeDooWhop), pictured here in Baltimore, helped whip up the Ferguson mobs. This year Fortune Magazine named these two professional activists two of the world s greatest leaders.Many conservatives rightly smelled a rat in the supposed organic race-riot movement that sprang up so quickly in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 after the shooting death of robber Michael Brown. After burning the Ferguson and Dellwood, Missouri business districts to the ground the radical left has relentlessly sought to recreate the same discord and disinformation in various locations around the U.S. Ferguson #BlackLivesMatter protest leaders have been flown to New York, South Carolina, Milwaukee, Selma, and more recently to McKinney, Texas and Hillary s campaign relaunch in New York.Thankfully, every day patriots and online conservative investigators still fight to shine truth, anywhere the movement tries to sow its twisted seeds to foment anger, feed bitterness, and breed division.Much has been printed about the paid protesters and Soros connections.** Nearly half of the roughly 500 businesses operating in Ferguson and adjacent communities, such as Dellwood and Jennings, suffered property damage or lost revenue as a result of the coordinated Ferguson protests and riots.In May black Ferguson activists staged a protest at the office of MORE (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment) to complain that the group s white leaders collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations off of the Black Lives Matter movement without paying the Black participants their fair share. It was during these protests that Ferguson activists admitted that fellow protesters were making MORE THAN $5,000 a month to disrupt cities, damage property and attack police!In response to these protests MORE released a list of names and amounts paid out to protesters and protest groups who agitated and harassed police night-after-night in Ferguson last fall and winter.The list of over 80 groups and individuals was posted on Twitter by an irate protester. Via Weasel ZippersOne of the protest leaders who showed up in Ferguson shortly after Michael Brown s death was DeRay McKesson from Minneapolis. DeRay and fellow activist Johnetta Elzie (ShordeeDooWhop) were nationally recognized and celebrated by the liberal media as two of the top stars of the violent protest mob.We now know that DeRay McKesson has been working with and for Soros-funded groups since he was in junior high school. We know this because DeRay released his resume online this past weekend.DeRay says he s been living off of savings for the past nine months as he s turned up in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York City, Milwaukee, Selma, McKinney and this past weekend he was at Hillary Clinton s campaign relaunch in New York state.DeRay and Charles Wade, Solange Knowles s stylist, the founder of Op Help or Hush have known each other for three years. Wade and McKesson were regular Ferguson protesters. That means the two have been affiliated well before Michael Brown went on his crime spree. DeRay has used his capacity, as Charles calls it, to push the movement s agenda far and wide.DeRay has long been known for his skill at community organizing .He served as president of his class at Bowdoin College, as well as president of Bowdoin Student Government. While at Bowdoin, DeRay reportedly grew close to Bowdoin President Barry Mills, whose wife, Karen Gordon Mills, served in the Obama Administration. DeRay just happened to stay on the couch of an unnamed Bowdoin alum when he first descended on Ferguson.After graduating from Bowdoin, DeRay worked for the Harlem Children s Zone, run by none other than Bowdoin alums Druckenmiller and Geoffrey Canada. Coincidentally, Geoffrey served on the Open Society Institute s board.Throwback, meeting HCZ's Geoff Canada. pic.twitter.com/ocyw6Yo57q deray mckesson (@deray) February 16, 2015DeRay also worked for the movement linked Teach For America, another radical Soros-funded group.But DeRay s ties to Soros and community organizing seemingly date back even further, to McKesson s teen years, at least. Suffice it to say, DeRay has been tied to Soros for more than a decade, through many programs.Perhaps DeRay s long and numerous apparent ties to Soros explain how he was so quickly dispatched to Ferguson, Missouri to take control of the protesters and become the powerfuls approved and promoted voice on the ground. As DeRay said, People will come out into the streets to confront a system that is corrupt. Yet, DeRay seems to be molded, directed, and funded by some of the most powerful men in that very system. It looks as if someone may be pulling the strings behind the scenes to foment rage as this astroturf anti-police movement spreads from Ferguson to other points in America.Via: Gateway PunditAND LAST BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST...Here s Deray throwing his support behind Hillary on Twitter! What a surprise | 1real |
This Irish TV channel killed their weather presenter for Halloween | Next Swipe left/right This Irish TV channel killed their weather presenter for Halloween What did you do to celebrate Halloween last night? Irish language broadcaster TG4 killed their weather presenter. RIP Caitlín Nic Aoidh. Wtf just happened to caitlin on the weather tonight? #TG4XX pic.twitter.com/IOUR3xiLgy | 1real |
Bret Baier: FBI Indictment ALMOST certain in Hillary case | Bret Baier: FBI Indictment ALMOST certain in Hillary case November 03, 2016
Fox News’ Bret Baier says his sources claim that an indictment is almost certain in the new FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Baier made the claim Wednesday night during a broadcast of “On the Record” with Brit Hume. Baier: “Lot of evidence” had been recovered from Anthony Wiener’s laptop. “I pressed, again and again, on this very issue. These sources said, yes, the investigations will continues [sic], there’s a lot of evidence, and barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they’ll continue to, likely, an indictment.” Baier didn’t say exactly who would be the most most likely target of an indictment, nor the timeline. Baiser sources: Greater than 99 percent confidence that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies.
(WASHINGTON, DC) Citing sources at the FBI, Fox News anchor Bret Baier said the FBI’s renewed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server will almost certainly end in an indictment, unless some sort of “obstruction” arises.
Baier made the claim Wednesday night during a broadcast of “On the Record” with Brit Hume. He said that a “lot of evidence” had been recovered from Anthony Wiener’s laptop, and made an eventual indictment appear very likely, even if it came months after the election.
“I pressed, again and again, on this very issue,” Baier told Hume. “These sources said, yes, the investigations will continues [sic], there’s a lot of evidence, and barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they’ll continue to, likely, an indictment.”
Baier didn’t say exactly who would be the most most likely target of an indictment, and what the timeline on such an indictment would be.
Baier also said that his sources had greater than 99 percent confidence that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies. When FBI Director James Comey first announced last summer that no charges would be recommended regarding Clinton’s server, he said the FBI had no way of knowing whether the server had been hacked.
Clinton’s presidential campaign aggressively downplayed the severity of the renewed investigation into her private email server, and criticized the judgment of Comey for publicly announcing it.
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We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories | 1real |
New Trump immigration efforts aim to stop child border crossers | NEW YORK (Reuters) - Many of the immigration initiatives launched by the Trump administration in recent weeks target one kind of migrant: children. The measures are aimed at expelling young people already in the United States illegally and preventing new ones from crossing into the country. Some of the policy shifts have generated headlines, including Trump’s decision in September to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. That measure, put in place by former President Barack Obama in 2012, allowed nearly 800,000 young people brought to the United States illegally as children the ability to live, work and study in the country without fear of deportation. Other proposals and actions have received far less attention. The Trump administration has recently intensified scrutiny of abused and neglected foreign minors applying to stay in the United States. It is seeking to restrict who qualifies for special protections granted to children crossing the border alone. And it is stepping up prosecutions of adults who paid smugglers to bring unaccompanied kids to the United States. The White House also announced this fall it will end a program allowing Central American minors to apply for U.S. asylum while still living abroad. At the same time, the administration is exploring ways to scrap legal protections that limit how long and under what conditions children can be held in immigration detention centers. In response to questions about the changes in immigration policy focused on children, the White House said that relevant agencies were reviewing ways to help “law enforcement professionals to do their jobs and keep the country safe.” (For a graphic on Trump policies targeting young immigrants, see: tmsnrt.rs/2zaT2BK) Trump came to office promising to crack down on immigration. That message grew stronger this week in the wake of a terrorist attack in New York by a 29-year-old immigrant awarded a green card through a visa lottery program the president has now vowed to end. Some of his messaging on child immigrants also reflects security concerns. In a speech in Long Island in July, Trump called out “alien minors” as responsible for gang-related killings in the United States. “These are animals,” he said of members of the notorious Central American gang MS-13. In addition, the administration says it wants to prevent children from undertaking perilous journeys to the United States and eliminate fraud from programs for young immigrants. “The President wants to stop the incentives for vulnerable children to come here illegally,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech in Texas in October. In another speech last month, he blamed “dirty immigration lawyers” for encouraging clients to game the process. Some immigration advocates see the president’s focus on young border crossers differently. Children are perceived sympathetically by the public and have more legal protections than other immigrants, giving authorities less flexibility to deport them, they say. It is “in the administration’s interest to paint unaccompanied children as gang bangers and not as asylum seekers fleeing violence and abuse,” said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Michael Tan. “The administration wants the public to perceive these children as monsters and not people deserving of refuge.” President Trump is not the first president to try to crack down on minors crossing the border illegally. Obama prioritized the removal of young immigrants after the number of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border peaked at more than 68,000 in 2014, most of them from violence-torn Central America. Trump campaigned on a promise to toughen enforcement further, saying Obama’s policies had failed. After he took office early in 2017, apprehensions of unaccompanied minors dropped sharply, to a low of just over 990 in April from more than 4,400 in January. But the number of arrests has begun rising again, with nearly 3,000 unaccompanied minors caught in August, according to government data. One target of the administration is a legal agreement dating back to 1997 that bars the government from holding child immigrants for long periods. The so-called Flores settlement addressed what advocates said were harsh conditions for kids held in immigration detention facilities. To settle a class-action lawsuit, the government agreed to release minors quickly to adult relatives or licensed childcare programs, or to put them in the “least restrictive” setting possible if other options were not available. Faced with 2014 surge in illegal crossings, the Obama administration fought broad legal interpretations of the agreement in court to make it easier to detain families. The Trump White House now wants to scrap it altogether. An internal memo dated Sept. 8 written by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and reviewed by Reuters called the two-decade-old legal agreement “unworkable,” and presented four options to fight or end it. Among them: DHS could ask a federal court to dissolve the Flores deal, a move the memo acknowledged could prove difficult given past rulings that have bolstered the agreement. A DHS spokesperson said the agency would not comment on “internal working documents.” The administration is focused not just on stopping illegal border crossings by children but also on limiting their ability to stay once they reach the United States. One of its targets is SIJS, or special immigrant juvenile status, a program for foreign minors who have been abused, abandoned or neglected. To qualify, children have to prove their mistreatment in U.S. family court, after which they are protected from deportation and allowed to apply for green cards. SIJS applications ballooned following the 2014 surge in unaccompanied minors. The program’s numbers hit 19,475 in the 2016 fiscal year, a more than 1,000 percent increase from 1,646 in fiscal year 2010. The White House and immigration hard-liners in Congress say lawyers have taken advantage of the program by using it for kids who are not in the kind of peril the statute was intended to address. Chief among their complaints is that children abandoned by one parent can apply for SIJS even if another parent is providing adequate care. The administration is already taking steps to limit the program. Immigration attorneys say government scrutiny of SIJS petitions has increased, slowing the approval process and leaving kids in limbo. Approvals from April to June totaled 1,862, down more than 50 percent from the previous three-month period, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS acknowledged that it has stepped up scrutiny of petitions “to ensure that they meet criteria for approval.” But the agency stressed that the majority of applications are still approved. From January through June of this year 5,671 SIJS petitions were approved while 403 applications were denied. Meanwhile pending applications are ballooning, totaling 22,745 through June, as new petitions grow. The delays are creating confusion for young immigrants such as 20-year-old Drucilla. She says her mother neglected her after bringing her to the United States illegally from Jamaica when she was three years old following her father’s murder. Drucilla eventually moved in with an aunt in New York and applied for SIJS last year in order to stay in the country. Drucilla, who asked only be identified by her first name, said she is nervous about the outcome of her case after U.S. officials recently requested additional documents to substantiate her claims. “Growing up, nothing was ever in my control,” she said. “I have a lot of anxiety.” See how the administration’s actions affect people, communities, institutions and companies at The Trump Effect www.reuters.com/trump-effect | 0fake |
China's tighter drone rules send new pilots flocking to school | BEIJING (Reuters) - A buzz fills the sky above a flight base in northern Beijing, as pilots practise take-offs and landings ahead of tests to qualify for a license - to fly drones. Drone enthusiasts in China, the world s top maker of consumer unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are scrambling for licenses after the government adopted strict rules this year to tackle incidents of drones straying into aircraft flight paths. A drone is not a toy, said Yang Nuo, the principal of the drone training school in the Chinese capital, who expects more students to sign up in a drive to boost flying skills. It involves complicated aerial theoretical knowledge. Gao Huiqiang, 32, said his construction company told him to seek a license. Since the laws on drones are tightening and a legal framework is being built, they told me to come and get the license first, he added. In June, China set an end-August deadline for owners of civilian drones to register crafts up to a certain weight under their real names. Last week, a test-flight base opened in the commercial hub of Shanghai, which requires civilian drones to fly below 150 m (492 ft), the official news agency s Xinhuanet website said. Others have balked at the idea of spending around 10,000 yuan ($1,534) for an official qualification, particularly as uncertainty surrounds future regulations. They don t know when the next regulation will be introduced, said Hao Jiale, the manager at a DJI drone store. Some people want to wait and see. Privately-held SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd, based in the southeastern city of Shenzen, had a roughly 70 percent share of the global commercial and consumer drone market, according to a 2016 estimate by Goldman Sachs and Oppenheimer analysts. Despite the curbs, prospects for growth look bright. China s camera drone market will see a compound annual growth rate of 68 percent in five years, with shipments reaching 3 million units by 2019, up from 40,000 in the third quarter of 2015, tech research firm IDC said last year. More than 120,000 drones have been registered in China, Xinhuanet said, compared to just 77,000 registered users in the United States. | 0fake |
FAKE NEWS UPDATE: Newsweek Reporter Caught LYING About Trump Supporters Booing Late John Glenn Tries To Cover Tracks | Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald came under fire Thursday after sending a tweet that incorrectly reported that Iowa supporters of president-elect Donald Trump booed astronaut and former senator John Glenn when informed of his recent passing.Eichenwald s initial tweet (which has since been deleted) racked up thousands of retweets and likes in a short time. MediaiteWhen asked why they might have booed, he speculated that it was because Glenn was a Democrat.He just moved on, said "maybe they'll come around." I think context was that Glenn was a democrat. Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 9, 2016But notice the interesting tidbit, that Trump said maybe they ll come around. According to other reports on the ground, Trump said this while his supporters were booing protesters.Post-election Trump: as protesters heckle and crowd boos them, he says: "I think they're actually on our side. They just don't know it yet." pic.twitter.com/qFSH3qUVUE Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) December 9, 2016Eichenwald s false tweet shouldn t surprise anyone, given his obsession with pumping out FAKE news about Trump s ties to Russia, and how they affected the outcome of our election. The mainstream media is panicking over the realization that they ve lost their influence over Americans, and the market share with advertisers to alternative conservative alternative news sources. And now, it s their obsession with convincing Americans that Trump worked with the Russians to influence the outcome of our election.After Eichenwald was caught fabricating story about Trump supporters, he made an apology on Twitter: Meanwhile, he s still trying to excuse Hillary s seizure in NYC at the 9-11 ceremony as pneumonia related:It s time to get over it Kurt Hillary lost. America voted for a majority in the House and Senate, and for the next two years, there are no more chances at changing that simple fact. | 1real |
Johnson & Johnson Loses Yet Another Multimillion Dollar Case Over Baby Powder | By Brandon Turbeville In the latest development in the Johnson & Johnson talcum powder saga, a St. Louis jury has awarded a California woman over... | 1real |
Casts Of Broadway’s ‘Hamilton’ And ‘Color Purple’ Give Stunning Musical Tribute To Fallen Icon Prince (VIDEO) | The world is reeling from the shocking news of the death of musical icon Prince on Thursday. There has been an outpouring of grief, as well as amazing tributes to the man who shaped pop culture and music like no other. Among the many tributes being paid to Prince are two amazing musical displays from the casts of Hamilton and Color Purple on Broadway.Both casts finished their Thursday night editions of their musicals by singing Prince songs. The Hamilton cast chose to dance to an instrumental rendition of Let s Go Crazy, which is one of the icon s most famous and timeless songs. Here is video of that performance via Raw Story:The cast of Color Purple, instead, chose to sing the iconic classic Purple Rain. That is the song that really catapulted Prince to the top of the charts upon its release on the album by the same name in 1984. Here is video of that beautiful tribute, led by Color Purple star Jennifer Hudson:These tributes are nothing short of absolutely beautiful and definitely appropriate. Prince has to be one of the most important figures in modern music, and his influence is legendary. He will truly be missed, by fans, celebrities, and everyone in between worldwide.Thank you, Broadway, for giving us these beautiful tributes in our time of mourning.Featured image via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images | 1real |
Telescope That ‘Ate Astronomy’ Is on Track to Surpass Hubble - The New York Times | GREENBELT, Md. — The next great space telescope spread its golden wings this month. Like the petals of a sunflower seeking the light, the 18 hexagonal mirrors that make up the heart of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope were faced toward a balcony overlooking a cavernous clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center here. Inside the room, reporters and a gaggle of space agency officials, including the ebullient administrator Charles Bolden, were getting their pictures taken in front of the giant mirror. Now, after 20 years with a budget of $8. 7 billion, the Webb telescope is on track and on budget to be launched in October 2018 and sent a million miles from Earth, NASA says. The telescope, named after NASA Administrator James Webb, who led the space agency in the 1960s, is the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope. Seven times larger than the Hubble in ability, the Webb was designed to see farther out in space and deeper into the past of the universe. It may solve mysteries about how and when the first stars and galaxies emerged some 13 billion years ago in the smoky aftermath of the Big Bang. Equipped with the sort of infrared goggles that give troops and police officers night vision, the Webb would peer into the dust clouds and gas storms of the Milky Way in which stars and planets are presently being birthed. It would be able to study planets around other stars. That has been NASA’s dream since 1996 when the idea for the telescope was conceived with a projected price tag then of $500 million But as recently as six years ago, the James Webb Space Telescope was, in the words of Nature magazine, “the telescope that ate astronomy,” mismanaged, over budget and behind schedule so that it had crushed everything else out of NASA’s science budget. A House subcommittee once voted to cancel it. Instead, the program was rebooted with a strict spending cap. The scientific capabilities of the telescope emerged unscathed from that period, astronomers on the project say. The major change, said Jonathan P. Gardner, the deputy senior project scientist, was to simplify the testing of the telescope. Most of the pain was dealt to other NASA projects like a proposed space telescope to study dark energy, which the National Academy of Sciences had hoped to put on a fast track to be launched this decade. It’s now delayed until 2025 or so. Typically for NASA, the Webb telescope was a technologically ambitious project, requiring 10 new technologies to make it work. Bill Ochs, a veteran Goddard engineer who became project manager in 2010 during what he calls the “replan,” said the key to its success so far, was having enough money in the budget to provide a cushion for nasty surprises. The telescope smiling up at us like a giant Tiffany shaving mirror is 6. 5 meters in diameter, or just over 21 feet, compared with 2. 4 meters for the Hubble. The aim is to explore a realm of cosmic history about 150 million to one billion years after time began — known as the reionization epoch, when bright and violent new stars and the searing radiation from quasars were burning away a gloomy fog of hydrogen gas that prevailed at the end of the Big Bang. In fact, astronomers don’t know how the spectacle that greets our eyes every night when the sun goes down or the lights go out wrenched itself into luminous existence. They theorize that an initial generation of stars made purely of hydrogen and helium — the elements created during the Big Bang — burned ferociously and exploded apocalyptically, the seeding of the cosmos with progressively more diverse materials. But nobody has ever seen any Population 3 stars, as those first stars are known. They don’t exist in the modern universe. Astronomers have to hunt them in the dim past. That ambition requires the Webb to be tuned to a different kind of light than our eyes or the Hubble can see. Because the expansion of the cosmos is rushing those earliest stars and galaxies away from us so fast, their light is “ ” to longer wavelengths the way the siren from an ambulance shifts to a lower register as it passes by. So blue light from an infant galaxy bursting with bright spanking new stars way back then has been stretched to invisible infrared wavelengths, or heat radiation, by the time it reaches us 13 billion years later. As a result, the Webb telescope will produce cosmic postcards in colors no eye has ever seen. It also turns out that infrared emanations are the best way to study exoplanets, the worlds beyond our own solar system that have been discovered in the thousands since the Webb telescope was first conceived. In order to see those infrared colors, however, the telescope has to be very cold — less than 45 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero — so that its own heat does not swamp the heat from outer space. Once in space, the telescope will unfold a giant umbrella the size of a tennis court to keep the sun off it. The telescope, marooned in permanent shade a million miles beyond the moon, will experience an infinite cold soak. The sunshield consists of five thin, layers of a material called Kapton. Way too big to fit into a rocket, the shield, as well as the telescope mirror, will have be launched folded up. It will then be unfolded in space in a series of some 180 maneuvers that look in computer animations like a cross between a parachute opening and a swimming pool cover going into place. Or at least that is the $8 billion plan. Engineers have done it on the ground, and it worked. The same people who refolded the shield after each test will fold it again, in a process Mr. Ochs compares to packing up your parachute before a jump. The test will come in space, where no one will be able to help if things go wrong. That whole process will amount to what Mr. Ochs called “six months of high anxiety. ” “For the most part, it all has to work,” Mr. Ochs said. The last time NASA did something this big astronomically, in 1990, things didn’t quite work. Once in orbit, the Hubble couldn’t be focused it had a misshapen mirror that had never been properly tested. Astronauts eventually fitted it with corrective lenses, and it went on to become the crown jewel of astronomy. Making sure that doesn’t happen this time is the agenda for the next two years. “Our telescope is finished,” John C. Mather, the senior project scientist, said. “Now we are about to prove it works. ” In the coming weeks, the mirror and the box of scientific instruments on its back will be put on a rig and shaken to simulate the vibrations of a launch, and then sealed in an acoustic chamber and bombarded with the noise of a launch. If the parts survive unscathed, the telescope assembly will be shipped to a giant vacuum chamber at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. There it will be chilled to the temperatures at which it will have to work, and engineers will actually focus the telescope, twiddling the controls for seven actuators on each of the 18 mirror segments. No Hubble surprises here. Then the telescope will go to Los Angeles to be mounted on its gigantic sunshield. That whole contraption, now too big for even the giant military transport plane, will travel by ship through the Panama Canal to French Guiana. It will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket supplied by the European Space Agency as part of Europe’s contribution to the observatory, and go into orbit around the sun at a point called L2 about a million miles from Earth. Canada, NASA’s other partner, supplied some of the instruments. Then come the six months of anxiety. Sometime in the spring of 2019, if all goes well, the telescope will record its first real image — of what, the assembled astronomers were not ready to guess. In a bonus undreamed of when the Webb telescope was first conceived, it looks as if the Hubble will still be going strong when the Webb is launched. They will share the sky and the potential for joint observing projects. A million miles apart, they can view objects in the solar system from different angles, providing a kind of stereoscopic perspective. Besides the expected baby galaxies and the exoplanets, there are, as astronomers like to remind us, always new surprises (like colliding black holes when the LIGO observatory was turned on last year) when humanity devises a new way to look at the sky. Asked what the telescope’s greatest discovery would be, Dr. Mather said, “If I knew, I would tell you. ” Nor would the project members talk about contingency plans to rescue the telescope if anything goes wrong a million miles from Earth. There are no plans to fix it or bring it back. They know how to attach a probe or robot to the telescope, Dr. Mather said, but “we are planning to not need it, thank you. ” | 0fake |
WOW! OBAMA Manages To Insult Black Graduates During Unreal Grad Speech [Video] | Obama spoke to graduates of Howard University and managed to offend and confuse everyone with his jerky speech. He told these grads they re lucky among other things in this rant-filled lecture. No words just shock! | 1real |
FIRST LOOK: Obamas Spotted In British Virgin Islands On Well-Deserved Vacation (VIDEO) | With everything being so utterly chaotic under the new seeming dictatorship of Donald Trump, it s left many longing for the days of former President Barack Obama.In only a little over a week, Trump has signed nearly two dozen Executive Orders, causing chaos at home and abroad.However, for all those desperately seeking a break from the new fascist regime of the Trump administration, the Obama family was spotted in the British Virgin Islands.According to TMZ: Barack and Michelle were spotted Tuesday on one of the British Virgin Islands with their pal, Sir Richard Branson. The former First Couple touched down on Branson s nearby Necker Island just over a week ago. The Obamas look happy and healthy and, best of all, relaxed. They definitely seem to be taking in the sun and sand of a very deserved vacation after being First Family of the nation for eight years. Goodness knows they need it.The last thing the Obamas likely want is to be brought into the turmoil of the Trump administration. However, knowing Barack Obama, and the fact the fact that he loves the nation more than himself, he ll undoubtedly do whatever he can to prevent Trump from unraveling his eight years of progress.In the mean time, enjoy the Obamas are enjoying their time off.Watch here:Barack Obama & Michelle Obama spotted out in the British Virgin Islands pic.twitter.com/IhWsoRXbxu MEFeater Magazine (@mefeater) February 1, 2017Featured image via video screen capture | 1real |
“Mommy am I Going To Die?” Mom Calls 911 For Paramedic, Cop Shows Up, Shoots 4 Year Old Daughter | Whiten Your Face By Using One Ingredient Wrinkles Will Disappear Ξ [November 2, 2016] BLOG “Mommy am I Going To Die?” Mom Calls 911 For Paramedic, Cop Shows Up, Shoots 4 Year Old Daughter posted by Eddie A mother’s attempt to get medical help for a cut on her arm turned into a nightmare after a trigger happy cop showed up. The dramatic 9-1-1 recordings were just published, detailing this insane incident that happened back in June. The nightmare began after Andrea Ellis had cut her arm on some glass and her sister dialed 9-1-1 for medical help. “She’s bleeding all over the place!” her sister said in the call. “I need a paramedic!” As she was on the call, her sister saw a police officer nearby and called him over for help. “Sir, can you get me a paramedic?! I need a paramedic here!” she said. According to the report by Inside Edition: But as the cop approached the house , events took a horrific turn. Cops said the family pet – a boxer terrier mix named Patches, charged at the officer. The cop fired his gun, and the bullet hit Andrea’s four-year-old daughter, Ava, in the leg, shattering the bone. “She asked me several times, ‘Mommy, am I gonna die?’” Andrea Ellis told INSIDE EDITION. The next 9-1-1 call would come from Ellis’ neighbor to report the cop shooting a child. “ My neighbor across the street had an officer at her door and she’s screaming that he shot a child,” said the neighbor. “They had started to cut her pants off her and I just see blood everywhere,” her mother said, describing the horrific scene. Luckily, the bullet didn’t hit Ava a few inches higher in the stomach, which could’ve proved fatal . The shot did, however, shatter her bone. The officer involved has not been disciplined , but the Columbus police department assures the public that the incident is under investigation. Source: | 1real |
U.N. says U.S. withdrawal from Paris deal 'major disappointment' | UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States’ decision to withdraw from the landmark Paris climate agreement was a “major disappointment for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote global security,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Thursday. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “remains confident that cities, states and businesses within the United States - along with other countries - will continue to demonstrate vision and leadership by working for the low-carbon, resilient economic growth that will create quality jobs and markets for 21st century prosperity,” Dujarric said. He said it was crucial that the United States remains a leader on environmental issues and that Guterres looked forward to engaging with the U.S. government “to build the sustainable future on which our grandchildren depend.” | 0fake |
Prerequisite for Key White House Posts: Loyalty, Not Experience - The New York Times | WASHINGTON — President Trump’s point man on negotiations is a longtime Trump Organization lawyer with no government or diplomatic experience. His liaison to leaders is a former villain with a penchant for résumé inflation. And his Oval Office gatekeeper is a former New York City cop best known for smacking a protester on the head. Every president sweeps into office with a coterie of friends and who sometimes have minimal experience in the arcana of the federal government. But few have arrived with a contingent more colorful and controversial than that of Mr. Trump, whose White House is peppered with assistants and advisers whose principal qualification is their long friendship with Mr. Trump and his family. There is Jason Greenblatt, the former Trump Organization lawyer, whose portfolio now includes peace in the West Bank, international trade deals and relations with Cuba. Omarosa Manigault, whose star turn on “The Apprentice” propelled the show’s breakout first season, is now among about two dozen aides with the rank of assistant to the president — and one of the few with privileges for the Oval Office. Most other staff members must go through Keith Schiller, who rose from security guard at the Trump Organization to its director of security. Mr. Schiller is now the director of Oval Office operations, controlling physical access to a president whose whims and frustrations routinely send aides throughout the building scurrying to deflect, defend and justify. The influence of longtime Trump friends and associates — some of them with vague portfolios — comes as a leadership void has been created by the Trump administration’s slow pace in filling top jobs in many agencies. It has also added to the confusion of a West Wing already legendary for its power struggles, while bewildering Washington policy hands. “Titles do matter,” said Paul C. Light, a presidential scholar at New York University. “You don’t say: ‘You are my buddy you are my friend you were with me on my television show. I’m going to give you a really great title.’ These are not things to be handed out like candy. ” To help him wrangle Silicon Valley chief executives and modernize United States government technology systems, Mr. Trump has hired Reed Cordish, the scion of a Baltimore real estate dynasty who is married to a close college friend of Ivanka Trump, who set them up. In a statement, Mr. Cordish said his real estate experience had taught him how to successfully meld public and private interests. The president also recently hired Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and a Trump family friend, to work in the White House Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs. Mr. Giuliani, 31, who made headlines after he sued Duke University for kicking him off the college golf team, previously worked in sales and marketing at a small suburban New York financial firm. Personal relationships with the president often bestow a power exceeding official West Wing job titles. Valerie Jarrett, a businesswoman, former city official in Chicago and longtime friend of the Obamas, was renowned for her unmatched access to President Barack Obama and reach into policy matters far beyond her official portfolio. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House press spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump had recruited highly skilled advisers with refreshingly different backgrounds. “Even though some of the staff doesn’t have government experience it doesn’t mean they are amateurs,” she wrote in an email. “President Trump has promised to change Washington and you can’t do that by putting Washington bureaucrats in charge of everything. ” If Mr. Trump appears more eager than past presidents to bring in longtime associates with limited Washington experience, friends said, it stems partly from his background of four decades at the helm of a closely held family business, with no experience in public service. He has had to assemble a White House team largely from scratch, tapping a party apparatus he believed had tried to deny him the nomination and a Republican policy elite that had largely opposed him. The bulk of his senior White House aides were unknown to him until two years ago. ”Trump doesn’t have a longtime staff of political aides these loyalists fill that vacuum,” said Christopher Ruddy, a friend and chief executive of Newsmax Media, the conservative news site. “He is figuring out who he can depend on. ” Mr. Schiller, 58, a former narcotics detective, has protected Mr. Trump for 18 years. The head of a Praetorian Guard of private security detectives, Mr. Schiller occupied a Trump Tower office on the same floor as his boss and learned, he said, to anticipate his wishes. A fierce protector of Mr. Trump’s image and interests, he physically removed a reporter from a 2015 news conference on the campaign trail after he repeatedly questioned Mr. Trump without being called on. Five activists later sued Mr. Schiller, the Trump Organization and other Trump security guards, claiming they had been assaulted during a protest outside Trump Tower in September 2015. Mr. Schiller has acknowledged hitting one man but said the man attacked him first. No longer responsible for Mr. Trump’s physical safety, he is now a combination gatekeeper, valet and security blanket — a familiar face for a president who detests solitude and whose wife and youngest son have remained at Trump Tower. But Mr. Schiller has not entirely shed his role as Mr. Trump’s enforcer. During a briefing on health care legislation on Friday, he shouted at reporters to clear out of the Roosevelt Room after they tried to question Mr. Trump about continuing controversies. Mr. Greenblatt’s ties to Mr. Trump have translated into more striking levels of power and prestige. A lawyer who helped Mr. Trump negotiate business deals for two decades, Mr. Greenblatt rose to become the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer and executive vice president. Now, as special representative for international negotiations for the White House, Mr. Greenblatt, 49, is charged with negotiating trade agreements and overseeing the conflict and United relations. Mr. Trump has called him “brilliant. ” But experts say it is hard to imagine how anyone, no matter how intelligent, could handle three such sensitive and complex assignments without previous experience. “Our sense is that the Trump White House views the foreign policy establishment as pretty feckless. They seem to think that applying a business approach can work better,” said Martin S. Indyk, the executive vice president of the Brookings Institution, who was President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East. “Not to have experience or knowledge of the issues in dispute, nor any relationship with the Palestinians, will be a challenge,” he said. In announcing his appointment, Mr. Trump said Mr. Greenblatt’s success in negotiating complex transactions and building consensus made him the ideal roving global negotiator. Mr. Greenblatt has told reporters that after so many years at Mr. Trump’s side, “I know how he thinks I know how to get his bidding done. ” In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Greenblatt suggested calling back later when “I’ll have something to actually say that’s meaningful. ” Through the press office, he addressed the trade aspect of his portfolio, saying that working with Mr. Trump taught him how government can impede job creation. Still, C. Fred Bergsten, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a member of the president’s Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, said he had never known a White House official “outside of the trade policy network who has been assigned negotiation of trade issues. ” By law, the Office of the United States Trade Representative is charged with negotiating trade deals. Various secretaries also weigh in on policy. “So what would that leave for this guy?” Mr. Bergsten asked. “It’s very mysterious. ” A sign of Mr. Greenblatt’s expansive role came last month, not long after he traveled to Capitol Hill with Peter Navarro — a economist who is head of Mr. Trump’s newly created National Trade Council — to discuss trade policy with staff aides of the Senate Finance Committee. Mr. Greenblatt missed a session with senators because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was visiting the White House that day. “He’s got to negotiate Middle East peace,” Mr. Navarro quipped to the senators, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “So he can’t be here today. ” Although Mr. Greenblatt has not been given the title of special envoy to the Middle East, he appears to be acting in that role too. Visiting the region this week, he met Mr. Netanyahu in Israel on Monday and is scheduled to meet the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. A State Department spokesman said Monday that a senior National Security Council official was accompanying Mr. Greenblatt, but was unsure whether a State Department official had been included. Mr. Greenblatt appears more independent of the State Department than at least some previous envoys he has told others he reports not to Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, but to the president’s Jared Kushner, 36, one of the most senior White House advisers. And where past envoys were foreign policy specialists, Mr. Greenblatt told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in April that his main sources of information were daily email alerts, material supplied by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a weekly Jewish radio program. “There’s just a tremendous amount of literature out there, emails and all that, so I read all of those as often as I can,” he said then. Still, Mr. Greenblatt seemed at that point somewhat taken aback that Mr. Trump had identified him to the news agency as his principal adviser on Israel, telling reporters that Mr. Greenblatt was so passionate that “when he goes on vacation, he goes to Israel. ” “I knew that he was relying on me for certain aspects of Israel, but I didn’t know I was his top adviser,” he said. Ms. Manigault, 43, has no policy experience, a spotty history in her previous federal positions and a résumé that has cast her — inaccurately — as a university professor and a former top aide to Vice President Al Gore. Yet, to the consternation of the president’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and others, Mr. Trump has given her the same title of presidential assistant as Mr. Priebus and other senior aides — and regularly includes her in strategy sessions on the budget and other matters. She said in a January interview in Variety that Mr. Trump “really wanted me to have the freedom to work on many different things. ” In a statement from the White House press office, Ms. Manigault said that “while some people try to tear me down,” she was focused on giving women, minorities and other groups a voice in the White House. Nominally, Ms. Manigault directs the office of communications in the White House’s public liaison office, a midlevel post. She is also a bridge to groups, including the heads of more than 60 historically black colleges and universities who met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office last month. She also joined a State Department delegation to the inauguration of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse. She said Mr. Moïse had invited her because of her previous hurricane relief work in the country. “She is the in the White House, and she has the ear of the president,” said Paris Dennard, a White House director of outreach under President George W. Bush. “That is a good thing. ” During the presidential campaign, Ms. Manigault cast herself as an insider, saying Mr. Trump has called her “his Valerie Jarrett. ” In an interview published last June in Essence magazine, she said, “I’m the person who pulls him back when he goes too far. ” In her White House post, she has already had a few reminiscent of her role on “The Apprentice,” including a much publicized confrontation with a veteran White House reporter. (Mr. Trump also sponsored a dating show called “The Ultimate Merger” in which she starred.) Ms. Manigault has told others that she earned her way to a White House position. She grew up on welfare in a housing project in Youngstown, Ohio, and lost her father to violence at age 7, but went on to earn a college degree and, at age 24, a job in the office of Vice President Al Gore. But while her ascent is impressive, it is not quite as she has described it. On a 2005 résumé provided by a former employer, she described herself as Mr. Gore’s “senior scheduling and advance coordinator” overseeing all aspects of his schedule. She continues to maintain that description is accurate and that she succeeded at the job. But numerous former staff members in that office said that she was pushed out of an $ job replying to invitations to Mr. Gore after 13 months, leaving a pile of unanswered correspondence under her desk. “She was the worst hire we ever made,” said Mary Margaret Overbey, Mr. Gore’s former office administrator. Ms. Manigault transferred to a job as deputy associate director of presidential personnel, then eight months later moved to the Commerce Department. In her statement, she said she performed well in that job. But Cheryl Shavers, then the agency’s under secretary for technology administration, disagreed, saying Ms. Manigault “was unqualified and disruptive,” so “I had her removed. ” On her official website and elsewhere, Ms. Manigault also has identified herself as a professor at Howard University in Washington. But Anthony D. Owens, a university spokesman, said she actually was a “facilitator and presenter. ” A letter from the university that Ms. Manigault provided states that she was an instructor, a temporary position. Ms. Manigault also maintains that the only requirement left for her to complete a doctorate at Howard is to defend her dissertation. But Carolyn M. Byerly, chairwoman of the university’s communications department, said that according to the university’s rules, the period for her to do that expired more than a decade ago. Ms. Manigault tweeted her support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2014, but when Mr. Trump decided to run for president she joined his campaign and defended him vigorously. At an victory party in November, she gave a television interview during which she warned that Mr. Trump’s campaign was keeping an “enemies” list. Her “Apprentice” pugnacity notwithstanding, Mr. Trump insists there is a side of her that she keeps well hidden. “Omarosa’s actually a very nice person,” he joked at a Roosevelt Room breakfast that she helped organize last month to celebrate Black History Month. “Nobody knows that. ” | 0fake |
Trump’s Ghostwriter Issues DIRE Warning About His Dangerous Current Mental State (VIDEO) | Tony Schwartz is a man who knows Donald Trump well. He spent nearly two years glued to Trump s side as they wrote Trump s famous book, The Art of the Deal. During this time, Schwartz learned some very disturbing things about Trump s broken personality, and for this reason, felt deep remorse for helping to make Trump as famous as he is.During the 2016 presidential campaign, Schwartz tirelessly warned America that this man was dangerous, that he had no conscience, that he had no soul, that he would be gravely dangerous as president. Now that a Trump presidency has come to pass, and the Trump White House is mired in deep scandal, Schwartz is speaking out again, to warn the nation and world about Trump s dangerous mental state.Schwartz has written a piece in the Washington Post explaining Trump s recent behavior, who the man is, his current state of mind, and the impulsive and dangerous actions that are sure to come.On Wednesday evening, Schwartz appeared on CNN s Anderson Cooper 360. He told host Anderson Cooper of Trump s likely mental state regarding the series of blows and events relating to the incompetence of his administration, and especially the Trump/Russia collusion investigation: I think he s reacting from a survival place. He s in pure defensive mode. I think that he s being run by the part of his brain that s reactive and impulsive, not capable of reflection. The sense of siege that he feels because his sense of self-worth is so, so vulnerable that the series of things that have happened are overwhelming to him. In other words, right now, Trump is like a caged animal who is feeling attacked, and he is not thinking clearly at all. It s pure impulse and reaction. Trump is dangerously impulsive on a good day. There s no telling what he is capable of when he is feeling this attacked and aggrieved.These are dangerous times, America. The man who is supposedly leading us is desperate and unhinged. Hopefully, someone in a position to do something about him steps up, for the good of the nation and the world.Watch Tony Schwartz s remarks below:Co-author of The Art of Deal on Trump: I think he s in a pretty significant meltdown https://t.co/YZ32bCBsdM https://t.co/rpTGglpp5H Anderson Cooper 360 (@AC360) May 18, 2017Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images | 1real |
Having Won, Boris Johnson and ‘Brexit’ Leaders Fumble - The New York Times | LONDON — With their giddy celebrations of “independence day” having given way to political and economic turmoil, one thing has become especially clear about the former London mayor Boris Johnson and other leaders of the successful campaign to vote Britain out of the European Union: They had no plan for what comes next. In the days since Britain voted to leave the bloc, the movement’s leaders have often appeared as if they had not expected to win and were not prepared to cope with the consequences. Faced with the scope of the decision, they have been busy walking back promises they made during the campaign and scaling back expectations. They have failed to show a united front or to answer basic questions. Their faltering performance has added to the sense of political chaos in Britain and, arguably, to the turmoil in the financial markets. And it has undercut their credibility and authority as Mr. Johnson prepares his bid to become prime minister and lead Britain into a new relationship with the Continent. The stakes are high for Mr. Johnson in particular, as he tries to build an impression as a capable leader amid the chaos that followed the vote in favor of a British exit, or “Brexit. ” But the mixed signals coming from him and other proponents of leaving the European Union have left their intentions unclear on such basic issues as when and how they will seek to negotiate a withdrawal, and what kind of new arrangement they want. To the degree that they have signaled a direction, it has often been substantially different from what they promised during the campaign. On issues from immigration to spending on the National Health Service, the “Leave” coalition has retreated from its more populist and apparently exaggerated claims. Many of those assertions had been promoted by the U. K. Independence Party, or UKIP, led by Nigel Farage, and benefited the broader Leave campaign, whose most prominent figures included two senior Conservatives, Mr. Johnson and Michael Gove, the justice minister. In changing their tune, the leaders of the Union campaign risk undermining whatever trust they had earned from the millions who voted to leave the bloc in the expectation that immigration would be cut sharply and that money now going to the European Union — which the Leave campaign said was 350 million pounds, or $465 million, a week — would be available to help finance the National Health Service. For example, one Leave advocate, Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative Party leader and cabinet secretary, walked away from the campaign pledge to reallocate the £350 million a week to the health service. Instead, he said, “the lion’s share” of anything left from that amount after replacing subsidies from the bloc to British farmers could be available for health services. On immigration, too, there was immediate backtracking from Mr. Johnson and Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament from the Conservative Party, who told the BBC, “Frankly, if people watching think that they have voted and there is now going to be zero immigration from the E. U. they are going to be disappointed. ” Analysts say the change in tone may be necessary to begin reeling in unrealistic expectations about the changes the referendum could produce, but it also holds considerable political peril for Mr. Johnson and other Conservative Party leaders of the Leave campaign, especially with populist sentiment spreading and groups like the U. K. Independence Party eager to build support. “There is a clear tension between what the voter wanted and what senior euroskeptic leaders want to produce,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent. “If they don’t deliver radical reforms on immigration, it would be the equivalent of pouring gasoline on the populist UKIP fire that has been burning since 2010. ” In his regular column in The Daily Telegraph on Monday, Mr. Johnson tried to strike a prime ministerial tone of unity in the wake of the divisive referendum, but he emphasized continuity over change and tried to argue that immigration, clearly the primary motivation for many voters in taking a position against Europe, was somehow not a major issue. “It is said that those who voted Leave were mainly driven by anxieties about immigration,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “I do not believe that is so. ” Suggesting that he wants to keep some kind of open flow of people across the border with Europe, Mr. Johnson wrote, “British people will still be able to go and work in the E. U. to live to travel to study to buy homes and to settle down. ” Not only that, he asserted, “There will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market. ” What he described was a relationship with the European Union like that of Norway, which would allow freedom of movement and labor and would pay money to Brussels in return for access to the single market, but without having a voice in . But Mr. Johnson rejected the Norway model during the campaign, and even if negotiations proved to lead to a slightly enhanced Norway, with some symbolic measures to restrict immigration of European Union citizens to Britain, the result would be a betrayal of those who voted Leave. And right now, Norway pays Brussels roughly per capita what Britain currently does as a full member. “The difficulty for Boris and Gove is that Brexit feels like a column gone wrong, an academic exercise suddenly turned into reality,” Paul Waugh wrote in his blog for The Huffington Post, alluding to the shared backgrounds in journalism of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gove. “And reality, particularly where the E. U. is concerned, is a messy, complex thing. ” Mr. Johnson is clearly looking to unite the divided Conservative Party behind his own, flamboyant self and to burnish his economic credentials. But playing down immigration, Mr. Goodwin said, could create more political trouble. “I worry for senior euroskeptic leaders, because there is a misunderstanding of the vote, and that will feed voter dissatisfaction,” he said, driving many of the voters who chose a British exit to turn away from both mainstream parties and move to the populist right. The referendum was unusual, because it pitted a government on one side, “Remain,” against a loose coalition on the other, made up of Conservatives, some Labour legislators and U. K. Independence Party supporters. The Leave side never had to hammer out an agreement on how to proceed if it won, said Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics. “There was no coherence, because it wasn’t a political party fighting for government, but an odd coalition fighting against something, but with no consistent view of what it was fighting for,” he said. Even on the economy, the Leave side was made of economists who believe in no tariffs at all, those who believe in trade deals and protectionists who want to shield the declining working class against globalization, Professor Travers said. “And now the government will have to be reformed as if it were representing the Leave side and yet represent both, a government that must reflect the schism in itself,” he said. In the aftermath of the Leave campaign’s victory, the political editor for Sky News, Faisal Islam, asked a Conservative member of Parliament who supported leaving the bloc to see his camp’s plan. The legislator replied, according to Mr. Islam: “There is no plan. The Leave campaign don’t have a plan. ” Then the legislator added, “Number 10 should have had a plan,” referring to the prime minister’s office. | 0fake |
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